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Sinn Féin’s Killian Forde Talks Citizenship And Democracy With IrishElection.com
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Killian Forde (SF) Talks Globalisation with IrishElection.com
Frank — Killian, you’ve praised ‘the coming together of the broad left in Europe’ against the Services Directive, and you said the global left has been ‘ideologically drifting, defensive and struggling to articulate a credible alternative’. You expressed satisfaction with the defeat of right-wing MEPs over the Services Directive, and you’ve mentioned members of two Irish political dynasties, Simon Coveney of Fine Gael and Eoin Ryan of Fianna Fáil.
Sinn Féin is a eurosceptic party but it’s a party that’s fully engaged in representative democratic politics. Killian, do you think the Irish electorate can be trusted to give the right results in Irish elections and referendums, and do you see a need for improved education in citizenship and a more pluralist approach to the teaching of Irish history?
Killian Forde — Downwards trends in democratic participation, not just voting, but involvement in community groups, residents’ organisations and volunteerism are all evident in most developed countries. While I think that we need to look at the introduction of compulsory voting, the danger is that by the State providing, for instance, an economic incentive to ensure compliance that voting becomes a reluctant task rather than an earned right.
Steps that can be taken to increase electoral turnout should be first around citizen participation and education. Given that it is younger people who are the least likely to vote, initiatives such as an extension of the CSPE subject beyond the Junior Certificate and it being a Leaving Certificate subject, allowing the youth branches of the parties organise in secondary schools, encouraging political parties to promote younger people to run in winnable seats and ensuring that where younger people engage directly with the State or services, in areas around sports, education grants etc that they are included in the decision making process in terms of funding and planning.
But the very basics before even that are that our electoral registers are kept up to date and accurate!
Frank — Yes, Environment Minister Dick Roche has been making noises about the registers.
Killian — Politics is a unique profession in that essentially many politicians have recognised that the quickest way to public recognition and gain political weight is to belittle, disparage, sell gossip as fact, libel, abuse, lie, exaggerate, embellish, and, on their very best days, sneer, snipe and pick fault with each other’s policies and personalities.
Frank — I wish I’d said that.
Killian — The press, unfortunately, laps up a lot of this nonsense, and it really is of no surprise then that people have a low opinion of politicians. In my own experience, while there is not exactly a bubbling cauldron of emerging creative or original thinkers the vast majority of politicians work extremely long hours and are broadly honest. Political parties’ and the media’s focus on the negative and adversarial does undermine democracy and citizen participation.
Frank — This brings us back to the question about the electorate and their ability to “give the right results”.
Killian — It does. As I see it the right result on a referendum and election can only be attained if the electorate have been in receipt of honest and accurate information around the decision they are being asked to make and the consequences of that decision. An example of where this was abused was in the unnecessary citizenship constitutional referendum of 2004, when the electorate was misled by the promoters of the referendum for their presumed electoral gain.
All that said there was a healthy increase in participation in the 2004 local and European elections. One of the factors was the referendum; the other big factor was the emergence of a whole swathe of community based Sinn Féin candidates that helped double the turnout in most working class areas of Dublin. The pluralism that your question talked about being required is one around choice of parties and their respective policy platforms. There are only cosmetic differences between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and Labour’s insistence on acting as a cushion to these two only reinforces working class and left leaning voters’ suspicion of them.
Frank — And the alternatives?
Killian — Sinn Féin, the Greens, the Socialist Party and the SWP have all upped their game over the past decade and can compete with the more professional electioneering approaches that the big three have dominated since the early 60’s. For many of the electorate their decision to participate as active citizens will be based on finding a party that reflects their views and, as importantly, and this is where Labour seems to miss the point, where the candidates are ‘like them’.
Frank — Hm. I hope someone in Ely Place is reading this.
Killian — There remains in Irish society an enormous gap in terms of a pluralist mainstream media. Currently all the major daily papers are of varying degrees to the right and increasingly focused on gossip, half truth and tittle tattle to sell their wares.
I wonder how in tune with their own readers, for instance, is the preposterous debate on 1916 that is going on at the moment in the mainstream media? To me that just demonstrates how out of touch the commenteriat of this state are from normal opinion. While a huge gap exists for an Irish left wing national daily on the island, it is difficult, given the ferocious competition and deep pockets required, to see how an indigenous publisher can hope to operate a profitable wide-reaching daily.
