He's a British writer, and has a pretty well watched youtube channel. His views are very controversial, and I would label as very much anti Islam and pro free speech (heavy criticism) against Islam.
One of his more interesting videos, at least I thought
So agree or disagree with Condell? And, beyond that regardless of your answer should he be allowed to speak as he does? Does it cross free speech lines into hate? Can you identify hate without being authoritarian? Can you prevent hate speech without doing damage to freedoms that should be protected above all else?
Can you prevent hate speech without doing damage to freedoms that should be protected above all else?
No you can't. The moment you suppress free speech you do a great disfavor to a free society. Suppressing "haters" doesn't stop them. They just go underground to fester. Out in the light of public discourse these people are quickly exposed for what they are and can be confronted and hopefully ignored. Banning swastikas and neo-nazi symbols don't make them go away. Confronting them does. Groups like the Canadian Jewish Congress have done us a great disservice in promoting anti-hate speech laws. Now we have radicals using those hate speech laws to ban cartoons or anything criticising Islam.
As for Pat Condell strongly criticizes Islam and Christianity. That does not make it hate speech though I strongly suspect that a lot of people here can't distinguish between the two.
Embedded flash doesn't work on my galaxy but he was posted in the goodbye sweden thread dealing with immigration.
I can't really make much of a post on my phone but I will say that we shouldn't tolerate extremism that is violent or oppressive simply because it falls under the veil of religion.whether it is islam or any other religion. The problem becomes combating extremism when it hides amongst the mainstream.
The same issue arises in bountiful for example where we know polygamy occurs but do nothing about it.
Which leads to another problem, people raised in these societies don't necessarily feel oppressed because they only know it as the norm.
He has more reasonable videos out there but here's his view of the Ground Zero Mosque which I thought was about as hateful and wrongheaded as they come:
An especially dumb and short-sighted viewpoint. There are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, I guess they are all violent and hateful. Since that's true, we are all done for anyway. Hard to stop 1.5 billion violent people. Really, that was worse than Glenn Beck. Does he realize that Arabs make up only a fraction of the Muslims in the world? Or that generalizing religious viewpoint to be shared across 1.5 billion people is beyond dumb? Muslims died in 9/11 too. The ones working from the inside I guess.
On the other hand, there's something soothing and nice about his voice. Damn Brits.
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As you can see, I'm completely ridiculous.
Last edited by Weiser Wonder; 12-28-2010 at 11:12 PM.
He's actually pretty fair. On any given day, he'll give to any of the three 'Gods of the desert'.
__________________ “The fact is that censorship always defeats it's own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.”
Let's talk about Pat Condell (or his views at least)
