Hate speech is speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as race, religion, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability, or gender. The law of some countries describes hate speech as speech, gesture or conduct, writing, or display that incites violence or prejudicial action against a protected group or individual on the basis of their membership of the group, or because it disparages or intimidates a protected group, or individual on the basis of their membership of the group. The law may identify a protected group by certain characteristics. In some countries, hate speech is not a legal term and in some it is constitutionally protected.
In some countries, a victim of hate speech may seek redress under civil law, criminal law, or both. A website that contains hate speech may be called a hate site. Many of these sites contain Internet forums and news briefs that emphasize a particular viewpoint.
There has been debate over freedom of speech, hate speech and hate speech legislation.
In Germany, Volksverhetzung ("incitement to hatred") is a punishable offense under Section 130 of the Strafgesetzbuch (Germany's criminal code) and can lead to up to five years' imprisonment. Section 130 makes it a crime to publicly incite hatred against parts of the population or to call for violent or arbitrary measures against them or to insult, maliciously slur or defame them in a manner violating their (constitutionally protected) human dignity. Thus for instance it is illegal to publicly call certain ethnic groups "maggots" or "freeloaders". Volksverhetzung is punishable in Germany even if committed abroad and even if committed by non-German citizens, if only the incitement of hatred takes effect within German territory, e.g., the seditious sentiment was expressed in German writing or speech and made accessible in Germany (German criminal code's Principle of Ubiquity, Section 9 §1 Alt. 3 and 4 of the Strafgesetzbuch).
On June 30, 2017, Germany approved a bill criminalizing hate speech on social media sites. Among criminalizing hate speech, the law states that social networking sites may be fined up to €50 million ($56 million) if they persistently fail to remove illegal content within a week, including defamatory "fake news".
Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940)
According to Jürgen Trimborn's biography of Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, both Chaplin and French filmmaker René Clair viewed Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will together at a showing at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Filmmaker Luis Buñuel reports that Clair was horrified by the power of the film, crying out that this should never be shown or the West was lost. Chaplin, on the other hand, laughed uproariously at the film. He used it to inspire many elements of The Great Dictator, and by repeatedly viewing this film, Chaplin could closely mimic Hitler's mannerisms.
Trimborn suggests that Chaplin decided to proceed with making The Great Dictator after viewing Riefenstahl's film. Hynkel's rally speech near the beginning of the film, delivered in German-sounding gibberish, is a caricature of Hitler's oratory style, which Chaplin also studied carefully in newsreels.
Obviously Charlie Chaplin's final speech in his film The Great Dictator is about love-speech opposing hate-speech.
The 24-year-old comedian from Cologne posted a satirical message on Twitter early on New Year’s Day, mocking the German far right’s fear that the hundreds of thousands of immigrants that have entered the country in recent years would endanger Germany’s culture. Instead of entertaining her more than 14,000 Twitter followers, Passmann’s tweet was blocked within nine hours by the American social media giant, telling users in Germany that Passmann’s message had run afoul of local laws.
Germany’s hate speech rules, known locally as NetzDG and which came into full force Monday, demand that social media giants promptly remove potentially illegal material, some of it within 24 hours of being notified, or face fines of up to €50 million. Enforcement of the rules has reignited debate about their practicality in an age when a tweet, Facebook post or YouTube video can spread virally around the globe within minutes. The law also highlights the problems that policymakers, in Berlin and elsewhere, now face when trying to police what can, and cannot, be posted online, as they try to balance people’s legitimate right to free speech with others’ desire to be protected against harmful material.
“I would consider it a huge coincidence if this didn’t have to do with the new law,” Passmann said of being blocked, adding that during the last couple of months, she has “tweeted things that were significantly more extreme” without being blocked.
Titanic, a German satirical magazine, was similarly barred after parodying anti-Muslim comments on its own Twitter account. At the other end of the political spectrum, Beatrix von Storch, a leading figure in the far-right Alternative for Germany party, was blocked on Twitter and Facebook after posting anti-immigrant messages. Twitter would not comment on either case, but said under certain circumstances, potentially harmful tweets may run against the company’s existing terms and conditions and not be linked to the new German hate speech rules.
“It all comes down to conflicting rules with freedom of speech on one side, and human dignity on the other,” said Martin Drechsler, managing director of FSM, a nonprofit organization in Berlin that works with companies to tackle digital hate speech. “You have to balance those fundamental rights against each other.”
German coalition effect
The controversial hate speech rules have come into the spotlight as Germany’s ruling political parties — Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, their Bavarian ally the Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) — are trying to patch together another “grand coalition” and put an end to the country’s unprecedented coalition deadlock, almost four months after a general election.
And although it was the political parties’ previous alliance that passed the hate speech law, the legislation will likely reemerge on the negotiation table during the upcoming talks.
“To a certain degree, the concerns that we had back when we were negotiating the law with the Social Democrats now prove to be justified,” said Thomas Jarzombek, a senior member of the German parliament for the CDU. “The core problem is that companies can play judges.”Jarzombek said Germany should change the law to include more incentives for the tech companies to set up independent, third-party agencies to examine whether content should be blocked, instead of doing it themselves.
“But I don’t have the impression that [the SPD’s] Justice Minister Heiko Maas is willing to change anything about the law,” he said.Maas — the country’s current federal justice minister, the law’s architect and its most prominent advocate — was quick to defend the rules in an interview with Bild newspaper Thursday, reiterating his position that the principle of freedom of opinion does not allow for spreading criminal content.
“Facebook, Twitter and Co. should have no interest in their platforms being misused for crimes,” he told the German publication.The country’s demands that social media companies take greater responsibility for what is posted online follows a government report last year that shows Facebook managed to remove only 39 percent of illegal material within 24 hours of being notified by users. Twitter met the deadline in only 1 percent of cases, while Youtube, which removed 90 percent of flagged content within a day, was the only platform to meet the government’s targets.
