We [you(s) - I’d ‘quit’ by then] may have been ‘high fived’ by people who thought it was a pro-free speech statement but we were equally castigated for the same - the editorial in the Oxford Student, for example.

As for the experience of issues affecting diverse communities… well it is astonishing that people would get so upset over a cartoon; you were trying to show it in the context of a news story, as useful information; and there hadn’t been any protests in the UK by gair rhydd’s deadline night.

Of course, we were ignorant of other people, but so is everyone at some point.

I think people often interpret the purpose of freedom of speech as an opportunity to intentionally get offensive, which may be why they put that… nevertheless, I think we all got high fived way too much for what looked like ‘making a statement,’ when really it was my bad for just not reading the newspaper.

I’m in the middle of a lengthy application for a BBC trainee thingy, and one of the questions asks me to outline a time when I’ve had ‘direct experience of issues affecting diverse communities.’ I think the time has come to bring up gair rhydd, but I’m finding it terribly hard to describe it as a ‘learning curve’ without making it look like we were ignorant towards other people. Tricky.

I wondered at first whether he was so (relatively) unoffended by the cartoons because he’s a convert and hasn’r grown up with Islam; he’s American, and the have more generally liberal attitudes to free speech anyway (except re: the Flag); and Muslims aren’t really marginalised in the US as they’re perceived to be in the UK because of America’s long tradition of racial and religious pluralism.

But I was having a look around the internet, and a poll at IslamOnline.net had 57% of 70,000 respondents disagreeing that there should be limits on free speech when it comes to the ’sacred’ (nearly wrote ’scared’…) in religion.

I’d pitched the piece that I was researching to Index on Censorship - got a rejection letter last night. (They’re covering a similar topic with one of their staff.)

In it they mentioned about the “right to offend”. Index seem to have missed the point just as virtually everyone else did: it’s not about having the right to offend; it’s about not having the right to censor just because something is “offensive”.