Free Speech Death Watch Update: Pastorius of the Infidel Blogger's Alliance, whose show I had the honor being on recently, kindly sends over the bad news, and has the details.
Free Speech Death Watch Update: Pastorius of the Infidel Blogger's Alliance, whose show I had the honor being on recently, kindly sends over the bad news, and has the details.
Uh, make that "inciting Cult hatred" to make this statement correct. He was sentenced unjustly, for his outspokenness against this Islamic Cult of Allah, and hist human rights were violated.
I'd bet in Finland you could cover a Virgin Mary portrait with dung, call it art and have it shown in some museum. But if you tried covering a depiction of Mohammed with dung, it would be a hate crime.
Good God! Finland?
Finland doesn't have free speech?
Dear western nation. it's so thoughtful of you to use tyranny against us to stop us from noticing or taking exception to ... well ... tyranny. Good job you boneheads. Oh! I'm so proud Canada is now a fast learner in these techniques too.
Finnish "leadership" is now fully islamified.
Will the people follow - as sheep to their own slaughter?
"Police commissioner from Keskusrikospoliisi (Central Criminal Police) Timo Laine stated: "The writings should be punishable by law in both countries for us to be able to request assistance. In the United States this kind of writings could be regarded as exercise of free speech."
Give us a little more time, Mr. Laine, we've already bought into the idea that government can punish citizens for so-called "hate crimes" (and our supreme court has confirmed their constitunality), so don't think our first amendment means a great deal any more. It means what ever the ideologues in our government and judiciary want it to mean.
We'll be catching up your enlightend view of rights sooner than you think, and sooner than the American people suspect.
For inciting religious hatred (or disturbing religious worship may be a better translation) the maximum penalty is six months.
Lehto was convicted for displaying rude images of islamic prophet Muhammad and Allah having sexual intercourse with a pig. The pictures were not created by Lehto or his associate but they had found them from another website and included them in their blog.
-from the article
Up is down and down is up.
So now freedom is the right not to be offended.
How did these pictures "disturb religious worship"? When did that ever apply to any other religion?
Why wouldn't any of these courts or countries (including the US) answer such complaints simply:
When and where were you hurt by this man's blog?
If you don't like what's on the television, change the channel. If you don't like this man's blog, don't access it. No one is forcing you to read it.
This is exactly what the aggrieved Muslims charged in the Macleans Magazine / Mark Steyn witch trail in Vancouver this past week, that Macleans Magazine was responsible for comments made about Steyn's published article in the blogs owned in the US and the Brussels Journal.
"Police commissioner from Keskusrikospoliisi (Central Criminal Police) Timo Laine stated: "The writings should be punishable by law in both countries for us to be able to request assistance. In the United States this kind of writings could be regarded as exercise of free speech."
You're darn tootin'! FREE SPEECH!
Anything can be insulted - INCLUDING MOHAMMED!
If someone is not free to voice his opinions (however absurd) and not free to offend the thin-skinned, then there is nothing called freedom left.
Only self-castrated stupidity.
The EU: tip-toeing to Oblivion.
(Don't want to disturb their future, murderous overlords.)
l would suggest some Fin person should bring the Koran to the courts for hate speech. anyone reading the koran is inciting hate speach, and worse inciting violence against Christians,Jews and other non muslims. Yes let them bring up the KKKoran up on charges!!! line up those books, put them on trial!
I'd bet in Finland you could cover a Virgin Mary portrait with dung, call it art and have it shown in some museum. But if you tried covering a depiction of Mohammed with dung, it would be a hate crime.
It would be interesting if some "artist" would try this as a side-by-side experiment.
Just for the record, Gates of Vienna says of Lehto:
"Mr. Lehto is not the most appealing poster child for freedom of expression. Unfortunately, one can’t choose only the most noble and upstanding people as defendants in civil liberties cases. When it comes to the suppression of free speech, authorities are more likely to pick off the stragglers — the unpopular, unpleasant, and unattractive media personalities who inhabit the fringes of public discourse."
Pastorius comment: My experience with Seppo Lehto has led me to believe he is an unrelenting satirist and self-promoter. Nothing I have seen from him gives me the impression that he is a racist, or that he foments violence in his writing or drawing.
If I knew of him to express racist and hateful opinions, I would not have him on the list of contributors to IBA. However, if he does express racist opinions in his writings and drawings, that is no reason to send him to prison.
If, on the other hand, he were to foment violence, then he would deserve to go to prison.
However, I have not been able to find a single news account which accuses him of fomenting violence.
It seems to me that Seppo is being railroaded by a dhimmified government.
"I'd bet in Finland you could cover a Virgin Mary portrait with dung, call it art and have it shown in some museum. But if you tried covering a depiction of Mohammed with dung, it would be a hate crime.
It would be interesting if some "artist" would try this as a side-by-side experiment.
madijihadi,
It would be interesting, but not likely to happen. No museum would take the chance of having their entire collection of art wiped by an aggrieved Muslim doing his duty to Allah.
That's why only Christians get bashed in art galleries. They know that no Christian would destroy a Rembrandt or other great art object in retailation for for being offended.
It seems to me that Seppo is being railroaded by a dhimmified government.
Posted by: pastorius at June 8, 2008 7:17 PM
and
No museum would take the chance of having their entire collection of art wiped by an aggrieved Muslim doing his duty to Allah. --rational
I can't believe how cowardly the West has become. It's both shocking and sad.
If McCain wants to rattle some cages he should come out against hate-speech laws in our country as well as others. He should pound his fist on the table whenever the Supreme Court allows the First Amendment (or any of them for that matter) to be proscribed.