But deregulation of radio has led to better quality of programming, and usually silent voices and topics being covered. In Dublin, the presence of Newstalk in particular, and also some of the late night shows such as 98FMs late night show, has ensured that issues that are uncomfortable to the permanent elite in the state are aired.
Frank — And the internet?
Killian — I feel that the emergence of citizen journalist through blogs and other multi media tools can only be of benefit to both political and societal developments in the state. The recent riots in Dublin were instructive in that bloggers presence and recording of events meant that some mainstream media coverage the following day which attempted to blame Sinn Féin, and had reports of senior party and IRA figures directing the rioters, was challenged and ultimately their tale was dismissed.
In addition we now have Irish blogs that monitor journalists’ work and papers and highlighting the mistakes, lies and inaccuracies they are printing. This is very powerful, and I see that blogs will increasingly play a role of quality control on the mainstream media. I also feel that blogs are going to make journalism school increasingly redundant with interesting bloggers co-opted into the mainstream media.
Whether that’s a good or bad thing? Time will tell!
Frank — Killian Forde, go raibh míle maith agat.
Opinionated terrorist apologist. Shouldn’t even be on this site. FOAD.
Every view is welcomed on this site. Any other politican or person is welcome to have there say here. We can only put to ones up that will reply to us.
So any politicans reading this. Feel free to contact anyone of us.
“defeat of right-wing MEPs over the Services Directive”??
But the Services Directive was approved by the EU parliament!
Even allowing for the amendments, adoption of the Services Directive can hardly be claimed as a win for the left (as roughly alluded to in the article). As for the “the coming together of the broad left in Europe”, it could also be observed that the broad forces of reactionism in Europe did what they could to hinder what could turn out to be a vital piece of forward looking legislation.
Sinn Fein a left wing party? My arse! This must be a sick joke. Years of murder exclude these people from the socialist family. If they want a shred of credibility, let them apologise for their past, pack in public life and live in quiet shame, leaving politics and my country to democrats. Stop asking them questions which allow them to pose. Make them talk about political murder, sectarian cleansing, vigilanteism, no-go areas, crime, thuggery and fscism. “A Sinn Fein socialist” is the ultimate oxymoron!
F
I think yours is the only hint of menace on this page, but I’m not going to take offence at the suggstion that I would have given a platform to an individual I believed to be a ‘terrorist apologist’, because I don’t know you and you don’t know me.
I do however hope that IrishElection.com will also feature the diverse views of elected representatives from Northern Ireland, as well as of victims and their representatives.
And as simon wrote earlier, anyone can have their say or comment.
I too wonder at the passing of the services directive, while social services were ringfenced it was far more a consensus reached than an outright victory for left or right.
I have to agree with Frank and Simon this site allows both sides to get out there, we can read it and make our mind up but the stage is open to all comers. It is likely that other politicians from other walks of life will be contributing in the near future.
While Michael talks of reactionism i think that the TUs and Left Meps ought be proud of securing safety for social services in the long run. A services directive which respects labour rights and social provision is not the most shameful thing PES and Trade unions have ever done.
A though on Forde and Sinn Fein, he talked a great deal through the interview about economics, globalization and democracy, there has been hardly a peep about Sinn Fein bread and butter-the national question. Are they planning on ignoring it come the next election?
“while social services were ringfenced it was far more a consensus reached than an outright victory for left or right.”
Reasonable point. So to portray the adoption of the services directive as a “victory”, especially for those positioning themselves as eurosceptic left, would seem to be an attempt to undermine the concept of broad democratic consensus.
Michael,
I interpreted the ‘victory’ as being the fact that the ‘left’ parliamentarians had succeeded in changing the point on the ideological spectrum at which ‘consensus’ was finally reached to a lefter position than was being promoted by the commission.
Frank, fair enough. I am not aware of Killian Fordes original comments so perhaps I am being unfair. However, I am responding to the possibility that those positioning themselves on the eurosceptic left could present what everybody, from Charlie McCreevy to the European Trade Union Confederation, considers a positive consensus agreement as a political defeat for its enemies.
As far as I am aware, the European grouping which Sinn Fein is part of voted against the services directive in spite of negotiated amendments. If that is the case, it could be postulated that the broad left came together against the services directive and then split into reasoned negotiators and forces of reactionism.
Michael,
I’ve checkled back. Killian himself didn’t use the word ‘victory’, that came from Cian, to which you responded above.
