New Swedish Law Criminalizes Anti-immigration Internet Speech
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/18116-new-swedish-law-criminalizes-anti-immigration-internet-speech
Written by Selwyn DukeWe recently learned about how anti-immigration Internet commenters in Sweden were tracked down and persecuted. As journalist Pamela Geller wrote:
As Fria Tider reported (translated electronically from Swedish and then edited for grammar and word usage) in a piece entitled “New Law Makes it Easier to Prosecute Those Who Offend Immigrants or Those in Power,” “The crime of ‘insult’ will be prosecuted — but only for giving offense to immigrants, LGBTQ persons or authorities ... [under a] common insult to the public prosecution.”
The law has been pushed by Swedish parliamentarian Andreas Norlén, who said, during what Fria Tider described as “an unchallenged debate on the issue in parliament,” “I do not think it takes very many prosecutions before a signal is transmitted in the community that the Internet is not a lawless country — the sheriff is back in town.”
And unchallenged is precisely how Swedish authorities — and many other Western governments — want their leftist agenda to be, with immigration in particular enjoying sanctified status in Sweden. As CBN reported earlier this month in a piece entitled “Soviet Sweden? Model Nation Sliding to Third World”:
What does this mean? Journalist Ingrid Carlqvist explains that you become a pariah, stating, “If they point at you and say you are a racist, then you will have no job, no career, you might lose your family. You will have no future.”
This is despite the fact, say critics, that wide-scale Third World immigration is threatening Sweden’s future. As CBN also reported:
And Western governments have long aimed to make politically incorrect criticism go away with tyrannical hate-speech laws. For example, LifeSiteNews.com reports, “Chapter 15, Section 8 of Sweden’s criminal code prohibits the expression of ‘disrespect’ towards favoured minority groups.
The law carries a penalty of up to four years of imprisonment. It requires no evidence of incitement to violence and lacks any objective standard for identifying ‘disrespect.’” Quoting the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, Lifesite mentions that Pope John Paul II himself “dissented from popularly held views on homosexual behavior, abortion, and divorce”; this means that under Western hate-speech laws, the pope could conceivably have been arrested for espousing Catholic teaching.
In reality, of course, a pope’s status and clout offer protection (at least for now). But a Swedish pastor named Ake Green was not so lucky, as he was convicted and sentenced under hate-speech law in 2004 after giving a sermon on homosexuality. And while his story has a not-too-unhappy ending — Sweden’s Supreme Court reluctantly acquitted Green in 2005 — wasn’t it, as Andreas Norlén said, a signal “transmitted in the community” that the thought-police “sheriff is back in town”?
Moreover, other stories don’t end happily. For instance, Canadian Mark Harding was convicted and punished under federal hate-speech laws in 1998 for distributing pamphlets critical of Islam, and countryman Hugh Owens was punished three years later for taking out a newspaper ad that included four Bible verses critical of homosexual behavior.
As for Sweden’s new law, it’s designed to target näthatare, which, I understand, translates into “net haters.” Yet as The New Republic’s Benjamin Birnbaum points out in “Sweden's Free-Speech Charade,” hate is whatever the Swedish thought police say it is — at the particular moment in question. Here’s one example he provides:
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