Burn the witch!

The comedian –a term you might choose to apply loosely- Mark Meechan, a.k.a. Count Dankula, has been fined £800 after appearing at Airdrie Sheriff Court charged with aggravating religious prejudice. His crime was to post a video on youtube, during which he trained his girlfriend’s dog to respond to the words “gas the Jews” and to perform the Sieg Heil with one of its paws.The video is not particularly funny and it would be easy to argue that it is in bad taste. That, however, is an observation which should only merit a response of ‘so what’?

At the start of the clip, Dankula announces that his aim is to transform the dog from being what his girlfriend regards as the cutest thing in the world –a little pug- into the least cute thing imaginable: a Nazi. But Sheriff Derek O'Carroll found him guilty under the Communications Act of a charge that he posted material which was grossly offensive because it was "anti-Semitic and racist in nature" and was “aggravated by religious prejudice”.

The clip wasn’t sent to anyone in particular; it was uploaded to a server and was only viewable upon demand. And, in spite of Dankula’s explanation of the joke, the context of his words were deemed to be irrelevant. If the context provided by the comedian was irrelevant, then it must surely follow that Sheriff O'Carroll’s use of the phrase “gas the Jews” in court was also anti-Semitic. The only way those words couldn’t be interpreted as anti-Semitic would be if one acknowledged the importance of context. If context is irrelevant, shouldn’t Sheriff O’Carroll be charged too? 

One of the worst things about this case (and there are many bad things) is that other comedians have been willing to throw a fellow traveller under the bus, indifferent or oblivious to their wretched acceptance of a milieu in which the context of words can be deemed irrelevant by the authorities. Just how complacent, stupid or tribal do you have to be in order not to grasp that the creation of such conditions might one day result in your own imprisonment?

Some have observed that Dankula didn’t get sent to jail and that his fine of £800 will probably be paid by donations from his supporters. Indeed, at the time of writing, his crowd funding page has raised around £114,000 to cover the predicted legal costs of his appeal against the sentence. Such observations are facile and ignore the two main points.

1.      This shouldn't have gone to court. The fact that it did and the way that it did, should set our alarm bells ringing.

2.      The fine is irrelevant, because the process itself is the punishment. The precedent has been set; if you wish to avoid the possibility of a two-year legal battle with its attendant fees, stress and adverse publicity, you had best rein in your online comments, opinions and jokes.

Last week, a young woman from Liverpool was convicted of hate speech for posting the lyrics from Snap Dogg’s track I’m trippin’. One wonders how this can be possible when neither the author nor the publisher of those lyrics have been prosecuted. Nor has any action ever been undertaken against the many folk who sing along with the lyrics at Mr Dogg’s concerts. The person who made the complaint was PC Dominique Walker, who works for the Hate Crime Unit of Merseyside Police. Let’s lay that one out for inspection: A person who gets paid to spot ‘hate crime’ makes a complaint about a ‘hate crime’ incident in which a young woman has quoted lyrics from a song that has been broadcast, promoted  and performed on many occasions.

Perhaps we should acknowledge the possibility (and by that, I mean the probability) that someone who gets paid to spot ‘hate crime’ ought not to be able to bring a ‘hate crime’ complaint against a member of the public.

Perhaps we should acknowledge the possibility (and by that I mean the probability) that it is in PC Dominique Walker’s professional interests to find and prosecute examples of ‘hate crime’ in the same way that it was in the best interests of witch-finders in the 17^th century to find and prosecute witches.       

Anyone who can look upon these prosecutions with equanimity should consider the possibility (and by that I mean the probability) that one day it might not be ‘reasonable’ folk who happen to share their views who will get to exercise this kind of capricious authority. Perhaps they should try and envisage a world in which the most reprehensible people imaginable have been granted the power to behave as the police and the courts have behaved in these cases.

In a mature democracy, people who make frivolous accusations of ‘hate crime’ would be ignored and considered ridiculous. Personally, I’d favour a more remedial treatment, perhaps involving them being marched through town, put in the stocks and pelted with rotten fruit.

But we can’t claim to live in a mature democracy when the actions of the authorities are edging us ever closer to an age in which that ‘stocks and rotten fruit’ option might begin to look like a quaint remnant of a golden age of progressive enlightenment.