My question and Killian’s response in the previous post http://www.irishelection.com/wordpress/?p=78
were —
“Frank — Killian, last December the Irish Congress of Trade Unions mobilised a mass demonstration supporting the minority of workers in Irish Ferries who didn’t want to accept the company’s redundancy offer. You know from your family background that a seafarer’s way of life can be hard on workers and their families. Could you tell me your thoughts on how the Irish economy and society, and the quality of peoples’ lives’, have changed since the mid-1990s when the IRA cessation began?
Killian — Frank, thanks. Interestingly the shipping industry proved to have been the socio-economic predictor for a globalised economy. Initially when I was at school I was keen to go to sea but one of the people advising me against it was my own dad, who despite spending a lifetime on ships, saw the writing on the wall; the power of the shipping unions had been broken, containerisation had reduced the size of crews, creating intense competition among maritime workers, and private shipping company’s were registering their ships under “flags of convenience” in the likes of Liberia and Panama to avoid paying taxes and adhering to labor and safety laws. Due to these changes and the active recruitment by shipping agents of crews in the likes of the Cape Verde, Poland and Turkey, conditions deteriorated to the point where a career at sea is no longer an option in most European countries.
Yet despite the evidence of what occurs when companies are encouraged to ‘relocate’ on paper to jurisdictions with weak or non existent labor and safety regulations, the EU commissioners still approved the Bolkenstein (Services) Directive which, as a core competent on opening up services in the EU, included the by now infamous Country Of Origin principle. This principle, which would have decimated some of our own home industries similar to what happened to the Irish shipping industry was only passed in a watered down version, (and) this was seen as a defeat to the EU-liberals in Brussels. What was most heartening from their defeat was the coming together of the broad left in Europe to prevent the passing of the initial draft in the parliament.
That demonstrated two things; one was the retreat by the right-wing MEPs in Ireland (and other countries) such as Simon Coveney and Eoin Ryan, on the issue when confronted in Brussels and back in Dublin by concerned constituents, and secondly the potential power of the left in Europe to mobilise, strategise and campaign on ‘dull’ and turgid European legislation.’
Unfortunately since the early 90’s the global left, with the exception of South America, has been fractured, ideologically drifting, defensive and struggling to articulate a credible alternative. This recent partial victory by the European left I hope indicates the start of a refocused and cooperative approach that will roll back the neo-liberal project of the past decades.”
Michael,
I don’t think there are any false claims there, though the political art and life skill of using ambiguity may be at play.
This moral relativism is sickening and dangerous. Socialists and other democrats must take sides against Sinn Fein.
Sinn Fein make a mockery of free speech by refusing to debate the one thing that sets them apart: the morality of political violence. The media facilitate the sham. There’s a convicted gun runner in the Dail and he’s allowed pose as a normal person by speaking on routine matters. Would the same “freedom” be extended to, for example, a convicted paedophile?
Jackie,
Do you think this indicates a widespread view in Irish society that what the Provos did over the past thirty-five years was stuff that they themselves couldn’t admit to supporting, while feeling nonetheless that the cause was in some way a just one whose outcome they l;ooked forward to welcoming beyond some suitably sanitising time interval?
Frank,
SinnFein/IRA are very sophisticated users of the media. Other terrorist organisations look to them as model media manipulators. It’s brutally simple. They bomb, maim and murder their way into being the centre of attention. Liberals correctly demand to hear the arguments for this behaviour. The terrorists then refuse to discuss violence but will discuss everything else and will portray themselves as at least normal, acceptable or even as nice people. It is a parody of freedom that Adams and the occupants of that corner of evil in the Dail are permitted to play this game. I focussed on Ferris as a convicted gun runner and asked would a convicted paedophile receive the same media treatment
Jackie,
You needn’t answer this if you don’t want to, but are you active yourself in any political or community organization, and have you been directly affected by any terrorist violence in either part of Ireland?
Frank,
Why do you ask? My argument stands or falls without reference to my experience. However, I’ve no problem answering your question. I’m a lapsed member of the Labour Party. I’m a socialist who votes Labour. I’ve been threatened by SF down here.
Jackie,
Thanks for answering that. I’m a Fianna Fáil member, and was briefly with the Green Party. I didn’t feel any need to discuss violence with Killian Forde, as we all know what we know and will hold our own opinions of what went on in Northern Ireland from the late 1960’s.
You wrote above that ‘years of murder exclude these people from the socialist family.’
