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The War on Free Speech

Published on Thursday, 24 January 2013

  Written by Pyrus 

 

It’s very easy to accuse politicians or the media of waging a war on free speech when what you have to say is considered controversial or even dangerous.

Freedom of speech does have limits, and it is the duty of government to determine what those limits are and what penalties should be in place for those who overstep the mark.
Why? Because freedom of speech can be dangerous. It can be used to incite violence, to manipulate the impressionable or to spread lies about a person’s character.

Sometimes poisonous words can be defeated by argument, by appeals to reason or simply by good old common decency. But sometimes they can take root, breed discontent and tear communities or even nations apart.

Equally, freedom of speech is important. Without it we cannot challenge established beliefs, expand the boundaries of our knowledge, or speak out against tyranny. Without freedom of speech we would, quite literally, have no voice.

The government’s job is a balancing act: it must ensure freedom of speech whilst also applying limitations when absolutely necessary, such as when an extremist encourages his followers to respond to criticism with violence.

When a government fails to explain or justify the limitations that it has placed on freedom of speech, those who find themselves penalised for speaking out will quite rightly ask why it is that their freedoms are not being protected. Did they overstep the mark? Did they incite violence? Did their words do people harm? Was there a good reason for limiting what they are allowed to say?
If so, then they can have no complaints about the charge. If not, then freedom of speech is most certainly under threat.

But how to decide what is a good reason for limiting freedom of speech?

The recent decision to reform Section 5 of the Public Order Act so that using “insulting words” can no longer be considered a criminal offence just goes to show how badly wrong the politicians can get it. The fear of “insult” is so obviously not a good reason to limit freedom of speech that it’s terrifying to think how it came to be written into law in the first place. 

Much in the same way as ‘offence’, ‘insult’ is subjective – the more sensitive you are, the more likely you are to find yourself getting offended or feeling like you’ve been insulted. No wonder there are so many examples of ‘the professionally offended’ exploiting this law to silence people that they happen to disagree with.

So good riddance – no one should have the right to be protected from hearing either something they don’t want to hear or something that they happen to find offensive.
But, of course, this was just a baby step.

Last week EDL Leader Kevin Carroll was arrested for comments he allegedly posted on Facebook. The comments in question, made in response to a particularly graphic and unpleasant video about halal slaughter, were as follows:

“They are all ***king backward savages, a devil-spawned death cult worshipping all that is unholy and barbaric, pure evil”
Not the most eloquent or polite words, certainly. But when people see something abhorrent (in this case animals being dismembered in the name of religious ritual) they speak from the heart.  We’re talking about a Facebook post, not a public speech or a pre-planned press release. It was immediate, and it was honest.

The police response was decisive. In Kev’s words, “…they swooped down on me, blues flashing and sirens wailing — you would have thought I was a serial killer or something. Right in the middle of the town centre!”
He was charged with “religious and racial hatred” and has been ordered to report to a police station twice a week.

For a Facebook post.
So let’s look at the content of that post in more detail, because there are a lot of unanswered questions.
It is, most certainly, a criticism of religious practices. Whether or not that constitutes ‘hatred’ is difficult to tell. But if it does, then hatred of what: those who carry out that particular practice or the religion in general?

Surely it’s perfectly legitimate to hate “barbaric practices”, whether they are performed in the name of a religion or not? And surely causing an animal an enormous amount of pain just to abide by some ancient ritual is “backwards” and “savage”?

Is Islam (or radical Islam – it’s not clear what’s being referred to here) a “devil-spawned death cult worshipping all that is unholy and barbaric?” The atheists amongst us this might question whether anything could truly be devil-spawned or unholy, but surely Christians (or any other religion for that matter) can legitimately claim that followers of other religions have got it wrong, or that their practices are “unholy”?
And “death cult”? Well how many other world religions make weekly headlines with countless suicide bomb attackers?

Even if we do accept that all this demonstrates hatred of Islam, so what? Is it illegal to hate something?
Of course, we’re over-analysing. But the allegation of “racial hatred” is worth considering as it’s even more puzzling. As Patrick Hayes of Spiked.com (not usually big fans of the EDL) pointed out, “…Islam is a religion, not a race. Indeed, to make the odd assumption that Islam only has an appeal to a particular race speaks volumes about the prejudices of those making such an assumption.”
Quite.

For whatever reason, the police evidently decided that Kev had overstepped the mark, that his alleged comments were dangerous. Maybe, if you really wanted them to, they could be used as justification for violence. But what evidence of this is there really?

Yes the EDL has seen its fair share of controversies, but compare our organisation with Islam – not the radicals, not the extremists, but mainstream Islam. In fact, our friends over at British Freedom have done exactly that, compiling a list of hateful passages that are to be found in the Qur’an.
Should anyone who quotes these passages be arrested? There are countless examples to prove that these words can be dangerous – terrorists the world over use them as their justification. And they do so not simply as a convenient excuse. Instead, they act on these words due to a deeply held conviction that they are not the words of man but the words of God.

As much as we appreciate him, Kevin Carroll doesn’t quite have that sort of sway.
If Kev’s words warranted arrest, then the police really ought to be raiding Mosques up and down the country. But can anyone see that happening any time soon? The truth is, it’s never easy to decide whether what someone has said could be ‘dangerous’.

The easiest way to protect freedom of speech is to limit it only when there is a clear risk of incitement to violence. The EDL incite people to protest, to demonstrate and to campaign. Our supporters are much maligned in the press and often demonised by the government. But what they most certainly are not are dangerous zealots who can be counted on to rise to even the slightest provocation or goading.

Unfortunately, there appear to be no shortage of these kinds of characters in the Muslim community. Religious judgements, even if they do not explicitly promote violence, have the power to be particularly divisive. But in today’s political climate, even pointing out that fact makes you the enemy.
In a rational world, the enemy would be anyone who attacked free speech.
Today, free speech is treated as if were the enemy.*

This is the war on free speech – and it’s a war we must win.

(englishdefenseleague.org)
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