Section 14

The German bid to spread its holocaust denial laws across the entire European union has gone a step further, although in a watered-down form. The new law will make it an offence to deny or trivialise the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, but only if the effect is to incite racial hatred or violence.

A Polish/Baltic attempt to have Stalin’s crimes covered was rejected as was, in a nod to candidate-hopeful Turkey, any mention of the Armenian genocide. Germany’s bid to ban Nazi iconography has also been dropped.

While it’s good that the law has been watered down, (my thoughts on the original proposal are here: German bid to spread fascism), it is still an entirely unwarranted limitation on freedom of speech. There are already laws against inciting violence and inciting hatred is nothing more than thoughtcrime.

On a related topic, Spiked has an essay (Turning society into Room 101) on the “pathologisation” of certain types of expression:

People are silenced because they are ‘in denial’ (of the Holocaust or climate change), or because they’re ‘phobic’ (whether Islamophobic or homophobic), or because they spread ‘hate speech’ (they’re consumed by irrational hatred). All of these new censorious categories – denial, phobia, hatefulness – speak to the pathologisation of certain ideas. Speech is increasingly depicted as a sickness, and censorship as the cure.

Hat tip: Kiwiblog.

Many British football clubs have their origins in communities that were for years divided by religion. In Glasgow, Celtic is the Catholic team and Rangers is the protestant team. In London, Tottenham Hotspur has traditional links to the Jewish community and for decades the fans have referred to themselves as the “Yid Army”.

Last week, eight schoolboys were arrested and questioned for ten hours by Hertfordshire police after singing a football chant at a Jewish teacher’s leaving do. Tottenham Hotspur Football Club is already in consultation with an array of busybodies over concerns that fans might be being racist towards themselves.

Fans and club historians point out that the use of the words “Yiddo” and “Yid Army” by the fans to refer to themselves has developed over decades and stopped some of the real racial abuse that used to occur at football matches.

Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill has coined the phrase “mate speech” to describe this new assault on free speech.

if recent cases in Britain are anything to go by, the language police are turning their attentions to what we might call ‘Mate Speech’. They’re cracking down on banter between buddies, throwaway chants at football matches, and words uttered in informal, behind-the-scenes settings, on the basis that someone somewhere, if they ever caught drift of these words, might possibly be offended by them.

Welcome to the humourless society, where no off-the-cuff remark, gag or utterance is beyond the sanction of the sanctimonious word-watchers.

UPDATE: More from Spiked on the ‘Yid Army’, including this sporting-rivalry gem:

Chants at sports stadiums should not be interpreted literally. An obvious case in point are the basketball games between Hapoel Jerusalem and Maccabi Tel Aviv in Israel, where a common chant from the Jerusalem supporters is ‘Ya Saddam ya habib udrub udrub Tel Aviv’. Hapoel fans adopted it after news programmes showed Palestinians chanting it on rooftops during the Gulf War. It means ‘Saddam, darling, bomb Tel Aviv’ in Arabic.

The prosecution in France’s Muhammad cartoons trial has dropped all charges against Charlie Hebdo magazine, which republished the Jyllands-Posten cartoons along with some of its own - including a cover picture of Muhammad saying “It’s tough being loved by idiots.”

Charlie Hebdo was prosecuted for inciting hatred but the trial brought a huge backlash from the defenders of free speech and the prosecution has asked that the magazine be cleared of all charges.

“Free speech is not the issue here. The issue is that, in France, racism is not an opinion, it is a crime,” said Francis Szpiner, lawyer for the Grand Mosque, which has sued along with the Union of French Islamic Organisations (UOIF).

“Two of those caricatures make a link between Muslims and Muslim terrorists. That has a name and it’s called racism.” During the cartoon controversy, offended Muslims demanded an apology and a ban on criticising Islam.

President Jacques Chirac accused Charlie Hebdo of willfully provoking Muslims.