Tech executives and lobbyists have repeatedly said Germany’s new hate speech rules have the potential to limit freedom of expression of the country’s citizens, and that it should not be left to private companies to determine what should be allowed online.
The hate speech rules “put companies under tremendous time pressure when examining reported content,” said Bernhard Rohleder, chief executive of Bitkom, a German trade body. “The high fines reinforce this pressure. This will inevitably lead to the deletion of permitted content.”Watching worldwide
Germany’s battle over how to tackle online hate speech — rules that are arguably the strictest anywhere in the Western world — will likely have repercussions across Europe and farther afield.
The European "freedom of expression perspective"
Over the years, the Council of Europe has worked in multiple manners to counter hate speech. The media and internet division’s work in this area is based on a “freedom of expression perspective” which focuses on co-operation with member states in preparing, assessing, reviewing and bringing in line with the European Convention on Human Rights any laws and practices that place restrictions on freedom of expression.
The division also looks to foster media and internet literacy throughout all member states, to raise awareness about hate speech and the risks it poses for democracy and individuals, to reduce the levels of acceptance of hate speech as well as to develop consensus on European policy instruments combating hate speech.
Hate speech has no particular definition in international human rights; it is a term used to describe broad discourse that is extremely negative and constitutes a threat to social peace.
According to the Committee of Ministers, hate speech covers all forms of expressions that spread, incite, promote or justify racial hatred, xenophobia, anti-Semitism or other forms of hatred based on intolerance.
Along with the development of new forms of media, online hate speech has been brought about. Hate speech in the online space requires further reflection and action on the regulation and new ways for combating it.
The Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy
Jason Burke in Paris, Luke Harding in Berlin, Alex Duval Smith in Copenhagen and Peter Beaumont in Ramallah
Sun 5 Feb 2006 11.00 GMT
If the consequences are global, the source is almost farcically local. You reach number 3 Grondals Street by taking the number 9 bus to the outskirts of the Danish city of Aarhus and getting off by the red post box half way up the hill. The modest single-story yellow brick building is the head office of Jyllands-Posten, a national newspaper with a circulation of 150,000. It is where Flemming Rose, the arts editor, decided that publishing a page of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad would provoke a debate on multiculturalism and spice up a paper whose daily highlight for many readers is the diamond wedding listing on page 18.
This weekend, the fallout from that editorial whim six months ago has left half the globe reeling. A week of violent rhetoric and action, of statements by scores of heads of states, of commercial boycotts and diplomatic intervention, of strife and anguish and emotion, has exposed deep tensions and fissures at the heart of the modern world, tensions between the Islamic world and the West, between religion and secular society, between journalists and politicians, between different conceptions of the role of faith and a free press in society, tensions that look unlikely to disappear soon.
What they said...
'I have been hurt, grieved and I am angry.'
Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf
'There is freedom of speech, we all respect that, but there is not any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory... I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong.'
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw
'We'd take Muslim protests more seriously if they weren't so hypocritical... The imams were quiet when Syrian TV showed Jewish rabbis as cannibals in a primetime series.'
Berlin's Die Welt which republished one of the cartoons
'We didn't think the cartoons had crossed any line... We are the biggest newspaper in Denmark. We have always been the enfant terrible of the Danish press. Our cartoonists have made fun of politicians, Jesus and the Virgin Mary.'
Jan Lund, foreign editor of Danish Jyllands-Posten
'As much as we condemn this, we must have, as Muslims, the courage to forgive and to not make an issue... between religions or cultures.'
Afghan president Hamid Karzai
'This plays into the hands of Muslim extremists. Many people at Friday prayers will want to express their anger, but we say do it within the law.'
Inayat Bunglawala, of the Muslim Council of Britain
'If someone said something offensive about my mother, I would deal with it, but if they insulted the Prophet it would be worse.'
Abdullah Wahim, teacher, outside the Danish embassy in London
Date 13.04.2012
The editorial headquarters of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in Copenhagen resembles a maximum security facility, with plenty of gates, metal detectors and guards intended to keep undesired guests out.
The Danish newspaper has its share of enemies. In the fall of 2005, Jyllands-Posten published caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, triggering a wave of outrage. Violent demonstrations broke out in several Muslim countries, leading to the deaths of 150 people.
Violent protests broke out around the world after the cartoon was published
The broadsheet and its political cartoonist Kurt Westergaard - who depicted Mohammed with a turban in the form of a bomb - have become hate icons for radical Islamists. The paper and the illustrator continue to be targeted by death threats and planned attacks.
This Friday, a trial will begin against four men whom prosecutors suspect of plotting a bloodbath for the Jyllands-Posten newsroom two years ago. The alleged criminals come from various Arab countries and apparently belong to the Islamist scene.
Increased pressure on caricaturists
Had the attack been carried out, Anders Jerichow could have been present - the renowned foreign correspondent works for the Danish newspaper Politiken, under the same publisher that owns Jyllands-Posten.
In Denmark, Jerichow released a book entitled "Cartoonists in the Global Minefield," in which he documents the working conditions of post-Mohammed-era caricaturists in places such as Amman, Delhi and Paris.
In his book, Jerichow comes to the conclusion that pressure on political cartoonists has increased since the protests against the Mohammed cartoons. Due to dealing with controversial topics, caricaturists are in a more precarious position than that of typical journalists.
This is apparently not just the case with illustrators critical of Islam - other religious figures, as well as politicians, seek to interfere with the caricaturists' work, Jerichow says.
He says this has been behind increasing self-censorship - and not just in the Middle East, but in Europe as well.
