I love a good intra-right-wing philosophical debate, and last week brought us one with the banning of Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker from the United Kingdom.
Piker and Uygur were slated to speak at an SXSW London when the British Home Office suddenly revoked their visas. Their reasoning was that it would “not be conducive to the public good” for them to enter the country.
The radical pair instantly did what people like them always do. They blamed Israel, despite the fact that right-wing influencers who are pro-Israel have also been recently banned, and that the U.K. government is openly hostile to the Jewish state.
That led a number of right-of-center intellectuals, some of whom I deeply respect, to argue that the ban was folly. Both the Free Press and National Review editorial boards published pieces criticizing the ban on both pragmatic and philosophical grounds, asserting that the bans would both foster more anti-Israel sentiment and were also a betrayal of free speech and classical liberalism. Several other notable conservatives made similar arguments, including that a “confident” civilization wouldn’t need to do this.
But why should the U.K., Europe, or perhaps even the entire West be confident right now?
The entire continent is a shell of itself by any conceivable metric. Militarily impotent, economically depressed, and morally bankrupt, Western Europe is simply not in a position to be taking for granted that people will see radicalism for what it is when exposed to it.
Only a small minority of young Europeans say they are willing to fight and die for their country. Radical Islamism is becoming more prevalent by the day. Europe needs to be on a defensive posture, and that means fighting back against the forces that seek to destroy it by any means necessary, not being open to a good clean debate for the future of humanity.
The principled case for letting the pair travel is that liberalism dictates such. But Piker and Uygur are not British. We’ve seen similar arguments play out in the United States during the second Trump administration, about how to extend rights to non-citizens that we all agree citizens do have.
I am not a constitutional lawyer, so I won’t weigh in on the American legality, and I’m not a scholar of the British legal system either, so I won’t opine on Uygur and Piker’s legal rights across the pond, because I don’t know. What I will say is that I see no reason to extend the full charities of Western liberalism to foreigners who wish to destroy it.
This is the right’s version of suicidal empathy. Being a free speech absolutist comes from a good place. And within our own borders with our own people, it is necessary. But there’s no compelling reason a society must let in outsiders, with no stake in its fortune, to interlope, spread the seeds of destruction, and then go back where they came from, even from a classically liberal viewpoint.
The strongest argument comes from the pragmatists. Rich Lowry makes a version of this case, arguing that the ban is counterproductive because it raises the profile of the offenders in the U.K. and gives them an opportunity to clownishly blame Israel for it.
Lowry makes the good points that the British Home Office is run by a critic of Israel, the country is run by a left-wing government, and the country itself is profoundly anti-Zionist at this point, so of course it’s silly to blame Israel. That is all true, which is why I come to the opposite conclusion.
The suggestion that this ban is going to make more people aware of the dunce duo, and thus more likely to subscribe to their ideas, falls flat when they are already aligned with the majority. The case that it gives them an opportunity to falsely blame Israel falls flat because the case is so facially absurd.
Rather, the prevailing takeaway from this decision is that two destructive provocateurs were made to face consequences for their actions. That is all too rare today, and it’s about time that a Western government stood up for itself.
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