UCT Flemming Rose debate
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After the Executive of the University of Cape Town released a statement stating their decision to withdraw the invitation by the UCT Academic Freedom Committee (AFC) to Mr Flemming Rose for this year’s TB Davie Memorial Lecture, the lecture was cancelled. The invited speaker, Mr Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of the Danish magazine, Jyllands Posten, which in 2005 had published a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. The publication of the cartoons generated extensive debate and controversy globally, regarding freedom of speech, blasphemy and Islamophobia, and was accompanied by public protests and riots. But the statement proved to be problematic in its assumptions. Shafiq Morton spoke to Mohammed Jameel Abdullah, Contributor to the Daily Vox and Rhodes Must Fall activist as well as Francis Petersen, Deputy Vice Chancellor of UCT.