Ordonnance du juge des référés et communiqué de presse du 13 décembre 2004. Président du Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel. La société Eutelsat sommée de faire cesser la diffusion de la chaîne de télévision Al Manar sous 48 heures.
-My reading of this is that Al Manar was indeed peddling hate and is therefore guilty as charged. There are plenty of noble causes to be defended without anybody wasting much time on these people!
-I recall the time when Salman Rushdie published his hate-filled inflammatory book about Islam, how the entire West was sermonising the Muslims on the great virtues of free speech and tolerance. I don’t know why those damn Iranian Mullas had to issue a fatwa; the CIA doesn’t issue fatwas before they act.
We were told that you can’t have laws which protect you from being offended. The only problem we are clearly facing now is, that you can call the Muslims: terrorists, murderers, fascists, thugs, etc., but you just can’t use any of those words to describe the Jews, because we are told that would be anti-semitic.
Silencing a newsnetwork is like murder, because you silence the voices. Al Manar was in fact murdered in “remove your headscarf, girl” France and “freedom-loving” U.S. My Canadian friend while decrying the fact that an Arab would avenge the assassination of Sheikh Yasin in faraway Montreal, conveniently forgets that the Israeli Government and Sharon have openly declared that they have a right to strike anywhere in the world to protect Jews.
-There is absolutely no link between the murder of Theo Van Gogh and the French court decision, or indeed, for that matter, between Van Gogh and ANYTHING else! All this talk about the Van Gogh murder having had an effect in Europe is crap which I have found to my amazement in some US websites and I can only assume that it is neocon war propaganda designed to hoodwink Americans into believing that there is a wave of anti-Muslim feeling sweeping Europe and to conceal the fact (which some mainstream US media outlets are starting to notice) that hostility to Bush’s war is massive over here (opposition running at 75 – 85%!). Clearly, making Europeans hate Muslims would be very convenient, but it isn’t happening!
….Having been a spindoctor myself, my best guess is that some neocon source fed disinformation to a few pliable outlets, who put it out, and now the whole pack is just repeating each other….
Last point: One of the little oddities of this is that the right foot doesn’t seem to know what the even more right foot is doing! One part of the neocon propaganda machine is proclaiming that Islam is incompatible with Western (sic!) civilization and that Europe’s Muslims are at war with their fellow citizens, while another is trying to force the (largely hostile!) EU to admit Turkey and, indeed force the (moderately Islamist) Turkish government to pursue an application it said it was against during the election campaign! They can’t have it both ways! If the Van Gogh spin is true, then Turkey should not be admitted to the EU and if Turkey should be admitted to the EU, then the Van Gogh story is a lie!
-Did I gather correctly from the article that public speech which might incite terrorism is illegal according to the Patriot Act?
It occurred to me that if speech _and_ actions which incite terrorism are illegal under that act then the Federal Government’s terrorism inciting wars in the Near East must also be illegal. Seems like an open and shut case…
-I too live in Canada and I regard the laws against disseminating “hateful†opinions as dangerous infringements of the right of free _expression. The thick end of this sort of wedge can be seen in the attack on Fallujah’s hospital as a source of “incitement.†The ridiculous conditions of the CRTC designed to keep Al Jazeera off Canada’s satellite and cable TV choices and so on…Only a few days ago a trade unionist was imprisoned in Jordan for explaining to a public meeting the role of the United States in his country. His crime: “incitement.†In truth these laws are designed to appease unthinking ‘liberals’ while immensely gratifying those who believe that all dissenting opinion is dangerous. There is not the slightest attempt to pretend that balance is aimed at: is it not incitement to post large signs outside Community Centres proclaiming that Palestine belongs to the club members forever? It makes my blood boil but I grit my teeth and walk by. The wonder is not that there are attacks on targets openly identifying with Israel but that there are so very few of them. One thing is certain if the _expression of opinion becomes dangerous those who hew to “unlawful†opinions will engage in propaganda involving deeds.
It is no accident that the dangers of abridging freedom of speech are well understood in the South where, it might be argued, Israel went to find much of its current policy towards Arabs and some of its ideology too. But not even Mississippi ever thought of Jim Crow roads bypassing Arab villages and reserved for the herrenvolk.
MoPress 