Staying sensitive
Meanwhile, in Germany as well, caricaturists are broaching the topic of Islam more cautiously.
Heiko Sakurai regularly draws political cartoons on current affairs for German newspapers such as Die Welt and Financial Times Deutschland. Although he didn't go so far as to call it self-censorship, Sakurai admits he's become more cautious.
"I think the protests against the Mohammed cartoons represented a certain crossroads," Sakurai told DW. He says since then, he has always considered the consequences while working on his cartoons.
"Am I going too far? Not far enough? Since the cartoon controversy, I ask myself these questions, because in the back of my head I'm considering certain sensitivities," Sakurai said.
He points to a piece he drew about the abuse scandal in the Catholic church two years ago, which he described as making more impartial than the cartoons about Islam.
cartoon of people in building with security forces in front
"Will the chancellor be joining us?" - "No, it's just our political cartoonist coming for an editorial meeting."
Editorial self-censorship?
Newspaper editors, despite touting freedom of expression during the discussion of the Mohammed cartoon, are also approaching certain topics with more caution, Sakurai thinks.
Describing previous political cartoons about Islam published in German newspapers as "pretty harsh," Sakurai added, "I don't know if they'd be printed nowadays."
The standards by which publishers judge an illustration have also changed, says media researcher Teresa Naab.
"Freedom of expression is a basic right. But its boundaries should continue to be discussed," she said.Naab thinks the caricature conflict could be considered an opportunity to promote such a discussion. The cartoonists themselves would of course play an important role in such a discussion, as they consider which portrayals of Islam are acceptable and which are not.
Defending artistic liberties
Sakurai says he has never faced threats as a result of his own drawings. But there are other German political cartoonists for whom things have gone differently.
Ahead of the World Cup, a colleague of Sakurai depicted the Iranian soccer team as suicide bombers wearing bombing belts. Although the comic was actually targeting certain German politicians who had put forward an absurd proposal to bring in the army as security during the World Cup, Iranians at home and abroad reacted indignantly. The illustrator was subject to numerous death threats, and had to retreat from public life for some time.
"That really shocked me," said Sakurai, adding that despite the reaction, he plans to keep exercising his artistic liberties when drawing political cartoons.
Author: Jan Bruck
Editor: Martin Kuebler
The Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy (or Muhammad cartoons crisis) (Danish: Muhammedkrisen) began after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 editorial cartoons on 30 September 2005, most of which depicted Muhammad, a principal figure of the religion of Islam. The newspaper announced that this was an attempt to contribute to the debate about criticism of Islam and self-censorship. Muslim groups in Denmark complained, and the issue eventually led to protests around the world, including violent demonstrations and riots in some Muslim countries.
Islam has a strong tradition of aniconism, and it is considered highly blasphemous in most Islamic traditions to visually depict Muhammad. This, compounded with a sense that the cartoons insulted Muhammad and Islam, offended many Muslims. Danish Muslim organisations that objected to the depictions responded by petitioning the embassies of Islamic countries and the Danish government to take action in response, and filed a judicial complaint against the newspaper, which was dismissed in January 2006. After the Danish government refused to meet with diplomatic representatives of the Muslim countries and would not intervene in the case, a number of Danish imams visited the Middle East in late 2005 to raise awareness of the issue. They presented a dossier containing the twelve cartoons from the Jyllands-Posten, and other information some of which was found to be falsified.
As a result, the issue received prominent media attention in some Muslim-majority countries, leading to protests across the world in late January and early February 2006. Some escalated into violence resulting in more than 200 reported deaths, attacks on Danish and other European diplomatic missions, attacks on churches and Christians, and a major international boycott. Some groups responded to the outpouring of protest by endorsing the Danish policies, launching "Buy Danish" campaigns and other displays of support. The cartoons were reprinted in newspapers around the world both in a sense of journalistic solidarity and as an illustration in what became a major news story.
Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen described the controversy as Denmark's worst international relations incident since the Second World War. The incident came at a time of heightened political and social tensions between Muslim majority countries and Western countries, following several, high-profile Islamic terrorist attacks in the West—including the September 11 attacks—and Western military interventions in Muslim countries, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The cartoons and the reaction to them aggravated already-strained relations. The relationship between Muslims in Denmark and the broader society was similarly at a low-point, and the conflict came to symbolize the misunderstandings between the Islamic community and the rest of society. In the years since, terrorist plots claiming to be in retaliation for the cartoons have been planned, and some executed, against targets affiliated with newspapers that published the cartoons or Denmark.
Supporters said that the publication of the cartoons was a legitimate exercise of free speech regardless of the validity of the expression, that it was important to openly discuss Islam without fear or that the cartoons made important points about topical issues. The Danish tradition of relatively high tolerance for freedom of speech became a focus of some attention. The controversy ignited a debate about the limits of freedom of expression in all societies, religious tolerance and the relationship of Muslim minorities with their broader societies in the West, and relations between the Islamic World in general and the West. Critics of the cartoons described them as Islamophobic, racist, or baiting and blasphemous to Muslims, possibly intended to humiliate a Danish minority. Others saw them as a manifestation of ignorance about the history of Western imperialism, double standards, and stereotyping.
Charlie Hebdo
The French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo was taken to court for publishing the cartoons; it was acquitted of charges that it incited hatred. The incident marked the beginning of a number of violent incidents related to the cartoons of Muhammad at the newspaper over the following decade.
On 2 November 2011, Charlie Hebdo was firebombed right before its 3 November issue was due; the issue was called Charia Hebdo and satirically featured Muhammad as guest-editor. The editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, known as Charb, and two co-workers at Charlie Hebdo subsequently received police protection. Charb was placed on a hit list by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula along with Kurt Westergaard, Lars Vilks, Carsten Juste and Flemming Rose after editing an edition of Charlie Hebdo that satirised Muhammad.
