Hate speech legislation, or introduce harsh penalties for those who try to obstruct free speech?

In the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt on Lars Hedegaard in Copenhagen earlier this month, where an Arabic/Pakistani looking male disguised as a postman tried to kill the well-known Danish Islam critic, newspaper editors and politicians, at least those that bothered to report of the incident, talked in poetic terms about how precious freedom of speech is and that we simply can’t allow anyone to do away with this hard-fought right. It’s nice to know that individuals in powerful positions are willing to stand up for free speech following such an appalling incident, and especially considering that they normally vilify and smear people like Lars Hedegaard who use this freedom to express views that they don’t like under more normal circumstances.

Another intrepid person who uses his freedom of speech to voice opinions that the MSM don’t like is the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders.  And just like Lars Hedegaard he too is on the hit list of fanatic assassins who would love nothing more than to silence him on a permanent basis. As a result of these very real threats Geert Wilders has been given around the clock protection by the Dutch police.

Last week he got to experience close up how the Australian media treat individuals that they don’t like. Their methods are fairly similar to that of their European colleagues. Wilders also got to see how Australian leftwing demonstrators behave, and it should come as no surprise that they are doing their very best to emulate the behaviour of their leftwing brethrens in Europe. At a conference in Melbourne organized by the Q society Wilders got to see firsthand how fanatical leftwing activists critical of his views actively tried to disrupt the event and resort to violence to prevent people from entering the premises and listening to his message.

Such behaviour has unfortunately been allowed to take root in Europe without any real attempts by the authorities to stop it. Violent individuals from organized movements on the extreme left have been permitted almost unopposed to behave violently in order to silence those they disagree with and to deter others from engaging in similar activities.  The demonstrators in Melbourne accused Mr. Wilders of hate speech and of causing animosity and division between the different ethnic groups, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Wilders have repeatedly gone on record stating that those immigrants that embrace western values are more than welcome to reside in the Netherlands, those however who are incapable of doing so have to go.

The demonstrators in Melbourne are of course entitles to believe and say what they like, but what makes them think that they have the right to prevent Mr. Wilders from speaking and violently attack those who have come to listen to him?

What is worse, so-called hate speech, or individuals who are willing to use violence to prevent others from speaking? Most western Governments, with the exception of the US Government, unfortunately seem to believe that hates speech is far worse than real violence

If western authorities were serious about defending freedom of speech they would never have introduced draconic hate speech laws that have completely stifled free speech in Europe and which have given the authorities the power to arrest anyone who doesn’t approve of the official line on such contentious issues as Islam and multiculturalism. Furthermore if the authorities’ had been genuine about defending freedom of speech they would have made sure that this right was properly protected in the eyes of the law. That is not the case today.

Any action whose sole purpose is to deter someone from using this right should be dealt with in the most serious manner. Because when we get down to the nitty gritty, is there really that much of a difference between a dictator preventing his fellow countrymen from expressing themselves freely by the use of terror and intimidation and groups of fanatical citizens that are wiling to attack anyone who dare to express opinions that they find unpalatable, and that are able to do so with impunity? The end result is the same; they’re silencing others by the use of fear.

Why is it that some individuals are given the green light to violently attack others on a regular basis simply because the members of the targeted group have the temerity to express their opinions? And why are they allowed to get away with only a light slap on the wrist and minimal fines in those cases that they are actually arrested? Wouldn’t it make more sense to charge them with obstructing others from exercising basic fundamental human rights?  

How is it that the Dutch authorities can justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on prosecuting someone like Geert Wilders for alleged hate speech violations, which they actually did a few years ago, but practically ignore those on the extreme left that are trying to physically assault Wilders and people like him for simply voicing their opinions? Surely it would make more sense to haul the violent leftwing fanatics into the courts, make them endure lengthy trials, pay for their own defence and sentence them to lengthy prison sentences or alternatively give them hefty fines?

How about making them go through similar protracted court processes like the one that Geert Wilders had to endure? There can be no doubts that such an initiative would send out a clear and unequivocal message to others who might be tempted to engage in similar activities. It would also send out a very clear signal that preventing someone from using their freedom of speech through the use of violence and intimidation is simply unacceptable in today’s Europe.

Unfortunately it’s the other way around. Those who express opinions which haven’t been given the official stamp of approval get to feel the full weight of the law. It doesn’t matter that they have refrained from violent activities, their opinions are considered intellectual violence and thus they have to be punished. They get ridiculed and smeared by the leftwing media; they run the risk of getting socially ostracized and in some case even lose their livelihoods for speaking their minds. We’ve come to a stage in history where words are considered to be far more dangerous than a blow from a baseball bat.

