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.

In the wake of the successful second reading of Sue Bradford’s amendment to the Crimes Act, which would outlaw smacking, CYFSWatch has entered the debate with a post describing a fantasised beating of the MP and suggesting she is “a worthy candidate for NZ’s first political assassination.”

The question is: does this post constitute something close enough to an act of force that it should be banned?

And the answer is no. Expressing violent fantasies doesn’t do much for CYFSWatch’s cause, given that they’re advoctaing on behalf of people who have had children removed by the state - parents who have probably been accused of abuse - but that doesn’t mean that their opinions should be illegal.

The fantasised beating is an attempt to explain the difference between smacking someone and beating them up, a key distinction that opponents of the anti-smacking bill feel is being glossed over. It’s written in a graphic manner but I don’t believe it constitutes a genuine threat. It is simply strong rhetoric.

Likewise, the supposed “death threat” is political commentary. Bradford’s position has roused strong emotions and this is an extreme expression of that. The writer does not threaten assassination, but simply calls Bradford “worthy” of assassination. How many people have made the same assertion about George W. Bush? There’s no evidence that the implied threat is anything more than hyperbole or that the writer has the means or intent to carry out a real attack.

Should genuine violent intent become apparent, a line will have been crossed from thought to action and preventative action will be required by the Police. Until then no action should be taken against the writer and Bradford should carry on with her job as a parliamentarian uncowed.

UPDATE 11:00am: CYFSWatch is gone - shut down by Google. The Watching CYFS site is still active but doesn’t contain all of the CYFSWatch posts.

UPDATE 23/2/07: CYFSWatch is back, this time hosted by WordPress, but the old posts have not been restored. I wonder whether they can stay inside the WordPress terms of service or whether the Ministry of Social Development’s crack legal team will carry the day.

UPDATE 1/03/07: The WordPress site has disappeared, saying that the authors have deleted it. In a post at a new Blogger blog, the authors claim they didn’t delete the WordPress site and have asked WordPress what happened.

UPDATE 3/03/07: They’re back, this time with their own domain.