Fears Labour’s Islamophobia definition could silence women’s rights campaigners - Baroness Falkner

You simply gave your personal opinion, and you don’t seem to really know about any of the cases that I know about, so I’ll be taking your own obvious agenda with a pinch of salt. Hope that helps!

A previous poster reposted a release from Free Speech Union, who considered it outrageous that they have not been consulted on the new definition.

I do not consider it outrageous (and made that clear).

I was then asked why I was so keen to dismiss them, so I answered.

I then responded to follow ups.

Hope that helps.

As pp said they have been involved in some high profile cases. I’m glad they exist, whatever other people reckon about them.

Seriously, who cares what your opinion of them is? No one is asking you to support them.

What pathetic hair splitting.

I don't know what else to say other than that I consider you to be grossly overstating their significance.

You quoted their ~80% success rate and number of "cases" they have "fought". I think its quite reasonable to point out that they seldom fight cases themselves and quite how they measure success (and attribute it to themselves) is not exactly clear.

For heavens sake. They offer support to ordinary people at there wits end who have fallen foul of hate speech prosecutions. They organise first class legal representation.
They are standing beside Hamit Coskin.
They supported Linzi Smith. Perhaps you've not heard of these people but they are the ones fighting for your freedom of speech. They are in the trenches.
Index on censorship have just held the ritual banned book list. On the real threat to freedom of speech in publishing today - tumbleweed.

Again - Free Speech Union are not a union.

Per my post, its very questionable whether FSU are doing much at all.

Meanwhile, what are the other unions doing for women? Several are refusing to even represent women like the Darlington nurses. Is that acceptable in your mind?

That's from their website.

Happy to assume their self-reported numbers as accurate, but I dare say they are over-inflating their role in "successes" (however they measure those).

They rarely handle cases themselves - they refer out to specialist law firms (in contrast to, say, Liberty, who have a dedicated legal team and long history of succesful and high-profile litigation).

FSU are more generally in the publicity/fundraising side of things - which is fine, that's obviously central to advocacy - but the quote you posted is, I'd say, rather misleading (and again, self-agrandizing). Framing it as "cases" they have "fought" makes it sound like they are regularly in the courtroom, securing "wins". They've only actually been involved in proceedings themselves a handful of times.

A survey of Muslim views from March 2024.

28% say it would be undesirable to outlaw homosexuality so 72% are either unsupportive of or even anti homosexuality. This could therefore be considered to be representative of Muslim views, and could meets the general definition of Islamophobia. How do we manage the obvious clash between the idea of ‘Islamophobia’ (on the Labour website as ‘targeting expressions of Muslimness) and gay rights?

It would be helpful to know if the government had consulted any gay rights groups (that actually support gay rights) on this.

From the survey:
Key stats: Future of society

• Only 17% think it is undesirable that women take a more traditional role in society
• Only 27% say it would be undesirable to outlaw gay marriage (compared to 60% of the wider public)
• Only 28% say it would be undesirable to outlaw homosexuality in the UK (compared to 62% of the public as a whole)
• Only 26% say it would be undesirable to outlaw abortion, compared to 63% of the public as a whole
• Only 35% say it would be undesirable to legalise polygamy, compared to 70% of the public

henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/HJS-Deck-200324-Final.pdf

Liberty have no interest in defending free speech. They have an interest in defending only people who parrot the agreed orthodoxy of the omnicause.

What exactly has Index on Censorship done for women? Jodie Ginsberg was good but what exactly has Ruth Anderson achieved. Apparently she's now left.
Like most rights organisations I used to support they have sold out.

I get you don't like Toby Young but so what, he's delivering.

I am a bit late to this conversation, but surely the only way a society can navigate questions like what degree should religious beliefs that seem to go against what we recognize as individual rights be accomodated or tolerated; or how to navigate the facts that members of special communities often disagree on issues, is to allow robust public discussion of the issues? That includes all the differernt people from differernt groups?

Or in other words, navigating it will require true democratic discourse.

Individuals' freedom of belief and expression is great and important, but we shouldn't forget that the more basic reason for upholding that robustly is that it is a necessary condition to a functioning liberal democracy.

The Labour Party, and the left more generally, is really playing with fire with these attempts to control what kinds of discussions people can have.

Sour grapes? Sour re. what, exactly?

Free speech advocacy is vital, and I have a lot of time for those people and groups who have dedicated their career to it.