In democratic society we only prosecute those who prevent others from using their democratic rights. Why not prosecute violent activists as rigorously as those that are guilty of ‘violating’ the draconic hate speech laws that are in place in most western nations today?  Apparently it’s more important to look after those that are feeling offended than it is to assist those that are being violently attacked by the offended.

Special laws apply to organized criminal gangs, such as Hells Angels and Bandidos, that are known to engage in mafia like activities. Perhaps similar tactics should be used against organized groups that are known to cause violence at public rallies and political event, such as the one that Geert Wilders attended recently in Melbourne? Their tactics are identical; it’s all about intimidation and deterring others from engaging in similar activities. Perhaps the authorities should start to issue restraining orders to know members of such organizations and arrest anyone who are in breach of these? It’s not a human right to assault other people.

Somehow I don’t believe that it wouldn’t go down too well if members from Hells Angels all of a sudden decided to target journalists for looking to closely into the dealings of their club.

Maybe the politicians and newspaper editors that were so vociferous in their defence of freedom of speech but yet so lukewarm of the activities and opinions of Lars Hedegaard should take a long hard look at themselves in the mirror and start sorting out their priorities and re-evaluate their principles? How about being the driving factor in getting such new legislation implemented?

Or perhaps they are comfortable with the way things are as long as they themselves aren’t the target of violence and intimidation?

Lars Gule: An older version of Anders Behring Breivik?

Also published at Gates of Vienna

Anyone with even a slight knowledge of the political climate today in Norway knows that it is literally career suicide for an academic to oppose the established truth in the tiny little fishbowl that is Norwegian academia. The bowl is full of lidless and bloodthirsty piranhas that are tirelessly working to ensure that everything is running according to the script. Those who diverge from the pre-approved plot are dealt with swiftly and in a very brutal manner. They are virtually shredded in public.

The piranhas set a standard that everyone in the bowl has to submit to. Their brutal behaviour and their willingness to attack sends out a very clear warning to those who might harbour any dissident thoughts. In many ways it’s an academic miniature version of the former Soviet Union, a regime which these self appointed piranhas used to glorify in the 1970s and ’80s, when many of them were active members of various communist organizations and called for a bloody revolution.

Despite the brutal and oppressive disciplinary regime that they have managed to create in Norway, every now and again someone in the fishbowl dares to stick their neck forward and accurately diagnose the obvious democratic deficit and the blatant political bias which exists inside the bowl. The latest dissident is Alexandra Irene Larsen, who wrote an op-ed in VG where she confronted the left-wing agenda found in the Norwegian academy, and in particular in human sciences, which she accurately described as being completely hijacked by leftwing ideologues. To the piranhas this was an inexcusable act of treason which they couldn’t let pass unpunished. They knew that they had to act, and do so in such a manner that it would quell any similar future attempts. They had to set an example, and it had to be a powerful one.

It is quite a spectacle to behold so-called researchers and scientists — who by nature should be very open-minded and actively encourage independent thinking — act like little Stalins whenever someone goes against the consensus that they have imposed upon the rest of the flock. Irrefutable facts and logic are of course impossible to dismiss by rational arguments, so the piranhas have adopted tactics that conveniently sidestep these inconvenient obstacles. Their method is to aim below the belt and portray the messenger of traditional scientific principles as evil, despicable, corrupt and dishonest. They use guilt by association, ridicule, intimidation, sabotage and any other vile technique in their repertoire to smear their victims.

In 2011 they were provided a god-sent present in the form of the Utøya massacre, which inserted a gigantic trump card up their sleeve. A trump card that was so potent that it could beat anything anyone could throw at them, hands down. To link someone with Anders Behring Breivik, especially in Norway, is the equivalent of publicly accusing someone of being a paedophile. The mud sticks like glue and will never quite go away, no matter how unsubstantiated and unfair the accusations are.

Lars Gule is one of these pompous self-appointed piranhas who will use any tactic to publicly crucify those who cross his ideological path. On Thursday he struck once again when in a very aggressive and mendacious manner he exacted his revenge against Alexandra Irene Larsen for having the temerity to shine a critical light on the academic milieu for which he is one of the prominent ideological suppliers. He did this before an audience which consisted mostly of ideologically indoctrinated students and other leftwing academics. Without an ounce of shame he publicly accused Mrs. Larsen of being ignorant, of not having read the proper books, of being intellectually dishonest, and last but not least of having views that are shared by the readership of the Islam-critical blog Gates of Vienna, which according to Gule was Anders Behring Breivik’s favourite website.

The basis of Gule’s extraordinary ‘logical’ deduction was that the op-ed in which Mrs. Larsen criticised the academic climate in Norway had been translated into English and then published at Gates of Vienna. This astonishing nugget of intellectual wisdom comes from a person whose title designates him an associate professor.

