In the wake of the recent treaty between the EU and Facebook, Twitter, etc., a crackdown on “hate speech” on the Internet has begun in earnest, especially in Germany.
The opinion piece below provides some background on what is happening. JLH, who did the translation, includes this note:
This article is a couple of months old, but offers interesting detail on the beginning of the crackdown on the German internet, and echoes of what is happening in the USA.
Heiko Maas — Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection — together with Google, Facebook and civic organizations goes on the hunt (cf. the meeting of Zuckerberg with “leading conservatives” about biased news choices, and the recently uncovered manipulation by Google to obscure the term “crooked Hillary” in Google searches).
The translated article from Roland Tichy’s blog:
Hate Posts: Two Kinds — Bad and Good Hate
by Anabel Schunke
April 8, 2016
Group picture of “Task Force Against Hate Content”
So-called Political Correctness makes us accomplices of the new, Islamic anti-Semitism and anti-liberalism. For that, now — measured against the historical responsibility of the Germans — we must be ashamed.
Almost four months have gone by since Heiko Maas first presented the results of the Task Force “Dealing with Illicit Hate Messages in the Internet”. The protocol as presented by the Minister of Justice: “Xenophobic and racist hate-messages which transgress the criminal code must disappear from the internet more swiftly and comprehensively than ever.” Further, it said that the field [of battle] must not be abandoned to the intellectual fire-bugs.
For this reason, an agreement was made with Facebook on specific measures for effectively combating hate and rabble-rousing in the net. According to statements of the Federal Ministry for Justice and Consumer Protection, the impulse for the formation of the task force in September was “an increasing coarseness in public debate, to the point of xenophobic and racist hate messages.” Its task was intended to be a sustained and effective way of dealing with hate messages in the internet, and the expansion of existing cooperation of internet providers, civic organizations and the Ministry of Justice. That was a dubious undertaking from the start, also because of the partners to it, who to some extent evoke disgusting memories of the STASI.
Major Crackdown on “Internet Rabble-Rousers”
Yesterday B.Z. reported on the first major crackdown on “internet rabble-rousers” in Berlin. According to B.Z., Berlin police acted on ten search warrants. Suspected perpetrators are said to be men ages 22 to 58 who — independently of one another — spread hate speech against refugees and Jewish fellow citizens, or songs with xenophobic implications, on social networks. A special action force, newly created specifically for the battle against rightist hate, was put into action here, which sought out such hate messages in the internet.
Certainly, the internet should not be a law-free zone, where hate speech and threats against other people can be uttered. However, someone could ask about proportionality and to what extent the battle against the Right justifies the formation of a STASI-like task force. Not only those identified clearly as rightist radicals must expect censure and persecution. In the land of Nazi neuroses and self-abnegation, “rabble-rousing” begins much earlier. Not infrequently, just a few Islam-critical posts are enough to get onto some radar. Quite apart from the societal contempt for a racist.
For a long time articles from my side have disappeared for a while, only to re-appear after some time. In the case of my colleague Markus Hibbeler, many user comments at first appeared only in gray. Some research revealed that this was the result of an automatic Facebook filter which fades out comments it identifies as spam. Why Facebook identifies certain comments as spam is as yet unclear, since none of them are really spam.
At any rate, the fading out of comments can be reversed manually. Others have had even worse experiences. Blocked profiles, erased posts have for a long time now not been unusual, so long as it is the profile of an Islam critic. Courageous people such as Imad Karim, Ronai Chaker and others, who have taken it upon themselves to point out the dangers emanating from radical Islam, could write a book about it. The unavoidable question is about limits. At what point in this country does someone qualify as a “hate-speaker”, and to what extent and for how long has the caprice of the virtue-minders of the STASI task force reigned?
This is inevitably a basic problem, if the vaguely formulated §130 StGB is interpreted by people with collective rightist gossip and no apparent political or legal understanding. In this case, the second paragraph can be seen as particularly problematic. While the first states unambiguously what is to be evaluated as hate-speech, the second completely relativizes these clear parameters. It says:
“Anyone who in any way that is apt to disturb the public peace,
2. impugns the human dignity of others by insulting, making contemptible or defaming an aforementioned group, parts of the population or an individual because of belonging to an aforementioned group or part of the population
will be subject to punishment of 3 months to 5 years.”
A tried-and-true political tool is revived here — the vaguest of all concepts — human dignity. It sounds good, but says nothing. Since when, in this country, is something considered insult or maliciously contemptuous to such an extent that — as noted in section 1 — it is promoted to hatred and violence?
