Rotten values

The West's Politically Correct Dictatorship

It Has Blinded Us to the Real Danger: Radical Islam

It might look like a golden age for free speech: more than a billion tweets, Facebook posts and blogs every day. But beneath this surface, freedom of expression is dramatically retreating.

Students at the City University of London, home to one of Britain's most respected schools of journalism, voted to ban three newspapers from its campus: The Sun, Daily Mail and Express. Their "crime", according to the approved motion, is to have published stories against migrants, "Islamophobic" articles, and "scapegoating the working classes that they so proudly claim to represent." City University, supposedly a place dedicated to openness and questioning, became the first Western educational institution to vote for censorship, and ban "right wing newspapers."

The filmmaker David Cronenberg called this self-censorship, after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo: "a weird, serpentine political correctness." It is one of the most lethal ideological poisons of the 21st century. It is not only closed-minded and ridiculous, it makes us blind to the radical Islam that is undermining our mental and cultural defenses.