Neither should be jailed.

Certainly the Saudi Arabian man should not be jailed, he should be given a medal!

But you cant have it both ways. Thats the rub with freedom of speech.

At this point most frothing D-M readers are probably wondering why the magistrate didnt have the poor twit flogged too...

I don't think it's having it both ways. It's the content which differentiates the speech. The problem here (for commentators) is that we don't know exactly what was tweeted.

The judge did, and he was jailed for being offensive, not for making threats.

Speech is either free or its not. If you are going to make legal judgments based on the offensiveness of the content, then its not free. Im sure some Saudi observers find Raif Badawis comments offensive to their strict muslim sensibilities after all.

Fine. We don't need it to be completely free.

I may be wrong but it seems like you are saying. That if you agree with someones point then they have the right to express it. if not, porridge.

As long as people dont deem your comments to be offensive though, right?

And then who gets to decide on what is/isnt offensive?

You have to differentiate between offensive comments and threats. The Westboro Baptist Church make offensive comments, but they don't make threats. As soon as you say "I" or "We" are going to kill, it becomes a threat. Such threats intimidate people and are crimes.

We’re agreed on that, but he didn’t threaten to kill anyone.
He said “I’d have killed them all”. Past tense. Hypothetical.
It’s not the same as “I’m going to kill them all”.

Is that the exact tweet? Where did you see it reported?

I think it's all quite alarming.

We are now deemed capable of being offended by people we may never have met posting things we may never have read.

Don't get me wrong, only a fool would put into print some of the more outrageous comments we all make from time to time, but showing yourself up to be a fool should not be a criminal offence.

But 100 years before the US bill of rights was ratified which was 1791, the US was not an independent country.

Granted but my point was that we already have one. The US copied Britain in this respect, we don't need to copy them.