SOCIETY MUST REJECT THE
CONCEPT OF “HATE CRIMES”
The world is currently transfixed by videos circulating online of riots in the United Kingdom.
Can this really be happening in gracious, civilized England, home of Shakespeare, Tennyson, Jane Austen, and afternoon tea?
Where are those hearty God-save-the-King Britishers who gave “blood, toil, tears and sweat” to save their precious isle?
Well, saving their precious isle is what this is all about, actually. Britain has endured an invasion of immigrants — mostly African Muslims, many of them illegals — who are changing the very character of this cradle of learning, culture and civility (and the occasional football melee).
Working- and middle-class Brits have borne up under a growing wave of immigration-related criminality, street violence, and desecration of British values. But patience reached its end with the recent stabbing of three schoolgirls aged 6, 7 and 9.
The attacker is alleged to be a 17-year old boy who was born in Wales of Rwandan parents.
Thousands of fed-up native Brits have been out in the streets demanding justice and the tightening of entry restrictions. Predictably, thousands of immigrants and their leftist allies have rioted in response.
It’s “Rule Britannia!” versus “Allahu Akbar!”
The new Labor government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer has come down hard on the native protestors, whom they have predictably labeled “Far Right.”
No surprise there. Defenders of traditional social norms are always assumed to be acting out of chauvinism, xenophobia or (worst-of-the-worst) racism. “Third-world” people are generally assigned the moral high ground.
But ordinary police action isn’t sufficient for the equity-obsessed leaders of modern Britain.
In our technological age, it’s common for protest demonstrations to be organized online. So police are scouring the Internet, hunting down messages about where to meet for a pint before everyone turns out into the street with signs and cricket bats in hand.
Not content with gathering intelligence, the bobbies are trying to suppress all online discussion of the immigration crisis, even going so far as to arrest people engaged in commenting on, or sharing information about, the rioting. They’re particularly keen on squelching posts of videos that show violence (in particular Muslim violence).
As the Gateway Pundit reports…
“‘Met Police Commissioner Mark Rowley told reporters, ‘We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you.”
The alleged online “crimes” are understood as “whipping up the hatred” — that is, hatred against Muslims. And enforcement objectives aren’t limited to those communities over which British police have jurisdiction. When Commissioner Rowley says “further afield” he means it.
As the Daily Wire wrote of a recent police interview…
“A reporter asked Rowley about ‘high profile figures’ who were allegedly ‘whipping up the hatred’ that he was claiming was happening online.
“‘I’m even thinking of the likes of Elon Musk getting involved,’ the reporter said. ‘What are you considering when it comes to dealing with people who are whipping up this kind of behavior from behind a keyboard and maybe in a different country?’
“‘Being a keyboard warrior does not make you safe from the law,’ Rowley responded.”
Precedent for this sort of extended policing has already been set. A UK man was recently arrested for posting an image of rainbow pride flags arranged to resemble a Nazi swastika. That might seem a bit off point. But these days, LGBT folk usually find ways to attach themselves to any agitation at hand.
Of course, Britain doesn’t hold the patent on speech suppression. In France, six members of the international pro-life group Citizen Go were arrested for driving a bus around Paris bearing the message: “Stop Attacks on Christians.” This was in reference to the drag queen tableaux suggesting DaVinci’s “Last Supper” featured during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics.
Now, one can readily understand why the French authorities wouldn’t want pesky pro-lifers tossing a wet blanket on the Olympic spirit so profitable to Paris souvenir vendors and bistro owners.
But after six Christian protestors spent the night in jail, Citizen Go pointed out on X (Twitter) that…
“This is not illegal in any way, as a lawyer states: ‘It appears impossible to constitute the crime of failing to communicate a protest, because there is no protest in the presence of one unique vehicle. The prosecutor pushed the law to its limits to stop the bus and limit their free speech. Moreover, the procedure was irregular.’”
Here in the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” extra-legal speech suppression has been an ongoing concern for some time.
Back in 2019, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it might take action against individuals “using social media to spread information considered inflammatory against Muslims,” on the basis that such talk could be a violation of their civil rights.
Speaking in advance of a presentation about the initiative planned for Tullahoma, Tennessee (a 20,000-population city located between Nashville and Chattanooga), an FBI spokesman explained…
“This is an educational effort with civil rights laws as they play into freedom of religion and exercising freedom of religion. This is also to inform the public what federal laws are in effect and what the consequences are.”