On 7 January 2015, two masked gunmen opened fire on Charlie Hebdo's staff and police officers as vengeance for its continued caricatures of Muhammad, killing 12 people, including Charb, and wounding 11 others. Jyllands-Posten did not re-print the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in the wake of the attack, with the new editor-in-chief citing security concerns.
In February 2015, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris, a gunman opened fire on attendants and police officers at a meeting discussing freedom of speech with the Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks among the panelists, and later attacked a synagogue killing two people in Copenhagen in the 2015 Copenhagen shootings.
Muhammad cartoons crisis and the relationship between the Liberal West and Islam
Francis Fukuyama of online magazine Slate wrote that "while beginning with a commendable European desire to assert basic liberal values," the controversy was an alarming sign of the degree of cultural conflict between Muslim immigrant communities in Europe and their broader populations, and advocated a measured and prudent response to the situation. Helle Rytkonen wrote in Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook 2007 that most of the debate around the cartoon controversy was over-simplified as a simple matter of free speech against religion. She said that the actual dispute was more nuanced, focusing on the tone of the debate and broader context of Western-Islamic relations.
Christopher Hitchens wrote in Slate that official reaction in the West—particularly the United States—was too lenient toward the protesters and Muslim community in Denmark, and insufficiently supportive of Denmark and the right to free speech. He said, "nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary—that we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is apparently to be expended upon those who lit the powder trail, and who yell and scream for joy as the embassies of democracies are put to the torch in the capital cities of miserable, fly-blown dictatorships. Let's be sure we haven't hurt the vandals' feelings." William Kristol also wrote that the response of Western leaders, with the exception of the Danish Prime Minister, was too weak and that the issue was used as an excuse by "those who are threatened by our effort to help liberalize and civilize the Middle East" to fight back against the "assault" on radical Islamists and Middle Eastern dictatorships.
Flemming Rose said he did not expect a violent reaction, and talked about what the incident implies about the relationship between the West and the Muslim world. He said,
I spoke to [historian of Islam] Bernard Lewis about this, and he said that the big difference between our case and the Rushdie affair is that Rushdie is perceived as an apostate by the Muslims while, in our case, Muslims were insisting on applying Islamic law to what non-Muslims are doing in non-Muslim countries. In that sense, he said it is a kind of unique case that might indicate that Europe is perceived as some kind of intermediate state between the Muslim world and the non-Muslim world.
Freedom of speech, political correctness and self-censorship
One of the principal lines of controversy surrounding the cartoons concerned the limits of free speech, how much it should be legally or ethically constrained and whether the cartoons were an appropriate expression for a newspaper to print. The cartoons were first printed in response to the perception of some journalists at the newspaper that self-censorship was becoming a problem; the ensuing reaction did nothing to dispel that idea. Rose said:
When I wrote the accompanying text to the publication of the cartoons, I said that this act was about self-censorship, not free speech. Free speech is on the books; we have the law, and nobody as yet has thought of rewriting it. This changed when the death threats were issued; it became an issue of the Sharia trumping the fundamental right of free speech.Rose also highlighted what he believed to be a difference between political correctness and self-censorship—which he considered more dangerous. He said:
There is a very important distinction to be made here between what you perceive as good behavior and a fear keeping you from doing things that you want to do ... A good example of this was the illustrator who refused to illustrate a children's book about the life of Mohammed. He is on the record in two interviews saying that he insisted on anonymity because he was afraid.Christopher Hitchens wrote that it is important to affirm "the right to criticize not merely Islam but religion in general". He criticised media outlets which did not print the cartoons while covering the story. Ralf Dahrendorf wrote that the violent reaction to the cartoons constituted a sort of counter-enlightenment which must be defended against. Sonia Mikich wrote in Die Tageszeitung, "I hereby refuse to feel badly for the chronically insulted. I refuse to argue politely why freedom of expression, reason and humour should be respected". She said that those things are part of a healthy society and that deeply held feelings or beliefs should not be exempt from commentary, and that those offended had the option of ignoring them.
Ashwani K. Peetush of Wilfrid Laurier University wrote that in a liberal democracy freedom of speech is not absolute, and that reasonable limits are put on it such as libel, defamation and hate speech laws in almost every society to protect individuals from "devastating and direct harm". He said that the cartoons "create a social environment of conflict and intimidation for a community that already feels that its way of life is threatened. I do not see how such tactics incorporate people into the wider public and democratic sphere, as Rose argues. They have the opposite effect: the marginalised feel further marginalised and powerless." He said that it is reasonable to consider two of the cartoons as hate speech, which directly undermine a group of people (Muslims) by forming part of an established discourse linking all Muslims with terrorism and barbarity.
In France, the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was taken to court for publishing the cartoons; it was acquitted of charges that it incited hatred. In Canada a human rights commission investigated The Western Standard, a magazine which published the cartoons, but found insufficient grounds to proceed with a human rights tribunal (which does not imply criminal charges, but is a quasi-judicial, mandatory process) against the publication. These government investigations of journalists catalysed debate about the role of government in censoring or prosecuting expressions they deemed potentially hateful. Critics said the cartoon controversy was a sign that attempts at judicial codification of such concepts as respect, tolerance and offence have backfired on the West. Michael Neumann wrote, "Western piety has left the West without a leg to stand on in this dispute. It is no good trumpeting rights of free expression, because these rights are now supposed to have nebulous but severe limitations." Tim Cavanaugh wrote that the incident revealed the danger of hate speech laws, writing, "The issue will almost certainly lead to a revisiting of the lamentable laws against 'hate speech' in Europe, and with any luck to a debate on whether these laws are more likely to destroy public harmony than encourage it."