I am less impressed by those who don't show any interest in defending free speech until their own, ill-advised words bite them on the arse, and who instead of lending support to existing groups, found their own one out of an apparent desire to self-promote.

I work with an excommunicated ex-Mormon. Unlike, say, <a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150108025940/www.thewire.com/global/2013/03/al-qaeda-most-wanted-list/62673/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he's not been put on a hit list by any of his former co-believers.

This.

They’ve had success supporting people legally on free speech issues.

Well as far as I'm concerned Liberty and Index on Censorship have been a dead loss.
FSU is grass roots activism.

Since its founding, the Free Speech Union has fought over 5,100 cases and receives, on average, 75 requests for help every week. In cases that have reached a conclusion, we have been successful in roughly 80 per cent. This year alone, we have taken on almost 2,000 cases.

They aren't a union, they just picked that as part of their company name.

I'm keen to dismiss them because, for all their self-agrandizing and self-promotion, they don't have any real track record to speak of and - again - seem to have been founded because Toby Young was butthurt about (very understandly) losing some roles.

They don't have the track record of established and larger free-speech advocacy groups, like Liberty or Index on Censorship.

They're a new, small, group who - based on the statement you copy-pasted - seem to have an extremely over-inflated sense of their own importance.

Again, I think they exist primarily as an attempt for Toby Young to restore his (rightfully) damaged reputation.

Criticising the plans, Baroness Falkner told Sky News: “If they’re going to bring in yet another area where, for example, anyone who’s defending women’s rights is going to be accused by those ethnic minority men of Islamophobia, if they dare say something about how Muslim women are suppressed.
“I’m a Muslim woman myself. I know all about this.
“I know the community.”

Baroness Falkner makes an excellent about about women’s rights. PPs may argue against us standing up for the human rights of Muslim women and girls but when a Muslim woman issues a warning like this, surely we should listen?

As we’ve seen recently, some of the beliefs that negatively affect Muslim women can also affect the rest of us. Shutting down conversation is not a benefit for women or society.

Wow sounds like sour grapes. I reckon he's being pretty successful.

1. It's really important to be able to name the perpetrator groups. Talking about "everyone who has been groomed" erases who the groomers are and how they operate. This isn't incompatible with saying "the problem is men", but it does let us recognise the different strategies used by Pakistani men's grooming gangs compared to, say, rich white men's paedo rings in order to counter them effectively.
2. It's really important to be able to name the overlapping groups and supergroups that the FGM victims are part of. Talking about "FGM victims" without any reference to overlapping groups erases our ability to identify women at risk.

To use an example from a different aspect of feminism:

One of the mechanisms used by the trans lobby to stop women from talking about women's issues was by asserting that the people with cervixes were a group, and the people who get pregnant are a group, and the people who suffer misogyny are a group, and we had to talk about these groups in those isolated ways without acknowledging that these groups had total or near-total overlap in their memberships and were in fact all part of a supergroup called "women". This nonsense even made it into prestigious medical journals:

"Furthermore, such an objection is an instance of regulation assuming that people with the physiology to become pregnant are irresponsible users of healthcare."

When you call the people who face excessive regulatory oversight about early medical abortion "people with the physiology to become pregnant", and call the people who get cervical cancer "people with cervixes", and the people who get cat-called when they go running "people who experience street-located sexual harassment", it looks like these are all different groups of people.

Reword that journal quote:

"Furthermore, such an objection is an instance of regulation assuming that women are irresponsible users of healthcare."

Suddenly, it becomes obvious that the overregulation of early medical abortion is part of a pattern of how women are treated as public property instead of as people, that it and the catcalling and the questionable smear-taking practices (e.g. "no wider than that" [ratcheting sound of speculum opening further] "oooowww I said no wider!") are all manifestations of Rule 16.

Likewise, when we can see evidence that Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim women are disportionately likely to go their ancestral homeland and come back married to a cousin they've never met, and are disproportionately likely to be the victims of "honour" murder committed by male relatives, etc, when we can see that the overlap between the two groups is very high, if we can say so, we can do something. If we are too scared to say anything because we fear falling foul of the law, we end up with Victoria Climbié situations where people are preventably killed or hurt because everyone was too scared to act.

It’s one of the few unions supporting free speech and women’s rights. Why are you so keen to dismiss them?

Free Speech Union is just a vehicle for Conservative Peer, Toby Young, to try and reframe himself as a righteous figure, rather than a misogynistic, ableist, classcist peice of shit who was stupid enough to think he could be as offensive as he liked without professional consequences.