In this mailing:
- Soeren Kern: Finland's War on Free Speech
- Michael Curtis: Western Critics of Democracy: "Accomplices to Injustice"
Finland's War on Free Speech
by Soeren Kern
June 11, 2012 at 5:00 am
June 11, 2012 at 5:00 am
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"Stating
of facts cannot and must not be criminal, even if they offend someone." — Jussi
Kristian Halla-aho, Finnish blogger convicted of defaming Islam.
Finland's Supreme Court has found a prominent
politician guilty of defaming Islam for "Islamophobic" comments he
made on his personal blog.
The ruling represents a major setback for free
speech in a Europe that is becoming increasingly stifled by politically
correct restrictions on free speech, particularly on issues related to
Islam and Muslim immigration.
The Helsinki-based Supreme
Court ruled on June 8 that Finns Party MP Jussi Kristian Halla-aho
was guilty of "inciting hatred against an ethnic group" for blog
posts he made in 2008 which compared Islam to paedophilia, and for sarcastic
comments which insinuated that immigrants from Somalia are predisposed to
stealing and living off welfare.
In its ruling, the court said that hate speech
does not fall under the protections afforded by the freedom of speech, even
though Halla-aho said his comments were a protest against public policy and not
against Islam and Mohammed per se.
Halla-aho, who has become well known in Finland
and elsewhere for his well-argued essays criticizing multiculturalism and
runaway immigration, was ordered to pay a hefty fine and delete the comments
from his blog.
Halla-aho maintains a blog called Scripta, which deals with issues
such as "immigration, multiculturalism, tolerance, racism, freedom of
speech and political correctness." His blog attracts thousands of readers
every day, and the Tampere-based newspaper Aamulehti has described him
the best-known
political blogger in Finland. Halla-aho's notoriety has placed the
guardians of Finnish multiculturalism on maximum alert.
In a blog post in June 2008, Halla-aho wrote
that the Islamic prophet Mohammed was a paedophile, and that Islam is a
religion of paedophilia because Mohammed had sexual intercourse with his wife,
Aisha, when she was only nine years old.
According
to Halla-aho: "This sentence is related to a discussion where I
criticize the idea of the subjective offensiveness of some sentence as being
sufficient criteria for its judicial offensiveness. In other words, if some
group is offended by sentence X, sentence X is illegal irrespective of whether
it is true or not. In my opinion, stating of facts cannot and must not be
criminal, even if they offend someone. This is also a problem of equality. For
example, a Muslim is offended by criticism of his religion far more easily than
an average Christian. If subjective offensiveness suffices as the elements of a
crime, the law protects a Muslim with greater force than it protects a
Christian."
He continued: "My sentences about Mohammed
and Islam were not opinions, but inescapably logical conclusions based on known
facts. I did not use the word 'paedophile' as psychopathological concept, but
in its popular meaning of a person having sex with children. The traditional
Muslim knowledge, the Hadith
literature, tells us that Mohammed had sex with his wife Aisha when she was
nine years old. A nine-year-old is seen as a child today, and physically she
was a child in 7th century, no matter what her judicial status was. Therefore,
if Mohammed had sex with Aisha and Aisha was a child, Mohammed had sex with a
child. That Mohammed is a holy figure to Muslims cannot make him immune to
criticism in West, especially if criticism is based on undisputed facts."
In another post, Halla-aho
responded to a Finnish columnist who wrote that drinking excessively and
fighting when drunk were cultural and possibly genetic characteristics of
Finns. In order to show the double standards of such arguments, Halla-aho asked
sarcastically if it could be stated that robbing passersby and living at the
expense of taxpayers are cultural and possibly genetic characteristics of
Somalis.
According to Halla-aho, "I turned the newspaper Kaleva's sentence into parody where
'Finns' were replaced by 'Somalis.' My hypothesis was that Somalis are under
the special protection of the media and government officials, and my argument
is that what is permissible to present about Finns becomes impermissible when
it is about Somalis. My own version was as follows: 'Robbing passers-by and
living as parasites on tax money is the national, maybe even genetic
characteristic of Somalis.'"
