So then are you saying that if people who have a history of Holocaust denial, such as Mahmoud Abbas, head of the PA, who wrote his Ph.D thesis denying the Holocaust were to travel to the West, then they should be arrested or deported?
Or do you feel that we shouldn’t have laws banning Holocaust denial?
You seem to want to go around in circles on this. Emphasis in above quote is mine. This is precisely the point. The city may (or may not) be able to prosecute such activities if they incidentally violate some of these other laws, and if they can prove it. But they can’t prosecute based on the burning cross symbol itself. Because this has to do with “content” (the court’s words) and therefore speech. It couldn’t be more clear. The court said this at least three times. I quoted it.
They absolutely did say it, and the potential ability to use “other laws” is incidental and irrelevant. If I try to scare away a black family by burning crosses and manage to do it without violating some stupid incidental technicality like starting a fire without a permit, the court ruled there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it. Do you see why?
I summarized those laws in post #84. If you read them, you’ll see they say nothing specific about Holocaust denial. That specific prohibition exists in Germany for obvious historical reasons, and I believe Belgium and perhaps a few other places. The several people who have been charged with hate speech in Canada were not just denying the Holocaust, but ranting about the evils and treachery of Jews and inciting violence against them.
Middle Eastern leaders or diplomats would not likely be banned from entry and would certainly not be arrested, any more than George W. Bush was at any risk of being arrested when he visited here as a private citizen. You seem to be trying to set up a ridiculous strawman. But I can see some individuals with a history of hate speech being denied entry, and I’m pretty sure that has happened. And I’m equally sure that the US is even more vigilant about keeping out known or suspected troublemakers. So what’s your point?
I’m sorry, but are you saying, in your belief, you (or I, or anyone) can go to St. Paul right now, fashion a wooden cross out of sticks, enter another persons yard, burn the cross right there in that person’s yard, and there is NOTHING anyone can do about it legally?
Is that really what you are saying?
Ok, do you think Canada should refuse to allow people like Mahmoud Abbas entry because he has a history of Holocaust Denial or do you think Holocaust Denial should not be considered a form of hate speech?
Similarly, should Canada refuse entry to or arrest people who say things like this
Or should that not be considered “hate speech”?
If not, why not?
Examples please.
I am not middle ground on this I live in a country that has libel and slander laws plus hate speech laws and I like it. (Australia)
Slander is saying something demonstrably not true that could harm someones life. Saying someone is gay, a thief, a kiddie fiddler are all things that can ruin a persons life and livelihood and as such if NOT TRUE should be dealt with.
Australia has certainly improved, but it’s a relatively recent improvement. In a number of Australian states, for example, truth was NOT necessarily a defense to a defamation suit before the new, uniform national laws were put in place in 2006. Before 2006, some states allowed true statements to be found legally defamatory if they were found to be not in the public interest.
Apart from being ridiculous, the legal principle that a true statement could also be defamatory served only to protect the interests of the wealthy and the powerful, and this had been the case in Australia for decades, as demonstrated by Robert Pullan’s excellent book, *Guilty secrets: Free Speech and Defamation in Australia * (1994). Libel and slander laws served, for a long time, as a way for people with deep pockets to curb freedom of speech and of the press in Australia. The 2006 revamp of the law was long overdue.
But doesn’t this present a conundrum for you, if you support hate speech laws? After all, one of the groups that sometimes benefit from hate speech laws are homosexuals.
Under hate speech laws in some jurisdictions, malicious and hateful and prejudiced speech directed at gays can be restricted. And yet you also argue that someone should be subject to defamation actions for falsely accusing another person of being gay. If we accept that there’s nothing wrong with being gay, though, why is it such a bad thing to accuse someone of?
I’m straight, and if someone accused me in public of being gay i might take the three seconds required to deny it (or i might not), but i certainly wouldn’t feel defamed by the accusation. For me, being accused of being gay is similar to being accused of being right-handed: untrue, and yet completely harmless.
In fairness, that was hardly unique to Australia. The US probably has the most favorable libel laws from the POV of anyone getting sued for libel, and yet even in the US the Church of Scientology was notorious for effectively using baseless(or nearly baseless) libel suits to silence it’s critics.
It is a conundrum, no apologies there but life is full of grey areas.!
Sure. The UK was similarly bad. But we can only hold each nation responsible for its own laws, and sisu argued that s/he was happy with the situation in Australia. Even now, there have been recent developments in Australian laws that sharply curb the freedom of the press to report material provided by whistleblowers, and to report on terrorist activities.
In hindsight I realize this post was a bit unclear.
What I meant was that they tried to “silence” their critics by nearly bankrupting them by forcing them to spend huge amounts of money defending themselves from what were glorified nuisance suits that the Church always lost.
You might think pornography is “speech”. I don’t consider it so, because it doesn’t convey any message. Saying “I like fucking and watching people fuck” at least conveys a message. But the first amendment protects freedom of “expression”, so porno is covered, even though I doubt porno was the original intent. Whatever. America is free on porno. Be proud.
America allows hate speech. Fair enough, and nice for racists etc., but, for example, Japan also allows hate speech. In fact if you want to organise your “I hate niggers and we should kill them all” rally, the police will stand by to protect you from the public.