On the side of Charlie Hebdo was an array of philosphers, intellectuals, and politicians:

Even [Interior Minister Nicolas] Sarkozy defended Charlie Hebdo, which typically portrays him as a nightstick-swinging policeman or a rabid pitbull terrier. But Sarkozy - stumping this year as a candidate for president from the conservative UMP party - characterized himself as a critic of “every form of censorship” in a written statement to the court. Sarkozy argued it was better to have “too many cartoons” than “no cartoons” and defended the “right to smile.”

Hat tip: Foreign Policy.

Sheik Feiz Mohammed’s call for his followers to “have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam” has attracted deserved outrage in the days since his “Death Series” DVDs were posted on YouTube (they have since been removed).

Sheik Mohammed is already under investigation for his links to a group arrested in Sydney during an anti-terrorism operation and is now being investigated in conection with these videos. Australian officials are calling for the DVDs to be banned and for Sheik Mohammed to be prosecuted for incitement to violence, inciting racial hatred, sedition, or presumably whatever else can be made to fit.

Idiot/Savant at No Right Turn rightly points out that

Prosecuting Mohammed is likely to [turn him into a martyr for freedom of speech, and give his views far more prominence and credibility than they deserve], with the added bonus of symbolising Australia’s hatred of Muslims - something which is not exactly going to help in the battle for “hearts and minds”.

Freedom of speech cuts both ways, and applies to views you don’t like as well as those you do. Sheik Mohammed’s views are vile and hateful, but they do not in and of themselves harm anyone. They are offensive, but giving offence is not harm.

I/S also makes an “obvious” comparison to the David Irving case. I don’t think the comparison is as obvious as I/S makes out and it downplays Sheik Mohammed’s evil. Irving promotes a demostrably false version of history that many, particularly Jews, find offensive. As noted above, “giving offence is not harm”.

Sheik Mohammed, while causing no direct harm himself, calls for others to do just that:

“Teach them this: there is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid. Put in their soft, tender hearts the zeal of jihad and a love of martyrdom.”

I.e., brainwash your children to kill themselves and murder others.

It is important that these words are said out loud, in public. Not so that people can follow his instructions, but so that we can truly understand the nature of freedom’s enemies; so that those who would claim that Islam isn’t that awful feel compelled to make their case in public.

The incitement to violence here is not direct enough to warrant a ban. There is still room to think between the impulse and the response. And the educational value of having the views of these so-called “leaders” aired in public is immense.

UPDATE 26/01/07: Dr Mirko Bagaric, head of the Deakin Law School in Melbourne and NZ Herald guest columnist, agrees in part.

The German government is intending to use its presidency of the Council of the European Union to introduce a Europe-wide ban on holocaust denial and the display of the swastika. See the work programme, p19 (PDF).

The Presidency plans to resume the stalled negotiations on drafting a framework decision on combating racism and xenophobia and to drive the project forward. The goal must be to achieve a minimum level of harmonization in the penal provisions of the EU Member States, particularly with regard to criminal liability for disseminating racist and xenophobic ideas.

This mouthful of bureaucratese bullshit means that they intend to spread the holocaust-denial ban that operates in nine EU countries (and possibly the Germany-only Nazi insignia ban) across the rest of the Union. A similar ban was rejected two years ago.

The original ban ran into trouble on a number of fronts - from Eastern European nations saying that if the swastika was to be banned then so should the hammer-and-sickle insignia, others saying that the swastika is an ancient good luck symbol in Hindu and Buddhist tradition, and even from Britain and Italy noting that the ban would curtail freedom of speech.

As I’ve said before, the best way to deal with holocaust denial is to discuss it openly:

If bad ideas are going to be defeated it must be with better ideas. Imprisoning a person for the ideas they express does nothing to defeat the idea. It is by evidence and debate that we must come to the truth.

No doubt many Germans are ashamed of their country’s history but the way to atone for Germany’s past is not to become president of the whole continent and then pass laws telling people what they’re allowed to think and say.

Holocaust denier David Irving has been released from prison in Austria. Irving was imprisoned in February this year and sentenced to three years for saying that the gas chambers at Auschwitz didn’t exist. (He later recanted.)

