Richard Dawkins on stage in Stockholm, December 2015. Picture by Anders Hesselbom (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.The cancellation of public speeches due to the fraught views of speakers on sensitive issues has become a staple of our daily news. We appear incapable of addressing the problem in a meaningful, straightforward way, and the negotiations over the line that separates hate speech and criticism so often fail. This time, the controversy emerged around the cancellation of Richard Dawkins’s speech at a live public radio event in Berkeley, due to his tweets and comments about Islam.
To be clear, I have zero sympathy with Dawkins’s views. When it comes to Islam, I find him deeply prejudiced and, for a scientist, surprisingly dismissive of facts. He has called Islam (and not Islamism, as he claims in his letter) the greatest force of evil, the most evil religion in the world, has condescendingly asked for a feminist revolution in the Muslim world without bothering to google it for five minutes and learn that it began a long time ago. His interventions have done little more than pouring salt into deep wounds of our troubled world, widening an already dangerous fissure, and providing fodder for the extremists of all sides. The issue here is not the content of his views, but denying him a platform to express them.
In the statement released by the radio station we read: ‘he had offended and hurt – in his tweets and other comments on Islam, so many people.’ That is the main reason for the cancellation. To me, the most problematic part of the phrase is the word ‘people’: who are the ‘hurt and offended people’? who is representing them? The question is never asked, because it is apparently commonplace to assume Muslims are being hurt by the slightest criticism of their religion. This is the view shared by many on left and right, and the fight is over whether the rest of the world should hurt them or not.
