Wiley has been cancelled by Twatter, Instagram and Farcebook.
Grime artist Wiley has been banned from Facebook and Instagram.
The news comes after an account purportedly belonging to the rapper, real name Richard Cowie, posted messages about some of his Jewish critics.
Cowie was recently condemned for a series of antisemitic posts on Twitter and Instagram, including one which compared Jewish people to the Ku Klux Klan.
An unverified Facebook account, listed under the name Richard Kylea Cowie, made reference to several Jewish celebrities, including Lord Alan Sugar, BBC presenter Emma Barnett and comedian David Baddiel, all of whom had criticised the rapper’s words.
So how do I feel about this?
Mixed, if I’m completely honest. There’s an easy route and a difficult one. On the one hand it’s tempting to say “you, too” and enjoy the schadenfreude. And there is a little pleasure to be gained when one of the Woken SS gets burned by the weapons they so readily use against us.
However, on the other, if I am consistent regarding free speech, then I defend it even for the most obnoxious and that Includes Wiley. So, much as I despise Wiley and everything he says, I’m with Spiked Online and the FSU on this one.
Prime minister Boris Johnson called Cowie’s previous remarks “abhorrent”, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews had called on Facebook to ban Cowie from the platform.
Marie van der Zyl, Board of Deputies president, said: “We are aware that Richard Cowie – AKA Wiley – has continued his obsessive targeting of the Jewish community on Facebook, now that Twitter and Instagram are closed off to him.
“We have raised his conduct with Facebook as a matter of urgency and have stressed in the strongest possible terms that they should remove him from their platform as well. We are in additional talks with Twitter to urge them to delete Wiley’s account, especially as he has made it clear on Facebook that when he gets back on Twitter he intends to exhibit even worse behaviour.”
Sigh… If you believe in freedom of speech and expression, then you believe in it for everyone. Doesn’t matter how awful they are, they have the right to speak and we have the right to robustly criticise them. I have to draw the conclusion that Marie van der Zyl is no friend of liberty.
Censorship is wrong no matter who is doing it or why they are doing it.
Yes, I feel much the same. It seems like such a rare event for one of the Woken SS to be so publicly hoist by their own petard that one longs to be allowed just a little time to savour its delicious aftermath. However, if one truly does believe in free speech, then one has to put that principle above such considerations as personal enjoyment.
And with that lofty sentiment duly out of the way, Jesus cross-eyed Christ what an unpleasant little fuck…
Thoroughly revolting, but then these racists are. See also my comments regarding Josephine Gyasi.
Don’t analyse it..just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Surely only Whitey can be racist after all ?
What’s his problem, he’s still got Myspace to be racist on, not to mention Friends Reunited.
I’m with you on the free speech issue. I take the view that freedom of speech is for everyone. For example I deplore Holocaust deniers but the best way to deal with these arseholes is to allow them to speak their brains and have their ideas ripped to shreds by evidence. As for Marie van der Zyl, I’ve been horrified at how the Board of Deputies has lurched leftwards since she took over. Her and her cohorts have been banning and silencing Deputies who voice criticisms of Islam or highlight issues surrounding Islamic Jew hatred. You are correct, she is no friend of liberty.
Deniers? Bit too binary that. Makes one sound like Greta.
Unlike the idea of man made climate change, there is plenty of evidence for the Holocaust. There are survivor testimonies, photographs, accounts of Allied troops who liberated the camps and of course copious documentation quite a lot of it provided by the defeated Nazis habit of relatively accurate record keeping. To say that the Holocaust did not happen, is counterfactual, it is a Duranty level of dishonesty. Greta and he supporters have only computer models (and we know how accurate they can be don’t we?) and hysteria for their claims of a ‘climate emergency’, not the sort of reams of actual evidence that there is for the Holocaust. I would like those who spout counterfactual stuff to be allowed to do so, whether it be Holocaust deniers or eco lunatics but mostly so that those with evidence can defeat them in open debate.
Allowing free speech is the only way that people with stupid, nasty and evil opinions can be identified and their ideas challenged
Spot on there. I tend to agree with the likes of Ben Shapiro when he says that the only way to defeat bad speech is with more speech.
Can’t say that I have ever heard of the man so certainly will have read nothing of his on Facebook, Twitter etc.
As is usual in these cases the media and the BBC expecially then broadcast it to the world and feign innocence and outrage at the same time.
Don’t Jews have a very long history of money lending and running banks? Apparently people who say that are would-be extermination camp guards.
I gather that pointing out that the Jew-hating Jew, Soros, is a Jew is anti-semitic too. Strange times.
Re the value of Free Speech in uncovering the hate that’s out there so its faults can be exposed and dealt with: That’s something I’ve been a strong supporter of for years. When I wrote TobakkoNacht in 2013 I had an entire section on that sort of thing and puzzled over how to best illustrate the hate that’s been built toward smokers. I thought about citing a half dozen or even a dozen examples and analyzing them, but realized I’d be targeted as having “cherry-picked” a few far out and hard to find examples.
So… instead, I set up four pages, two-facing doubles, reduced my font size and spacing a bit, and went for a straight “block” look that I later converted into a four-foot by three-foot poster of the four together. Take a look at
https://www.quora.com/q/djnneajdueethoxt/The-Wall-Of-Hate
Click your screen magnifier so you can read it. and consider the fact that I *could* just as easily have gone for eight or even sixteen pages from my years of internet debate on the topic if there was a reason to. The four pages made the point though.
– MJM
“Slavery hasn’t stopped, it’s just dressed-up in a million-pound record deal.”
Obviously the guy is an idiot.
Sadly freedom of speech means you have to put up with stuff you find personally repugnant or just nasty. If everyone was nice it would be a boring world. That said offence is taken not given.