If you protest against Israel and chant about erasing from the planet, you are cool with authorities.
But post a video in Facebook criticizing people putting Palestinian flags up and you get arrested.
Posting this video of himself criticizing migrants in his neighborhood for putting Palestine flags everywhere got this man arrested.
(2/2) pic.twitter.com/EnE0vaO8ZW
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) November 1, 2023
He is lucky. Soon enough an offense like that would have him beheaded right in the middle of Trafalgar Square if things keep going the way they are.
This is why we must fight the expansion of “hate speech” crimes.
.
Speech that is liked, needs no protection. Hate speech is still protected speech – in fact, speech that makes us uncomfortable, or mad, or we just don’t like, must be protected.
The UK is lost.
They started down this path by accepting asylum seekers without regard to their loyalties.
It continued as they cowtowed to islam, and allowed them to kick the police out of neighborhoods, and apologized for islamaphobia every time a muslim commits a crime.
.
The culture of “I’m offended” cost the UK their country. And, it will soon cost the US as well.
It started long before that. The entire culture, for centuries, is based on obedience and conformity. They threw out the rabble rousers, which is how our nation came to be.
Britain does not have a First Amendment. Your right to “free speech” ends where the authorities disagree.
.
It’s like Boris said above: Speech that is liked, favored, and agreed with, needs no protection. Speech that is disliked, disfavored, and disagreed with — up to and including so-called “hate speech” — has the greatest need for protection.
.
“Hate speech” should not be a crime. It should be exposed and challenged in the open — let the haters self-identify and defend their ideas — but it should never be banned. Openly challenging hateful ideas proves them wrong; banning the expression of those ideas proves nothing, and just drives them underground.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” — George Orwell (inscription on the wall behind his statue, Broadcasting House (BBC headquarters), UK.
I guess that was true (to some extent given the absence of a Constitution protecting free speech) in the past, but no longer.
BTW, a written Constitution does not necessarily help. I like to point to the Dutch one, which seems to protect free speech (“subject to everyone’s responsibility under the law” which seems to means “void where prohibited by law”. But in article 120 it says that no court has the authority to judge the constitutionality of any law or treaty — in other words, they have a fancy piece of paper, but it doesn’t actually mean anything because it isn’t allowed to be enforced.
and that’s why we have the 1st Amendment…. sorry fuckers.