In Russia, the socialists murdered the royals and the aristocrats, as well as quite a few of the plain people. In Spain in the 1930’s the socialists, with the active support of comrades from overseas, including from Ireland, popped off quite a few bullets in the unsuccessful struggle against Franco.
Putting myself in a devil’s advocate position, why on earth should Irish socialists not have the moral right to free themselves from their oppressive existences under a foreign monarch, a governor-general, and an indigenous conservative and hierarchical social elite?
I am not advocating pacifism. There are times to fight. Only a maniac would suggest that the outcome of the SF/IRA orgy has produced any good. Thirty years of dead and maimed citizens to achieve a single-state Ireland would be a sick equation but to achieve nothing, absolutely nothing, that screams for condemnation and dismissal from civilised society.
I’m not avoiding the soviet massacres; you understate them - millions died. No socialist would ever defend that. Spain is different. Socialists, liberals, communists, anarchists fought to defend the republic against Fascist rebels. It was a tragedy that they lost.
My point to you as a journalist is that you must not be complicit in the SF/IRA project of making themselves seem normal.
I am a member of no party and don’t plan to be. But I agree with Jackie the media go far too soft on Sinn Fein. In fact I posted on that very issue somewhere here. Type Media sinn fein into the search box should get it.
Jackie,
Thanks for your comments. I was hoping that the issue would be discussed here. To have even raised it with Kilian Forde, who got over 17% of the votes in his part of Dublin and was interviewed as an elected representative by me, might have merely led to platitudes or empty words, and I didn’t see the point of that.
IrishElection.com only asked me to communicate with him by email, and it was I who asked him to meet me in person, to see the whites of his eyes, and to get the feel of him. I liked him, I discovered that I had worked under his father at sea, and I took him as I found him. I am not aware if he has any criminal convictions.
I am not a journalist, however, only a blogger, and I don’t have much time for the media overall, who do seem to like the whiff of sulphur.
Do you aspire to a united independent Irish republic?
I’d like to live in a socialist Ireland within a federal Europe. My nationalism is cultural, comfortable and unthreatened. I don’t mind how many states, statelets, regions or counties exist. I’d never use the word “republic” in relation to Ireland as it has been drained of meaning.
Your interviewee represents a party which is buckling under the weight of convicted criminals and is trying to bury its very recent past. Your interviewee’s apparent normality is part of the creation of the new image. You were wrong to take him as you found him. No member of SF/IRA can be treated as normal.
Let’s go back a bit. There is an elected, convicted gun runner in the Dail. If he is allowed to speak on a whole range of issues and thereby appear normal, would the same freedom apply to a convicted paedophile?
Jackie,
I think the Oireachtas has it within its powers to disqualify convicted gun-runners and people who commit sex offences against children, but it hasn’t done so. There may be a human rights argument against disqualifying people but the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights doesn’t apply in the case of national parliaments. But the Oireachtas hasn’t, as far as I know, banned people convicted of terrorist offences from Dáil membership.
It’s also a fundamental principle of the justice and penal systems that when a convicted criminal has served his sentence, that’s the end of the matter. You may be thinking ‘liberal consensus’, but I’m thinking ‘broad consensus’. And voters agree, because Sinn Féin is the party that got the biggest share of ‘nationalist’ seats in the NI Assembly, and it also gets a good rate of transfers from other parties in the twenty-six counties.
If a convicted child sex offender stood for election and won a Dáil seat, that would be a bit surprising. But the Sinn Féin members in Leinster House were elected by their constituencies. You can’t honestly claim you want to change democracy because you don’t like the results the voters give.
You call Sinn Féin/IRA fascist. The Sunday Independent says they are Marxists. Both are largely meaningless emotive terms, in my opinion. But I understand Fascism to be normally associated with the actions of a previously dominant conservative class using brutality to hold onto its perceived right to dominate a lesser class of people. That brings me back to a question I put to you earlier — did the catholic underclass in Northern Ireland not have the moral right, even the duty, to use any and every method necessary to smash the oppressive NI system, its machinery, and the society of the conservative elite who controlled it — the B Specials, the Orange Lodges, the gerrymandering, the discriminatory electoral system for local government, the blatantly sectarian employment and housing allocation practices in local government, and the education system.
