The relentless and obsessive anti-free-speech activism of Jews continues to make itself felt around the world. One of the regular complaints of the Counterjewhad movement, consisting of Jews and the Judenknechte who work for then, is that it is now impossible to publicly criticse Islam in Europe without fear of persecution.
Recently, for example, the Gatestone Institute (link) (funded by the Jewess Nina Rosenwald) and JihadWatch (link) (funded by the Jew David Horowitz) expressed dismay at Geert Wilders' conviction for incitement to discrimination against Moroccans. They show no interest whatsoever, however, in exploring the historical origins of these laws that criminalise free expression. Anyone who undertakes this kind of investigation - as I did in the case of Britain (link) - almost invariably finds that Europe's "hate speech" laws came about as a result of pressure from Jews.
In Britain, Theresa May has just taken free speech repression a notch further. She seems unusually amenable to Jewish anti-free speech pressures, no doubt influenced in part by the partly successful "antisemitism" scam the Jews have been running against Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the opposition Labour party.
It was Theresa May's first day as Prime Minister. She met the Queen at Buckingham Palace, walked into her new home at Number 10, and could have been forgiven for clearing her diary of any other engagements.
But that evening she and her husband honoured a dinner invitation, made some months earlier, with Britain's chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis. The message was clear - Mr Mirvis said the gesture "reflects her great desire to maintain her commitments to and appreciation of Britain's Jewish Community".
The new definition of anti-Semitism being announced by Mrs May on Monday is the logical next step for the Prime Minister whose commitment to fighting hatred of Jews was already long evident. She visited Israel as Home Secretary and secured £11m of funding for security at UK schools and synagogues following terrorist attacks on Jewish communities in France, Belgium and elsewhere.
At an event last April to mark the 67th anniversary of Israel's independence, she responded to a rise in anti-Semitism by declaring: "I never thought I would see the day that members of the Jewish community in the United Kingdom would say that they are fearful of remaining here in our country. Without its Jews, Britain would not be Britain."
Too often, she will say today, culprits can wriggle out of anti-Semitism accusations because it is ill-defined. Now, she says, "they will be called out". Police forces, councils and public bodies can then use the wording from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which Britain is one of the first countries to adopt.
Source This "wording from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance" is just a rebadged version of the so-called “Working Definition of Anti-Semitism”, about which I have written before (link). It has come to play a sinister role in the efforts of organised Jewry to suppress free speech. Jews have lied and continue to lie about the status of this "definition". For example, Kenneth Stern of the American Jewish Committee, writing in the New York Times a few days ago (link), referred to the "Department of State’s definition of anti-Semitism, which is a version of the “Working Definition of Anti-Semitism” issued in 2005 by the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia".
To recapitulate for those who haven't been following this issue closely, the origins of the "working definition" are as follows. Some minor European bureaucrat was visiting New York to attend some "diversity" conference. She found herself waylaid by a bunch of Jewish activists who pressed on her the need to have a "working definition of antisemitism" to tackle the "problem". She tried to fob them off, saying something like, "Sure, if you have any ideas, send them to us." So the Jewish activists drew up their elaborate working definition of antisemitism and sent it to her. It was then posted on the agency's website along with numerous other unevaluated and unapproved submissions that were due for consideration and had no official status.
This "working definition" consisted of a first part that was so abstract as to be almost meaningless and therefore required a second part, listing specific examples, in order to acquire any substantive meaning. This second part, the list of specific examples of "antisemitism", became a kind of blank wish list on to which Jewish activists could pencil in whatever they wanted. Their foremost intent was to defend Israel so they defined various kinds of criticism of Israel as antisemitic. The fact that their foremost intent was to suppress criticism of Israel rather than "protect" themselves from the "scourge of antisemitism" indicates that there was almost zero concern about real antisemitism; as does the casual way in which accusations of antisemitism are now bandied around, something that continually devalues the currency further.
The impetus behind their initiative was clearly concern about the crowing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel. Desperation about the effect this campaign might ultimately have is causing diaspora Jewish communities to play the antisemitism card ever more feverishly and recklessly in an attempt to protect what they claim is their ancestral homeland. In turn, certain things this ethnic lobby, and the grip it has over the political class, is exposed to public scrutiny to a much greater degree.
Once this this "Working Definition of Antisemitism" had been posted on the agency's website, Jewish activists and lobbyists systematically lied about it, pretending that it had some officially-approved status, often describing it as the "EU's Working Definition of Antisemitism" or "Europe's Working Definition...". These lies have been given an extraordinary degree of credence, including by institutions and official, authoritative bodies, who have sometimes incorporated the definition into their own regulations or otherwise made explicit reference to it.
