RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272399/tightening-sharia-screws-bruce-bawer

It started out with an isolated case here and there. In 2005, Oriana Fallaci was put on trial in Italy for her anti-Islam book The Force of Reason. In 2010 and again in 2011, politician Geert Wilders was tried in the Netherlands for publicly criticizing Islam. In 2011, the Danish Lars Hedegaard was found guilty by a Danish court of hate speech for having, in the privacy of his own home, made reference to the frequency of incest rape in Muslim communities. (The verdict was later reversed by the Danish Supreme Court.) Also in 2011, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was tried and fined in Austria for having stated, truthfully, that the Prophet Muhammed was a pedophile. The verdict was upheld by two higher Austrian courts and, this year, by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

In the years since those notorious prosecutions were initiated, the net has spread ever wider, and such cases have become routine aspects of Western European life. In 2017 alone, about 77 people, most of them “middle aged and elderly ladies,” were convicted in Sweden of “inciting hate.” Also in 2017, two Norwegian parliamentarians, one of them belonging to the Conservative Party and the other to the Progress Party (which gained power by promising to fight such things) introduced a website at which citizens can, with a couple of keystrokes, report “hate speech” to the police. In Britain, too, members of the public are being urged to report “offensive or insulting comments” to the police, and increasing numbers of otherwise law-abiding British subjects are being imprisoned for, as Reason’s Brendan O’Neill put it, “making racist comments or just cracking tasteless jokes on Twitter.”

You might deduce from all this that Western European governments are already doing a bang-up job of suppressing freedom of speech. But the United Nations doesn’t seem to think so. At a December 6 meeting in Geneva of the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Keiko Ko, the committee’s Rapporteur for Norway, charged that the Norwegian government had not yet done enough to “prevent hate speech” directed at refugees and migrants, to ban so-called “racist organizations,” and to prosecute persons guilty of “racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia.” In response, a Norwegian official attending the meeting assured Ko of Norway’s determination to punish “hate speech” and to develop new ways for the police to “engage those spreading hatred.” Another Norwegian delegate affirmed that “[t]he prosecution of hate crimes, including hate utterances, was a priority in Norway.”

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/france-the-sick-man-of-europe

rance’s ambassador to Poland Pierre Levy has said he was “surprised, even shocked,” by the Polish foreign minister, Jacek Czaputowicz, declaring that “something’s not right” with France, and that was “sad because France is the sick man of Europe, dragging Europe down.” M. Levy went on to make an astonishing statement which only confirmed that the Pole was right.

Talking to the media shortly before Christmas, Mr. Czaputowicz said that the protests in recent weeks and the Strasbourg Christmas market attack by a Muslim reflected France’s overall decrepitude. His reference to the jihadist attack was particularly significant—and irksome to the French ambassador—because it clearly alluded to Poland’s refusal to accept any Muslim refugees from Greece and Italy under EU quotas. That position is shared by the other three members of the Visegrad Group, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.

Levy warned that populism and “fringe forces” threatened European interests. As for the Strasbourg attack, he said that “the investigation into its roots and causes had not yet been completed.” Levy further asserted that most of the perpetrators of past attacks were motivated by the same forces of economic inequality that gave rise to the yellow vest riots: “The attacks were acts of . . . people who, for various reasons, found themselves on the margins [of society], and who adopted the badge of Islamic radicals, even though, in reality, they weren’t radicals at all.”

This is reminiscent of any number of old jokes where, by trying to establish his rationality, the patient confirms that he is utterly insane.

Writing in these pages three years ago, I diagnosed the disorder which is on such blatant display in Pierre Levy’s statement: members of the elite class “treat the jihadist mindset as a pathology that can and should be treated by treating causes external to Islam itself.”

But M. Levy’s task is to represent his country’s government, which in France’s case primarily means President Emanuel Macron. As it happens, Macron is a paradigmatic pastiche—almost a caricature—of Europe’s postmodern, transnational elite. He is an Islamophile open-borders globalist. Two years ago he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that critics of Angela Merkel’s open-door migration policy were guilty of “disgraceful oversimplification.” By allowing over a million aliens into the country, “Merkel and German society as a whole exemplified our common European values. They saved our collective dignity by accepting, accommodating and educating distressed refugees.” He subsequently lampooned Donald Trump’s promise to protect America’s southern border by promising never to build a wall of any kind.