Earlier this week Liberty Victoria awarded Yassmin Abdel-Magied the 2018 Young Voltair Award. In a series of tweets, Abdel-Magied announced, “I won an award for Free Speech y’all. This one is for all those young Muslims and POC [people of colour] in Aus and around the world who know their equality is conditional, but know they need to speak anyway… And for all those who tried to silence me… Eat your hearts out.”
This one is for all those young Muslims and POC in Aus and around the world who know their equality is conditional, but know they need to speak anyway. I got your back, yâall.
— Yassmin Abdel-Magied (@yassmin_a) March 19, 2018
Simon Breheny, director of policy at the Institute of Public Affairs said, “I’m struggling to recall anything Ms Abdel-Magied has done to defend freedom of speech.” Last night on the Bolt Report, editor of the Spectator Australia, Rowan Dean, expressed a similar sentiment.
Free speech isn’t just the right to prattle on and say whatever you feel like saying at any given moment. That is a by-product of free speech, absolutely. And people are absolutely free to say whatever they want, make a goose of themselves, say the silliest thing that comes into their mind — Islam being a ‘feminist religion’ might fit into that little category… Yassmin uses her free speech, but is she a champion of free speech? Of course the answer is no.
Dean’s full comments can be heard in the video below.
