With little fanfare, the EU adopted new legislation this week that makes “certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia” criminal offenses — and allows individual EU nations to prosecute the citizens of other nations for those offenses. And no, it’s not European anti-Americanism that’s being targeted by the xenophobia provisions. Advocates of free speech in Europe are quite clear that what the new law will criminalize is analytical, factual, or hortatory discussion of Islam and Sharia by non-Muslims.
Their conclusion is bolstered by recent events. Geert Wilders of the Netherlands is only the most famous of several Europeans who have faced criminal charges for speaking critically of Islam. Another is Austrian journalist and activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, whose trial for “hate speech” opened in Vienna on November 23. Take a moment to read publicized transcripts of the proceedings; it is worth understanding that Sabaditsch-Wolff is being tried, literally, for quoting both the Koran and an authoritative work on Sunni law, and expressing criticism of the social institutions condoned in those religious texts.
She is not a cartoonist lampooning Muhammad, something most Westerners would recognize as less than respectful even if they didn’t all agree that it was “offensive.” Sabaditsch-Wolff quotes the texts of Islam seriously and accurately; she objects to their implications, but she doesn’t poke fun at them. However, as Ned May observes at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace:
It has been well-established in a number of jurisdictions — including several in the West — that a non-Muslim who quotes the Koran accurately can still be convicted of “hate speech”. This aligns with the definition of Islamic slander (also to be found in [Sunni law document] Reliance) which considers anything that insults Islam, whether true or false, to be defamation.
The author at the pseudonymous Daphne Anson blog (top link) wonders what will happen if Turkey is finally admitted to the EU, given the newly approved framework allowing cross-border prosecutions in Europe. But I am inclined to wonder how the other nations will react to being in the same union with Austria and the Netherlands, which have already shown a willingness to prosecute free speech as a hate crime. The charges against Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff are centered on questions like these, brought up one after another on the first day of her trial:
10:53: The judge inquires if we are talking about Islamic extremism, or of Islam as such?
Elisabeth explains that we are talking Islam as such, as defined by its scripture, and quotes Erdogan that there is no moderate Islam anyway.
The intellectual basis for her certainty (or the judge’s, for that matter) is not the issue here, nor should it be. The issue is that she is being prosecuted for forensic, critical investigation of Islam: for advancing opinions we hear argued nightly on American TV talk shows. The most basic of intellectual freedoms — attributing facts to sources and expressing opinions about them — is in the process of being criminalized in parts of the EU. Free-speech advocates fear that the new Framework Decision on Racism and Xenophobia will spread this trend toward criminalization across borders throughout Europe. They are justified in their concern.
Not sure about Question #1, but the answer to #2 & #3 is obvious: Of course not.
Europeans getting tough? Ha Ha Ha!
And what, Americans and Europeans are the only ones with gasoline to sell? It’s a lot harder to deny Iran gasoline than merely getting European producers to not sell it to them. Even making it cost them more isn’t going to bring down the government of Iran.
A lot of comments have suggested that Iran’s economic woes will lead to a national political implosion, and posit that this is what happened in the Soviet Union. But that’s NOT what happened in the Soviet Union. The Soviets were actually better off, economically, in the 1980s than they had been in any decade prior to it under communist rule. There was no great uprising of the people against a bad economy in the USSR.
Rather, the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe was weakened by a Soviet military posture that was deteriorating relative to that of America and the West; and when the Poles, and Czechs, and East Germans began to throw off Moscow’s fraternal socialist yoke, there was nothing the Soviet Union could do about it. The military suppression that had been possible in 1948, 1956, 1968 and so forth was no longer feasible — in part because the sclerotic government in Russia proper had lost its stomach for the fight military suppression implied. That in turn was due largely to the fact that the Russians — producers of the world’s greatest chess players — whose strategic thinking mirrors that of chess with its emphasis on “correlation of forces,” perceived themselves to be checkmated. In 1979, Soviet military planners thought they could win a war against NATO in Central Europe. Ten years later, they no longer did — AND they perceived a resurgent America, and an economically improving Europe, as more likely, at that point, to actively oppose overt military suppression of independence movements in Eastern Europe.
There was no popular, mass activity in Russia until AFTER Eastern Europe rebelled, the Warsaw Pact had broken up, Germany was on the reunification path, and Soviet troops had been pulled out of Afghanistan. The Soviet empire disintegrated first, and there was never a regicidal revolution against its leaders in the manner now hoped for in Iran’s case. Nor was the Soviet economy a precipitating issue, in terms of worsening and driving the people into the streets.
Maybe someday the Iranian people will revolt against the ruling clerics. But their history isn’t encouraging in that regard, and the former Soviet Union is not an example of a nation being pushed into that situation by sanctions from without.