McCain's idea of a union of democracies to bypass the defunct UN has a lot of merit. The number one qualification for membership should be a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech, and it should be in fact as well as in writing.
The United States should adopt a policy of downgrading diplomatic relations and/or imposing trade sanctions on any country that restrains freedom of speech. For starters that would probably be 2/3 of the countries in the world, including some close friends, and many who are definitely not.
Freedom of speech is a far more important liberty to make universal than democracy and its more exotic trappings. Freedom of speech will eventually lead the autocracies to democracy. Absent freedom of speech the autocracies and mullocracies will flourish.
So Finland has become an autocracy; how many more countries in so-called Free Europe are also free-speech deniers? A more interesting question is how many are not? How many have hate-speech laws on their books?
So British Columbia has a hate-speech court? We should downgrade trade with that province. Why should we recognize countries or provinces that deny free speech? And Finland: other countries make cell phones!
The Islamists who are Trojan Horses in our midst (EU, US, and Canada) are taking full advantage of legal means of restraining free speech against Islam. They have the mindless connivance of the Communist-inspired ACLU, which will be speechless themselves when their clients come at them with headcutters. When the Islamists control speech they have won a major battle, if not the war between our civilzations.
European Union is a dictatorship !
Pray for Ireland who may be save us the 12.
Lehto was indeed convicted of insulting religious sensibilities involving two cartoons depicting islamic prophet Muhammad. Lehto had found them somewhere in the internet and copied them to his blog.
However, the length of the sentence has little to do with insulting islam but by the fact that his blogs are defamatory towards individuals and according to Finnish law the maximum penalty for defamation is two years. For insulting religious sensibilities, on the other hand, only has a maximum penalty of six months. Lehto also had previous suspended sentence that he had served (for defamation).
The court ignored completely the fact that nobody in his right mind takes his blogs seriously. Even though the language is rude, sexually explicit and openly racist, Lehto has zero credibility as a writer.
There is also another article about Lehto case:
http://tundratabloid.blogspot.com/2008/06/finnish-court-serves-seppo-lehto-two.html
Gates of Vienna:
"Mr. Lehto is not the most appealing poster child for freedom of expression."
Well neither is GoV. Kind of ironic that someone would quote them for a story about freedom of expression.
I am not surprised. The same is happening here in Canada too. We are losing our freedoms such as our freedom of speech. I blame the creation of these "so-called" human rights commissions and left leaning liberal governments! In the not to distant future, Finland and many western nations including Canada, Britain and the U.S.A could eventually become Islamic nations.
As regards satire, obscenity and offensiveness: all one needs to do is to investigate the hair-raising political and social cartoons of Hogarth and his ilk, or the oeuvre of Jonathan Swift, or, going back further, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, the originals of the medieval dirty stories that underlie some of Chaucer's and Boccaccio's naughtier yarns, and, in the Greco-Roman pagan world, the plays of Aristophanes and the satires of Juvenal. (I am also told that pagan Irish literature - carefully written down and preserved by Irish Christian monkish scribes - contains some fairly astonishing obscenity and scatology).
Then one realizes that our pagan AND Christian ancestors, in the West, produced stuff that makes the efforts of the somewhat-less-than-talented modern attention-seekers and wannabe blasphemers look puerile.
Instead of being arrested and silenced, people like Lehto and Nekschott should be getting a flea put in their ears for their LACK of devotion to their calling, and receiving stern instructions to spend a month or two studying, for example, those authors and artists I have listed - I am sure there are others with which I am less familiar.
If you're going to be vulgar, vitriolic, blasphemous and obscene at least study the masters of the art and get some inspiration!
And when you're ready, there are plenty of worthy objects of your attention, plenty of corrupt and pompous tyrants and evil and ridiculous practices that badly need to be put in the literary/ artistic equivalent of the pillory and showered, metaphorically speaking, with rotten fruit and the contents of chamber-pots.
Let's put it this way: can one begin to imagine how Bosch or Hogarth or Jonathan Swift would have depicted the denizens of the House of Saud? Or the mullahs of Iran? Or the late unlamented Yasser Arafat, and Ayatollah Khomeini who wrote with a perfectly straight face about the proper method for molesting baby girls, and what a man is permitted to do with the sheep that he has, ahem, *used*? (Khomeini's answer? - sell it in the next village).
madijihadi wrote:
I'd bet in Finland you could cover a Virgin Mary portrait with dung, call it art and have it shown in some museum. But if you tried covering a depiction of Mohammed with dung, it would be a hate crime.
It would be interesting if some "artist" would try this as a side-by-side experiment.
................................
Well, part of this has already happened. I believe the above is a reference to Chris Ofili's notorious 1996 "portrait" of the Virgin Mary, painted in part with elephant dung. His coy comments that dung is still used in some parts of Africa to daub designs on huts seemed rather disingenuous. I think that today the average artist has more access to a good tube of raw umber or burnt sienna than a pile of elephant dung.
So what was the reaction in the Christian West? Exactly what one would imagine. Some outraged editorials, upset comments, and picketing of museums and galleries. No violence. No serious threats of violence.
Chris Ofili and Andres Serrano (he of the opus "Piss Christ", featuring a large crucifix suspended in urine) have no trouble upsetting Christians, who are mostly peaceful, and largely believers in free speech, no matter how disgusted they might be by these works.
Not sure I'll hold my breath waiting for "Dung Mohammed" or "Piss be Upon Him", though. The reaction to these works would unlikely be so measured.
Here's the dung virgin:
http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200706/r154646_556754.jpg