Johann Hari on the ‘March for Free Expression’

johann hariJohann Hari offers his assessment of last Saturday’s protest. “Communists mingled awkwardly with fascists”, he tells us approvingly, though unlike Tatchell he does at least have the honesty to admit that fascists participated in the demonstration.

Hari complains that a member of the Worker Communist Party of Iran was arrested for provocatively brandishing “silly cartoons of the Mohammed that some fundamentalist Muslims have declared to be blasphemous”.

The cartoons in question were in fact the most explicitly racist of the series published by Jyllands-Posten: one of the Prophet with a bomb as a turban and another of a wild-eyed Prophet wielding a knife, with two terrified veiled women cowering behind him – the implication of course being that Muslims are terrorists and misogynists.

We look forward to Hari defending the right of anti-semites to parade round Trafalgar Square with a caricature of a hook-nosed Jew counting money. After all, we have to defend freedom of expression at all costs, don’t we?

Evening Standard, 31 March 2006