It doesn’t matter what you think Freedom of the Press is, it matters how Sweden how defines it since the point of controversy originated there. Israel is in no position to head-lock and arm-twist a EU member into apologizing for a newspaper’s published material. If Israel feels its been legally wronged by the government of Sweden, it should file a complaint with the putative legal body of the United Nations.
What I find sad about this thread (and so many others) is the discussion is drowned out by the accusational din of anti-semitism. Nothing can be further from the truth. It’s not about Jews. Or Israelis as individuals or as a group. It’s about the government conspicuously oppressing an ethnic minority and not affording them the Rights and Privileges that would be provided if they (the Arab-Israelis) resided in other Western countries. The problem ends and begins with the fair and equitable treatment of the Palestinian people.
You misspelled “what the actual definition of Freedom of the Press is.”
Wrong.
It doesn’t become a FotP issue just because Sweden comes up with some idiosyncratic definition (which, of course, nobody has provided any proof for other than the non-binding interpretation of an non-judicial body whose interpretation contradicts what’s actually in their Constitution). Freedom of the Press has an actual, real definition. If Swedish politicians decided that “freedom of religion” means that nobody can insult your religious choices then it’d be equally self-serving and nonsensical for you to claim that the Mohamed cartoons were a violation of freedom of religion.
Of course, it doesn’t, so I have no idea why you’d mention it.
But good try.
I know! It’s like, these days you can hardly fabricate an international Jewish conspiracy of organ thievery without someone being all like “um, no.”
Won’t someone think of the anti-Semites?!?!?!?
They must be sad.
Meh, it’s just the same old standard boilerplate politics-divorced-from-reality.
Why look at the Mufti’s alliance with Hitler? The 1957 Homs Refugee Conference? The failure of Oslo, or Camp David? Arafat choosing to suspend negotiations and deliberately start the second “Intififada”?
It’s much easier just to say it’s all Israel’s fault and if they offered fair and equitable resolution, like Arafat rejected, then everything would be perfect.
Certainly the laws of libel apply, but that is the business of the courts or pressombudsmanden. The government won’t and shouldn’t mess with that. They make the laws, they shouldn’t enforce them too. Swedens constitution was based on Montesquieus theory of separation of powers and it is seen as a dangerous precedent to criticize the press directly and officially. You will see that the apologies for the cartoons, both in Sweden and Denmark, doesn’t criticize the press but regret hurt feelings.
First, thanks for the info. I’m the Editor in Chief of a smallish online fanzine that’s published from Sweden so I’m a bit familiar with the situation in Sweden wrt publications, but only a bit. I appreciate the additional info.
In any case, you are certainly correct and the courts determine legal transgressions (like libel), not the legislature. That’s fine.
However:
This seems a bit silly. I’m fine with accepting that by Swedish tradition they don’t engage in such behavior, or that they’d prefer not to, or what have you. But it’s not at all a slippery slope or a reason for concern. As long as Sweden has robust laws to protect FotP (and it certainly seems to) it is nonsensical to worry about mere rhetoric.
Let’s say, tomorrow, the government came out and said “That article sucks! It’s stupid ! It makes us want to poke our eyes out and pour salt in the bleeding ocular pits! Ayieeeee!”
What would happen the next day? I imagine that the paper would go on publishing just as it always had. They might even mock the politicians. After all, FotP is the right to publish whatever you want as long as it’s not libelous, but it is not the right to publish with criticism, even criticism from the government. As long as the government’s criticisms ‘have no teeth’, then there’s no real problem.
Honestly, if the Sweedish press was really so easily cowed that a mere verbal rebuke with no power behind it, at all, would silence them? Well… I’m sure they could order a shipment of some sort of spine-replicas from somewhere.
If FotP can only be maintained by treating journalists like hothouse flowers, then it’s nowhere near as robust as advertised.
Well… no, not really. The events of 2005 are a bit more complicated. Of course you could say (and people have said) that Sweden’s actions at the time were a mistake), but just to keep the record straight, Sweden did specifically go beyond ‘sorry your feelings were hurt.’
The quote at the time was “We support the freedom of speech, that I think is very clear. But at the same time it is important to say that with this freedom comes a certain responsibility, and it could be objectionable to act in a way that insults people”
IIRC Freivalds also use (semi-legal?) influence to have a website shut down that hosted other Mohamed cartoons and resigned in disgrace once the story broke.
So, it’s totally fine if you’d like to argue that Sweden shouldn’t apologize or make any diplomatic efforts to sooth things over. But it’s also true that there’s no real violation of FotP if they were to do that, and the Swedish government has, in the past, gone beyond mere ‘sorry you were offended’ type of watered down apologies.salt
The committee of the constitution would have something to say. A vote of no confidence or at least threats of it, perhaps, if the opposition think there is a chance.
If the quote is correct, I admit it’s more than that. Wasn’t the committee of the constitution mixed up in that apology somehow? I believe someone said so earlier in the thread.
It is called resentment and it sucks. It is what happens when you oppress people in a society. I beg you to notice that we don’t have this problem in Dearborn, Michigan.
