Defending the West in Vienna by Srdja Trifkovic • June 3, 2008 • Printer-friendly

A select few who see the peril to which their neighbors are oblivious and who proceed to save their community against overwhelming odds, is a familiar literary and cinematic concept. Earlier this month (May 11-12) I had the pleasure of addressing one such real-life group in the capital of Austria, where some sixty activists from 16 European countries and the United States attended a symposium with the self-explanatory title, Counter-Jihad Vienna 2008: Defending Civil Liberties in Europe.

The event, sponsored by Mission Europa Netzwerk Karl Martell and predictably ignored by the media, was part conference—with papers presented and discussed—and part hands-on workshop. Its immediate impact may seem limited, but the same could be said of the early days of each and every major political movement in history.

My keynote speech on the first day focused on debunking the new-fangled Thought Crime of “Islamophobia,” diagnosing the sources of current Western weakness, and recommending some practical remedies. (The address is also available in an elegant German translation.)

The second day of the conference focused on a series of reports—some frightening, others almost surreal—on the erosion of free speech in Europe. The forthcoming implementation of the Treaty of Lisbon (the failed EU Constitution under another name) opens countless possibilities for political repression. The European Commission’s “Framework Decision” provides an idea of what the new regime will be like for member states:

As a follow-up to Joint Action 98/443/JHA, this proposal provides for the approximation of the laws and regulations of the Member States regarding offences involving racism and xenophobia. Racist and xenophobic behaviour must constitute an offence in all Member States and be punishable by effective, proportionate and dissuasive penalties.

This framework decision will apply to all offenses committed within the territory of the EU and by any national of a Member State or for the benefit of a legal person established in a Member State. The definition of “racism and xenophobia” is constantly expanding, and increasingly includes practically all forms of criticism of Islam. The looming horror of the Lisbon Treaty notwithstanding, the repression of free speech and other civil liberties is already a fact in many European countries, as illustrated by the conference participants from those countries.

Denmark has more freedom of speech than any other country in Europe, yet the former leader of the Fremskridspartiet, Mogens Glistrup, was jailed for 20 days for saying, “Muslims multiply like rats, and when they are plentiful enough, they will kill us.”

In Finland, a blogger known as Tomashot, who operated an anti-immigration website, was fined 825 euros ($1,300) and ordered to close down the site. The country’s criminal code (section 11, # 8) states that a person “who spreads statements . . . where a certain race, national, ethnic or religious group is threatened, defamed or insulted, shall be sentenced for ethnic agitation to a fine or to imprisonment of up to two years.” The authorities are currently working to increase the power of the “Anti-Discrimination Board” (Syrjintälautakunta) and to establish a “Super Ombudsman” to oversee all discrimination cases; he would also be able to penalize alleged offenders without a trial. In addition, the authorities intend to make the internet service providers responsible for the “racist” content posted by their clients. But as a Finnish participant explained,

No legal repression is needed when talking about certain things in a certain way is just not done. The guardians of the public sphere take care of that, even if someone is naive enough to try. In the academia, write a research plan about studying “the challenges to democracy posed by changes in the cultural landscape due to the rise of fundamentalism and extremism”—and you won’t get any funding from the state monopoly institutions. Ask for help to study “our prejudices against the so-called terrorists” or “the implicitly racist aspects of the gender equality discourse in the Third World”—and your funding is guaranteed. This happens everywhere, but Finland is specific because we don’t have second or third options. So what remains to the not-PC-enough folks is the blogosphere—and that’s worrying the guardians, and they are trying to do something about it.

Reports from Germany and Switzerland (the latter half-way through the “Year of Intercultural Dialogue”) included the unbelievable case of a senior state persecutor in Berlin who was fired because of criticizing Islam. Roman Reusch, a determined prosecutor of crimes often committed by Muslim youngsters, was fired after a vilification campaign by Muslim activists and left wing politicians. His cardinal sin was to state some facts about the crimes committed by young immigrants in media interviews. At the same time, at the Frankfurt district court a German judge rejected the “hardship divorce application” of a woman regularly beaten by her husband because both partners came from the “Moroccan cultural background.”

In Sweden the rapporteur opened by noting the “overwhelming social consensus which inhibits the airing of dissident opinions: ostracism, loss of employment, and other unofficial sanctions against unorthodox views act as substitutes for judicial action.” Extra-governmental groups such as Antifa (Antifascistisk Aktion) act as enforcers of that consensus by threatening and committing violence against prominent individuals who fail to comply with the politically correct consensus. The anti-immigrant party Sverigedemokraterna, thus faces persistent harassment. The Swedish post office refused to deliver its newspaper in Svedala near Malmö. The country’s trade union representatives have demanded that all known members of the party should be denied trade union membership—which in Sweden is tantamount to virtual impossibility of obtaining employment in the public sector and most skilled trades.

There are also growing examples of legal repression. Dahn Pettersson, an activist of the Alliance Party, was convicted last year of “incitement/agitation against an ethnic group” and sentenced to pay dagsböter, “fines in proportion to his daily income,” totaling $2,600. He was indicted for writing a petition to the municipal council in which he argued that the arrival of large numbers of Kosovo Albanian immigrants to Sweden had led to an increase of heroin smuggling.