He also wrote: "In order to poke fun at
The Council for Mass Media in Finland, I mentioned in the text that I present
this argument as supposition, not as a fact. In addition, I proved that by
using crime statistics, the argument about Somalis can be proved just as
effectively as Kaleva's argument about Finns."
Halla-aho continued: "I emphasize that,
unlike the writer of newspaper Kaleva's primary editorial, I didn't present my
own, offensive argument as my opinion, but used it to criticize and insult
double standards. Factually speaking, and considering the mechanisms of
evolution, the mere thought of living as a parasite on tax funds or killing
people while intoxicated as being genetic characteristics of some population is
insane."
He concluded: "Therefore, even if I had
presented the argument about Somalis as my opinion and not as demonstrative
material, the fact that an indictment was made against me for my proposition
concerning Somalis but not against newspaper Kaleva for its proposition
concerning Finns, would be in conflict with the equality section of the
Constitution."
Elsewhere, Halla-aho wrote: "The imams are
building, on European soil, in their mosques paid for by Europeans, a fanatic
robot army without free will, whose only task is to destroy Western
society."
Later, Halla-aho also wrote -- based on the
common opinion in Finland that immigrant rapists select their victims randomly
-- that they should choose leftwing supporters of multiculturalism, since only
that would persuade them to reconsider their uncritical support for mass
immigration from Muslim countries.
In November 2008, the leftist Finnish Green
Women's Association responded by announcing that they had asked Finnish police
to initiate a criminal investigation of Halla-aho. The leader of the Green
Women's Association, Heli Järvinen, claimed that Halla-aho's texts were not
simply expressions of freedom of speech and bona fide criticism of
multiculturalism, but that they "incited both hatred and rape."
As a result, public prosecutors charged
Halla-aho, who has a doctorate degree in Slavic linguistics, over allegedly
racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim comments.
According to Deputy
Public Prosecutor Jorme Kalske, "Halla-aho had uploaded to the
Internet and submitted writings to the general public, in which Islam and its
sacred institutions were combined with paedophilia, and in which was also
presented the robbery of pedestrians and the looting of tax revenue by a certain
national group or with a specific genetic characteristic."
When the charges were presented in the Helsinki
District Court, Halla-aho stressed that he was opposed to violence against
women and he denied that he was against foreigners; he said that he was simply
"critical
of immigration."
According to Halla-aho, the biggest problem
associated with immigration is the large number of immigrants in relation to
the resources used to integrate them. He has said that the one minority group
whose integration has failed everywhere is Muslim, and that their refusal to
assimilate creates problems such as social
exclusion and ethnic ghettoization.
Halla-aho has also said that he is opposed to
so-called positive discrimination, which grants special privileges to Muslims
due to their culture or nationality. Moreover, Halla-aho has said that
criticizing "totalitarian
fascist ideologies like political Islam" should not be considered
racism and that "facts cannot be criminalized."
Two lower courts had previously dismissed the
hate charges against Halla-aho and only fined him for "defaming
religion." But Finnish public prosecutors, outraged at the lenient rulings
of the lower courts, appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which actually
increased the lower court sentence by ordering Halla-aho to pay a 50-day fine
instead of a 30-day fine.
Halla-aho, who chairs the Finnish Parliament's
Administration Committee (which deals with immigration issues), says he will
appeal the verdict in the European Court of Human Rights.
Soeren
Kern is Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based
Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.
Related Topics: Soeren Kern
Western Critics of Democracy: "Accomplices to Injustice"
by Michael Curtis
June 11, 2012 at 4:00 am
June 11, 2012 at 4:00 am
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Why would
these high-minded progressives and supposed upholders of free speech not
protest the decision of the UN Human Rights Council to punish criticism of
Islam, or speak out against honor killings or female genital mutilation, or
protest the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights Islam, which states that Sharia
law is the "only source of reference" for the protection of human
rights in Islamic countries -- a statement totally contrary to the UN
Declaration of Human Rights?
