Thread by @PosenIzzy

@BrisFreeSpeech was due to host an event with Steven Greer who faced a concerted and bad faith campiagn of spurious allegations of Islamophobia.
I wrote more about this in this thread:

https://twitter.com/PosenIzzy/status/1465284880921763845

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The event was cancelled last minute due to pressure from uni authorities without any regard for the committee that worked so hard to put it together and for @BristolUni students who deserve answers to what one of their lecturers were put through.

We don't have all the details behind the decision to cancel this event, but here is the statement from Steven:

@BrisFreeSpeech went out of their way to have a balanced and nuanced event and have invited @brisoc well ahead of time to fully participate in the event and present their side of the story. That invitation was not accepted.

@BrisFreeSpeech @brisoc I am so familiar and so frustrated by this story. Free speech is very rarely directly and explicitly silenced. Rather unnecessary beurocracy, regulation, 'safety concerns' are evoked ad hoc, last minute, whenever the powers that be don't want certain speech to take place.

@BrisFreeSpeech @brisoc During my 2years as president of @BrisFreeSpeech I had to deal with this on numerous ocassions. Its tiring and exhausting and has a very clear chilling effect: it is simply too exhausting for student societies to organise events on anything remotely controversial by uni standards

@BrisFreeSpeech @brisoc Free speech means that students should just be ale to decide that they want to talk about something, or hear a speaker talk about something and just be able to go ahead and do it.

@BrisFreeSpeech @brisoc Complex beaurocracy and prohibitive conditions and last minute cancellations ARE free speech issues, no matter how many times the authorities "reafirm their commitment to free speech." Those are just hollow words.

@BrisFreeSpeech @brisoc An academic at @BristolUni and @BristolUniLaw was put through hell based on cooked up and spurious allegations. The least that he deserves is a voice and the least that Bristol students deserve is answers to their questions.