At the time, a number of people showed their true illiberal colours:

We must learn the lessons of the past to built a decent society for the future. Irving’s conviction, especially in Austria which was a former Nazi country, is important and appropriate. - Lord Janner, chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust

Today’s sentencing confirms David Irving as a bigot and an anti-Semite and also serves a direct challenge to the Iranian regime’s embrace of Holocaust denial. - Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center

However, others had a much better attitude:

“This is a silly law by silly people for silly people,” [Lothar Hobelt, associate professor of history at the University of Vienna] said.

“In fact, having a law that says you mustn’t question a particular historical instance, if anything, creates doubt about it, because if an argument has to be protected by the force of law, it means it’s a weak argument.”

Hobelt has it exactly right. If bad ideas are going to be defeated it must be with better ideas. Imprisoning a person for the ideas they express does nothing to defeat the idea. It is by evidence and debate that we must come to the truth. See for example chapters 12 to 14 of Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things, which deal with pseudo-history in general and holocaust denial in particular.

U.S. Supreme Court judge and American Zionist leader Louis “Sunshine is the best disinfectant” Brandeis would have agreed.

Hat tip: Foreign Policy.

Iran yesterday opened a conference questioning the Holocaust. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has tried to claim that the conference makes Iran a champion of free speech, inviting speakers who have served jail time in Europe for expressing their opinion that the Holocaust did not occur or has been exaggerated.

As discussed at Not PC last week, the state sponsorship of a particular point of view at the expense of others can be just as damaging to free expression as state censorship. While France and Germany’s laws that punish holocaust denial are reprehensible, state-sponsored anti-Semitism in Iran is hardly the answer.

The real free speech lesson in Iran yesterday came from Ahmadinejad’s opponents.

Dozens of Iranian students burnt pictures of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and chanted “death to the dictator” as he gave a speech at a university inTehran.

The protest, during a speech at Amir Tabir University unrelated to the Holocaust meeting, will be embarrassing for Mr Ahmadinejad. He has portrayed Iran as a champion of free speech in hosting the two-day Holocaust conference, which has attracted revisionist historians who have served jail sentences in Europe, and American David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader.

But the conference has embarrassed many ordinary Iranians who are aware of the damage such events are inflicting on their country’s image. Some Iranians point out that they have much less freedom to debate pressing issues such as Iran’s nuclear program, which has brought the threat of international sanctions.

Despite being a total Islamic state Iran has an active reform movement, although its strength has waned since Ahmadinejad came to power with several opposition newspapers closed down, increased restrictions on Internet use, and continued arrests of journalists and bloggers. It’s very encouraging to see active opposition to the regime from inside the country.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday that Google is refusing to remove racist blogs from its Blogger site. (Hat Tip: David Farrar, who’s pictured on one of these sites, wearing a National Party shirt, labelled as a “red”. The days when the web was just for rocket scientists are long gone.)

Google, as a private organisation, has every right to set the terms on which they will host sites but they have chosen to do their bit to uphold freedom of speech and not censor anything.

“We allow our users to create blogs, but we don’t make any claims about the content of these pages. In cases where contact information for the author is listed on the page, we recommend working directly with this person to have this information removed or changed. We would only remove content from this blog if ordered to do so by a court order,” the [Google] spokesman said.

The ‘marketplace of ideas‘ theory of free speech, first given form by Oliver Wendell Holmes in Abrams v. United States, says “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” Another Supreme Court judge, Louis Brandeis, put it “the best disinfectant is sunshine.”

John Locke cautioned against using force to quash unpleasant or incorrect ideas, saying “truth is not taught by laws, nor has she any need of force to procure her entrance into the minds of men. If truth makes not her way into the understanding by her own light, she will be the weaker for any borrowed force violence can add to her.”

Defending people like neo-nazis can leave a nasty taste in one’s mouth but it is worthwhile remembering the words of H.L. Mencken: “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”