http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/michael-mannheimers-continuing-lawfare-odyssey-in-germany?f=puball
As previously reported at the Middle East Forum’s Legal Project, the independent German journalist and researcher Michael Mannheimer received on February 14, 2012, a 2,500 Euro fine from a local German court (Amtsgericht) under German laws against hate speech (Volksverhetzung) for his remarks condemning Islam as an aggressive and authoritarian belief system.
Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/michael-mannheimers-continuing-lawfare-odyssey-in-germany?f=puball#ixzz25Vg6nWJl
Under Creative Commons License: AttributionSpecifically, the court cited Mannheimer’s April 8, 2011, internet manifesto calling for “resistance” against the German political and media “establishment” on the basis of a charged uncritical acceptance of unassimilated mass Muslim migration to Germany. Now this past August 16, 2012, Mannheimer’s “at the moment coalescing and anonymous legal team” has issued a press release concerning the latest developments in Mannheimer’s appeal of his preliminary conviction under a Strafbefehl or punishment order. The press release is available online in German at the conservative German website Politically Incorrect (PI), the original publisher of Mannheimer’s manifesto. Judging from this document, Mannheimer’s fight for free speech is far from over.
As discussed in the Legal Project article, the press release notes that Mannheimer’s manifesto referenced the natural law right of resistance articulated in Article 20(4) of Germany’s Basic Law or Grundgesetz. According to the press release, the “interpretation” of Mannheimer’s specific call to “[t]ake up arms, when there is no other alternative”
now concerns the judiciary. Did Mannheimer call for violence? Or did he only indicate a basic right that can materialize in the future “when there is no other alternative”, that is to say as the last resort in the fight for the maintenance of a free democratic basic order [freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung or FdGO, a German legal terminus technicus occurring in various passages of the Grundgesetz, such as Article 18].
Aside from this basic dispute, Mannheimer’s defense team finds the court’s Strafbefehl judgment “conspicuous” in a variety of ways. In the first place, the Strafbefehl “neither cites Mannheimer’s statements about Islam nor Islamic religious or political texts. Facts do not therefore necessarily concern the court.” The defense team’s true “shock”, though, came on April 18, 2012, with the arrival of the prosecution’s Mannheimer dossier. “Parts of the Strafbefehl presented themselves as almost literal repetitions of the August 16, 2011, criminal complaint from the Imam Baschschar Masri of the Islamic Center [Islamisches Zentrum] in Düsseldorf.” “Did,” asks the defense team, “the judiciary allow itself to become an extended arm of legal jihad.”