Prime Minister Theresa May has now officially adopted it in Britain. No doubt this precedent will now be cited by Jewish activists in other countries, who will take the "British" definition as a reference.
In the USA, the first amendment to the constitution has always served as a bulwark against Jewish anti-free speech pressures. But Jewish ethno-activists have never stopped looking for ways around that. Their latest initiative is the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, aimed at denying government money to universities that create a "hostile environment" for Jews, a "hostile environment" apparently being defined as a place where any criticism of Jews or Israel is permitted to be uttered.
To be fair to the Jews, some of them are speaking out against this. This is a phenomenon I have never seen in Europe, in which some Jews mobilise against the anti-free speech activism of other Jews. However, their primary motivation seems to be, not a love of free speech per se, but concern that the law will unfairly stigmatise Muslims and will therefore limit Jews' ability to form an alliance with Muslims against "white nationalists" and Trump.
Instead of working to outlaw speech highly critical of Israel, we should be fostering broader, deeper conversations about what divides us. Instead of disparaging Muslim organizations who don’t toe the Jewish community line on Israel, we should commit to respecting that we have different views, debating those views openly, working together where we can and coming to one another when problems arise. The results of the 2016 election show that all of us have a stake in fighting bigotry. It is time to put aside old orthodoxies and fight the resurgence of nationalism and racism together.
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But it is not just in the countries inhabited by Jews that Jewish activism blights free speech. The news clip below features the story of Vladimir Luzgin, who was convicted of a crime in Russia for stating that the USSR invaded Poland during WW2 in a pact with the Nazis.
Luzgin was convicted and fined 200,000 rubles under Russia’s recent law against “Nazi rehabilitation,” which prohibits the “public denial of the Nuremberg trials and circulation of false information about the activities of the USSR during the years of World War II.” On Sept. 1 — the anniversary of the German invasion of Poland — Russia’s Supreme Court upheld the conviction.
The Russian law that was applied in this case was originally adopted in 2014 and has consistently been the subject of international criticism, especially from European media and institutions such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Yet Europe’s critics tend to skirt their own inconvenient truth: Such “memory laws” — laws that criminalize deviations from official historical accounts — were pioneered by European democracies and the EU. And they have provided impetus and legitimacy to the mushrooming of similar laws, applied to much more nefarious agendas, in places like Russia, Ukraine, Rwanda, and Bangladesh.
In October, Foreign Policy published an important article ("First they came for the Holocaust deniers and I did not speak out" link) showing the template of Europe's Holocaust Denial laws, zealously campaign for by Jewish activists, is being copied and used to criminalise political dissent across the world. When these practices are challenged, the response is always the same: they do it in Europe so it must be OK.
It is, of course, the Holocaust that has been the driver of European memory laws. Most of the laws on the continent prohibit the denial, justification, or trivialization of the crimes committed by the Nazis during World War II, the mass murder of Jews chief among them. According to University of Amsterdam legal scholar Uladzislau Belavusau, “the monumental legal prescription of historical truth has fulfilled a remarkable role in the project of Europe’s unification, with both [the EU and the Council of Europe] building their foundational discourse on the urge to avoid the misfortunes of World War II through European integration and acknowledgement of foundational atrocities.”
France has had a ban on Holocaust denial in place since 1990. Austria’s ban was adopted in 1992, and Belgium’s is from 1995. Germany itself did not adopt an explicit ban until 1994, though it countered Holocaust denial before then through laws against defamation, incitement, and disparaging the memory of the dead. The European Union also took steps in this direction through a joint action adopted in 1996, which obliged member states to take steps toward criminalizing the “public denial” of the crimes that formed part of the Nuremberg trials. Holocaust denial laws were also approved in the 1990s by the European Court of Human Rights (under the Council of Europe), which stated that the negation or revision of “clearly established historical facts — such as the Holocaust — … would be removed from the protection” of free speech under the European Convention on Human Rights. The joint action was given more bite in 2008 with the adoption of a much more detailed framework decision on combating racism and xenophobia.
Nor is the sinister effect of these laws confined to Europe.
Outside Europe, Rwanda and Bangladesh are examples of how European memory laws have migrated across continents and are being wielded as a weapon by undemocratic regimes. Following the Rwandan genocide in 1994, perhaps understandably, tough memory laws were passed in 2003 and 2008. Today, any person who has “publicly shown, by his or her words, writings, images, or by any other means, that he or she has negated the genocide committed, rudely minimised it or attempted to justify or approve its grounds” risks between 10 and 20 years imprisonment.
