Back in 2005, the New South Wales Labor government attempted to bring in a religious hate speech law.  Former MR contributor Steve Edwards joined the campaign to thwart the plan with this article.  It was published in Policy, the journal of the right-liberal Centre for Independent Studies.

The campaign was successful, though Steve took the opportunity to write a further piece for Policy six months later, this time on the Danish Cartoons Affair.

The hate-speechers went away to lick their wounds.  But they are believers in the political ratchet, and they didn’t give up.  Now the proposal is back, prompting Steve to return once more to the pages of Policy.  Here is his new article.

GW

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THE TROUBLE WITH RELIGIOUS HATRED LAWS

Religions and their followers should receive no special protection from spoken hostility, argues Steve Edwards

reedom of speech and conscience are invaluable and timeless principles. Thomas Paine summarised them crisply in the eighteenth century, in the introduction to The Age of Reason:

I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.

Governments should play very little or no role in determining what people are allowed to say and hear, regardless of whether this may be ‘offensive’ to the traditional enemies of liberty—primarily religious fanatics—or to those of a weaker ‘moderate’ disposition who would passively give up ‘their’ freedom (and ours too) to buy a little peace and quiet. Yet today there are few legal or moral principles that have come under greater sustained attack.

Under the guise of maintaining ‘religious harmony,’ Western governments are being pressured by a worldwide coalition of United Nations bureaucrats, third-world tyrannies, and ‘progressive’ academics and think tanks into passing legislation with the aim of criminalising the ‘vilification’ and even ‘defamation’ of religions—mainly Islam—and their followers. The instigators of this global confederacy are not arguing for anything particularly new or interesting, yet their goal would reverse hundreds of years of intellectual development in the pursuit of an unnecessary and unattainable ‘social peace,’ signed on the terms of theist zealots. As freedom of speech and conscience arguably provided and still provide the foundations of limited, anti-despotic government—and indeed the necessary breathing space for some of the most important social advances in the past two centuries, with entire nations and even civilisations climbing out of obscurantism and penury—it could be argued that the Enlightenment legacy itself is now under threat.

The accused

The list of people who have been prosecuted or censored for various speech crimes against religion and religious believers has grown at an impressive clip in recent years.

In 2005 and 2006, British National Party leader Nick Griffin was twice placed on trial, at great expense to himself and to British taxpayers, for ‘inciting racial hatred’ through comments he made in a speech that Islam was ‘a wicked, vicious faith.’ In the wake of Griffin’s subsequent acquittal, then-chancellor Gordon Brown said ‘mainstream opinion in this country will be offended by some of the statements that they have heard made,’ and called for a tightening of Britain’s ‘racial hatred’ laws.(1)

In 2006, the Swedish foreign minister, Laila Freivalds, resigned after it was discovered that her department had pressured a web-hosting company into shutting down a site that was about to display a set of anti-Muhammad cartoons.(2)

In 2007, a demonstration planned to take place in Brussels to promote the ‘single aim of preventing Islam becoming a dominant political force in Europe’ was banned by the city mayor, Freddy Thielemans, on the pretext that to allow the rally, organised by a coalition called Stop the Islamisation of Europe, to go ahead would ‘disturb public order.’(3)

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In memory of 9/11 from The Political Cesspool comes an interview with Kevin MacDonald in 3 parts…

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Dr K R Bolton FCIS

This is nearly, not quite, a first for MR.  When we started out in life, our categories were worked out to include New Zealand Politics.  But only one entry, dated 18th October 2005 and by JJR, has ever been posted.  Kerry Bolton, however, is on the spot and can provide some authoritive commentary.  This piece, like JJR’s post, concerns the travails of the nationalist, anti-Big Business politician, Winston Peters.
GW

The harassment, persecution and attempted prosecution of Winston Peters for alleged irregularities concerning donations either directly or indirectly to Peters and the NZ First Party have become a red-herring for the major issues facing NZ. But then again the General Elections themselves are re-herrings in regard to dealing with actual issues, and are relegated to banal party promises on tax reductions.

Peters has long been wholeheartedly hated by the usual combination of the Left and Big Business. Peters is the only politician to have taken on Big Business interests and now stands accused of accepting donations from several businessmen, principally Owen Glenn, and Robert Jones, although neither are supporters of the Party.

Glenn is, or rather was, a supporter of the Labour Party and is said to have contributed to a fund for the purposes of helping Peters’ attempt to over-turn the Tauranga election victory of National’s one-term ineffectual and clownish Bob Clarkson who defeated Peters in his own traditional stronghold at the 2004 Election. Glenn is supposed to have made the contribution on the basis that it would serve the interests of a Labour Government, which was obliged to accept NZ First support in Parliament.

Although Prime Minister Helen Clark has doggedly stood by Peters amidst the furore of allegations of financial mismanagement, if not corruption, it should be kept in mind that Labour before the necessity of seeking NZ First support, hated Peters just as much as others of the liberal-Left and Big Business. Clark often damned Peters for what she called “playing the race card”, in wanting to limit Asian immigration and in his opposition to free trade agreements with Asia.