Double standards
Ehsan Ahrari of Asia Times accused some European countries of double standards in adopting laws that outlaw Holocaust denial but still defended the concept of freedom of speech in this case. Anti-holocaust or genocide denial laws are in place in Austria, Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Israel, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, and Romania in 2005. However, Denmark has no such laws and there was—and still is—no EU-wide law against holocaust denial. Randall Hansen said that laws against holocaust denial were not directly comparable with restrictions on social satire, so could not be considered a double standard unless one believed in an absolute right to freedom of speech, and that those who do would doubtless oppose holocaust denial laws.:13 Columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote that there was a double standard in many protesters' demands for religious sensitivity in this case, but not in others. He asked, "Have any of these 'moderates' ever protested the grotesque caricatures of Christians and, most especially, Jews that are broadcast throughout the Middle East on a daily basis?"
The Faurisson affair
The Faurisson affair was an academic controversy in the wake of a book by French scholar Robert Faurisson, a Holocaust denier. The scandal largely dealt with the inclusion of an essay by American linguist Noam Chomsky, entitled "Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression", as an introduction to Faurisson's book, without Chomsky's knowledge or approval. Responding to a request for comment in a climate of attacks on Faurisson, Chomsky defended Faurisson's right to express and publish his opinions on the grounds that freedom of speech must be extended to all viewpoints, no matter how unpopular or fallacious.
His defense was the target of subsequent accusations by various academics and groups. The accusers claimed that his defense went beyond free speech arguments, and that it included a defense of Faurisson's work, and in general they sought to discredit Chomsky by claiming that there was a deeper philosophical and political association between him and Faurisson.
On several occasions, Robert Faurisson has been convicted under French law for his speech. For instance, on October 3, 2006, he was sentenced to a three-month suspended sentence by the Paris correctional court, for denying the Holocaust on an Iranian TV channel.
The Faurisson affair greatly damaged Chomsky's reputation in France, a country he did not visit for almost thirty years following the affair, and where translation of his political writings was delayed until the 2000s.
Free speech in a Democracy - Noam Chomsky
The Free Speech Movement
The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a massive, long-lasting student protest which took place during the 1964–65 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The Movement was informally under the central leadership of Berkeley graduate student Mario Savio. Other student leaders include Jack Weinberg, Michael Rossman, George Barton, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Michael Teal, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and others.
With the participation of thousands of students, the Free Speech Movement was the first mass act of civil disobedience on an American college campus in the 1960s. Students insisted that the university administration lift the ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom. The Free Speech Movement was influenced by the New Left, and was also related to the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. To this day, the Movement's legacy continues to shape American political dialogue both on college campuses and in broader society, impacting on the political views and values of college students and the general public.
FSM website and archive
Opinions
An American editorial cartoonist has been fired for skewering Trump. He likely won’t be the last.
by Ann Telnaes June 15 2018
“Oh, good lord.”
That was my reaction the day after the election of Donald Trump in November of 2016, when it dawned on me that I would be serving my year as president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists during the same time as the guy who wanted to “open up” libel laws and weaken the First Amendment so he could sue journalists more easily. Instead of the usual loss of jobs for editorial cartoonists that a president of the AAEC has to address during his or her tenure, now I’d be dealing with a much more fundamental threat to our profession: a president of the United States who has no idea or respect for the institution of a free press and its role in a democracy.
I did worry that editorial cartooning would be the next target of a president so enamored of visuals. That didn’t happen. In retrospect, I’m fairly certain it’s because Trump doesn’t read; he gets all his news from the television (Fox News) and uses Twitter as his megaphone. And I’m guessing his staff doesn’t cut out cartoons and tape them to the White House refrigerator so he will see them as he goes for his regular two scoops of ice cream. But with the firing of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoonist Rob Rogers, we now see that suppressing a free press can be accomplished without an authoritarian president’s orders. Michael Cohen isn’t the only “fixer” Trump has at his disposal.
Rogers has been the editorial cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for more than 25 years. Most working cartoonists have had an occasional idea spiked by his or her editor. But in the past few weeks, editorial director Keith Burris and publisher John Robinson Block have refused to publish six of Rogers’s cartoons, all criticizing Trump or his policies. Block and Burris have also rejected many of Rogers’s rough sketch ideas for several months.
This wasn’t the first time Block has used his position to defend President Trump’s actions; in January he demanded an editorial run in the Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade (where he is also the publisher) supporting Trump’s use of the term “shithole countries.”
I realize now I didn’t recognize this other danger of an authoritarian president: his enablers and the willing supporters who squash dissent and help attack the free press and subvert the Constitution. The fact that Trump will use any opportunity to spread lies and whip up hatred toward journalists only enables his powerful supporters in the media to do his dirty work for him. In April, another disturbing example of journalistic manipulation was exposed when a video surfaced showing news anchors from 45 Sinclair-owned stations reciting word for word the same script criticizing the mainstream media and spouting the “fake news” accusations that Trump uses in his diatribes. While Trump used the opportunity to blast its critics and offer his support for the “superior” Sinclair Broadcasting, he hadn’t orchestrated this abuse of journalistic integrity. He didn’t have to; there were others willing to do it for him.
Through satire, humor and pointed caricatures, editorial cartoonists criticize leaders and governments that are behaving badly. The purpose of an editorial cartoonist is to hold politicians and powerful institutions accountable — and we all know how little President Trump thinks he, his family or his sycophants should be held accountable. Rogers was the first American editorial cartoonist to lose his job as a result, but he won’t be the last. Trump has many “fixers.”
Trump 'n Block
This is the publisher behind the firing of a political cartoonist.
