Michael Savage, nee Michael Alan Weiner

England has it right when it comes to figuring out that hate speech is not defined by whether you agree with it. The country has banned some of America’s most famous haters, who stack up quite well in a group of 16 of the world’s most odious troublemakers.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith took the unprecedented step of “naming and shaming” 16 individuals who were barred from coming to the UK between November and March.

Most of those on the list are foreign Muslim preachers whom the Home Office believes would incite hatred or glorify terrorism if they were allowed in. But the list also includes a number of white supremacists, homophobic preachers and an anti-Arab Jewish militant. Two Slav supremacists on the list have been incarcerated in a Russian jail since October 2007.

One of these idiots is threatening a lawsuit. You might have heard of him.

Michael Savage, a so-called “shock jock” radio host who has a right-wing talk show called The Savage Nation, described the UK Home Secretary Jacqui Smith as a “lunatic” and said he had set his lawyers to work on the case…

“For this lunatic Jacqui Smith … to link me up with skinheads who are killing people in Russia, to put me in league with mass murderers who kill Jews on buses, is defamation,” Savage said on his show…

Savage, who says he has between 8 and 10 million listeners across the United States, urged them to support him by canceling any travel plans to Britain and by boycotting British-made goods…

Smith defended her decision, saying Savage – whose real name is Michael Alan Weiner – was a man of extreme views who expressed them “in such a way that it is actually likely to cause inter-community tension or even violence”.

“Coming to this country is a privilege,” she told Good Morning Television. “If you can’t live by the rules that we live by, the standards and the values that we live by, we should exclude you from this country.”

Our own favorite picks on the list are hate personified Fred Phelps and his spawn, Shirley Phelps-Roper.

Others include: Lebanese militant Samir Al Quintar, Kashmiri nationalist Nasr Javed, the prayer leader at Islamabad’s Red Mosque Amir Siddique, American white supremacist Don Black, British preacher Abdullah Qadri Al Ahdal, Egyptian writer calling for jihad against Jews who was deported from California in 2004 Wagdy Ghoneim, Hamas Parliament member Yunis Al Astal, anti-semite Abdul Ali Musa, Jewish supremacist Mike Guzofsky, Slav skinheads and murderers Artur Ryno and Pavel Skachevsky, Egyptian televangelist Safwat Hijazi, and West Virginia neo-Nazi Eric Gliebe.