The fact that Ms. Larsen had nothing to do with the translation, that she had not given her consent to such an undertaking and was more than likely unaware of the fact that it even existed meant nothing to Lars Gule. The mere fact that the op-ed appeared at Gates of Vienna was more than enough for him, and he accused and condemned her based on something that he himself knew very well that she had no part in. He employed the exact methods he accused Mrs. Larsen of employing, and he did it in such a way that no member of the audience was left in any doubt that they would receive the same treatment should they dare to oppose him or any of his fellow self-appointed salivating watchdogs.

I see Lars Gule as a comic figure, somewhat like the village idiot of earlier times who would shout vile epithets and insults while frothing at the mouth in the town square to the amusement of the spectators that had gathered to behold the behaviour of one who was obviously less mentally gifted than themselves. And it would be fine if the media and academia treated him as the clown he is, but they don’t. The former wannabe terrorist who underwent training at a DFLP terrorist camp in 1977 — the equivalent of a modern day Al Qaeda camp — and who was sentenced to prison for having been caught with explosives which he had planned to use to carry out a terrorist attack inside Israel, gets to set the tone of what is acceptable and what isn’t acceptable in Norway today.

It’s also completely preposterous that a person such as Gule is allowed to publicly condemn others and link them to ABB when he himself is one of the few living Norwegians who bears a strong ideological resemblance to Breivik. There are no more than a handful of ethnic Norwegian citizens who have been convicted of terrorist acts or planning to commit such acts. Lars Gule and Anders Behring Breivik are two of them.

Lars Gule likes to think that he has confronted his past and atoned for his sins, which he attributes to youthfulness and the volatile political situation in the Middle East at the time. But the fact of the matter is that his pitiful and pathetic explanations are just as believable as UFO sightings and green Martians walking around the desert in Nevada. It’s a complete mystery why no one has systematically challenged him in public on his murky and sinister past.

Gule maintains that he intended to place an explosive device outside a non-populated structure in Israel when he was caught with 750 grams of plastic explosives hidden in his backpack at the airport in Beirut in 1977. He has reassured the Norwegian public on numerous occasions that under no circumstances had he intended to target civilians with his powerful bomb, and the gullible Norwegian authorities and the pro-Palestinian Norwegian MSM have embraced this ‘confession’ and rolled out the red carpet so that he could rejoin the flock. No critical voices among the elites have contested this highly dubious version of events, and those individuals who hint that Gule’s account might not necessarily be accurate are quickly reprimanded for being rude and insulting.

Anyone with a fully working brain understands that a criminal when caught by the police will say anything to lessen the significance of his crime and do anything to try to reduce the time he has to spend in prison. The criminal will vehemently maintain that he didn’t do it, and if that tactic doesn’t work he will swear that he didn’t intend to hurt anyone, that it was an accident, that someone else committed the violent act, that he tried to help the victim and so on and so forth. There is a popular saying that prisons are full of innocent people. I venture that Gule is full of baloney.

Let’s look at it from a slightly different perspective. What if Breivik had been caught before he was able to carry out his hideous deeds in Oslo and Utøya in 2011? What if Anders Behring Breivik had maintained in police interviews that he had only intended to blow up an unpopulated structure far away from downtown Oslo and that he under no circumstances had intended to actively target innocent civilians? Would the authorities and the MSM have believed him? Would they have reprimanded those individuals who found this confession implausible and who maintained that it was more credible that ABB had intended to kill civilians?

How unlikely is it that Lars Gule employed the same tactic upon capture in Lebanon, and that he indeed had meant to kill innocent Israeli civilians? The Palestinian terrorist group he joined and supported in 1977 had three years earlier carried out a very bloody and cowardly terror attack inside Israel that resulted in significant loss of life. The infamous Ma’alot massacre of 1974, when DFLP attacked an Israeli elementary school and killed 27 people, mostly children between the ages of 14 and 16, would surely have been familiar to Gule at the time. And these were the people with whom Lars Gule ideologically identified and was so enthused about when he was caught at the airport in Beirut with 750 grams of plastic explosives hidden in his backpack. For all we know Gule could even have intended to blow up the plane that he was about to board.

It is also very plausible that he had a cover story that he fed to his Lebanese interrogators during the police interviews. It’s not uncommon for terrorists to concoct elaborate cover stories that they rely upon when they are arrested. Why should it be any different with Lars Gule?

To me Lars Gule is a despicable person who should be shunned and ostracized, just as Anders Behring Breivik would have been had he not been incarcerated. The only difference between Gule and ABB is that Gule was caught and ABB succeeded. Breivik had also compiled an incriminating manifesto which irrevocably tied him to his actions, and showed that he had intended all along to let himself be apprehended in order to spread his twisted ideology to the rest of the world. Gule was a little bit brighter than that, and didn’t incriminate himself with such nonsense. It’s also doubtful that he would have hung around for the police to come and arrest him should he have succeeded in carrying out his terrorist attack.

