Free speech law isn’t defamation law, and denial of the holocaust is legal under both free speech and defamation law. Saying counterfactual things like “Jews eat babies,” and “Obama is a Muslim” is protected free speech in the US. I don’t think defamation is a logical basis for differentiating the free speech rights of holocaust-denial an religious insults.
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Let’s do away with the idea that you can be restricted from expressing any political belief
Does that extend to Holland’s pro-pedophilia party? Some shit is deplorable and I’ll vitriolically abuse the political beliefs of some.
Holocaust deniers are wrong. There’s no two ways about it, so I’m perfectly happy for it to be a crime to deny the holocaust. Denying the holocaust stands to benefit no one yet has potential to offend many.
I also don’t believe the law your link refers to to be trampling a political viewpoint and I feel it’s splitting hairs to say France has its own, when that law was implemented 1 or 2 years before the EU came into existence. The law as described on your link makes it a crime to deny the crimes of the Nazi regieme during WWII. It doesn’t criminalise holding neo-Nazi political opinions, or expressing them outside of denying events that unarguably took place.
I thank you for the creamy-center comment. A+
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Obama could certainly bring defamation suits against specific people who claim he is a Muslim, or not a citizen, and probably even win. That’s what defamation is – the propagation of falsehoods to harm the reputation of somebody. It probably wouldn’t be a smart political move, but that’s a different issue. The “Jews eats babies” example is probably too general to be legally defamation, but somebody claiming that specific Jews eat babies would be.
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I’m sorry, I directly quoted you as saying: “You all realise that the criminalisation of antisemitism and holocaust-denial is a European Union law thing, right? It’s not like France just unilaterally made that law.” Antisemitism falls under the hate speech laws described in the link. And you want to call me dishonest for “answer[ing] as if [your] reply relates to one specific topic in [my] comment”? OK.
And why not look at the wiki on holocaust denial? Oh, that’s right, it says that France amended its 1881 law in 1990 to include holocaust denial. It did this all on its own, without the EU. And although the EU later, in 2001, proposed a law aimed at holocaust denial, this was blocked by the UK and currently the EU holocaust denial law is optional for member states to adopt.
[quote=“teapot, post:84, topic:49448”]
Nice generalisation, by the way… have Charlie Hebdo been counter-factual about world events? Kind of important since that’s the subject.
[/quote] Yeah, they were counter-factual about de Gaulle dying in a dance, which was the entire point of my comment. And, to use just one example that others have used, they are counter-factual about the pope abusing children.
I mentioned both holocaust denial and gratuitous antisemitism. You response said that they don’t deny that the holocaust happened because it actually did happen, and that at any rate “they do.” I think it’s fair to interpret “they do” as a reference to what you were just talking about, holocaust denial.
But even if we do interpret your statement as referring to antisemitism, I think it’s a stretch to see the cover you posted as antisemitic, much less gratuitously so.
I didn’t say it wasn’t defamation (though I think it would be a tough case to prove, not only in showing actual injury but also in establishing that it was intended as a factual statement and not an opinion); I said it was protected free speech. The pope-abusing-children cartoon is just as defamatory, but we’re still using it as an example of freedom of speech.
Check again, Muslim isn’t a race.
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It does. They don’t do so because they’re not funny topics. Additionally, those are situations which are not analagous to the current cartoon.
I mean, sure, they’re all WORDS on PAPER, but I think the comparisons end there in any honest discussion.
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I stand corrected on the EU law thing, but as I already said to Abe I support the premise of it so I’m cool with it. You trying to score points in discussions I’m having with others? Classy. It’s totally not obvious that you dislike me.
On the rest of it you’re - like always - comparing apples and oranges. Misrepresenting de Gaulle’s death as a dance is obviously a joke (every French person knew the actual story already) and it might have offended a handful of his relatives. Comparing that “misrepresentation” to holocaust denial is moronic.
On the pope, he is a symbol of the Catholic church - one that the Catholic church, by virtue of having a head honcho, created. Previous popes and various cardinals knowingly protected abusers or obscured the facts in child abuse cases and the Catholics fucking deserve it considering that behaviour continues to the present day to some extent. This was revealed by royal commission last year: http://brokenrites.org.au/drupal/node/280
Australia’s highest cardinal instructed church lawyers to “crush” a victim of sexual abuse because he wouldn’t accept their impossibly inadequate offer of compensation. Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and pretty much every idiotic religious organisation has skeletons in their closet.
IRT the depictions of Jews, I already said I should have been clearer in my original comment that the cover was in response to your claims that they don’t publish anti-semetism. I also said “on the spectrum of anti-semetism” as I agree that that comic is barely, if at all anti-semetic, though if you read a bit of Israeli press on the subject you’ll see that many have labelled their comic as such.
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The DEA is wrong to schedule marijuana was a Schedule I drug. But changing that had proven difficult largely because any clinical tests using marijuana directly must directly confirm the DEAs position in order for the DEA to allow it. So you get an endless feedback loop of Wrong. Sure, the holocaust happened, but what other “Wrong” ideas should we start rounding up? What happens when those ideas prove to be right? Fact is, truly free-speech isn’t broken enough to need fixing. Usually it’s when things start to go in the other direction that its really a problem.