Political euphemisms are age-old, but the subversion of language to describe America holding young people in cages has the whiff of Orwell’s Big Brother
Steven Poole
Wed 20 Jun 2018 16.59 BST
George Orwell’s Big Brother himself would be proud of the brutal euphemisms dreamed up to describe the separation of migrants’ children from their families and their subsequent incarceration at the US-Mexico border. The latest rhetorical ploy is that young children are being taken to “tender age” shelters. The adjective “tender” here officially describes the youngsters’ age, but it implies that the policy is itself an example of official tenderness. This idea is reinforced by the use of “shelter”, as though the children are being protected from a storm or bombing raid, whereas they have in fact been deprived of the shelter of their parents.
What do you do to children of a “tender” age? Why, you put them in cages, of course. But they must not be called cages, lest people realise that you think of these humans as little more than feral dogs. Instead, Fox News host Steve Doocy suggested, the authorities had simply improvised a bit of hipster interior design, building “walls out of chain-link fences”. This is reminiscent of the contest over what Israel called a “fence” built well into the occupied territories. Since much of it was a concrete wall, the opposition preferred to call it a “wall”. A room whose walls are built out of chain-link fencing is a cage.
What, meanwhile, should we call all the places in which the US is holding children near its southern border? “Internment camps” reminds some embarrassingly of the ignoble treatment of Japanese people during the second world war, while “concentration camps” seems to others, well, a bit too Nazi. (It was in fact the British who invented the term “concentration camp”, as a euphemism, during the Boer war.) The official term remains “detention centres”, as though the children have just been a bit naughty and are required to stay for an hour after school. That there can be such a relentless blizzard of dishonest unspeak to describe the kidnapping and imprisonment of children in 21st-century America might seem astonishing – but, as we are learning, in Trump’s world anything is possible.
Free speech and the subversion of language, doublespeak, Newspeak and doublethink
The term "doublespeak" originates in George Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although the term is not used in the book, it is a close relative of two of the book's central concepts, "doublethink" and "Newspeak". Another variant, "doubletalk", also referring to deliberately ambiguous speech, did exist at the time Orwell wrote his book, but the usage of "doublespeak", as well as of "doubletalk", in the sense emphasizing ambiguity clearly postdates the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Parallels have also been drawn between doublespeak and Orwell's classic essay Politics and the English Language, which discusses the distortion of language for political purposes.
Edward S. Herman, political economist and media analyst, has highlighted some examples of doublespeak and doublethink in modern society.[7] Herman describes in his book Beyond Hypocrisy the principal characteristics of doublespeak:
What is really important in the world of doublespeak is the ability to lie, whether knowingly or unconsciously, and to get away with it; and the ability to use lies and choose and shape facts selectively, blocking out those that don’t fit an agenda or program.In his essay "Politics and the English Language", George Orwell observes that political language serves to distort and obfuscate reality. Orwell’s description of political speech is extremely similar to the contemporary definition of doublespeak:
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible … Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness … the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. Where there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, ...Due to the inherently deceptive nature of doublespeak as well as its prominent use in politics, doublespeak has been linked[by whom? to the sociological perspective known as conflict theories. Conflict theories detract from ideas of society being naturally in harmony, instead placing emphasis on political and material inequality as its structural features. Antonio Gramsci's concepts on cultural hegemony, in particular, suggest that the culture and values of the economic elite – the bourgeoisie – become indoctrinated as "common sense" to the working-class, allowing for the maintenance of the status quo through misplaced belief. Being himself one of the leaders of the Communist Party of Italy, his theories had, in turn, been strongly influenced by the German social thinker Karl Marx, and have their ideological roots grounded in Marxist theory of false consciousness and capitalist exploitation. While Gramsci's views argue that culture (beliefs, perceptions and values) allows the ruling class to maintain domination, Marx's explanation is along more economic lines, with concepts such as commodity fetishism demonstrating how the ideology of the bourgeoisie (in this case, the existence of property as a social creation rather than an "eternal entity") dominate over that of the working classes. In both cases, both philosophers argue that one view – that of the bourgeoisie – dominates over others, hence the term conflict theories.
On the other hand, Terrence P. Moran of the US National Council of Teachers of English has compared the use of doublespeak in the mass media to laboratory experiments conducted on rats, where a batch of rats were deprived of food, before one half was fed sugar and water and the other half a saccharin solution. Both groups exhibited behavior indicating that their hunger was satisfied, but rats in the second group (which were fed saccharin solution) died from malnutrition. Moran highlights the structural nature of doublespeak, and notes that social institutions such as the mass media adopt an active, top-down approach in managing opinion. Therefore, Moran parallels doublespeak to producing an illusionary effect:
This experiment suggests certain analogies between the environments created for rats by the scientists and the environments created for us humans by language and the various mass media of communication. Like the saccharine environment, an environment created or infiltrated by doublespeak provides the appearance of nourishment and the promise of survival, but the appearance is illusionary and the promise false.Doublespeak might also have some connections with contemporary theories. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky note in their book that Orwellian doublespeak is an important component of the manipulation of the English language in American media, through a process called "dichotomization"; a component of media propaganda involving "deeply embedded double standards in the reporting of news". For example, the use of state funds by the poor and financially needy is commonly referred to as "social welfare" or "handouts", which the "coddled" poor "take advantage of". These terms, however, do not apply to other beneficiaries of government spending such as military spending.
