The biggest problem with thought-feeling-speech laws, is, has been, and always will be, the selective enforcement of them. Once you decide that it is illegal to say thing or feel a certain thing then it is guaranteed that the next decision will be what constitutes these things and, more importantly, what does not. Canada’s ‘Human Rights Commissions’ (hold your nose when you read that one) already proved it by prosecuting anyone who had a bad thing to say about a favored group based on the flimsiest reasoning or evidence and then quite overtly choosing not to prosecute a case of a Canadian imam who had violated the spirit and the letter of section XIII of Canada’s hate speech laws in every conceivable way and in every known form of mass communication.
Here we see the same reasoning and selective enforcement at work in Europe. In this bloggers opinion, the selective enforcement of law, is a cancer upon law itself.
Eeyore
From The Local.Se
It was not hate speech when Swedish public service broadcaster Sveriges Radio (SR) featured a programme in which a Somali imam called for all converts from Islam to be killed, the Swedish Chancellor of Justice (Justitiekanslern, JK) has ruled.
- Converts must die: imam to Swedish radio (15 Sep 11)
The motivation for the decision not to open up an investigation into the matter was that the presenter protested against what the imam said immediately following the controversial statement.
The decision said that ”the programme features opinions that could be taken as a threat aginst those who have converted from Islam”.
However, due to the responses from the presenter, the Chancellor has decided not to investigate the matter further.
The programme in question was a panel discussion and was broadcast live by SR International’s Somali service.
The initial police report was filed by Erik Johansson, at the Swedish Evangelical Mission (Evangeliska Fosterlands-Stiftelsen – EFS), after friends told him of the imam’s words underlining every Muslim’s responsibility to kill anyone who leaves Islam.
“I received a call from my Somali friends who had heard the programme. I don’t speak the language myself and when they explained to me, I concluded that this wasn’t a message which should be on an SR channel,” Erik Johansson told The Local at the time.
Johansson also contacted Sveriges Radio in order to register his dismay that the item was left available on their website for more than two weeks. Soon after his telephone call the programme was removed from the website.
In a comment to the Christian newspaper Dagen following the report, SR International head Ingemar Löfgren said that he decided to pull the transcript from SR’s website pending receipt of an official translation, pointing out that he is responsible for several channels broadcast in languages which he does not speak.
“If an imam calls for other Muslims to kill converts, then we have a journalistic responsibility… If he didn’t get any follow-up questions then we have failed in our journalistic responsibility,” he said.
Erik Johansson told The Local that the journalist had reminded the imam that they were in Sweden, to which the imam had replied that the same rules apply here.
Had the presenter not reacted as he did to the imam’s statements, JK might have investigated the matter further.
”It’s hard to say if we would or not. The statement was based on personal faith and the ceiling is pretty high when it comes to that kind of statement,” said Marcus Agnvall, of the the Chancellor’s office to newspaper Dagen,
After the Chancellor’s decision was made public, Johansson told the paper that SR has worked hard at balancing the controversial programme after the incident and that this is a direct result of being reported for hate speech.
The Local/rm (ne**@th******.se)
Yeah this has to be seen in the light of how less free speech we have here than across the Atlantic. Here pastery, ice creams and candy are racist and hate speechs laws are really suffocating, had it been someone saying the same things of muslim “reverts” than i can assure you it wouldve gotten much more, muuuuch more media time and had been investigated in every way possible. But now it was muslims, and then society judge by other standards.
Yes the situation is absurd and insane. The pastry is or rather was named negerbollar (negro balls). Today the new name is chokladbollar (chocolate balls) although none of the ingredients are chocolate, so you go figure. When it comes to the icecream they actually managed to ban the popsicle named Nogger Black. They actually wanted to ban the whole brand but only managed to get the one coated with licorice removed from the market. The word nogger is derived from nougat and has nothing to do with neither racism or dark skinned people. Of course the anti-racists had a different opinion about it. All these campaigns has been contra-productive since nobody associated these words with racism since the PC MC crowd started to whine about it. The pastry was created in the early 20th century and the original name was used up until about the year 2000, that is nearly hundred years.
The fuss about the candy is a symbol of a chinese in a triangular hat! All these multiculturalists are nutjobs all of them!
The left is trying to bring hate speech laws to the US, so far they have had little success but they keep trying.
Yeah Eeyore selective enforcement is going to come back an haunt the governments who engage in it, and probably sooner rather then later.