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Chapter 1: What led to Cenk Uygur's ban from entering the UK?
This is The Guardian. Today, the left-wing US commentators banned from coming to Britain. A few days ago, Cenk Uygur was at the airport.
So I went to LAX in Los Angeles, going to Heathrow. Didn't think twice about it. I have that ETA last two years. And since I'd come to speak at Oxford last year, it was still in effect.
An ETA, an electronic travel authorization, allows travelers to enter the UK. But Cenk, a left-wing commentator and host of the Young Turks YouTube channel, was having some problems.
I couldn't log on from my computer, which I found to be a little bit strange, but I thought, oh, I'll probably have to give the ETA number at the terminal. So I go to the terminal and a woman comes to help me and she tries to check me in through a kiosk and says, oh, that's weird. I can't check you in. Let's go look at my computer terminal. And she does.
And she says, oh, wow, I've never seen this.
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Chapter 2: How did Cenk and Hasan react to their travel bans?
You've been rejected by the British government. We're not allowed to put you on the plane. You can't board because the British government has withdrawn your ETA and said you're not allowed to enter the country.
How did you feel before?
Well, at first I thought it was a bureaucratic snafu. I was like, well, that can't be right. That's absurd. I was just there, right? And there's no reason to ban me. Then that piece from The Times came out about 15 or 20 minutes after that.
As Cenk found out, he'd been banned from entering the UK, seemingly for things he'd said about Israel in the past.
I had said that America is controlled by Israel and in reference to how the Israeli lobby has given more to American Congress than any other lobby in the last election cycle. Later, they added to the story and said Cenk said that Israel had committed a genocide and their acts were barbaric and savage.
And Cenk wasn't alone. He'd been due to speak in the UK this week with his nephew, Hassan Paika, the hugely popular left-wing streamer that Hassan too had been barred.
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Chapter 3: What specific comments triggered the UK's ban on Cenk Uygur?
And as the Home Office becomes ever more hardline, Cenk and Hassan are unlikely to be the last to be banned from coming to the UK to speak. From The Guardian, I'm Lucy Hough. Today in Focus, Cenk Uyghur on Israel, free speech and his ban from the UK. So Cenk Uygur, you will be a familiar face and voice to many of our listeners.
You spent more than 20 years building a huge audience through your talk show, The Young Turks. But for anyone unfamiliar with your work, how would you describe what you do?
Young Turks is the flagship show of the TYT Network. The TYT Network is on dozens of platforms, including as a 24-hour channel. So you can see that on Roku, Amazon Prime, YouTube TV, and so many other places. But our home base is YouTube. We're the longest-lasting online show in history.
We're considered on the left, and I certainly am, but all of our hosts have slightly different positions, so there is no one position for the TYT network, but we are known for being generally on the left.
Maybe the assassination was, like, not something that we... We don't know the full story.
We are the first YouTube channel ever, and so that makes me the original YouTuber.
Wow, what an accolade.
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Chapter 4: How do Cenk and Hasan perceive the implications of their bans?
Yeah. Yeah. We're the longest lasting online show in history. And in fact, I was coming to London to speak at South by Southwest about digital media, which I'm an expert in. So at Oxford, I was going to speak about Israel and foreign policy. But at South by, I was just speaking on digital media.
So you were due to come and give a talk in the UK, as you say. It's not the first time you've traveled to the UK to do such an event, right?
No.
That's right. I've spoken at Oxford twice before, and I've been to the UK many times. And in fact, they went and found old blogs from 30 years ago that was some manufactured controversy from a decade ago. Wait, I've been in Britain many times since then, so why are we now bringing those issues up? Oh, so this is an attempt at character assassination.
This doesn't have anything to do with what I actually said.
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Chapter 5: What context surrounds the UK government's decision to ban these commentators?
And that's because there's no reason to ban me at all. In fact, if you ban me, the great majority of British citizens agree with me. Are you going to ban your own citizens? Are your own citizens a threat to the public order? And in a sense, they are, right? Because the order is set by the powerful. And so they don't want you disturbing their order.
Kieran Stacey, you are policy editor for The Guardian. You're speaking to us from Parliament. So you're very well placed to speak to us about the decision by the government this week to ban these two American commentators. We've heard this sort of official statement from the Home Office that they felt that this visit would not be conducive to the public good.
But what else do you understand about the decision from the Home Office to bar them?
