Mufti’s plan to restrict free speech not too grand

Australia’s Grand Mufti wants tougher hate speech laws, and economist Joseph Stuglitz needs help with his arithmetic.

Rosie Lewis reports Grand Mufti Ibrahim Abu Mohammed wants tougher hate speech laws, The Australian, yesterday:

Australia’s Grand Mufti has called for Muslims to be given the same protections as ethnic groups under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act … He also recommends amending the act to include the prohibition of religious vilification to cover Muslims and all religions, in accordance with article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Restrictions on speech good … restrictions on terrorism, not so much? Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph, November 19, 2015:

Australia’s controversial Muslim leader has condemned the government’s tough new anti-terrorism laws as “racist” and “discriminatory”, claiming they will be used only to target Muslims.

We’ve heard this before. The Grand Mufti speaking to Fairfax Media in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, The Sydney Morning Herald, January 18, 2015:

And when we see a million copies being published you have to ask: are they not going to provoke more negative sentiments? Are they not going to push more moderate Muslims to begin to think, is this a freedom of speech? Or is it a provocation intended to cause more turmoil?

Senator James Paterson, The Australian, yesterday:

Effectively (the Grand Mufti’s proposal) would mean Australia has a national blasphemy law because criticising someone’s religious beliefs in a way that offended them could breach the law.

This newspaper’s Janet Albrechtsen raised the alarm a while ago. The Australian, September 26, 2012:

Radical Muslims, such as those protesting from Sydney to Islamabad, want global blasphemy laws available to Muslim minorities in the West, to suppress criticism of Islam in their new countries … And the right to freedom of expression? That has played second fiddle to the demands of this Muslim bloc, led by Pakistan, a country looking for international laws to provide cover for its abhorrent domestic blasphemy laws.

Meanwhile, where would we be without Nobel prize-winning economists? Melbourne’s Herald Sun reports on Brexit, yesterday:

Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says he is surprised the British government is pursuing a strategy that will remove the country from the European Union’s single market … “because it’s so clear that so many people in the UK really didn’t want a Brexit at all, let alone a hard Brexit”.

Which brings us to a tricky mathematical concept known as “the majority”. The Herald Sun continues, yesterday:

At the Brexit referendum in June last year, 48 per cent of those people who voted backed Britain to remain within the EU.

Has the poor bloke just forgotten how to count? Sky News UK, August 31 last year:

Stiglitz: A country voting over and over again that we want to move away from austerity towards growth strategy and Germany’s response is, “We don’t care how your citizens vote even it is 60 some per cent, you’re going to take our medicine even if you and most of the economic professors in the world think it’s the wrong medicine.”

Interviewer: So it’s anti-democratic?

Stiglitz: Very anti-democratic and I think that spirit, that rigidity, surely played a role … in the Brexit referendum.