This week the British government banned Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, two leftwing US commentators with millions of followers, from entering the country on the grounds that their presence would not be “conducive to the public good”. It did not spell out what it meant by this very broad phrase but Piker and Uygur have accused the government of denying them entry because of their prolific criticism of Israel. Some critics have accused the pair of antisemitism, which they deny.
A lot has been written about the Piker-Uygur ban, and I don’t think I need to litigate everything they have ever uttered here. They have undeniably said some objectionable things (Piker, for example, said some Orthodox Jews are “inbred”, which he later apologized for.) What sort of speech crosses a line that makes you detrimental to the public good, is not clear, however. Conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, for example, has said that “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage”. While he later apologized for this, he has repeatedly characterized Arabs as barbarians who “value murder”. The British government has never banned him from speaking in the UK.
Neither Piker nor Uygur have said anything that is more divisive or dangerous than former Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s declaration that all Palestinians were responsible for the Hamas attack on 7 October. A UN commission of inquiry found that Herzog incited the commission of genocide with this statement and said that his later modifications of that utterance were an effort “to deflect responsibility for the initial statement”. Still, the British seem fine with that first statement: Herzog met with Keir Starmer in London in 2025. Clearly that meeting was deemed to be conducive to the public good.
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But, again, I don’t want to pronounce on each of Piker or Uygur’s statements here. I don’t want to fall into the trap of making this a story about two American commentators or the limits of free speech. Because at its heart, the Piker-Uygur ban is about a far more insidious issue. It’s about what Britain, and the US and Israel, wants us to believe is “good”. About the way in which our fundamental sense of what is “good” and “bad” are being manipulated.
Wherever you live, whatever you believe, wherever you sit on the political spectrum most of us have a shared understanding of basic moral concepts, of what is good and what is bad. We understand that children are innocent and should not be killed in the thousands. We understand that a region’s healthcare system should not be systematically wiped out and medics targeted. We understand that there should be laws around warfare to protect civilians. We understand that people should not be expelled en masse from their land, their homes replaced with luxury settlements. We understand that collective punishment is a crime, one which is very much not “conducive to the public good”.
None of the above is complex,no matter what some people would have you believe. I come back to the diaries of American peace activist Rachel Corrie often because they very eloquently show how there is no room for moral confusion when you are watching atrocities unfold in front of your own eyes. When Corrie went to Gaza in 2003, more than two decades before 7 October 2023, she wrote how nothing could have prepared her for what she was seeing, which she characterized as “a somewhat gradual – often hidden, but nevertheless massive – removal and destruction of the ability of a particular group of people to survive”. It terrified her, she said. “I just want to write to my mom and tell her that I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature,” Corrie wrote. Not long after writing this she was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to save a Palestinian home in Rafah from destruction. Now, of course, the entirety of Rafah, once home to 275,000 people, has been razed to the ground.
Again, when you see children being killed and paramedics being executed and entire cities being wiped from the map, very few people think: “Hmm, this is complex.” You know on a fundamental level that what you are seeing is wrong – or to put in bland legalese, “not conducive to the public good”. Which is why, Israel, and some elements of the western media, are doing their best to ensure you don’t see the atrocities taking place in Gaza and the West Bank and now Lebanon. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Israel “has committed more targeted killings of journalists than any other government’s military since CPJ began documentation in 1992”. At least 235 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza. The foreign media, meanwhile, is still not allowed free access to what is now a demolition site. The only way to go there is on propaganda trips led by the Israeli military. There has been far too little outrage from the international press about this.
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Another way to muddle the moral waters, to collapse the distinction between good and bad, is dehumanization. To cast Palestinians as barbarians who all, even the babies, have blood on their hands. In How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, Adam Johnson analyzed about 12,000 articles and 5,000 television clips about Gaza, to show how the US media frames Israel as de facto good and Palestinians as de facto bad. He found, for example, found that on the liberal cable news channel MSNBC (now MS Now), presenters and guests used the words “massacre” 177 times, “barbaric” 46 times, “savage” 23 times and “slaughter” 102 times when talking about Israeli deaths. They never, however, called the killing of Palestinians “barbaric” or “savage”. As media lecturer Jeff Sparrow writes in an analysis of Johnson’s book: “References to ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’ echo the logic of settler colonialism, identifying the uncivilised natives as a problem to be solved.”
The media has also helped reinforce Herzog’s statement that no Palestinian is truly innocent. The New York Times, Johnson notes, used the term “Hamas stronghold” and other variations, 154 times from October 2023 to October 2024 to refer to the top five most populated cities in Gaza. This sort of framing muddles civilians and combatants and makes you question the innocence of the dead – just as the phrasing “Hamas-controlled ministry of health”, ubiquitous in western reporting, nudges you into questioning the veracity of what Palestinians are saying.
For decades now there has been a Palestine exception to free speech. Since the Hamas attack on 7 October, however, that has ramped up massively. Pro-Palestine marches have been demonized. Students have been deported. Pulitzer prize-winning novelists such as Viet Thanh Nguyen have had events pulled. Propaganda has proliferated: Israel has quintupled its PR budget to $730m to take control of the narrative. Criticizing Israel can now stop you from getting a green card in the US and, it would seem from the Piker decision, a visa to the UK. Despite all this, however, more people are coming to understand that what is happening to Palestinians is not complex, it is fundamentally wrong.
Indeed even some government ministers have started speaking more clearly. This week, Labour chair of the foreign affairs select committee, Emily Thornberry, said the UK government has let down the Palestinian people and Israel’s “sense of impunity is staggering”. It’s a good statement but meaningless when the Labour government continues to punish others who point it out.
“My opinion is the majority’s opinion, and they can’t arrest every single person, right?” Piker told the Times of his ban from the UK. “So they try to make an example out of members of the media, prominent critics of Israel … [to create] a chilling effect on speech.”
When you stop someone from entering your country because you deem that they are not “conducive to the public good” then I think it’s important to spell out exactly what you mean by “good”. The British government has declined to do that directly. But what has become very clear, over the last couple of years, is that the UK and US have deemed it conducive for the public good for Israel to be allowed to do whatever it likes, with no limits. What is morally bad, apparently, is talking about it.