At the time I noted on this blog that you didn’t have to be planning a Facebook campaign aimed at defaming Muslims to grasp the implications of that. I observed…
“The ability of government to threaten such consequences rests on the concept of hate crimes, a well established and court-affirmed category of law that came to prominence in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, and upon which layer upon layer of legal precedent has accumulated.”
And so today we have agencies of the federal government actively contracting with online providers and social network operators to monitor and censor vast portions of Internet traffic, backed up by the threat of criminal sanctions.
Perhaps it would be timely to revisit some highlights of my 2019 post, and assess where the hate crimes concept has brought us. I wrote…
“It is certainly true that hate has been the source of incalculable criminal acts and human misery through the years. Many people have died and many rights violated at the hands of hate-filled wrongdoers. One has only to review the history of sufferings endured by Black people and the frequent unwillingness of local authorities to protect them (sometimes the actual complicity of those local authorities) to understand how the concept of hate crimes came to be.
“But however understandable (indeed, justified), however well established and court-affirmed, the concept of hate crimes has at its heart a fundamentally flawed idea: that society can — indeed must — eliminate harmful attitudes by criminalizing them.
“To make a certain type of opinion criminal, in and of itself, detached from any particular act, is to ascribe to government the power to dictate the thoughts of its people. That is an idea in total opposition to America, as the nation we assume it to be, and to the Constitution (specifically the First Amendment) as the definitive statement of its foundational principles.
“It is, in fact, the very definition of tyranny.
“But aside from federal overreach, the hate crimes concept has abetted an atmosphere of belligerence in which everyone who perceives themselves on the receiving end of other people’s dislike or disapproval has been empowered to brand those attitudes hate….
“Anything can be called hate, because the definition of hate is endlessly elastic. It’s anything someone perceives as criticism or rejection or even lack of enthusiasm for whatever is important to him….
“I’m not so naive as to assume we’ve entered some kind of golden age when people no longer harbor prejudices. There will always be hate. No law can eliminate it, and there’s no ignoring it, because it can be a factor in crime. The answer is to enforce the criminal laws that are on the books — mostly state statutes — without encouraging the undue extension of federal power and without contributing to the atmosphere of belligerence that lets people charge hate where no hate may exist.
“The legal understanding of years past was that hate goes to motive. It can be a determinate of why a crime was committed, which is always considered in sentencing. But hate (which is to say, thought) is not a crime in itself.”
Neither can merely discussing a criminal act be criminal in itself, unless it contributes directly to the crime. That is to say unless it causes a wrongdoer to act, or it provides information to aid directly in the commission of the crime (i.e. giving a bank robber the combination to the safe, or warning him that the cops are coming).
Regardless of how much hate is involved, your attitude — your thoughts — are not, in themselves, crimes.
Britain is the home of the Magna Carta, that great document which began the growth of individual rights that eventually flowered throughout the English-speaking world. Here in America we have the Constitution, especially the First Amendment.
These historic guarantees of our rights have not been suspended.
We must still be free to think.
____________
Native British protesters have complained that the UK has adopted a “two-tiered” approach to policing that favors immigrants. When questioned about that charge, Minister of Justice Heidi Alexander demonstrated typical bureaucratic dissembling…
“I think it’s a completely baseless accusation,” she insisted, “and I won’t entertain it. The police in this country exercise their powers without fear or favor. And I think it does a disservice to the thousands of police men and women who go to work each day to uphold the rule of law, and who go into work to treat everyone equally. That’s the training that they’re given when they train to be police officers….”
This is a classic political dodge, an attempt to deflect criticism by painting it as an insult to all of our many hardworking public servants. The truth, of course, is that no one is laying a charge against the mass of ordinary British police officers, whom everybody acknowledges are merely following the policies laid out by their superiors.
British commentator Dan Wootton has a video of Alexander’s response. He analyzes the issue of “two-tiered policing” in the Starmer regime on an episode of his LBC Radio show, “Outspoken”…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzTdkmjA6Gs
Princeton University Law Professor Robert George calls out Tim Walz, the presumptive Democratic Party vice presidential candidate, for his views on freedom of expression — a distorted understanding that’s all too common on the Left…
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