Examples of the structural nature of the use of Doublespeak have been made by modern scholars. Noam Chomsky argues in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media that people in modern society consist of decision-makers and social participants who have to be made to agree. According to Chomsky, the media and public relations industry actively shape public opinion, working to present messages in line with their economic agenda for the purposes of controlling of the "public mind". Contrary to the popular belief that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy, Chomsky goes so far as to argue that "it's the essence of democracy":
The point is that in a ... totalitarian state, it doesn't much matter what people think because ... you can control what they do. But when the state loses the bludgeon, when you can't control people by force and when the voice of the people can be heard, ... you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what in more honest days used to be called propaganda. Manufacture of consent. Creation of necessary illusions.Edward Herman's book Beyond Hypocrisy also includes a doublespeak dictionary of commonly employed media terms and phrases into plain English.
Henceforth, conflict theories demonstrate the dominating ideology of the bourgeoisie and Moran's theory highlights that doublespeak produces an illusionary effect, both theories having parallels to Orwell's ideology in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Similarly, Herman's theory of doublespeak having an inherent nature to be manipulative and Chomsky's theory of "dichotomization" relates directly to the practice of doublespeak and how doublespeak is deliberately deceptive in nature.
Newspeak is the language of Oceania, a fictional totalitarian state ruled by the Party, who created the language to meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism (Ingsoc).
In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Newspeak is a controlled language, of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, a linguistic design meant to limit the freedom of thought—personal identity, self-expression, free will—that ideologically threatens the régime of Big Brother and the Party, who thus criminalized such concepts as thoughtcrime, contradictions of Ingsoc orthodoxy.
"The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever."The Oldspeak word free existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in terms of something not present, as in the sentences "The dog is free from lice." and "This field is free from weeds." Politically, the word free could not denote free will, because such a humanist concept does not exist in the society of Oceania. The linguistic design of Newspeak is for thought control, by diminishment of the user's range of thought, which is realised with a minimal vocabulary of limited denotation and connotation; hence words such as: crimethink (thought crime), doublethink (accepting contradictory beliefs), and Ingsoc (English Socialism).
The character Syme discusses his work on the latest edition of the Newspeak Dictionary: "By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of The Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "Freedom is Slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."
According to Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, doublethink is:
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.
The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
PRESS
Government by News Leak
The headline for an Associated Press release (February 25, 1963)
read:
PRESS BLAMED FOR SUCCESS
KENNEDY MANAGES NEWS BOLDLY,
CYNICALLY, SUBTLY, KROCK CLAIMS
Arthur Krock is quoted as saying that "the principle onus rests on the printed and electronic process itself." That may seem like another way of saying that "history is to blame." But it is the instant consequences of electrically moved iformation that make necessary a deliberate artistic aim in the placing and management of news.
In diplomacy the same electric speed causes the decisions to be announced before they are made in order to ascertain the varying responses that might occur when such decisions actually are made. Such procedure, quite inevitable at the electric speed that involves the entire society in the decision-making process, shocks the old press men because it abdicates any definite point of view. As the speed of information increases, the tendency is or politics to move away from representation and delegation of constituents toward immediate involvement of the entire community in the central acts of decision. Slower speeds of information make delegation and representation mandatory. Associated with such delegation are the points of view of the different sectors of public interest that are expected to be put forward for processing and consideration by the rest of the community. When the electric speed is introduced into such a delegated and representational organization, this obsolescent organization can only be made to function by a series of subterfuges and makeshifts. These strike some observers as base betrayals of the original aims and purposes of the established forms.
The massive theme of the press can be managed only by direct contact with the formal patterns of the medium in question. It is thus necessary to state at once that "human interest" is a technical term meaning that which happens when multiple book pages or multiple information items are arranged in a mosaic on one sheet. The book is a private confessional form that provides a "point of view." The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. It can "color" events by using them or by not using them at all. But it is the daily communal exposure of multiple items in juxtaposition that gives the press its complex dimension of human interest.
The book form is not a communal mosaic or corporate image but a private voice. One of the unexpected effects of TV on the press has been a great increase in the popularity of Time and Newsweek. Quite inexplicably to themselves and without any new effort at subscription, their circulations have more than doubled since TV. These news magazines are preeminently mosaic in form, offering not windows on the world like the old picture magazines, but presenting corporate images of society in action. Whereas the spectator of a picture magazine is passive, the reader of a news magazine becomes much involved in the making of meanings for the corporate image. Thus the TV habit of involvement in mosaic image has greatly strengthened the appeal of these news magazines, but at the same time has diminished the appeal of the older pictorial feature magazines. Both book and newspaper are confessional in character, creating the effect of inside story by their mere form, regardless of content. As the book page yields the inside story of the author's mental adventures, so the press page yields the inside story of the community in action and interaction. It is for this reason that the press seems to be performing its function most when revealing the seamy side. Real news is bad news --bad news about somebody, or bad news for somebody.
A viral photo of a crying Honduran girl didn't tell the whole story. Does it matter?
This girl was not separated from her mother. But other children were
Is it all about "optics"? Free optics? Hate optics?
The consequence of the images are the images of the consequences . . .
. . . and all of us becoming distracted from distraction by distraction!
Let's talk about the meaning of coats . . .
“Because in the middle of the worst moral scandal in recent memory, so bad that her husband backed down for the first time in memory, people who were supposedly on her side let her get on a plane with a jacket that said ‘I really don’t care, do you?'" he said.
“Remember when Michelle Obama showed her bare arms and went to an oil spill, and Fox News went nuts?" he said. "I’m sure they’ll have the same reaction to this."
"Keep in mind, she was on her way to meet children who’ve been separated from their parents," he added. "This is what she wore on the plane ride there. A jacket that says, ‘I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?’ Is the president now tweeting onto his wife’s clothes?'"
Times of India report
Meanwhile, Trevor Noah directed his ire at President Trump.
“It is kind of sweet that she made a jacket out of her and Donald’s wedding vows," he said.
