Proving the Point: Book on Cancel Culture Gets Canceled By Publisher

British journalist Julie Burchill was all set to push back on cancel culture with hew new book, “Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics.” The book was to be published by Little, Brown, and it would have served as a sharp critique of the modern left and how unhinged from both reality and from traditional liberal ideas they have become in recent years. Ideals like “guilty until proven innocent.” Ideals like “we should believe in science.” Ideals, of course, like “freedom of speech.”

Well, now the book’s publisher has officially withdrawn Burchill’s book. Why? Well, because she got into a little tiff with Muslim writer Ash Sarkar, and now Sarkar’s followers are accusing Burchill of the Dreaded Crime of Islamophobia.

FrontPage Mag has more:

The book, according to the report, “was promoted as a ‘characteristically irreverent and entertaining’ indictment of the ‘outrage mob.’” But the outrage mob was not outraged by anything in the book itself. It was evidently outraged because Burchill asked Sarkar, “Can you please remind me of the age of the Prophet Mohammad’s first wife?”

Burchill is clearly speaking about Muhammad’s child bride Aisha, not his first wife, Khadija, who was fifteen years older than he was. But that’s just a detail. Commenters raked Burchill over the coals for her supposed hypocrisy for ignoring child marriage in British history and claiming that Mary was a child when she married Joseph. Yet none of that was on point. No one would care about Muhammad’s child marriage were his behavior not normative for Islamic law and imitated by all too many Muslims even today. So what Burchill said, aside from mixing up the order of Muhammad’s wives, was entirely based on fact.

Sarkar herself was eager to get the outrage mob rolling. She tweeted, “Julie Burchill, who once I suppose was a well-regarded journalist, has quite openly subjected me to Islamophobia on here. I’m a big girl – it’s not going to upset me – but I do find it strange that none of her colleagues or friends in the industry seems to have a problem with it.”

Well, that was all it took. Within days, Burchill’s publisher rushed to prove to the world that they are every bit as woke as they need to be in the current environment.

“We will no longer be publishing Julie Burchill’s book. This is not a decision we have taken lightly. We believe passionately in freedom of speech at Little, Brown and we have always published authors with controversial or challenging perspectives – and we will continue to do so,” they said.

If your passion for free speech ends at the point where a Muslim gets their feelings hurt (or pretends to), then it isn’t worth a mossy penny. The values of free speech only matter when someone – or some group – wants to shut that speech down. It’s how you respond at those moments that prove how much or how little you care about freedom of speech.

Britain has shown over and over again in recent years that they care more about protecting Muslims than they do about upholding the values of Western democracy. This is just the latest example.