As the debate on free speech
for supposed terrorism sympathisers continues, people who are keen to
propose new restrictions should stop and look at the fate of two
professors in Britain, as revealed by contrasting stories in
yesterday’s Guardian.

Steven Best
is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso.
He’s a strong supporter of animal rights, and had planned to visit
Britain to take part in celebrating a successful campaign to close down
a farm that bred guinea pigs for research. But the Blair government,
using its new anti-terrorism rules, has banned him from entering the
country.

There seems no suggestion that Professor Best had
engaged in any acts of violence himself; the most that could be said
was that he had encouraged and defended animal liberationists who had
(he claims his words were taken out of context). And even if Islamic
terrorism is such an extreme global threat that it requires
restrictions on free speech, putting animal liberation in the same
basket is downright bizarre.

But speaking of Islamists brings us to the second professor, Tariq Ramadan,
a distinguished Swiss-based scholar of Islam and philosophy. He was
planning to travel to the United States to take up a position at Notre
Dame University, but a month ago the US government informed him that
his visa had been revoked on “national security” grounds, based on his
supposed endorsement of terrorism. He has also in the past been denied
entry to France.

But the Blair government has no such reservations; according to The Guardian,
Professor Ramadan has just been “appointed to a government taskforce
attempting to root out Islamic extremism in Britain.” In the words of a
Labour MP, “It sends all the right messages that the government is
engaged in a real search for answers, rather than pandering to kneejerk
elements in the rightwing press and their prejudices.”

We used
to say that one person’s freedom fighter was another person’s
terrorist. Now, it seems, one person’s philosopher is another person’s
terrorist – and vice versa.