Yeah, well, I mean, it comes in the context of a kind of ramping up of similar action over the last few months by the Home Office. PICA and UGA are by no means the only people to have had their travel permission revoked in recent months to the UK. They are unusual in that they are on the left of politics.
Chapter 6: How does the Home Office justify banning individuals based on speech?
Mainly, we've had people on the right of politics being banned from travelling, whether that's Kanye West or whether that's a group of activists, commentators and politicians who are banned from coming to a rally hosted by Tommy Robinson, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the far right agitator over here in the UK. This has been happening quite a lot.
And these two are simply the latest to have this happen as a result of action by the Home Office.
So Paika and Yuga were due to be travelling to the UK for two events. One was South by Southwest UK, as well as a talk at the Oxford Union. The Oxford Union have said on Wednesday that they are going to go ahead with the event, but instead do it remotely. But Hugo travelled to Oxford last year without any issues.
So what are some of the concerns now that the Home Office are worried about that they've said? Is it recent comments? Because Hugo said they've looked back at comments that he said a very long time ago.
Yeah, I mean, first thing to say is that we don't completely know because the Home Office doesn't have to say. However, judging by some of the comments that have been flagged by people close to the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, and have appeared in press reports, Hassan Paika, I think the comments that come up again and again... ones where he said he would vote for Hamas over Israel.
He thinks that Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel. He has described Orthodox Jews as being inbreds, and he's also claimed that America deserved 9-11.
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Chapter 7: What are the broader implications of banning commentators for free speech?
As you say, none of these are particularly new comments, but you can see, especially with Hamas being a prescribed entity, why support for what is essentially regarded in the UK as a terrorist organisation might have been flagged at high levels within the Home Office.
Because I think it connects to another comment of yours that's been circulating. This is one from January. Hamas is a thousand times better than a fascist settler colonial apartheid state. I stand by that.
For Cenk Uygur, it's slightly different. His language has been less clear cut. The things that have been flagged with him are he has repeatedly framed Israel's actions as genocide, barbaric and savage, particularly in Palestine. He's accused Israel of using Jews as human shields.
Also, there was one exchange on Uncensored with Piers Morgan in which you guys seem to dismiss evidence relating to grooming gangs in towns in the north, such as Rotherham.
But Cenk, Cenk, I'm a Jew, right? And I've already sat here and I can say there are huge problems that I find in the Hasidic Jewish community. Why can't you guys, when we talk about the grooming gangs, when we talk about Islamism, can you address it? Can you shut up and let me address it? Can you address it without mentioning Israel?
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Chapter 8: What actions might Cenk take to challenge his ban from the UK?
Or can you address grooming gangs? Because that's the whole reason we're having this conversation.
Because your Israeli buddies wanted a distraction from the Epstein files. That's why they threw this garbage into the media.
This has become quite a sensitive racial issue in the UK. And what Hugo went on to say on Piers Morgan's show was, well, these aren't really such a big issue. And he said, in fact, that concerns about this themselves were Islamophobic. Now,
I think it is a pattern here from the Home Office of drawing the line potentially further lower down than it might have done in the past as to what constitutes unacceptable language.
Yeah, and in terms of what's led to the decision, we understand that the Community Security Trust, a Jewish security organisation, had raised concerns last week about this scheduled visit and had spoken to the government about it. What do we understand about what has influenced this decision?
Yes, we're told that that is the case. I mean, I would say that the CST is in regular contact with the government and will always flag people coming into the country that it regards as being anti-Semitic and should not be here. That's fairly open. That's what they do.
I would say that politically part of the sensitivity around this is that the British police have been accused and in fact are being accused again as we speak of so-called two-tier policing. And that's basically of treating right-wing people differently from left-wing people or in certain occasions white people differently from non-white people.
And I think the government's quite sensitive about this. So if it is going to ban people like, for example, Valentina Gomez, a right wing campaigner, agitator, because she was filmed burning a Koran and has referred to rapist Muslims, then it also, I think, felt it was under an obligation to act quite strongly against anybody who had made what it regarded as anti-Semitic comments as well.
Yes, so both Paika and Yuga vehemently deny that they're anti-Semitic. And you mentioned that this is not unprecedented, that there are a number of people who've been barred from entry. I mean, what is the logic? Is there a sense from the Home Office that they are increasingly not allowing people who've said certain offensive things?
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