To counter the case you put, answer me this. I say it wasn’t Sinn Féin/IRA who were the fascists in Northern Ireland, it was the Unionists. You don’t like Sinn Féin because you hold the honorable but different view that your ideological doctrine is the one true socialist faith. And you are anti-democratic and illiberal, because you think you know better than the voters, the Oireachtas, the two governments with jurisdiction on this island, and the fundamental principle of the penal system that a person serves the sentence for crimes s/he’s convicted of, and can be subjected to whatever surveillance the security services deem appropriate, but beyond that, under our constitution, it’s the people and their elected and appointed representatives who have the final say, not Jackie Laughlin. That puts you in the same camp as the NI Unionists, who always appear to know better than everyone else and expect and demand the last word on everything. If they don’t like the result, they sulk, and are totally opposed to change their ideology and to progress.
Frank,
Wow! I’m flattered by all your accusations! Am I really that bad? This is great; I’m usually accused of being moderate and boring.
I think your definition of fascist is good and applicable to SF/IRA.
I accept election results but I don’t fall silent before them. Do you? I hope not!
British troops were deployed in NI in the late 60s to protect Catholics and were welcomed. If you don’t believe me, check it out. The troops were then targetted by our nationalist patriots and the spiral took another turn. The civil rights movement and the SDLP set out to change the oppressive unionist state; they were heroes, in realising that change must happen but that things were not so bad as to justify killing.
I’m not arguing that criminals be barred from running for the Dail. Once elected, however, I don’t think they should be treated any better or worse by the media. Hence my question, would a paedophile be allowed talk about routine political matters?
I think you misunderstand socialism. To misquote Dick Spring, we REALLY DO believe in the mixed economy. We also see the achievement of a good life for all as a horizon which must be perpetually pursued without any hope of reaching a final solution. To be honest that metaphor was stolen from Regis Debray.
Jackie,
Final solution, eh? Where have I heard that term before
I’m certainly arguing the Sinn Féin stance as the guy who met Killian Forde and wrote up the interview for IrishElection.com, in order to winkle out the opposite view you are expressing, and I hope the readers find it as interesting as I do.
You point out that ‘British troops were deployed in NI in the late 60s to protect Catholics’. I remember that, and I suspect you’re old enough to remember it too. I started secondary school in 1969. Who did the London government put its military on the streets to protect Catholics from? An oppressed and powerless unionist minority devoid of influence over political or administrative or policing powers?
Why do you consider that my definition of fascist is applicable to SF/IRA post 1970, and that they should not be regarded as righteous defenders of the catholics who needed protecting so badly that troops had been put on the streets?
I recognise that you view the insurrection of 1916 as the act of blood-obsessed fruitcakes, but surely you’re not saying that because you dislike either the tactics or the romanticism of the 1916 Rising, the hegemonic community in the monolithic Unionist statlet of Northern Ireland was fifty years later an oppressed minority living in terror of an oppressive catholic majority in its jurisdiction.
Frank,
I accept that you put a smilie after the comment to take the harm out of it but I was saying that socialists do not envision final solutions.
I am quite clear that NI since its inception was an awful place for catholics, that the unionist majority cruelly denied those catholics the basic rights they would have enjoyed in Britain or the in the Republic. The civil rights movement and the SDLP rose in peaceful challenge to this. Unionists attacked catholics. British troops moved in to protect catholics. The IRA grasped the opportunity and targetted the troops. This is a gross oversimplification, of course. However, I write it more than anything else to convince you that I have nothing good to say about unionist oppression and bigotry.
However, equal rights, a representative Stormont and honest government in NI have been delayed by SF/IRA. They are also responsible for deaths, maiming and increased bigotry along the way. They have learned a route to power and have brought their fascist gift for organisation to the south. This is no longer about a united Ireland. SF/IRA have copperfastened partition.
You defined “Fascism to be normally associated with the actions of a previously dominant conservative class using brutality to hold onto its perceived right to dominate a lesser class of people” and that’s what SF/IRA are up to. They are the rump of catholic, nationalist Ireland, they are brutal and they regard unionists, the poor (on whom they paricularly prey)and progressive Irish people as lesser beings who are not part of the one true faith of the dead generations. You do realise that they believe that IRA action can never be criminal?
You are avoiding my question. I’ll repeat it. I’m appalled that a convicted gun runner is allowed to contribute to routine political debate. Would (indeed, should)a convicted paedophile be allowed the same?
‘I’m appalled that a convicted gun runner is allowed to contribute to routine political debate. Would (indeed, should)a convicted paedophile be allowed the same?’