The age of self-censorship

I’ve nothing against the various displays of 'solidarity' with the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. I’m sure the folk at the demonstrations mean well, but all of that #jesuischarlie and candlelit vigil stuff won’t amount to a hill of beans. If the demonstrators think they are protecting freedom of speech, I’m afraid they’re a bit late. We gave that up when we embarked upon the age of self-censorship. 

Historians might quibble about the date, but I reckon the age of self-censorship started in 1989 when the fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie. Some of us jumped up and down at the time and demanded a vigorous response from the authorities. Instead of lying low and apologising for Rushdie’s ‘offence’, I thought we should have printed hundreds of thousands of copies of ‘Midnight’s Children’ and distributed them free in schools, libraries and health centre waiting rooms. I thought we should have filled huge skips full of these books and left them in every town centre, just to make a point. We should have done something like that because the point was worth making. The bedrock of our civilisation is intellectual freedom and we should have been confident enough to send a clear message to the medievalists: Feel free to practice whichever religion you want, believe whichever ancient fairy stories you like, but do it in peace. Do not seek to impose your views and your rules on people who do not follow your beliefs. It’s really as simple as that. If we’d made our position clear at the time, we might have saved ourselves a whole heap of trouble. Instead, we’ve seen our political and cultural leaders retreat from their responsibilities to protect the ideals they’re supposed to hold dear. 

I don’t blame the fundamentalist nut-jobs for this state of affairs, because fundamentalist nut-jobs have being doing fundamentalist nut-job things for centuries and will no doubt continue to do those things. There will, alas, always be a tiny but violent minority of fundamentalist nut-jobs and one of the things about that tiny but violent minority is that they tend to notice when people cave in to pressure. And we have, since 1989, been doing a lot of caving in. In the years since the Rushdie fatwa, who knows how many authors and journalists have excised characters, themes or lines from their stories and articles because they feared reprisals from fundamentalists? 

Of course, it’s impossible to quantify things that only might have existed, but it is possible to judge things that have happened. Only a couple of years ago, the Obama administration asked YouTube to remove a video that had (allegedly) set off attacks on the American embassy in Benghazi. Then, to compound this craven stupidity, the de facto leader of the western world made a speech to the UN in which he said that “the future must not belong to the slanderers of the Prophet Mohammed”. Really? Imagine, if you will, how folk would have reacted had George W. Bush said “the future must not belong to the slanderers of the Lord Jesus Christ.”   

As long as we keep re-drawing our line in the sand, we’re heading for our date with destiny: the point at which there will be no-one willing or able to stand up to the fundamentalist nut-jobs. And, as we re-draw that line, we become acclimatised to the idea that a British author might have to go into hiding because of the ‘actions’ of one of his fictional characters; we become acclimatised to the idea that a Dutch film maker can be murdered because he makes a film critical of a certain religion; we become acclimatised to the idea that the headquarters of a Danish magazine can be fire bombed because it prints some cartoons; we become acclimatised to the idea of not publishing ‘offensive’ cartoons; we become acclimatised to the idea that police officers, civil servants and journalists will suppress factual accounts of grooming and gang rape for fear of ‘causing offence’.  

When the ‘blasphemous’ publication of cartoons led to the attack on that obscure little Danish magazine in 2005, not a single British newspaper or magazine acted in solidarity with their fellow journalists. Not one editor had the guts to publish the cartoons and say: ’This is what all the fuss is about’. Of course, they all composed editorials declaring their abhorrence of intimidation and violence and their unshakeable belief in our rights to freedom of speech, but -for the sake of not offending sensibilities- they decided against publishing the cartoons. Not one of them would do it.

  

And here we are again, pretending to show solidarity in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo outrage. Except, when The Telegraph published an article on the massacre, the cartoon image of Mohammed was pixelated in order to obscure the view and avoid causing offence. The BBC website invited historian Tom Holland to write an article on Islam, but refused his request to publish the cartoon. As David Dimbleby revealed the other night on ‘Question Time’, it is official BBC policy that: “the prophet Mohammed should not be represented in any shape or form”.  
Amol Ragan, editor of The Independent stated that his “every instinct” was to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, but he decided that it was “too much of a risk”. He admitted that he was “very uncomfortable” with this. One is tempted to point out that so he should be, because he’s supposed to be a journalist. 

