the late Jade Goody

[Rob]

You can't really label all hate speech as wrong as you did there since hate speech is such a subjective form of speech. If you say something (anything) in a public place large enough someone is bound to be offended. Should such occurrences be labelled as hate speech because one person in a million takes offence? and if not, how many people need to take offence?

Any speech that expresses hatred towards an unchangeable attribute of a group is hate speech. This covers gender (unchangeable at least in a non-scientific sense), sexual orientation, race, etc. Beliefs are free to be criticized because they are an active choice (i.e. you choose who you vote for, you choose to follow certain religious doctrines).

Intriguing definition. The only definitions I was able to find earlier today were were substantially more general. Thank you for clearing that up.

Why is it that Jade's should demand an apology and the muslims should not?

Both should have, but the UK is afraid of Islam. Just look at what they are forcing through the UN! A resolution that makes it a crime to insult religion! The UK needs to wake up and realize that you cannot possibly protect citizens from hate speech as well as condemn people for attacking religion. Religions are all forms of hate speech in some way or another, and Islam is one of the worst.

With the exception of the first three words I agree with all of the above paragraph. What the UN is doing flies in the face of all the progress and benefits we should be experiencing as we step towards a world government.
I disagree with the first three words since in Jade's case I do not see how the incident would classify as hate speech under the aforementioned definition. Now correct me if I'm wrong and I quite probably am on account of having a colander for a brain and not seeing the footage for years, but as far as I remember she did not make a hateful comment. The comment could not have been hate speech unless of course we extend the definition to cover people not present nor referenced in the speech. However, then once again we again have a problem over a definition too general to be useful.