In the USA you can’t ask certain questions of a prospective employee, because it has been decided that their rights override your rights to free speech. Not so in Japan, where you can ask anything.
The USA has constitutional speech protection. But so does Japan, in article 21 of its constitution.
Freedom of the press may sometimes be called in to question in Japan, but in truth, independent reporters don’t play by the rules, and avoid prosecution. In the USA, I’m pretty sure you have the highest total number and number per capita of gag orders issued by the state. So maybe you are on par there.
Your freedoms are just different freedoms. Have fun.
I don’t believe Holocaust Denial is necessarily Hate Speech under the UK’s current laws (for example), as the failed attempt to extradite Gerald Tobin from the UK to Germany for Holocaust Denial seems to confirm (which also puts the idea that instituting Hate Speech laws necessarily creates some form of slippery slope where all questionable speech acts are eventually going to be made illegal — if you can’t even extradite somebody accused of Holocaust Denial to another EU country from the UK with its well developed Hate Speech laws, then the slope is neither particularly slippery nor particularly slope-like). Further, Abbas’ position of Head of State of a country in a strategically important area would clearly complicate matters.
Having said that, I believe people who had previously called for the “death of Jews” or calls for “violence against homosexuals”, or similar, would be barred from entry into the country, and I’m completely OK with that. Governments have no obligation to accept the world’s trash into their country under some autistic application of principle.
In Denmark you can deny the WW-II holocaust, Armenian genocide, Ukrainian starving disaster, the gulags, that the Earth is round and the Moon is made of green cheese. You can even go full in and deny existence itself and become a solophist.
I already answered that in the part that you omitted from the quotation. Here it is again:
I summarized [Canadian hate speech laws] in post #84. If you read them, you’ll see they say nothing specific about Holocaust denial. That specific prohibition exists in Germany for obvious historical reasons, and I believe Belgium and perhaps a few other places. The several people who have been charged with hate speech in Canada were not just denying the Holocaust, but ranting about the evils and treachery of Jews and inciting violence against them.
I don’t know if Abbas has ever been to Canada but I know that Canadian officials including the Prime Minister have met with him, and if he wanted to come here I doubt there would be a problem.
Incidentally, just as a point of information, I read somewhere that Abbas was quoted in conversation with an Israeli official as calling the Holocaust “the greatest atrocity in modern history” so if he was once a denier it seems that he isn’t any more.
That’s a good question and it gives me the opportunity to make some important points.
First of all I believe that’s a quotation from the Qu’ran or a hadith so I gather that you’re trying to make the point that in Canada someone could get thrown in jail for practicing their religion. Nice try, but no. What you’re perhaps not understanding is that the threshold for something to qualify as hate speech is very high and its definition very specific, which is part of what I was trying to say above. And no, Islamic texts don’t qualify.
A couple of examples might help illustrate this.
After a number of jihadists who were plotting to blow up government buildings were arrested in Toronto, a reporter from the Globe and Mail interviewed their wives. Their rantings verged on the unbelievable; they raged against western society, the evils of Jews and infidels, and one of them said that if her husband ever ceased to be a dedicated jihadist she would divorce him. Asked how they could say such things while enjoying the benefits of a free democracy like Canada, one of them responded, “Who cares? We hate Canada”.
A pretty awful bunch of ranting, but they said it, and they could say it because we have free speech. As hateful as it was, nothing they said met the legal threshold for hate speech. Maybe it attracted some attention from law enforcement – I have no idea, but it certainly would have in the US. The First Amendment notwithstanding, I could see them on an FBI watch list, the NSA wiretapping them, and being put on the no-fly list with no forewarning or explanation.
Another example is when Maclean’s magazine published a series of articles condemning Islam and its practitioners and characterizing Muslims as a threat, most notably a column by a right-wing lunatic named Mark Steyn. Here’s a summary of the key outcomes – the full story is here:
It’s an, until recently, almost forgotten Hadith that’s regularly quoted nowadays to justify killing Jews and is in the Hamas Charter.
Anyway, I asked you what you thought, not the Canadian government.
Is your position that explicitly calling for the slaughter of Jews doesn’t qualify as “hate speech”?
If yes, then how can you argue that particular quote isn’t “hate speech”?
Well first of all I don’t see it as “explicitly calling for” anything at all, it comes across to me more like a sentence from a story in the Arabian Nights. But assuming that one can establish from the context that this is some sort of parable that is clearly calling for the slaughter of Jews, I’ll remind you again that the bar for hate speech is intentionally set really high.
You asked me what I think, personally, and I agree with setting it high. This means it has to be more than just someone saying that they don’t like a certain race or religion and would like to see them dead; in my view (and in the view of the law, I believe) it has to be a concerted effort to persuade, to rail against the alleged evils and transgressions of the target group to such an extent that an otherwise neutral audience might plausibly be persuaded to adopt the same hateful point of view. When hate speech is prohibited, it must be regarded as much, much more than just the appearance of certain words in a sentence. It must pass the test of being a real and present danger to public order to such a degree that it justifies a limitation of an important constitutional right.