Of course it is highly unlikely that Gule will ever be held accountable for his actions. After all, he lives in a country whose leaders protect those on the left who carry out militant acts and commit high treason, as is the case with those politicians who actively collaborated with the KGB and Stasi. The Norwegian authorities have refused to release the names of these Norwegian traitors. But people should at least be made aware of one particular creep who is allowed to enjoy a perfectly normal career and live a perfectly normal live in a country where the rational people are deemed racists and bigots, and would-be terrorists and traitors are treated with the utmost respect.

(Alexandra Irene Larsen's translated op-ed which was published at Gates of Vienna.)

 

The Gypsy case

Also published at Gates of Vienna

 

This clip is important for several reasons.

 

It’s important because of the highly ideological and uncritical way basic information of the case is presented; it’s obvious from the beginning that the narrator has a political agenda.

It’s also important because vital information from the ruling has deliberately been omitted. According to the judgment of the Bergen City Court, Mirela Mustaza, the woman who is being portrayed as a victim of institutionalized Norwegian racism in the clip, allowed and facilitated the rape of her 11-year-old daughter back in 2008 when her daughter was forcibly married to another gypsy. The narrator ‘failed’ to mention this very important piece of information, and I’m sure a lot of viewers wonder why this fact was left out.

According to the court ruling, Mustaza’s daughter was raped by her new ‘husband’ on the wedding night while being held down by several grown men. She now lives at an undisclosed location in Sweden and was very upset about the dishonest way facts were presented in the story.

NRK has stated that the reason why they left out the information about the rape was due to the fact that it happened back in 2008, and that it would therefore ‘complicate things!’

Another piece of information that was conveniently left out was the fact that several of the convicted adults indecently assault the children in their care while they were touring Norway and Sweden in 2010. The narrator also ‘forgot’ to mention that some of the children were forcibly married, or rather sold by their families to members of the group for approximately 10,000 and 15,000 euros, hence the trafficking aspect of the conviction.

And last but not least, the narrator failed to mention that the convicted adults and the children in their care were involved in theft and scams that pocketed for the group several hundred thousand NoK, which was then wired back to Romania. This refutes the claim made by the narrator that the members of the group are poor and vulnerable.

Another important aspect of this case is that the Norwegian media didn’t bother to react, nor did they attempt to refute the information presented in the story. This is grotesque, considering that the majority of the big newspapers in Norway covered the so-called ‘gypsy case’ when it was before the court in Bergen in 2012. In other words, the MSM was aware of the basic facts of the case, but deliberately chose not to raise the matter.

This could of course arise from the fact that the quality of journalism in Norway leaves a lot to be desired, or that the media in Norway are mostly left-wing and choose to downplay incidents that go against their political beliefs, or a combination of both. This particular case only received MSM attention when Document.no picked up on it and started making some noise. It took almost two weeks before the MSM in Norway paid any attention to it.

The main reason for this deafening silence is a concerted effort on the part of certain strata of the political establishment to counter the massive public outcry to the Gypsy invasion of Norway, an invasion which has seen petty crime skyrocket all over the country. In some of the more sickening cases, Romanian and Bulgarian gypsies have violently assaulted very old people and stolen their valuables.

Those brave people who have voiced their opinions despite the official intimidation campaign have quickly found themselves at the receiving end of the very effective Norwegian smear machinery, and have been branded ‘racists’ by the MSM. I suppose it is ‘understandable’ to a certain extent that the MSM wanted to downplay this case, as it paints a very different picture than the glossy fairytale story about ‘poor and honest oppressed people’ who are simply trying to make a better life for themselves in Norway the ‘narrative’ that they, the MSM, have been force-feeding us for such a long time.

NRK, the state broadcaster which aired the clip, is financed through a compulsory yearly fee which has to be paid by anyone who owns a TV set in Norway. More and more people have finally begun to realize that it’s morally wrong to demand that ordinary Norwegians finance a media outlet that is so blatantly slanted politically. And this is by no means an isolated incident. In the 1980s and ‘90s news clips like this were commonplace, but back then NRK and the leftwing Norwegian MSM enjoyed a literal media monopoly where critical voices were persona non grata.

Thankfully, it seems that conservative independent media outlets in Norway have finally managed to gain enough strength to make a difference. Let’s hope that NRK and the MSM start paying some attention and see the value of unbiased and honest reporting.

For those who read Norwegian, here’s a copy of the Court’s indictment of the defendants as presented during their arraignment.