Different Standards for Muslim Sites
Here then, is a discrepancy between what we perceive as hate-speech from an allegedly rightist site and the same thing from other directions. So. even though anyone in Germany who says anything in any way critical of Islam is considered a “rightist hater”, we will have to wait a long while for the formation of a task force dedicated to the rabble-rousing hate-speech of Islamists.
Thus, on the day of the attacks in Brussels, the Muslimstern [Muslim Star] site posted a photo of a yawning man with the superscription “If you must hear again that someone at an attack heard someone somewhere shouting in Arabic.”
No trace of objectivity. Scorn and mockery on a day when people lost their lives to fanatic Muslims. Not hate-speech, but an unmistakable positioning. And it is not stingy with posts that make clear how little many of even the Muslims born here identify with the liberal values of this society. And as on almost all the sites of followers of Islam, here too the regular appearance of frothing anti-Semites in the commentary columns. A special example of Islamic anti-Semitism, already reported on by the blog tapferimnirgendwo.com, is the site Islamfakten. Comments there extend from an expressed desire for gassing to sympathetic comments on Hitler, because “what he did was good.” Should we avoid such sites and posts? Largely useless. At such times as these, we Germans should ask ourselves, to whom do we have a genuine historical obligation?
And yet that is only the tip of the iceberg of crudity and hatred. A glance at sites like that of Salafist hate preacher Ibrahim Abou-Nagie, who distinguishes only between Muslims, and kuffar against whom any violence is legitimate, will suffice to form an impression of how deeply radical Islam is rooted in Germany, even among Muslims born here. People like Bilal Gümüs who recruits with the IS gesture of raised index finger for trips to Mecca with him and Pierre Vogel. Countless profiles of Muslims with the IS logo as a profile image or title picture, people who daily threaten and publicly ridicule those who criticize Islam — they can all spread their hatred on Facebook unchallenged, while people like Hamel Abdel Samad are accused of hate speech.
What dominates here is a simply intolerable asymmetry in treatment of hate messages on the net. There is a blindness to the hatred that emanates from Islam and allegedly integrated people, because there is no will to recognize that the greatest danger to internal security, to liberal society, has long since not been from the “right”, but from Islamic ideology. An in-and-of-itself antidemocratic, deeply misogynist and fascistic political ideology which draws a clear line between its adherents and everyone else. Its fundamentalist followers are no less racist and intolerant than any rightist radical, and its opinions are deeply rooted in our allegedly normal Muslim population.
Sensitized to Hate From the Right, But Not From Others
Still, we may expect no decisive move against Islamic hatred. People here are sensitized to hatred from the right. Accompanied since childhood by the bogeyman of rightist radicalism, bearing the historical responsibility of battling any and all forms of natural-born German fascism, in the end, we hardly notice what version of fascism has long since arrived from the other side and is right here and is a threat to Jews, to women, to homosexuals and actually to all people who are living a free, Western — and in Islamic eyes — unbelieving life.
A decisive and tough political, legal and law-enforcement intervention would be called for here. It will be a long wait. The worst of it is that they know this is a time of “anything goes.” Or in the words of the mischief-making rapper Sadiq, “Fick den Richter!” [F*** the judge]. It is obvious that our police are a toothless tiger, that justice is dealing out cultural discounts, and that the authorities have simply capitulated to Islamic refractoriness. It is obvious that Germans are prepared to be intimidated, just so as not to be called Nazis.
Against this background, it is cold comfort that the site Islamfakten has, in the meantime, been eliminated. The opinions of these people will remain. The self-conception of being superior will remain, as long as no one points out who has the monopoly on violence in this state, and begins to defend our own, liberal values, which are being compromised by these people.
Our historical responsibility does not consist of answering intolerance with tolerance taken to the point of self-denial. It consists of defending democracy and its liberal values, which were dearly bought here, of protecting those damaged by our own fascism, and not exposing them to a renewed, incalculable threat. The captivity of this alleged political correctness has ultimately made us accomplices of this new Islamic anti-Semitism and anti-liberalism. It is this complicity for which — by the standard of the historical responsibility of the Germans — we must be ashamed.
“Courageous people such as Imad Karim, Ronai Chaker and others, who have taken it upon themselves to point out the dangers emanating from radical Islam…”
What is this thing called “radical Islam”…? Is it different from plain old Islam, straight no chaser? How so? If it is not different, why the qualifier?