I am much less concerned with the formation of a new state of Palestine, than I am with Israel providing unequivocal, same-treatment for all of its citizens. The former won’t last much without the latter. You can’t say that you have equal suffrage, while, at the same time allowing racial profiling. You can’t say you have equal opportunity in a country, where laws exclude minorities from certain privileges afforded to the majority. Equality isn’t a mathematical process of cancelling of “rights” and “unrights” on both sides, it is the fair and equitable for all, no exceptions, inclusions, or astriks.
A combination of various things. Not simply a desire for world domination, or whatever it was that you said. Anyone that denies that racism - mostly anti-semitism - wasn’t a large part o fit is deluding themselves.
In total around 90,000 Jews are believed to have been allowed to settle in the UK.
Kindertransport.
All pretty much the same question. Under British control the Jewish population in Palestine grew substantially. The earliest forms of a Jewish government was created. They were given tax raising powers.
I do realise that, for political reasons, many like to pretend that these things never happened, but they did.
Also, you mentioned earlier the White Papers that limited Jewish immigration. I don’t deny that these existed, but they did so in the late 1930s, after about two decades of British control and mass Jewish immigration.
Happy now?
Kindertransport wasn’t the only route that Jews took to the UK. It was however, what the British Government did in reaction to Kristallnacht, which was exactly what you had asked me about.
Oh I know. Just for you, from Wikipedia:
Which is exactly what you had done.
However there seem to be many here, that have a lot more experience of how such things are interpreted in Sweden where this has happened, that disagree with you.
Yes! Mock the Wiki! As I said, it was a starter for you. Something that Wikipedia is actually very good for. I at no point stated that it was the be all and end all definitive facts.
I actually don’t want to discuss that bit at all. Hell, I didn’t even mention it, you got annoyed when someone else did. I just thought that your response was naïve and demonstrably false.
Which will be why I asked if it had been “officially retracted”. Go on, check my post up there ^^^^
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. You are now trying to worm out of things by going all symantic (which, amusingly, is pretty much what you get annoyed at me for doing with “freedom of the press”).
The fact remains that in terms of statements, especially political ones, to retract has a very definite meaning. It is done via the means of a retraction
How would you like me to retract
The fact of the matter is that neither of us are very good with Swedish Constitutional Law. I am letting the experts figure it out whereas you think that you can just read an English translation and work it out for yourself.
Out of interest, can you read Swedish? You have “Finn” in your name, so there is a chance you have some Finnish in you and hence some Swedish abilities. If so, have you been following how this has been presented in the Swedish media? The media from a country where they deal a lot more with this sort of thing?
All immigration has been strictly limited for a long time, most countries have a tendency to do that. Again, I was specifically asked what the UK did after Kristallnacht. I answered, correctly, that the Government put forward a plan to bring in Jewish children. This plan wasn’t perfect, but it did save 9,000 or so kids that I assume were rather glad that the UK did it.
These were not the only Jews let in to the country. Approximately 90,000 in total were. Not perfect, but a hell of a lot better than none.
No I’m not. My link clearly says “Approximately 40,000 Jews from Austria and Germany were eventually allowed to settle in Britain before the War, in addition to 50,000 Jews from Italy, Poland, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.” 40,000 + 50,000 = 90,000.
Would it help your comprehension if I added a new line in the middle of what I wrote? I had hoped that you’d read the link and see exactly what the numbers refer to.
Your quote is somewhat unfair as well as it omits the lead up to the two sentences you do show, where I feel it makes it clear that Kindertransport was but a part of the Jewish immigration to the UK. You’ve presented it in a way so as to make it look like I thought it was the only immigration.
Still, the figures don’t lie. 90,000 Jews. Again, as a direct response to Kristallnacht the Kindertransport programme was put into place which saved approximately 9000 children. And all of this was done before the shit really hit the fan. It wasn’t until well into the war that the true depths of the “final solution” was understood. That’s why earlier I asked you to try and reply without using knowledge gained from hindsight. Perhaps if we knew that the Nazis were going to have set up deaths camps and slaughter several million people we’d have done something different, but we didn’t.
Which is what makes it particularly disgraceful that you try to imply that the UK did next to nothing.
I did. That’s where I got the numbers from.
Counter-factual my arse.
Again I ask, what was the UK supposed to do? Bear in mind that the Great Depression was a worldwide phenomenon that took place not that long after the First World War ended. Also consider that from the mid-thirties onwards the UK began to prepare for war.
So, what do you think the UK should have done? Open the borders completely for mass migration of Jews from mainland Europe whilst knowing full well that the country just didn’t have the capacity to look after them? Remember that at this point no-one knew how far the Nazis had planned to go with the Holocaust.
Would you have risked your country for that? Because that’s what was at stake. This wasn’t was in some faroff land, this was just across the channel.
Based on those cites I don’t see much of a difference between Israel and other countries with sizable minority groups, particularly countries with a history of violence between the minority and the majority. Certainly, there’s no reason there for the dispropotionate global attention my country receives.
No, I actually agree, I think the reason is the somewhat flattering that Israel after all are democratic and supposedly will listen better than for instance Sudan. Another reason is the grave breaches of the Geneva Convention Israel commit in Palestine. But are you saying that we shouldn’t criticize Israel because others are as bad?
White phosphorus used on civilians. Assassinations, as told in the Swedish article in Aftonbladet, even if the mans organs wasn’t stolen. Destruction of property as covered by article 53 of the fourth Geneva convention. Settlements in the occupied teritories.
