On March 6, 2012, six British soldiers were killed in Afghanistan by a roadside explosive device, and a national ritual of mourning and rage ensued. Prime Minister David Cameron called it a desperately sad day for our country. A British teenager, Azhar Ahmed, observed the reaction for two days and then went to Facebook to angrily object that the innocent Afghans killed by British soldiers receive almost no attention from British media. He opined that the UKs soldiers in Afghanistan are guilty, their deaths deserved, and are therefore going to hell. The following day, Ahmed was arrested and charged with a racially aggravated public order offense. The police spokesman explained that he didnt make his point very well and that is why he has landed himself in bother. The state proceeded to prosecute him, and in October of that year, he was convicted of sending a grossly offensive communication, fined and sentenced to 240 hours of community service. As demonstrators demanded he be imprisoned, the judge who sentenced Ahmed pronounced his opinions beyond the pale of whats tolerable in our society, ruling: Im satisfied that the message was grossly offensive. The Independents Jerome Taylor noted that he escaped jail partially because he quickly took down his unpleasant posting and tried to apologize to those he offended. Apparently, heretics may be partially redeemed if they publicly renounce their heresies. Criminal cases for online political speech are now commonplace in the UK, notorious for its hostility to basic free speech and press rights. As The Independents James Bloodworth reported last week, around 20,000 people in Britain have been investigated in the past three years for comments made online. But the persecution is by no means viewpoint-neutral. It instead is overwhelmingly directed at the countrys Muslims for expressing political opinions critical of the states actions. To put it mildly, not all online hate speech or advocacy of violence is treated equally. It is, for instance, extremely difficult to imagine that Facebook users who sanction violence by the UK in Iraq and Afghanistan, or who spew anti-Muslim animus, or who call for and celebrate the deaths of Gazans, would be similarly prosecuted. In both the UK and Europe generally, cases are occasionally brought for right-wing hate speech (the above warning from Scotlands police was issued after a polemicist posted repellent jokes on Twitter about Ebola patients). But the proposed punishments for such advocacy are rarely more than symbolic: trivial fines and the like. The real punishment is meted out overwhelmingly against Muslim dissidents and critics of the West. In sum, this is not merely an attack on free speech but on specific ideas. Writing about Ahmeds case in The Guardian, Richard Seymour described him as the latest victim of a concerted effort to redefine racism as anything that could conceivably offend white people. Needless to say, an English judge would never lecture, let alone sentence, anyone for holding to an ideology that advocates violence by the British government in Muslim countries, nor parents who indoctrinate their children to join the British military, nor those who led that country to invade and destroy Iraq in an aggressive war. To understand the point, one need not equate these views or view some as better than others. The point is that this is the state punishing expression of some viewpoints while sanctioning others. This is about criminalizing specific views anathema to the governments policies, outlawing particular value systems. This eagerness to criminalize political speech becomes more compelling as social media vests ordinary individuals with greater autonomy to disseminate news as well as their views. No longer dependent on corporate media institutions acting as Responsible Gatekeepers of Tolerable Opinions, individuals all over the world are now able to curate their own news and create their own powerful opinion platforms. The democratizing effects on political discourse have long been heralded as a future potential of the internet, but it is now a promise finally being fulfilled, and it is scaring entrenched political and media institutions all over the world.
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 20:32:17 +0000