Danish parties want to legalize hate speech

From Politiken:

The Danish Peoples Party wants the Danish government to scrap a law that prohibits racist statements in public, and the ruling Liberals are not saying no. This is after DPP member of parliament Jesper Langballe had his special immunity from prosecution lifted, paving the way for charges against him after allegedly racist comments. The DPP wants to ensure this does not happen again. Liberal spokesman Kim Andersen says his party is willing to discuss the matter with the DPP.

The DPP is angry that politicians elected for their views are not allowed to publicly state these views. And Kim Andersen sympathizes with the DPP over the case against Langballe. "I am very much in agreement that there should be extremely broad tolerance for what members of parliament are allowed to say. There should be very few limitations on what a politician can say in a transparent society such as ours."

Prosecutors want to charge Langballe for comments he wrote in a debate when he claimed that muslim fathers routinely murder their daughters and turn a blind eye when their daughters are raped by their uncles. Andersen doesn't wish to comment on whether Langballe's comments should be punishable. "There obviously needs to be decency. We shouldn't say things just to harass individual of a religion or race. But a parliamentarian deserves very wide boundaries." The Liberal Alliance is also in favor of scrapping the law. The Liberals have yet to discuss the matter internally, but Kim Andersen hopes that there won't be further incidents such as this one.

"Personally, I don't like it when we in a democracy prosecute each other for things we say. It doesn't fit in with our culture. It is a last-ditch solution to be used seldomly, and only in serious cases".

Thanks for setting the record straight, Kim Andersen. You helped get a whole bunch of important things out in the open. Like, speak out emphatically for the bigot, and mumble under your breathe when asked about bigotry. You clearly come out swinging for one, and are all kinds of skittish when dealing with the other. The way Kim Andersen puts it, you'd think bigotry was a victimless crime. The EU and immigrants have been complaining for years that Denmark drags its feet when it comes to protecting minorities, and now we get to see how. First they give you a condescending scoff when you call it "hate speech" and refer you to the more positive term "transparent political view". And then they insist that they're still descent people and that they have great faith in their ability to behave properly. So why have laws at all?

Denmark has minimal legislation to protect against discrimination; prosecutors usually opt to interpret the accused's statements as "personal views", the standards for proving that you have been victimized is extremely high, and formal charges are rare. In cases which do go to court, convictions are rare. The result is that minorities simply learn to live with people like Jesper Langballe - live with, but not accept. You learn quickly that Denmark is full of Jespers.

I approve of free speech, even for haters, but I also think Denmark is being a bit too fast out of the block in crowing about its achievements. Free speech, like democracy, is a function of a civil and stable society. If a section of that society is routinely the victim of prejudice, there is no civility: your society falls out of balance, and the symptoms are a lack of trust, an unwillingness to vote, mass emigration etc., all of which are already clearly evident here. Something has to give : either Denmark admits that it cannot rid itself of bigotry and that minorities must all leave so that the society can return to harmony , or it accepts that bigotry is wrong and its own people need to be re-educated, forcefully if needed. But Denmark cannot have it both ways, and this is exactly what it wants. It doesn't want to have to deal with the sticky issue of reining in Jesper Langballe, but it also wants the world to see it as a model society devoid of people like ... Jesper Langballe. And right now, Denmark gets to have it both ways because it lies, a big bald-faced lie. A page on the government's immigrant portal doles out the usual saccharine.

In November 2003, the Government adopted an action plan for the promotion of equal treatment and diversity and to combat racism.

The initiatives in this action plan are intended to ensure that there is room for diversity in Denmark and that we learn to benefit from it. The plan includes financial support for dialogue meetings on ethnic minority participation in political activities, and local events that focus on diversity.

Just how do they plan on delivering all this when they repeal the laws that combat racism? Denmark has reduced "equality" and "diversity" to meaningless buzzwords - if combating racism is a Dilbert cartoon, Denmark would be the pointy-haired manager guy.

Danish politicians seem to be of the school of thought that free speech spontaneously fixes all other problems, and that being allowed to say ignorant things unchecked will somehow cause intelligence to spontaneously break out. In their hubris, they are either unable or unwilling to distinguish between free speech and malicious untruths. The real controversy here is not that Jesper Langballe said something offensive, it's that he said something that has no factual basis whatsoever. As other observers have noted, Langballe's views on muslims are not far removed from stereotypes of jews, such as the once-widespread belief that jews kidnapped and murdered christian boys during Passover. The purpose is the same : portray a group of outsiders as inhuman and barbaric, bereft of something as simple as compassion for children.

There are no credible studies to show that muslim fathers murder or allow their daughters to be raped - if we're going to start down that road, we may as well add that white Danes from Jutland are statistically most likely to sell their underage children to pedophile rings. But no one would dream of saying that, because then you'd be offending actual Danes, lots of them, and then they stop calling it free speech. For what it's worth, I think that Jesper Langballe and anyone else for that matter should be allowed to state The Facts, unabridged, no matter how unpleasant, as loudly and as frequently as they want. And by facts I mean hard and independently-corroborated data. If Langballe wants to spin harmless yarns about aliens or buried pirate treasure, that's fine - and it's not like his supporters are smart enough to sit up and notice anyway. But when he starts combining myth and bigotry, we have a problem, and that dear reader is why we needs laws, because unscrupulous leaders have a tendency to mobilize the gullible, and the gullible then have a tendency to ambulate in large groups and put pitchforks though the unfairly-maligned. Kim Andersen says that politicians deserve extra room to maneuver - well I say the exact opposite. Politicians, being in a position of responsibility, need to be kept on an extra-tight leash; their statements should be subjected to extra scrutiny and higher standards of credibility, and should it become evident that they are willfully misleading their public, they should be turned into ex-politicians. This is what has become a trademark of the Liberals and their voters; an utter indifference to the DPP's constant stream of warped facts, coupled with a smug arrogance that they can solve any moral dilemma merely by redefining all the words in the argument.

Of course the DPP are against the current law - it's their political lifeblood that's at stake here. They come right out and admit that people vote for Langballe because they want to hear him speak nasty. This is a party that built itself out of nothing in the space of just a few years by cornering the scared-and-irrational vote, achieved almost entirely by playing on ethnic, racial and religious prejudice. But being scared is a bit like pornography : you build up a tolerance to it, and then you need something harder to get you going again. The DPP's rhetoric has gotten increasingly tougher, all the time edging closer to the boundaries of what is legally permissible under current legislation. Finally, come 2010, the DPP is out of tricks and the Liberals are acting like they'd rather help out a reliable political ally than hang on to a piece of token legislation they passed for PR purposes.

Here's something else worth considering. Denmark's homegrown interpretation of "freedom" has greatly weakened the international standing of free speech, because here, free speech is frequently used as convenient cover for hatred against muslims, and through Kurt Westergaard's cartoons, Denmark hijacked the whole western world and appointed themselves

the de facto standard bearer. Which means every time we sit down at a table to talk freedom with islamic countries, Denmark's attitude towards muslims, the one defined by Danish leaders like Kim Andersen and Jesper Langballe, sits with us at the table. Danish attitudes are to free speech what Dick Cheney's waterboarding was to the Geneva Convention: fudged definitions, ulterior motives, and ultimately, the undermining of everyone's standards.