Human rights lawyer Nani Jansen estimates that as of 2014 the Rwandan memorial laws had resulted in upwards of 2,000 cases being brought; she also notes that they have been used to “restrict a free and open debate on matters of public interest in the country and especially the restrictive effect the laws have had on free speech in the media.” Those convicted under the law include journalists and political opponents of President Paul Kagame. When human rights organizations criticized the broad and vague nature of the country’s law, Rwanda’s then-prosecutor-general shot back at Western critics: “Their narrative is as if this is a draconian law meant to suppress political dissent and freedom of speech. What is not often told however is that the laws of similar nature actually have been in place in a number of European Countries for decades!” He then went on to specifically highlight the EU framework decision, the Holocaust denial laws in European democracies, and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights.
This year, the government of Bangladesh tabled a draft “Liberation War Denial Crimes Act” aimed at settling the historical account of that country’s bloody separation from Pakistan. The Bangladeshi draft law, too, is justified with a reference to European Holocaust denial laws. According to the draft law, undermining, misinterpreting, distorting, disrespecting, or running propaganda campaigns against the official historical account would be punishable with up to five years in prison.
According to the government’s official account, the liberation war resulted in the deaths of some 3 million people. However, a number of studies suggest alternative figures ranging as “low” as 200,000 to 300,000 deaths. Yet such historical accounts would no longer be permissible if the bill is passed. Apart from cementing a questionable historical account as unquestionable truth, Bangladesh-based journalist David Bergman also worries that if passed, the law would shore up the current government and be used as a weapon against its opponents.
The pressure to restrict speech does not just come from local Jewish organisations and activists. The Israeli government continually pressures the EU to clamp down on free expression.
Representatives from the European Union and Israel gathered Tuesday in Jerusalem for the 10th EU-Israel Seminar on Combating Racism, Xenophobia and Antisemitism, where they discussed their continuing work to combat antisemitism, exchanging experiences and best practices. The main issues on the agenda were fighting antisemitism through online platforms and education. The EU and Israel agreed to continue their close cooperation though educational initiatives, in addition to tackling dangerous cyber hate.
The seminar drew representatives from the Foreign Affairs Ministry, the European Commission, the European External Action Service, the Fundamental Rights Agency, members of Knesset and representatives from the Education Ministry, research institutions, NGOs and technology companies. “In the face of rising intolerance in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere, government and public servants must find their way to develop new tools for confronting fresh challenges,” said Akiva Tor, head of the Bureau for World Jewish Affairs and World Religions at the Foreign Affairs Ministry. “We need to be proactive and creative in developing innovative tools for education towards tolerance, and we need to become more vigilant against the use of hi-tech in the spread of hate.”
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The European Union exhibits a frightening degree of deference to these demands and, in turn, puts pressure on the world's leading tech companies to create facilities that allow dissident speech to be suppressed.
European officials pushed on Tuesday for American technology giants to do more to tackle online hate speech across the region, adding to the chorus of policy makers worldwide demanding greater action from the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter.
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European leaders who happily denounce China for its state control of the internet and repression of political dissent demand exactly the same thing in their own countries yet see no connection between the two. China's censorship and repression is crazy and evil, they say; but Europe's repression is good. Europe's dissident really are bad people, deserving of repression, while China's dissidents are just innocent freedom fighters.
The size of the European economy makes it a market tech companies cannot afford to ignore. So they will create these "anti-hate-speech" mechanisms as required and, once they exist, they will be used around the world, including in countries where there are not, and have never been, any significant Jewish populations.
Campaigners for change across the globe, fighting to make their countries incrementally better places, find their hopes stymied by the obsessive insistence of a small, Middle Eastern tribe that no one should be able to make critical remarks about it; and the fawning subservience shown to this Middle Eastern tribe by the elites of the western world.
UPDATE: New development today.
An initiative to fight hate crime was launched on Monday evening at the Google offices in Brussels. The project is a collaboration between the European Commission, social media giants Twitter and Facebook and Jewish NGO CEJI – A Jewish Contribution to an Inclusive Europe.
“Who could better represent the diversity of Europe than a Jewish organization born out of... Jewish culture and awareness of embracing differences, while still adhering eventually to one big understanding of mutual respect?” asked Katharina von Schnurbein, coordinator on combating antisemitism for the European Commission. She was speaking on behalf of the group’s first vice president, Frans Timmermans, who had to cancel at the last minute.
“With the unique Jewish European experience with regard to inclusion and being confronted with prejudice and hatred, CEJI is well placed to share this wide knowledge with schools, law enforcement authorities, other NGOs and also with us, the European Commission,” Von Schurbein said.
The event saw the beginning of a project called “Facing all the Facts,” funded by the rights, equality and citizenship program of the EC, and coordinated by CEJI.
... Law enforcement agencies from the UK, Italy and Hungary attended the launch, along with representatives from the EC, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Open Society Foundations and numerous civil society organizations that are stakeholders and collaborators in the initiative.
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