The suppression of free speech appears to have gone further in Great Britain than in any other EU country, however. As Paul Weston (one of the participants comfortable with having his name made public) reported, the problem can be traced back to 1984, when Ray Honeyford, a headmaster, wrote an article for The Salisbury Review in which he questioned the values of multiculturalism. Honeyford argued that minority children were being badly let down educationally, and that their future life chances were being sacrificed for Leftist political gain. He was duly chased from his job amid accusations of racism, in an orchestrated campaign that allied the Left with various ethnic-minority spokesmen. Soon thereafter came the Public Order Act 1986, Section 17 of which clarified racial hatred as being “hatred against a group of persons in Great Britain defined by reference to colour, race, nationality or ethnic or national origins.” Section 18 clarified racist behaviour as “the use of words or behaviour or display of written material intended or likely to stir up racial hatred.” The maximum penalty under this act was two years’ imprisonment.

In 1999 Sir William Macpherson published the seminal Macpherson Report which, in addition to labelling the police as “institutionally racist,” gave birth to eighteen words which have been used by the British authorities to clamp down on any speech critical of any minority group. The exact wording is as follows: “A racial incident is one that is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.”

In 1998 the Crime And Disorder Act 1998 extended the maximum jail sentence over and above normal sentence times if racial aggravation was used in crimes up to and including murder. In 2006 the Racial And Religious Hatred Act 2006 was passed which classified religious hatred along the same lines as racial hatred and extended the jail sentence for transgression to seven years. That same year also saw the introduction of the Equality Act 2006, which replaced the Commission For Racial Equality, the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Disability Rights Commission with a single entity, the Commission For Equality And Human Rights or CEHR. In 2007 the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill was passed, with an amendment that bought “homophobic” hate crime in line with the definition of racial or religious hatred, including a maximum jail sentence of seven years. In addition to the above legislation, Britain has also seen the introduction of the Terrorism Act 2000 and the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, both of which have been used to suppress freedom of speech in the UK.

Paul Weston pointed out that “Ray Honeyford was fortunate that none of the above legislation was in place when he transgressed the racial thought police in 1984”—but other Britons have not been so lucky.

• Robin Page, a television presenter, was arrested in 2002 for inciting racial hatred when he stated that people living in the countryside who supported fox hunting should be granted the same rights as blacks, gays and lesbians.
• Fourteen-year-old schoolgirl Codie Stott was arrested over a “racial incident” in 2006, after she asked her teacher to be moved to a different discussion group where her fellow pupils actually spoke English. She was released without charge but only after spending several hours in the cells where her DNA was taken.
• One of Britain’s top lawyers Robert Kilroy-Silk was not prosecuted for inciting racial hatred after he referred to Muslims as suicide bombers and limb amputators in a 2004 Independent newspaper article, but he did lose his job as a television show host.
• The blogger Lionheart has been arrested and bailed on charges of inciting racial/religious hatred for detailing the activities of Muslim criminals in the Luton area.
• A retired couple, Joe and Helen Roberts were warned by Lancashire police in 2005 that their request to display Christian literature alongside homosexual rights pamphlets at their local council offices was discriminatory and homophobic. (Lancashire police would have to wait a couple of years for the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill 2007 to be enacted in order to prosecute them.)
• The use of anti-terrorism legislation has now spread to parents who lie about their post code in order to obtain a place at a desirable school for their children.
• Anti-terrorism laws were invoked when Walter Wolfgang was detained by police in 2005. His crime: attempted re-entry to the Labour Party Conference, from which he had been physically ejected for heckling a speaker over the war in Iraq.

“This is the culture war in all its glory,” concludes Paul Weston. The myriad laws passed in recent years are simply there in order to stifle discussion, let alone dissent, in the ongoing war against indigenous European, Christian, heterosexual families. All animals are equal, says he,

but some are more equal than others. Nowhere is this maxim more apparent than the approach by the police to areas where Islam is at fault and the indigenous European innocent. No imams exposed in Channel 4’s Undercover Mosques program have been prosecuted under any of the legislation outlined above. In fact, the West-Midlands police force attempted to prosecute Channel 4 themselves for inciting racial-religious hatred by dint of their sheer temerity in broadcasting footage of Muslims calling for the overthrow of the West and the murder of homosexuals and the infidel kuffir.

Before the Lisbon Treaty is ratified early next year, the Europeans would be well advised to ponder a quote from Terry Davis, Secretary general of the Council of Europe, in the aftermath of the crackdown against the Vlaams Belang in Brussels last September:

It is very important to remember that the freedom of assembly and expression can be restricted to protect the rights and freedoms of others, including the freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This applies to everyone in Europe including the millions of Europeans of Islamic faith, who were the main target of today’s shameful display of bigotry and intolerance.

As I said at the end of my Vienna address, this is insane—and it is up to the millions of normal Europeans and their American cousins to stop such madness. The traitor class wants them to share its death wish, to self-annihilate as people with a historical memory and a cultural identity, and to make room for the post-human, monistic Utopia spearheaded by the jihadist fifth column. This crime can and must be stopped. The founders of the United States overthrew the colonial government for offenses far lighter than those of which the Euro-traitor class is guilty.

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