Hey there, you're listening to Unlimited Hangout. I'm your host Whitney Webb. Today, we are going to be talking about speech and how the concept of free speech is changing rapidly, not just in the United States.

But elsewhere, particularly in the West. Increasingly, in the countries that have long claimed to champion democracy and the freedom to say what you wish, speech is becoming like into terrorism and those that speak the wrong words could soon find themselves labeled as terrorists for doing so.

As I've noted in past articles and also in a more recent speech, the Biden administration's policy documents for the so-called war on domestic terror call for the censorship of, quote, polarizing voices.

Voices that disagree with the state's narrative and thus foment disagreement and allegedly incite violence. Such speech, if this agenda is allowed to advance further, will label those polarizing figures terrorists merely because what they say might persuade people from distrusting the government.

There are precedents for what follows the implementation of such policies, though not so much in the West in recent history. It's not hard to see what the criminalization of dissent leads to and what kind of government makes that criminalization in a state policy.

To discuss the state of speech in the West today, I'm joined by Gareth Ike, a journalist activist and musician who is all too familiar with the themes of censorship and how this particular agenda has been a steady, if gradual, march over the course of the past several years and even decades.

Gareth and his family, particularly his father, David Ike, have been on the front lines of the censorship agenda much longer than most people. Very recently, David Ike was banned from visiting several European countries after the Dutch government made that decision after consultations with police and counter-terrorism officials.

Has the line between inconvenient speech and terrorism allegations begun to disappear entirely?

We'll be getting into this question and much more in today's podcast. So hey Gareth, thanks for being here and welcome to Unlimited Hangout.

Thanks for having me.

My pleasure. So I guess it goes without saying that the hot topic today is how your father has been banned from much of Europe. So what exactly happened and what was the role as far as you know of counter-terror officials in reaching that decision?

It was, wow, it was crazy, crazy. So basically dad was asked to speak at a peace rally and anti-war rally in Amsterdam.

And as soon as he was asked, he said, yeah, that sounds great. I could love to do that. And then the Dutch media jumped on that.

There's a couple of complaints from organizations that have kind of gone from my dad before.

The usual suspects that all have ties to Israel. Just saying, you know, anti-Semite, anti-Semite, they never give only evidence of it.

Of course, they just kind of shout it and it tends to stick when it comes to the media.

So the media went on the absolute rampage with it and it was like it was front page news for like two weeks.

It was, you know, it was leading bulletins on mainstream news shows. It was crazy, really.

But they had all these people in, they had police officers, head of police, the mayor, they had politicians in there who were talking about it.

Never asked my dad, obviously, for his point of view. But then he got to a point in the end where they were interviewing two police officers or two police chiefs, sorry.

And one of them said on this show that actually, well, we can't ban him because he's not done anything wrong.

Like he's not, like he's in, he doesn't have a criminal record, he's not breaking the law.

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