Free speech for Wiley?
by Paul Goodman, Conservative Home:
Our older readers will be familiar with Wiley – the rapper who last week posted a series of anti-semitic remarks on social media.
We linger on one tweet only, in which he undertook a whirlwind tour of the Israel-Palestine dispute, claiming that “I cannot be upset about two sets of people killing each other on land that belongs to us anyway”. This is a Black Israelite trope – the claim that black people are real descendants of the biblical Hebrews.
It takes a unique diplomatic talent to deny the rights of both Jews and Palestinians simultaneously. At any rate, it goes almost without saying that Wiley’s posts were deeply stupid, disgusting, and self-defeating.
On that last point, Wiley has lost his manager, John Woolf, a self-described “proud Jewish man” who first clung to his client, saying that “as someone who has known him for 12 years I know he does not truly feel this way,” but soon let him go – an admission that Wiley does truly feel this way.
The point about our more aged readers is not a piece of self-trolling, incidentally. At 41, Wiley isn’t exactly a slip of a grime artist almost young enough to know no better.
Anti-semitism these days is found more often on the Left than the Right, so it is tempting for a conservative site simply to slag off Wiley, as we do above, and move on. But if free speech demands anything, it demands even more than Orwell’s famous quote about liberty meaning “the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”.
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