What is also salient about the whole circus is the unconcealed satisfaction, the outright gloating, the universal glee, of the news media in seeing Peters pilloried.

The most damning evidence supposedly has come from Owen Glenn who took time out from Monaco to come back to NZ and testify that he had been asked personally by Peters for a donation, and has apparently provided documents to ‘prove’ this. Glenn states that he came back to defend his ‘reputation’ and was rather indignant that Peters had brought his character into question by the implication that he’s lying.

Glenn is also stating that Labour Party president Mike Williams invited himself aboard Glenn’s yacht for a stay in the hope of getting a job with Glenn’s business empire. Williams was able to counter this with his own documentation showing that Glenn invited him, and that Glenn was interested in being appointed honorary consul to Monaco on the basis that it would give him a diplomatic passport and would be useful for his business operations. Therefore, there is in this instance at least a convincing scenario of Glenn having given misleading statements to the Parliamentary Privileges Committee. Certainly the Williams explanation seems more plausible than that of Glenn’s.

What has been missing from all this, and for some reason Peters has not used the evidence, is the background of Glenn himself. According to several pages in “Absolute Power”, a recently published biography on Prime Minister Helen Clark by investigative journalist Ian Wishart, editor of the independent “Investigate” magazine, Glenn was involved in fraudulent business dealings concerning his shipping company, and paid $1,500,000 to US authorities in an out of court settlement to avoid prosecution. He is also claimed to have been associated with organised crime in the USA. He is also said to have kept a coked-up Black hostess, and is described allegedly by a former US associate as an “arrogant jerk”, descriptions far removed from the way he is being portrayed as the soft spoken and deeply hurt paragon of nobility by the news media. If Wishart’s allegations are not true, they would clearly be libellous and one wonders why Glenn – given his concern for his good reputation – has not sued Wishart or indeed even attempted a denial?

The whole Peters saga stinks of a conspiracy to bring down the only political leader effectively opposing the sell-out of NZ, who has been a thorn in the side of our local plutocrats for many years.

Kerry Bolton is the editor of Restoration Magazine.

David Hamilton

According to the Mail on Sunday, which obtained the official statistics of 37 police forces under the Freedom of Information Act, there is an offence involving a knife every 24 minutes of the day in England. 

There were over 5,500 serious crimes involving knives in just three months this year - one every 24 minutes. That is 55 knife-related murders and more than 2,000 stabbings.  [And that figure does not include data from Northamptonshire, Somerset and Lincolnshire - Ed]

The newspaper explained:-

London, Manchester and Birmingham are the worst-affected areas, while West Yorkshire, Merseyside and Northumbria police forces were also in the top 10. During just April, May and June this year, the Metropolitan Police recorded 1,580 offences – more than quarter of the national total.  A breakdown reveals 17 people are stabbed or robbed at knife point in the every day and by July 2008 twenty teenagers had been murdered in London.  The total for the whole of last year was 26 shooting or stabbing killings among young people”.

Our elites have imported gang warfare while pretending that the immigrants were soft, sentimental like pets and if we were nice to them they would be nice to us!

Common sense tells people that immigrant areas are no longer safe for white people to live in.  But to obfuscate the facts, a 9 percent reduction in crime is claimed by the police, with the violent crime sector being reduced by 8 percent.  As is now well known, in areas with much crime many people do not report burglaries or muggings because experience tells them that the police will do nothing about it.  Less than half of such crimes are reported.  It is a deceit visited upon the population by a government who cannot control crime because they are acolytes of the religion of equality, and no racial or ethnic group can be more inclined to certain crimes than any other.

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In line with my prior posts on The Amygdala War, UPI reports in Chronic stress = depression, infertility that:

Chronic stress, however, increases the length and volume of expression of corticotropin releasing factor in areas of the brain associated with fear and emotion, including the amygdala—the brain…

In our study, rats that continuously were exposed to corticotropin releasing factor from this area of the brain experienced anxious and depressive behavior, decreased libido and disrupted ovarian cycles suggesting that persistent release of CRF such as occurs in chronic stress clearly affects multiple body systems,” says Wilson. “These behavioral changes are similar to what we see in human females who are exposed to stressors on a daily basis.

So “liberate” your enemy’s females by seducing them, with money and “independence”, into a high stress workplace within two income trap families and you exterminate their genes without so much as a peep from the UN’s commission on human rights!

Genius.

This ...

is Eva-Britt Svensson ... not Kafka’s pin-up but a Swedish Member of the European Parliament who serves on the Committee on Women’s Gender and Equality Rights.  The Committee is seeking a Europe-wide ban on advertising which features exiguously dressed women possessed of that quality once known as “it”.

Today Ms Svensson is reported to have said:-

“Gender stereotyping in advertising straitjackets women, men, girls and boys by restricting individuals to predetermined and artificial roles that are often degrading, humiliating and dumbed down for both sexes.”

