Category: Free speech online

From FiveFeetOfFury I learn of this report.  It seems that a UN “human rights council” has passed a resolution “urging passage of laws around the world to protect religion from criticism.”  Of course they have one particular religion in mind here: yes, they want to ensure that if Osama bin Laden blows up your home in the name of Allah, and, emerging from the wreckage you utter some contemptuous phrase about him and his god, then the police will arrest you.  Nice!

I’m a Christian.  I don’t want laws that treat ideas as if they were people, and endow them with “rights”.  Such laws are always used to persecute real people.  It was in the name of “diversity” that the student union, backed by the university, orchestrated a ban on Exeter Christian Union, seized its assets, and attempted to distribute them to the donors, set up a mock “trial” with a tame QC, in order to try to drown them in legal bills, and so on.  Only widespread publicity defeated the nasty little game, and as far as I know the perpetrators were never brought to justice.  Similar attacks have taken place on Catholic societies.  What happens in our universities today happens in society tomorrow.

So imagine how this new idea would work.  Would I myself end up getting arrested for posting Isidore of Pelusium’s letters about the sleazebag bishop Eusebius?  After all, who’s to say that this wouldn’t amount to “criticism”?   Would large and rather corrupt church denominations like the Episcopal Church of America start employing lawyers to sue any church member who dared to object to their policies?  (They do already, but only to seize property).  “Calculated to incite hatred of the <insert name here> church”, or some such charge?  The effect would be to chill discussion, for fear of the consequences.

Do we care what the UN says?  Not much; but it shows how the wind blows.  We need to fight for freedom of speech, and we need to do it now.

In Slash.dot today there is an article which tells me that “Christian groups” in Australia are campaigning to get the government to filter all internet traffic there.  This puts in place the tools to censor the web in Australia.  Looking around, I find the Australian Christian Lobby seems to be the group in question.  They want to block internet porn.

I don’t know the background to this, and internet porn is certainly an evil.  But there are several questions that jump out at us.  Leaving aside whether the ACL represents anyone but itself, we might ask whether the Australian government is a pro-Christian one.  Because if not, then anti-porn is not the agenda.

As I understand it, the government currently trying to erect its own “Human Rights Commission”.  The very name will send a chill through anyone who has followed the evil bodies of that name in Canada.  This is about “banning hate”, which has becoming the code-word for censoring disagreement.  It wants to make it possible for favoured groups like gays and Moslems to drag into court people who they don’t like.  At least one Christian pastor has already been hauled into court after talking about Islam, without these new laws and bodies.  So this is not a government which favours Christianity, unless making legal harassment possible is a novel form of favour.

So why is it backing the ACL?  It looks a lot to me as if the ACL is a convenient patsy.  The government wants to end free speech in Australia.  As part of that, it wants mechanisms to censor the internet.  But since this is unpopular, it has to pretend that this is to “protect our kiddies”, and blame any negative effects on some group that it doesn’t actually like that much. 

This way they evade the blame for their censorship, while setting up the Christians to be blamed.  After all, when the censors block Christian sites, they can point to the ACL and say “well, you proposed it!”

All of us must oppose these measures to censor the web, whatever guise they appear in.  They are purely about removing freedom, whatever the pretext.

This blog is mainly about patristics and ancient history.  But any blogger must take an interest in whether he might be dragged before the courts by someone who decides to be “offended” and belongs to a legally privileged group.  It is for this reason that I link to Ezra Levant, the Canadian blogger who was attacked by the Orwellian-sounding “Human Rights Commissions” in a variety of ways that certainly violated his human rights of free speech and a fair trial. 

The same organisation has systematically harassed Christians, with the intention of “chilling” free speech.  The accusers face no costs; the victims, even if acquitted, face financial ruin: the process of ‘investigation’ is the punishment.  I won’t usually post on the continuing story – Ezra does that every day very ably.  But the same tendency exists everywhere.

Canada’s politicians have been slow to act.  But an inquiry into the functioning of these  bodies has begun.  The unfortunately named Mark Steyn — does no-one read Vanity Fair any more? — has been another victim, and was asked to address the inquiry.  A summary of it is here.

My attention was caught by this section:

…every time you have someone like Haroun Siddiqui at the Toronto Star saying that it’s all about striking a balance and all the rest of it, every time that someone tiptoes down that primrose path, it leads only to tyranny. If you don’t believe in free speech for people you hate, you loathe, you revile, you don’t believe in free speech at all. …

The Tribunal, I think, needs to be brought within the codes and conventions of this country’s legal system. At the moment, it upends them. The burden of proof ought to be on the accuser. The accuser should not be allowed unlimited funds to frivolously torment people for no reason, beggaring them for something that serves no public purpose.

We need to be aware of the concerted attempt across the world to stifle freedom of speech, to make it risky to say anything that might offend those with power.   We need to resist.

From time to time I comment on free speech online issues.  This is not because I want to, but because of the threats to all bloggers which of course includes me.  The best way to resist this is to highlight it.

I frequently read Guido Fawkes UK political blog for its alternative and somewhat subversive picture of what is really happening in UK politics.  Today I read that a leading libel lawyer has tried to silence discussion online (and presumably succeeded in some cases) concerning one of his clients.  See here for Guido’s comments.  A court order threatening people with prison for revealing that there is a court order?!?

I recall that during the 80’s UK television acted as mouth-pieces for Irish terrorists. When the then government tried to prevent them, the BBC spitefully announced that “this report has been compiled in accordance with government reporting restrictions” whenever it had an relevant news, which was most nights for a couple of years.  But that wasn’t censored in this way.  I recall how the New Statesman in the 1960’s used to publish official D-notices, which indicated matters of vital security interest which should not be published, thereby violating them comprehensively, endangering us all, and insulting the system which was trying to protect them.  They too went free.  But then, they weren’t writing a  blog.

UK. Free Speech. Now.

As a postscript, today I was reading a BBC piece about a new Chinese crackdown on dissent in Tibet.  Apparently the Tibetan nationalists were being arrested for “trying to stir up racial hatred”; weasel words for “resisting the Chinese occupation.”  Goebbels would be proud of whoever invented this phrase, I think.