Support for people who criticize their own
Western democratic societies is now all too apparent among many Western
intellectuals, academics, members of the media, international organizations,
and religious groups which, while refusing to challenge cases of injustice,
particularly in Muslim countries, instead criticize and condemn the state of
Israel at every turn, despite the continuing physical and rhetorical aggression
against it.
Intellectual support for, or acquiescence in,
tyrannical regimes and unjust rulers is familiar in history. It runs from Plato
supporting the tyrant of Syracuse; Seneca praising Nero; Aristotle advising
Alexander the Great, and it extends to modern times with individuals such as
Martin Heidegger approving, for a time, Hitler, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who,
in 1947, justified the fraudulent Moscow Trials which condemned the Russian
critics of Stalin.
The Dean of Canterbury in Britain for over 30
years, Hewlett Johnson, embodied a deluded, fanatical mind at work: safe in his
ecclesiastical position, and suffering no penalties for his utterances and
actions, Johnson was a life-long admirer of both Communism in theory, and the
Soviet Union in action. He defended the Nazi-Soviet Pact of September 1939 --
the prelude to Hitler's start of World War II. Johnson's undying admiration for
Communism led him to defend both the arrest in 1949 on false charges, of
Cardinal Mindzenty by the Hungarian secret police, and the Soviet invasion of
Hungary -- for which he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1950, and the
Stalin International Peace Prize in 1951,
As George Orwell, familiar with such
"fellow travelers" of the Soviet Communist regime who, in their
irresponsible fashion, supported or excused that regime despite its tyranny and
brutality, and at no cost to themselves, wrote, "So much of left-wing
thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire
is hot."
These critics, consciously or not, are now
allying with groups and states the open, ultimate, objective of whom is the
destruction of the state of Israel. In fairness, people with this mindset have,
in recent years, also supported worthy causes, such as sanctions against the
apartheid state of South Africa and calls for its abolition. Such support,
however, could hardly be considered courageous: no one had to pay any price for
it; on the contrary, there were benefits, both ideological and personal, such as
enlarged self-esteem or glory in success.
What is important is that the compassion shown
by these individuals has not been present in the face of gratuitous attacks on
democratic values, or in the face of aggression, physical and rhetorical,
against the state of Israel. Nor have Western Europeans, at least, been willing
to face the real problems currently exponentiating there,such as the mass
immigration of people from other cultures, who have failed to be successfully
integrated into Western societies, as well as the rise of Islamism. The critics
of their own democratic societies rarely discuss the real difficulties, both
demographically and politically, of the multicultural societies of Britain and
France, or what the significance might be of over half the Muslims in Britain
believing that it was actually the CIA or the Israeli Mossad which were
responsible for the 9/11 attacks in New York City.
What can explain this failure by
self-proclaimed high-minded people to respond not only to the physical violence
against a tiny democratic ally, but also to the attacks on free speech, or the
attempts to prevent criticism of some activity supposedly based on religious
principles, such as Christians continually being burned alive in their churches
in Nigeria by the fundamentalist goup, Boko Haram [literally: "Western
Education Is Forbidden"], or the the possible judicial murder by Iran of
Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani for refusing to recant his conversion to Christianity,
or Iran's illegal, ongoing threats of genocide against a fellow member of the
United Nations?
Part of the explanation, at least regarding
Europeans, may be due to what Walter Laqueur, in After the Fall, called
a "crisis of lack of will, inertia, tiredness, self-doubt, a lack of
self-confidence." Other people, who are perhaps seeking fame, or
acceptance as politically correct, or even material rewards, or who are simply
ignorant of political reality, pay no price for their appeasement of the
actions and language of countries and groups that are critical of, and actively
threaten, democratic values.
Some Westerners may be deluded by feelings of
guilt for the actions of democratic countries in the past, such as the brutal
takeover of the Congo by Belgium. No one, of course, wants to be accused of
"racism" or intolerance towards minority groups, or of supporting
Western "imperialism." But while these critic of democracies often
express concern about abuses of power in their own countries, they are more
quiescent about the much greater abuses in non-Western countries. Rarely do
they protest the violations of human rights in Arab and Muslim countries, such
as that women are officially worth only half of what a man is worth in
inheritance or judicial disputes; or (with a straight face) that the presence
of four male witnesses four male witnesses is required to testify that a woman
was not the victim of a rape, not to mention their silence and staggering
absence of over, for example, honor killings, religiously-sanctioned
wife-beating, and female genital mutilation; or the wholesale jailing of
journalists currently under way in, among other places, Turkey and the
Palestinian Territories.