Extracts from 10:14 am comment on April 3rd
I think the Oireachtas has it within its powers to disqualify convicted gun-runners and people who commit sex offences against children, but it hasn’t done so…You can’t honestly claim you want to change democracy because you don’t like the results the voters give…
It’s also a fundamental principle of the justice and penal systems that when a convicted criminal has served his sentence, that’s the end of the matter…
If a convicted child sex offender stood for election and won a Dáil seat, that would be a bit surprising…
the fundamental principle of the penal system that a person serves the sentence for crimes s/he’s convicted of, and can be subjected to whatever surveillance the security services deem appropriate, but beyond that, under our constitution, it’s the people and their elected and appointed representatives who have the final say…
Who is “Admin”? He or she has forced the discussion back to ground already covered.
There is no dispute about a served sentence being the end of the matter.
However, in practice the media do not allow released criminals to talk openly about anything and everything. One criminal is treated differently. If he were a paedophile would he be allowed to present himself as normal?
Article 11 of the Charter Of Fundamental Rights of the EU recognises freedom of expression, including the freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information without interference by public authority.
I know that!
Now, address the question. If we allow a known, convicted, unapologetic gunrunner (Dail membership is beside the point.)to talk in the media about routine matters, knowing full well that he is trying to appear ordinary, acceptable and good, do we allow the same freedom to a known, convicted paedophile?
Subject to the constitution, the laws and regulatory regime in force at the time, and any relevant court orders operating, the freedom of commercial media broadcasting, publishing or distributing in the republic to make their own editorial decisions is an important component of democracy. The state broadcaster is also regulated by statute.
The media appear prone to a bit of senationalism, but ten or fifteen years ago no-one had ever heard the word paedophile. Now everyone has, thanks to the media.
Within the law, people are free to make up their own minds what they want to read, see or hear. If an unapologetic convicted paedophile were to be given access to present him or herself as normal in the media, the paying public and the cash-rich advertisers would make their views known.
Ah, so “market” equals “freedom”! Then why do you need to resort to laws and conventions to avoid the question?
Do YOU think it right that a paedophile be free to present himself (herself?) in the media as normal? Similarly, do you think it right that a gunrunner be allowed present himself as normal? Both presentations are implied arguments in favour of their of their perversions. The creation of “normality” is a continuing “argument” in the media.
Normality may be in the eye of the beholder. If the media allows objectionable individuals to expose themselves to the ridicule and contempt of the public, censorship would arguably be doing the public good a disservce. Who in authority SHOULD decide who to ban. Both UK and Irish governments have lifted the media bans on SF/IRA years ago. It’s a closed matter at present, and the paedophile analogy is hypothetical and not comparable.
Normality is certainly not in the eye of the beholder. Ask any outsider who is excluded. Normality is a social construct and the media play perhaps the largest part in portraying what is normal, i.e. expressing who is inside or outside the consensus.
You will try anything to avoid the essential question. I’m coming to the conclusion that you think an unapologetic gun runner is normal and should be allowed to demonstrate that by appearing as a regular guy. I am of course appalled by such an attitude.
Again, you tell me what I already know: that the Irish and British broadcasting bans on terrorists are long gone. That has nothing to do with the discussion.
The paedophile analogy is not entirely hypothetical. Gay Byrne tried such an interview a few years ago and there was an enormous public outcry. Our gun runner is seldom condemned.
Can any conclusions be drawn?
Let’s try a very direct question. Are you distressed by an unreformed terrorist being treated in the media as a celebrity?
(By the way, you said in passing that 10 or 15 years ago no one had heard of paedophilia. How old are you? If you are young, don’t buy that! I’m over 40, a victim of the Christian Brothers, and believe me everyone knew what was going on!)
Jackie,
You’re free to think as you do, and to express yourself as you wish, so long as you don’t defame anyone. You’re straying close to abusing the very freedom of expression you would deny to others, and the freedom of others to receive information enabling them to make their own minds up what they make of people who put themselves in the public arena.
Admin,
You will not engage, will you?
There is no question of limiting free speech. The one thing that terrorists and their supporters will not do is argue for their violence. That awful phrase springs to mind: they are “economical with the truth”. In creating their acceptable image, insinuating themselves within normality, essentially they lie. A free media should expose lies.
To return to the analogy, if a paedophile tried to talk about, say, rural development, any journalist worthy of the name would drag him quickly back to his defining issue. When an unrepentent gunrunner pulls the same stroke, journalists let it pass.
Jackie,
Very well put. Any other views out there?