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posted by martyb on Tuesday November 13 2018, @12:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the Room-101-dept dept.

As the days go by our hard won freedoms and liberty are slowly being eroded. In Europe a crushing blow has been made to freedom of speech with a European Court of Human Rights upholding a conviction for saying that the person known as Muhammad ten centuries ago was technically a paedophile based on information in historical texts. The statement was made in reference to Muhammad's marriage to a six year old child name called Aisha. The court found that “Presenting objects of religious worship in a provocative way capable of hurting the feelings of the followers of that religion could be conceived as a malicious violation of the spirit of tolerance, which was one of the bases of a democratic society.”. In giving its ruling that "Muhammad was not a worthy subject of worship" the court has additionally demonstrated a complete misunderstanding as to the religion involved which worships "Allah", a word meaning 'God', not 'Muhammad' who claimed to be a prophet of this god. Freedom of speech is dying.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 13 2018, @11:00PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 13 2018, @11:00PM (#761492)

    Nobody would feel a need to deny objective truth.

    So, in True Scotsman fashion, the following items [wikipedia.org] must not be objective truths then:

    - the planned systematic genocide of 1.5 million Armenians during World War I
    - the Nazi authorities' usage of extermination camps and gas chambers to mass murder Jews
    - the killing of 8,000 women and children in Srebrenica
    - the Tiananmen Square protests
    - the genocide of the Tutsi's in Rwanda

    From that link, quoting George Orwell on denialism:

    The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. [..] In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind.

    The reason for outlawing denialism has nothing to do with curbing free speech: the goal is to force people to deal with ugly truths, and not letting them put their fingers in their ears and scream "la la la can't hear you".

    Moreover, as you can note from the list above, most of the denialism is perpretrated by governments themselves. Are you now going to argue that those governments (Turkey, China, Serbia) are pinnacles of free speech for supporting denialism?

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Sulla on Wednesday November 14 2018, @02:40AM

    by Sulla (5173) on Wednesday November 14 2018, @02:40AM (#761564) Journal

    You brought up some good examples of what was said above. Turkey's continued denial of the genocide they committed and repression of speech saying that it happened makes people question the official story and want to investigate the truth behind it. People don't like being told what they should and shouldn't think, so some people will question whether or not the holocaust happened simply because the government says you cannot talk about it, in the same way people question what Turkey and China did just because they repress speech saying that bad things happened.

    I am unaware of anyone, no matter how racist, who denies that slavery existed as an institution in America's past. If the US was to ban saying slavery never happened or ban saying it did happen it would have the opposite result. Through propaganda you can enforce an idea but by banning you can be sure that people will investigate it.

    How many of us read the anarchists cookbook, brave new world, of mice and men, etc just because they were either banned for a time or there were attempts to do so?

    --
    Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
  • (Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Wednesday November 14 2018, @08:21AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 14 2018, @08:21AM (#761654) Journal

    The reason for outlawing denialism has nothing to do with curbing free speech: the goal is to force people to deal with ugly truths, and not letting them put their fingers in their ears and scream "la la la can't hear you".

    Sorry, that goal should be illegal in a democratic society. It is in the US, which gets it right via the First Amendment. "Ugly truths" are extremely subjective. We already have an example in this very story where such a truth has been suppressed instead.