In an article on the ex-Muslim Imad Karim, I note that it says that he “…warnt gleichzeitig vor der Islamisierung Deutschlands.
Islamisierung is just “Islamization” — it’s not “radical-Islamization”.
Hey, Hesperado, are you offering to be a translator? Your help would be welcome, I’m sure. Both Vlad Tepes and the B value our translators highly. And those willing to videos especially.
In the English Court of Appeal ten years ago an anti discrimination case exposed the very same problem. A white English person sued Serco for racial discrimination.
The judge hearing the case said “the purpose of the race discrimination rules is to combat the state of mind that breeds intolerance”. This implied that all supremacists were denied access to the equality laws. In the paricular case the white natioinalist from blocked from using the now defunct Race Relations Act 1976, but no evidence was presented to prove that the claimant had supremacist views. The case was decided six years later in Strasbourg in favour of the nationalist.
I have never seen a case in which an islamist or black supremacist has had their race discrimination claims closed down on the same basis, yet there is plenty of evidence to prove islamic and black supremacism.
What we have above, under English law at least is unfavourable treatment on racial grounds i e direct racial discrimination.
The best way to fight is to to sue for racial discrimination as a “Litigant In Person” and bypass the biased and useless solicitors.
In the United States, this would be called an “In Pro Per” filing, meaning the claimant is representing him/herself without benefit (?) of an attorney.
The article by Anabel Schunke sticks in my craw, as an American, regardless of how well it was intended. It says “Actually, your speech is the real hate speech, not my speech. You ought to shut him down, not me.”
Embedded is the assumption that the government has a legitimate right to censor speech. It is simply not doing a very good job of it.
Our American heritage is that the government has no function and no business whatsoever in regulating or filtering speech, unless the speech is an incitement to physical violence. Americans do not trust the government to decide the content of their speech or thoughts. They can do that perfectly well themselves.
It is an American attitude of proud defiance and independence, as opposed to a European attitude of compliance and reliance. Reading an essay like this always makes me grateful for the American heritage of liberty. If someone wants to deny the holocaust, let him make his arguments. Do not put him in jail or fine him. We’re not so fragile that we can’t hear wrong opinions.
And, there is absolutely no doubt that once you concede the validity of government censoring thought and speech, the groups based on racial identity, which always act in cohesion, will capture the process and co-opt it to their own purposes. This is a normal phenomenon in government regulation. The regulating body gets co-opted by the groups it is supposed to regulate, and ends up protecting them.
Strange – I understood that the American Attorney General is seeking ways – under the direction of the Commander in Chief – to criminalise those who
deny “climate change” – known in old-speak as “the Weather”!
I further understand that the above-mentioned Commander in Chief has
issued edicts that everyone must accept his Government’s definition of
gender fluidity.
So much for the American heritage . . . Roll out Trump and these
claims might not be baseless!
Interestingly I read Psalm 139 today, look at verses 21/22: ‘Do I not hate them, O Lord, that hate thee?… I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.’ I could argue that I have a religious duty to hate those that hate the real God. Especially since Muslims hate those that hate Allah and Mohammed, and their right to do so is protected in previously Christian countries.
“Progressive” criminals pretend to hold submissive masochism as the highest virtue (for their victims to hold, not them) and the ultimate crime to be causing offense and hurting other people’s (criminal’s) feelings, (i.e: by accusing them of their crimes).
So they want to make it illegal to accuse criminals of their crimes, since that might hurt their feelings and in offending them with the often-painful truth, “make” them commit even more crimes!
Is there anything which really ought to qualify as hate speech and be banned?
NO – not because it’s “hateful” (because that sort of nonsense is only making subjective assessments based on emotions;) and “HATE” is really only the perfectly natural human response of perpetual anger towards ongoing crimes (like islam); without ‘hate’ we would never bother to accuse criminals of their crimes in order to stop those crimes.
Unreasonable false displays of hatred and anger on the other hand, are what the Left is good at – but that’s already illegal, not because of the anger displayed – that’s just the outrageous holier-than-thou virtue-signalling packaging used to disguise their preposterous extortion attempts – but because it’s fraudulent slander.
Such criminal leftists who try to make “hate” into a crime, only ever make it ‘illegal’ to hate crime itself!
Speech which is already disallowed is incitement of immediate violence and death-threats… and even those aren’t illegal, if say they call for the police to use violence to counter ongoing mob violence and looting, or call for the death-penalty for murderers!