“Gender stereotyping in advertising is one of several factors that have a big influence in efforts to make society more gender equal. When women and men are portrayed in a stereotypical way the consequence may be that it becomes difficult in other contexts to see women and men’s resources and abilities.”

And this ...

is Eva Herzigová pictured out of her straitjacket.  Miss Herzigová‘s “resources and abilities” include making such observations as:-

“History is the key to everything: politics, religion, even fashion.”

So be honest now.  Which of these statements would you prefer to discuss?  With the speaker in person, of course.

Speech given by Dr. Tom Sunic at the “Nordic festival,” Gothenburg, Sweden, 30th August, 2008

We start to wonder about our identity at the moment when we are about to lose it. Our fathers and our grandparents never asked questions about their identity; they never worried about it. They took for granted their affiliation to a given religion and to a given tribe or a people. It is with the rising tide of globalization, multiculturalism and multiracialism, along with the waning of the traditional nation-state, that we start asking a question about who we are. The minute we raise the question of identity we start thinking about national identity.

But is this still really so today? How do we define our modern identity? Let us propose a couple of modern definitions that are onerous to Europeans.

First, we must mention the “substitute” identity, or ersatz identity, or identity by proxy. It is no accident that along with the loss of their own identity, white Europeans resort to ersatz identities. For instance they espouse the Palestinian or Tibetan identity or some other distant Third World identity as if it was their own. They spot some lost Indian tribe in the Amazon forest and then, with all their passion, strive to protect and preserve it. But when it comes to defining and preserving their own identity they remain silent. To say aloud “I am proud of being European,” let alone “I am proud of being a Swede,” or “proud of being a Croat,” smacks of nationalism. It must be avoided in modern discourse.

So which is the defining factor of identity today? Here in this place, you and I can talk about primary identity, secondary and tertiary identity. Does our local national identity today, in the epoch of globalism, precede our secondary European identity? I may have many more things in common in terms of my identity here with young Swedish identitarians than with my fellow Croat nationalists. But in a multicultural and multiracial society it changes. I may find common bonds even with my former enemies, the Serbs, who may also have difficulties identifying themselves with non-European residents coming to their shores.

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Harold Myerson’s frank and malevolent Jewish hate-piece in Tuesday’s Washington Post concludes with this paragraph:-

In a year when the Democrats have an African American presidential nominee, the Republicans now more than ever are the white folks’ party, the party that delays the advent of our multicultural future, the party of the American past. Republican conventions have long been bastions of de facto Caucasian exclusivity, but coming right after the diversity of Denver, this year’s GOP convention is almost shockingly—un-Americanly—white.  Long term, this whiteness is a huge problem. This year, however, whiteness is the only way Republicans cling to power. If the election is about the economy, they’re cooked—and their silence this week on nearly all things economic means that they know it.

Now, Myerson is plainly a frustrated man.  He has climbed to the summit of his own personal Mt Nebo, and he can see that longed-for multiracial Promised Land where Jews shall be free.  It’s so close he could almost smell it.  He has come to the conclusion that the first sign of arriving in it ... a sign that only a few days ago looked so darned believable ... would be the election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth President of the United States.

The election of Obama = the consent of white America to submerge itself in “our multicultural future”.

But then along comes a gust of cold Alaskan wind and the too, too solid fear that the white American majority of voters may not consent at all.  Myerson and his kin group will have to wait to fire up their celebrations.

In his frustration he affirms two contradictory facts.  First, “our multicultural future” is going to happen, he is saying.  In terms of numbers it’s just a matter of when.  It cannot be put off through the political process.

And he’s right, of course.  A McCain presidency wouldn’t do anything to change that, quite the reverse.  But there is a crucial distincton to be made here.  The process of political and demographic marginalisation that afflicts white America - which will continue whoever is in the Oval Office - has been imposed without discussion, without consent.  It lacks all legitimacy, therefore, and carries within itself permanently the seeds of revolt.  As long as there is a large body of men and women who call themselves white Americans ... as long as white American gun-owners and church-goers are a fact on the electoral, cultural and racial ground, there is the possibility, even likelihood, that “our multicultural future” will, in some definitive sense, be rejected.  Such a permanent challenge, which is rooted in the existential fact of being a white American, could have highly unpredictable consequences.

So Myerson desperately needs to see that shifting the schwerpunkt to culture (which began as long ago as 1923, with the establishment of the The Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt) has worked.  He needs the undoing of white America to bear its own imprimateur.  It is balm to his inate paranoia.

And so we get fact two: “Long term,” says Myerson, “this whiteness is a huge problem”.

For Jews, he means.  The only way of dealing with it is more of the same ... more Rothstein, more NBA, more porn, more Brangelina, more Bratz, more Myerson, indeed ... more everything.  More white deconstruction, too.  More, more, more.  White Americans as people who are, in any kind of sense, their European selves have to be “solved”.  Finally.