This week, the British government banned
Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, two leftwing US commentators with millions
of followers, from entering the country on the grounds that their
presence would not be “conducive to the public good”. It did not spell
out what it meant by this very broad phrase, but Piker and Uygur have
accused the government of denying them entry because of their prolific
criticism of Israel. Some critics have accused the pair of antisemitism, which they deny.
A
lot has been written about the Piker-Uygur ban, and I don’t think I
need to litigate everything they have ever uttered here. They have
undeniably said some objectionable things (Piker, for example, said some
Orthodox Jews are “inbred”, which he later apologized for). What sort
of speech crosses a line that makes you detrimental to the public good,
is not clear, however. Conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, for example,
has said that “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage”. While
he later apologized for this, he has repeatedly characterized Arabs as
barbarians who “value murder”. The British government has never banned him from speaking in the UK.
Neither Piker nor Uygur have said anything that
is more divisive or dangerous than former Israeli president Isaac
Herzog’s declaration that all Palestinians were responsible for the
Hamas attack on 7 October 2023. A UN commission of inquiry found that Herzog incited the commission of genocide
with this statement and said that his later modifications of that
utterance were an effort “to deflect responsibility for the initial
statement”. Still, the British seem fine with that first statement:
Herzog met with Keir Starmer in London in 2025. Clearly that meeting was deemed to be conducive to the public good.
But,
again, I don’t want to pronounce on each of Piker or Uygur’s statements
here. I don’t want to fall into the trap of making this a story about
two American commentators or the limits of free speech. Because at its
heart, the Piker-Uygur ban is about a far more insidious issue. It’s
about what Britain, and the US and Israel,
wants us to believe is “good” – about the way in which our fundamental
sense of what is “good” and “bad” are being manipulated.
Wherever
you live, whatever you believe, wherever you sit on the political
spectrum, most of us have a shared understanding of basic moral
concepts, of what is good and what is bad. We understand that children
are innocent and should not be killed in the thousands. We understand
that a region’s healthcare system
should not be systematically wiped out and medics targeted. We
understand that there should be laws around warfare to protect
civilians. We understand that people should not be expelled en masse
from their land, their homes replaced with luxury settlements. We
understand that collective punishment is a crime, one that is very much
not “conducive to the public good”.
None of the above is complex, no
matter what some people would have you believe. I come back to the
diaries of American peace activist Rachel Corrie often because they very
eloquently show how there is no room for moral confusion when you are
watching atrocities unfold in front of your own eyes. When Corrie went to Gaza in 2003, more than two decades before 7 October 2023, she wrote how nothing could have prepared her for what she was seeing,
which she characterized as “a somewhat gradual – often hidden, but
nevertheless massive – removal and destruction of the ability of a
particular group of people to survive”. It terrified her, she said. “I
just want to write to my mom and tell her that I’m witnessing this
chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my
fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature,” Corrie wrote. Not
long after writing this, she was crushed to death by an Israeli
bulldozer while trying to save a Palestinian home in Rafah from
destruction. Now, of course, the entirety of Rafah, once home to 275,000
people, has been razed to the ground.... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/04/uk-hasan-piker-ban-israel
[AS
ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO
READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP
SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and
conversations) THAT EMPOWER
DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE &
PEACE... and hopefully
Palestine]
