Why is Hasan Piker ‘not conducive to the public good’? Because on Gaza, we punish the witness, not the crime
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