Another explanation for this quiescence is that
discussion of the issue of Islamist actions, such as the murder in November
2004 of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, or the threats against writers such
as Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the current Dutch MP Geert Wilders; or
the condemnation of the Danish journalists -- especially the courageous editor
Flemming Rose, responsible in 2005 for the controversial cartoons of the
Prophet Muhammad -- would lead to greater support for right wing parties, which
would then call for restrictions on immigration, or mass deportation, or
economic and educational discrimination against Muslims.
This can hardly explain, however, the refusal
of well-known fellow writers, such as John Le Carre, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and
Roald Dahl, to defend Salman Rushdie after his book, The Satanic Verses,
was condemned by the Ayatollah Khomeini in a fatwa [religious edict]
that called for the faithful to kill both Rushdie and his publishers. Why would
these supposed upholders of the principle of free speech not protest the
decision of the UN Human Rights Council to punish criticism of Islam, or its
continuing efforts, backed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,
internationally to criminalize all discussion of Islam in an ongoing series of
a series of meetings called 'The Istanbul Process'?
Why would they not challenge the 1990 Cairo
Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which states that Sharia law is "the
only source of reference" for the protection of human rights in Islamic
countries -- a statement that is totally contrary to the UN Declaration of
Human Rights of December 1948? Why do the high-minded progressives acquiesce in
the attacks on Enlightenment principles?
A more probable explanation for such behavior
is an attitude of appeasement, reminiscent of the refusal by some in the 1930s
to recognize and counter the emerging reality of Hitlerism. In the present,
this entails a politically correct acceptance of the "culturally
relativist" position which holds that the demands of Muslim authorities
and Muslim habits, values, and customs are appropriate -- a view that
apparently cannot bear to imagine that possibly all cultures and religious
expressions might not be equal. This view often amounts to toleration of
the intolerant.
The most plausible explanation for silence in
democratic countries, however, is fear. Westerners fear being accused of racial
prejudice or "Islamophobia." Publishing houses have been wary out of
fear of physical violence and economic boycott, of issuing books, such as the
novel, The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones, a work that might
"offend" some in the Muslim community, which often sounds as if it
believes there should be a new Right Not To Be Offended. The behavior of Random
House on this issue was not a profile in courage. Both the media and many in
the academic and entertainment world have engaged in self-censorship; upholders
of the principle of free speech have been unwilling or reluctant to discuss
some of those topics, such as jihad or the impact of Sharia law, that might be
considered offensive to Muslims or to developing countries. Silence, as Ayaan
Hirsi Ali said in a speech in Berlin on May 11, 2012, becomes an accomplice to
injustice. She might have added that silence also tends to embolden extremists.
An increasingly dangerous development is the
silence or whitewashing by Western commentators of Arab and Muslim deviations
from human rights. These commentators refrain from criticism, or sometimes they
even justify hatred and injustice -- perhaps out of the cowardly fear that they
might "lose access" to these autocrats, or perhaps out of the concern
that they, too, might be physically attacked; suffer material loss, or even be
accused of the charges so frequently propounded in international gatherings of
"racism," "Islamophobia," or "orientalism."
We have been through this before -- when a
quiet, unconcerned policy of appeasement towards the criminal behavior of
non-democracies in the 1930s was considered an inadequate response to Hitler
and Nazism. It is time to apply lessons from this disastrous policy to the
present attacks on Israel and other democracies by non-democratic forces.
Genuine believers in political and intellectual freedom must not be hesitant to
denounce attempts to stifle such freedoms; and they must not appease those
countries and groups who make such attempts.
Michael Curtis is Distinguished Professor
Emeritus of Political Science at Rutgers University and author of Should
Israel Exist? A Sovereign Nation under attack by the International Community.
Related Topics: Michael Curtis
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