See the thing about the Holocaust is that eventually it’s going to a couple of hundred years removed from the present day, and then these laws are going to seem very detached from reality. But once you get people in the business of figuring out that you can keep people from saying things that are Obviously Wrong, then you can keep them from saying pretty much whatever you want. That’s the wonderful legacy that gets set up. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that any weapon of the weak isn’t better and more devastatingly wielded by the powerful. (As always, there’s a very relevant Discworld novel on the subject.)
Okay, you seem to really want France not to have laws that it does, by all accounts, seem to have. I can’t force you to believe they’re there. And apparently if it was created before the EU, it doesn’t count if it’s “close enough” because apparently laws work by some weird mechanism of temporal proximity? You’re not being very clear. Either those are the laws in France, or they’re not. Either they’re enforceable in France, or they’re not. It doesn’t matter if it’s EU or treaty-defined, as long as it’s the law in France. Fact is, there are laws against anti-semitism as racism not limited to Holocaust denial, in France.
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For instance, I’m an atheist and an apostate of my former religion. In both Islam, and Christianity, I’m supposed to be killed with rocks.
My very existence is offensive to many religious people. Therefore I apparently am not allowed to exist in certain countries where insulting religious sensibilities is considered a crime.
This is why anti-blasphemy laws and religious sensitivity laws are pandering bullshit that can’t ever be enforced in a way that even smells like equity or justice. Anyone who tries to claim otherwise should be imprisoned under their own proposed blasphemy law, because it violates my atheist non-belief, and insults my moral sensibilities.
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The thing is: If you’re so thin skinned about your religious beliefs that you feel the need to go off and kill people who insult them, then you’re betraying the fact that you have no confidence in your beliefs anyway.
For instance, I don’t get mad at, say, climate change deniers for saying that climate change isn’t happening. I try to educate the willing, and give up on the lost causes. In fact, it’s incredibly insulting to me when religious people say things like “you’re only an atheist because you want to sin without consequences.” Yet I haven’t killed a single person. In fact, I’ve never even harmed someone for saying that. Even though it’s very insulting.
Perhaps religions don’t deserve respect, and religious people need to grow thicker skin like reasonable people. Instead of being coddled and treated with kid-gloves, and appeased even though they can’t justify their demands beyond “do what I want because I want it.”
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The holocaust is a very particular case and it is because Europe was so heavily involved and many EU countries bear reaponsibility. Find me an example of European law that restricts the denial of any single other thing. I don’t believe holocaust denial laws to be some sort of template for future speech silencing.
IRT my comment about it being in close temporal proximity to the EU (which ive now been corrected on) I was getting at the idea that these laws were brought into effect due to a particular political climate and the resurgence of holocaust denial and neo-nazism in the region at the time.
I am not denying that laws exist. I was mistaken as, you might be surprised to know, I don’t spend a lot of time reading the laws of particular countries. All I was responding to was the wiki link you provided which says nothing about anti-semetism (but it does cover discrimination or incitement of hate based on religion) and it says this about holocaust denial, which is exactly what I said to you:
The Gayssot Act sets a punishment of five years’ imprisonment and a €45,000 fine for the public expression of ideas that challenge the existence of the crimes against humanity committed by Nazi Germany during World War II as defined in the appendix to the London Agreement of 8 August 1945
Yes, let’s not forget the death threats over Piss Christ and Terrence McNally’s play Corpus Christi.
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Don’t forget they got chocolate christ cancelled: http://boingboing.net/2007/03/30/chocolate-christ-art.html
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Annoyingly they include religion in there too under the hate speech laws, though his suggestions it’s mostly used against anti-semetism is bunk (surprise surprise). According to the select cases section of the Wikipedia article Abe provided there are 2/16 cases that are about Judaism, while the rest are all whingy Christians, Catholics or Muslims. Obviously the list isn’t comprehensive, but it’s representative enough.
I have no doubt that in their long career, Charlie Hebdo have done more than one joke that I would find bad, racist, or whatever.
I know that the principles of the magazine, and the principles that the dead writers exposed, are the principles of freedom of expression and, further, of irreverent satire to ANYTHING that pretends to be sacred, above all, and untouchable.
Thats why I’m Charlie Hebdo. Even when I dont agree with them in one picture or another. All those that pretend that something is so sacred that everybody else should respect the lines that THEY draw is asking for a mocking refutal. Even if it is only in principle, to say no, I’m not bound by your ideas, I refuse to be bound by them.
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Very well said. Just because I believe in people’s freedom to be assholes, doesn’t mean I’m in solidarity with them.
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I heard this beautifully put on the radio yesterday - the problem is that we don’t do enough mocking. It should be so routine that nobody thinks twice when another mocking cartoon appears. Self censorship merely creates the feeling of crossing a line when something is said.
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Here one front of Charlie Hebdo for all of you that think they were racists
They were enemies both of racist fascist like FN and of any kind of religious imposition on society.
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So, no fan of Voltaire then?
If he wasn’t so definitive with his own opinion I might have been inclined to agree with parts of the commentary. If he’s going to throw around a word like racism then he’d better have read what the editor had himself said in reply to such charges and make up his mind then, but I’m pretty sure he hasn’t.
Also I understand why they resort to characatures that annoy or border on racial stereotype: annoying their perceived enemies is the whole point. If you seek to infuriate, then use the tools which will best infuriate. It’s merely efficiency. They’re trolling with comics - to great effect. If everyone didn’t notice, they kind of dont care about civility. They want to express themselves and nothing, even fraternity or taste will get in their way.