As the blogger David Budge put it:
'I get why journalists are scared of offending Muslims. I just don’t get why they’re journalists'.

So, good people, go to your demonstrations and your candlelit vigils. Tweet your hashtags and put your Je suis Charlie badges up on facebook. Feel free to live in the hope that it will make some difference. But if any of those murderous thugs are watching, the stupid folk who think it’s their duty to slaughter the infidel, how much notice do you think they’re going to take?    

What we need to do is to re-draw our line in the sand, but let’s move it a little bit in the other direction. Let’s do something that makes a positive, celebratory statement about how much we value freedom of speech. Something that will tell the medievalists that, instead of picking on little magazines, they will have to take on every publication in the land. Let’s do something that really does say: "We are all Charlie Hendo."

   

I make this appeal to all newspaper and magazine editors: Please, print an image of the prophet Mohammed. Do it on your front page and explain why you are doing it. Do it to make a point about freedom of speech. Do it to express the right of those with no religious affiliations not to be bound by the rules that believers are bound by. Do it, not to offend anyone’s sensibilities, but to celebrate a sensibility that has evolved over several hundred years of conflict and socio-political development throughout a continent. It’s the sensibility that embraces the most important diversity of all: intellectual diversity. Do it, if you think that value is worth sticking up for.   

But if you can’t do that, please stop insulting our intelligence by pretending that your actions are informed by ‘respect’. At least be brave enough to call your reluctance to publish exactly what it is: fear. There’s nothing wrong with being frightened; being frightened in the face of intimidation is part of our survival mechanism. But if we don’t republish those cartoons, all we’re doing is letting those poor French journalists take the bullets on our behalf. So if you can’t at least honour their bravery by republishing the work that got them killed, please don’t write about showing 'solidarity' with the massacre victims. Please don’t come out with any more fatuous pieties about how we’re all going to live together in perfect harmony. Please don’t patronise us with more rubbish about your staunch support for freedom of speech, because all you’re doing is redrawing that line in the sand, that line we’ve been moving since 1989.   

So please … print a cartoon. 

Or just shut up and admit that we are now in the age of self-censorship and that the bad men with the guns have already won.

The trouble with trolling

It has been interesting to hear some of the comments made over the last couple of days in relation to the case of Sean Duffy. In case you missed it, Duffy from Reading, Berkshire, was jailed for 18 weeks for sending abusive messages on social networking sites. His victims were the bereaved relatives of people he didn't know and had no connection with, including the family of the Worcester teenager Natasha MacBryde, who killed herself after being bullied. He pleaded guilty to two counts of sending communications (via Facebook and YouTube) of an indecent or offensive nature.

Duffy appears to be a pathetic individual whose horrible and stupid actions have caused a great deal of grief. Some have suggested that the fact that he suffers from Asperger's Syndrome is a mitigating factor. This syndrome may well cause him to lack empathy, but there is, surely, quite a leap from merely ‘lacking empathy’ to posting the kind of vile messages he inflicted upon the grieving families.

We can argue about whether or not his condition may have been a mitigating factor, just as we can argue about whether or not a jail sentence was the appropriate punishment for his actions, but what is more concerning is the possible fall-out from this case. Almost all of the news reports have described it as a ‘trolling’ offence. Trolling, in internet slang, is the practice of posting inflammatory messages in an online community with the intent of provoking heated responses. Trolling is not big and it’s not clever, but it’s also not what Duffy was doing; his malicious actions deserve a far more pejorative label. The fact that he has been labelled as a ‘troll’ should worry us all.

If the notion that trolling can be criminalised is allowed to fester and grow, there will be grave implications for freedom of speech. Should we start to concede that trolling might be a criminal offence, we might as well declare open season for all of the single-issue zealots and grievance-monkeys who would jump at the opportunity to prosecute ‘trolls’ who expressed ‘unacceptable’ views on any number of topics – abortion, climate change, immigration, creationism, whatever.

The desire to close down debate is, in essence, a totalitarian impulse (both Stalin and Mao-Tse-tung criminalised and pathologised local dissent). If we open that door to the criminalisation of 'trolling', we face a bleak future.

It’s a fact of life that some people are morons and have stupid, hateful, ill-informed opinions. Internet traffic merely reflects that fact. That’s why the trolls should be left alone.