MORE HYPOCRISY: Next Week, Manchester Students’ Union to host Org that says “Holocaust a Hoax, Women not Permitted in the Workplace”

The University of Manchester Students’ Union has barred Milo Yiannopoulos and Julie Bindel from speaking at an upcoming University event titled, “Does Modern Feminism Have Problem with Free Speech?” Since two speakers on opposite sides of a debate have been censored, this gives rise to the question — who could possibly be politically correct enough to earn the Union’s approval?

As I previously reported, it didn’t take much research to find that the Students’ Union had hosted a speaker who said that in an ideal society, gays would be executed for kissing. Yiannopoulos and Bindel are both homosexual, which makes us wonder why the Union would permit someone who advocates killing of gays, but censor two gay speakers?

But wait — there’s more! On October 14th, the Students’ Union will be hosting Muslim Engagement and Development’s (MEND) exhibition on Islamophobia. MEND has quite an interesting history when it comes to women’s rights and antisemitism, and has even been linked to charities with terrorist ties.

Abu Eesa Niamatullah, MEND’s CEO, has come under fire for comments he made on Facebook regarding women, such as, “Don’t try to understand women. Women understand women and they hate each other.” When feminists responded with outrage, Niamatullah responded that feminism was antithetical to Islam, and that he relished women’s anger over his comments:

For you, carry on burning in your rage. There is nothing that delights me more by God than making you mad. I hope you spend the rest of this entire week spending every second thinking about these comments and it freaking you out.

Niamatullah went on to say that his position on women’s rights and gender equality was simply what “was stated by Allah and His Messenger.” The issue here is consistency: even from the perspective of mincing political correctness, the Union’s standards for censorship just don’t add up. As provocative as Milo Yiannopoulos may be, his reasonable critiques of feminism are no more offensive than Niamatullah’s inflammatory rhetoric. And certainly Bindel, who has spent her career advocating for women, deserves a platform if MEND does.

MEND continues to promote views that are unequivocally antisemitic and anti-women. Azad Ali, Mend’s director of engagement, is an extremist who has given support to the killing of British troops. Yasir Qadhi, MEND’s speaker for their “Islam in Britain” events this year, is already controversial for claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax. In addition, he has also gone on record as saying that women should be entirely barred from the workplace:

Women should not be in the workplace whatsoever. Full stop. I simply can’t imagine how we will safeguard our Islamic identity in the future and build strong Muslim communities in the West with women wanting to go out and becoming employed in the hell that it is out there.

Students are already complaining about this blatant inconsistency to Jess Lishak, the Union’s Women’s Officer:

So the question remains: how does the Manchester Students’ Union justify hosting such an antisemitic, anti-women group on campus, while censoring a feminist activist like Julie Bindel? Next to the beliefs of MEND, Milo Yiannopoulos’s critiques of modern feminism appear quite tame. He’s certainly never advocated that women be excluded from the workplace. In fact, he supports women having every legal right that men do. If the Manchester Students’ Union are going to censor speakers based on an authoritarian set of rules, they should at least be consistent and not give platform to anti-women and antisemitic groups like MEND.

Of course the true solution is simply to open up discussion on campus. If the most controversial views can’t be discussed at a university, then where?

As we continue to inquire into the Student Union’s bizarre policing of speech, perhaps the most compelling question is, “When will the irony end?”