"We could spend forever talking about how out of touch this makes Melania seem," he continued. "But I don't care, do you?"
George Orwell wrote in his essay Politics and the English Language: “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues.” When Facebook constructed a new archive of political advertising, had it thought a little more about this concept of what is “political”, it might have more accurately anticipated the subsequent Orwellian headache. As it is, journalists are finding their articles restricted from promotion because they are lumped in with campaigning materials from politicians, lobby groups and advocacy organisations.
The new archive of ads with political content, which Facebook made public last month, has become the latest contested piece of territory between platforms and publishers. The complaint from publishers is that Facebook is categorising posts in which they are promoting their own journalism (paying money to target particular groups of the audience) as “political ads”.
Publishers have reacted furiously to what they see as toxic taxonomy.
Mark Thompson, the chief executive of the New York Times, has been the most vocal critic, describing Facebook’s practices as “a threat to democracy” and criticising the platform in a recent speech to the Open Markets Initiative in Washington DC.
“When it comes to news, Facebook still doesn’t get it,” said Thompson. “In its effort to clear up one bad mess, it seems to be joining those who want to blur the line between reality-based journalism and propaganda.”At a separate event at Columbia University, Thompson and Facebook’s head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, fought openly about the initiative. Thompson showed examples of where New York Times articles, including recipes, had been wrongly flagged as political. Brown emphasised that the archive was being refined, but stood firm on the principle that promoted journalism ought to be flagged as “paid-for” political posts. “On this you are just wrong,” she told Thompson.
Publishers took to social platforms to question the labelling and representation of their work. One of the most egregious examples came from investigative journalism organisation Reveal. Last week, at the height of the scandal around the separation of undocumented migrant families crossing the US border, it published an exclusive story involving the alleged drugging of children at a centre housing immigrant minors. It was flagged in the Facebook system as containing political content, and as Reveal had not registered its promotion of the story, the promoted posts were stifled. Facebook did not remove the article, but rather stopped its paid circulation. Given the importance of paid promotion, it is not surprising that publishers see this as amounting to the same thing.
The furore and confusion over what had happened to the post demonstrated that publishers were themselves confused about the new system. It also demonstrated the way in which even a well-intentioned initiative to add more clarity to political advertising could in fact militate against the rapid spread of what many would consider important high-quality news.
The central problem exposed by Facebook’s advertising archive is the flaw in its entire business model. Targeted advertising represents 98% of Facebook’s revenues which were $40bn last year.
Many people who use Facebook remain unaware that what shows up in their news feed can get there two ways: it is targeted by an algorithm based on their behaviour, profile and preferences; and often it is targeted at their demographic by paid promotion. It is routine for publishers to pay to boost pages of their own journalism in order for them to reach a wider audience. In fact for many publishers it is a prerequisite of being read, as Facebook does not recognise or seek to categorise good journalism or urgent news over any other material.
Facebook is ill-equipped to deal with the type and scale of the task it has created for itselfIt is precisely these mechanics which led in the 2016 US election cycle to the platform playing host to all types of propaganda and “fake news” often masquerading as legitimate journalism. The idea that Facebook should add transparency to what was being paid for as political advertising was almost universally welcomed as a “first step” to combating misinformation.
The friction over its implementation highlights a key tension within Facebook and all tech companies when it comes to dealing with cultural concepts. Should companies just rely far more heavily on human judgment or should they leave it to algorithms?Robots, algorithms, computers and maths are amazingly potent in their capacity to sort unique objects: faces, places, images and text can be searched and identified quickly at great scale. But things which are not unique, or which carry with them inherent ambiguity – such as culture, politics, humanity even – are unsuited to evaluation by any kind of artificial intelligence application. Orwell was right, everything is political: holiday photos are political; fashion, weddings, theatre and film, architecture, are all in one sense political. (Maybe it is only the cat picture which the whole of the internet can agree on as being apolitical.
In deciding that a New Yorker piece in praise of adultery is “political”, the Facebook advertising archive algorithm might be making a profound, almost philosophical, judgment about hetero-normative values, but more likely it is just incompetently sorting material it can’t recognise. These examples are good copy, but essentially teething problems that Facebook has the capacity to solve.
However, there are profound issues about the nature and control of the public sphere. As the large platforms now effectively are the internet for many people, their governance structures are of key public interest. If categorisation as being “political” has consequences for how fact-based reporting is perceived both by the public and by the algorithm, this could be catastrophic. It could lead to local news or urgent political coverage being harder to find – or prioritised according only to the amount a publisher or advertiser spends.
The second is that Facebook is to some extent on the right side of the argument when it comes to labelling content. But it is unfortunately ill-equipped to deal with the type and scale of the task it has created for itself. There is a looming civic crisis in the field of political communications. The provenance of material masquerading as news often deliberately obscures funding sources and influences; comb the Facebook political advertising archive around any keyword and you will find a host of apparently neutral news media entities which are funded and controlled by hyper-partisan groups. And these groups can also pay to promote articles from other news organisations in pursuit of their own aims. The number of New York Times articles paid for by candidates boosting their own campaigns is just as large as the Times’s own promotional strategies.
The unavoidable core of this issue is taking transparency into the realm of political judgment, and separating legitimate news sources from non-legitimate. Nobody, including Facebook, wishes this organisation to have such a level of control over the free press or even political campaigning. The answer to Facebook, as has often been said, cannot be more Facebook.
News and journalism are now dependent on Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple and others for many aspects of their existence. What is clear is that these companies are not inherently suited to be custodians of our information ecosystem, and arguably never will be.
Update 14.07.2018
The death of truth: how we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump
Update 19.07.2018
Mark Zuckerberg's remarks on Holocaust denial 'irresponsible'
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg slammed by Germany over Holocaust comments
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