Run That By Me Again?
There’s a lot of ‘How’s That Again?’ at the moment. There is the half-laughable half-weepable mess of the ‘March for Free Expression’ ha ha for instance. The ‘March for Free Expression’ which had to be renamed at the last minute the ‘March for Free Expression Only as Long as the Free Expression in Question Doesn’t Irritate Anyone Too Much’ – which, you have to admit, is a pretty lame halting stumbling weak-kneed shambling unimpressive unstirring sort of march. More like a ‘Keep on Lying Down for Thoroughly Hedged “Free” Expression’ than a march for anything. You might as well march against a war and have on all the banners ‘Unless You Really Really Want to Of Course’. You might as well march for workers’ rights and add ‘Unless it’s too expensive that is’.
You did see what happened, right? On Thursday, two days before the march and demonstration, Voltaire/Peter Risdon (and props to him for trying, anyway) said – of all things in the world – ‘No Danish cartoons, please’. Umm – okay, but then what’s the march for? What good is it to take a stand for free speech prompted by the cartoon fuss and at the same time say ‘No Danish cartoons, please’?
A lot of commenters at the site are very annoyed. And things at the demonstration itself got…peculiar.
Peter Risdon, an organizer of the March for Free Expression, initially had announced that he would allow protesters to display banners and wear T-shirts depicting those images. On Thursday, however, Risdon asked demonstrators not to show the cartoons out of fear their display would alienate sympathetic Muslims and give credibility to a far-right political group, the British National Party, which has used the cartoons as a rallying cry. “The principle of freedom of expression is used by some as a Trojan horse, as a proxy for racism and Islamophobia,” Risdon wrote in an explanation on the Web site. The decision prompted angry responses on the Web site – and at the march. “It’s my freedom, everyone’s freedom, to expose these pictures and encourage everyone to do the same,” said Reza Moradi, 29, a protester who identified himself as an Iranian who has lived in Britain for eight years. Moradi was later questioned by police after someone lodged a complaint regarding the “nature of his placard,” which featured a copy of the Danish cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, a London police spokeswoman said. After a brief, heated exchange with officers, Moradi left the protest on his own and then rejoined the demonstration later.
Someone lodged a complaint about the nature of his placard, so the police questioned him. Er – isn’t this where we came in? Wasn’t this rather the point?
As time goes by I feel less and less charitable toward Peter. Right now I’m thinking he got starstruck by the fact that people were paying attention to him, and he got an inflated view of his own, and the demonstration’s, importance.
The initial impulse was correct. Following the cowardice of the UK media and the perfidy of the UK govt., a demonstration was called for. The March for Free Expression seemed to fit the bill. But then stars struck… He must have had a very low threshold for attention paid to him…
One point is worth mentioning, though, I was there and counted 50 people just up the right side of the crowd — that’s the people on the right edge of the crowd, only people who had no one to their right. Fifty of them. Next to that strip of people one person wide, I saw about the same number of people in a similar sized strip one-person side.
That brought the total to 100 people, just on the far right side of the crowd. Estimating the width of that strip of the crowd, I further estimated there to be about 15 such strips to include the full crowd. Further estimating, given that there was a large hole in the crowd around the speakers and the fact that there were a fair number of people behind the speakers who hadn’t been included in my calculations, I figured about 1000 people were there in total. The organisers said 600. Later, I counted 200 people in one partial photo of the demo. There were easily 600 people there.
But I’m no longer interested in Peter’s plans, for reasons I posted and discussed in the comments section of the March’s blog and of Harry’s Place.
It has a lot in common with what I was saying about free speech in discussing OB’s various recent posts on the topic.
Yes, it’s all rather depressing – and at times alarming. Did you see that Maryam says Reza Moradi has been summoned to court? For ‘offending’ someone?! You say at Harry’s you saw seven cops talking to him. Jeezis – they really don’t get it, do they!
just to set the record straight, I didn’t see it happen. That was what Maryam said to the crowd. I’ve been thinking it over and I can imagine the cops taking it at face value that the posters intimidate someone so they get to take the “victim’s” side and intimidate the intimidator back, so they geo to feel righteous and have a little workout. Cops in Texas and most everywhere in the US are like that: they’ll work up an impressive righteous indignation at the drop of a hat. But British cops are usually not so bad. Demos are different, unfortunately.