ANOTHER CLUE TO BRITAIN’S FUTURE UNDER EUROPEAN UNION
By Paul Merkley.
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Discussion continues to rage around Britain’s decision to withdraw from the European Union.
So far as I can tell, almost all of this discussion revolves around what writers imagine will be the economic consequences of withdrawal. These will of course be large, but, I expect, manageable—certainly worth the price of achieving greater sovereignty over Britain’s affairs in general.
Still, I suspect that most Brits voted to leave Europe because they had concluded that a great gulf had developed between Europe’s values and purposes and what Brits imagine are their own values – what they are today, and what they have been in the past. The instinct of most was that Britain had to recover its former distance from Europe and henceforth follow its own purposes.
In colorful illustration of this existential imperative we need look no further than to a decision issued just a few days ago by the unelected members of the European Court of Human Rights. (Soren Kern, “European Human Rights Court Backs Blasphemy Law,” October 29 [www.gatestoneinstitute.org/1302; “A Black Day for Austria,” ibid. December 26, 2011.]
The immediate object of this decision was something that happened in the courts of Austria, but the decision itself is immediately applicable to all of Europe. In the opinion of this body, Austria has violated the human rights provisions laid out in protocols of the European Convention on Human Rights. by failing to prevent Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, from dishonoring Prophet Muhammad. The offending speech was an offhand remark by Mrs. Sabaditsch-Wolff during a three-part seminar on Islam held in in November, 2009, in Austria, under auspices of a body called “the Freedom Education Institute,” to the effect that Mohammed was a pedophile because he married his wife Aisha when she was just six or seven years old. Mrs. Sabaditsch-Wolff’s actual words were: “A 56-year-old and a six-year-old? What do we call it, if it is not pedophilia?”
The ruling establishes a dangerous legal precedent, in that it requires European states – and this would include the United Kingdom — to curtail the right to free speech if such speech is deemed to be offensive to Muslims and thus might pose “a threat to religious peace.” In effect, the decision would establish in the law-codes of Western nations the full force of the Islamic blasphemy code.
The case began when Mrs. Sabaditsch-Wolff was convicted of “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion” according to Section 188 of the Austrian Criminal Code. Her subsequent appeal to the Provincial Appellate Court in Vienna was rejected on December 20, 2011, as was her subsequent appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. The decision at the ECHR was that states could restrict the free speech rights enshrined in Article 10 of the Convention if such speech was “likely to incite religious intolerance” and was “likely to disturb the religious peace in their country… [or was] capable of arousing justified indignation.”
In making this decision, the European court has in effect imposed an Islamic code about blasphemy upon the people of Europe and has done so for the sake of preserving religious peace in Austria. Their view was that “it was not compatible with Article 10 of the Convention to pack incriminating statements into the wrapping of an otherwise acceptable expression of opinion and claim that this rendered passable those statements exceeding the permissible limits of freedom of expression.”
Did you get that? You are deluding yourself if you imagine that you did. This is a clear case of smothering failed logic under impenetrable syntax — as ever, the clue to a bad conscience.
Still, it is clear that this decision now imposes on European governments – including that of the U.K. – the duty of curtailing the right to free speech of their citizens, if such speech is deemed to be offensive to Muslims. Such an obligation might not stop the President of France in his tracks; and we can be quite sure that it will not spoil Justin Trudeau’s day when, not if, the same matter comes to be deliberated by our courts.
The American tradition, following the British tradition, does of course acknowledge limits to the right of freedom of speech. These are best summarized in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s proscription of the right to cry fire in a crowded theatre. But only good sense, not jurisprudence, is needed for understanding these matters. The bottom line here is that proscription of free speech along the lines mandated by the European Court is plainly incompatible with what every grown up recognizes as my right to criticize other persons and/or the institutions which they embrace—as I am doing here.
The story behind this story is the campaign waged over recent decades by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of 57 Muslim countries, which argues for entrenchment of the Islamic view-of-things at the United Nations. OIC also claims to speak for the interests of the exponentially-growing Muslim community in Europe and in North America.
Hard to grasp for us born-Westerners is the reality that these immigrant communities in our midst for which OIC claims to speak and who are made up of persons in flight from incompetent or oppressive Muslim governments in their homelands are telling us with apparent enthusiasm that they want to see established here, in Europe and in North America, for themselves and their children and their children’s children, equivalently oppressive Islamic institutions.
The cornerstone of the Muslim campaign against people like Mrs. Sabaditsch-Wolff who stumble into negative expression about the Prophet is an appeal to UNHRC Resolution 16/18, to which Canada like other Western nations subscribes, and which requires our governments to combat “intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatisation of religion and belief.”
It never occurs to Roman Catholic or Protestant or Jewish organizations to fight this same fight under their own banners — even though ear-splitting mockery and abuse against Christian and Jewish faith and practice rings out all day long in lecture halls in every university and college in the West, and likewise finds unchecked expression in academic bodies and academic journals
If Britain intends to stay in the European Union, she will have to promptly adjust her ancient vision of the rights and duties of citizens so as to conform to the utterly alien view of the same which has always obtained in the Islamic world. This is, indeed, what Europe is doing and doing gladly, as must be concluded from the judgments of the European courts with respect to the challenge to the peace caused by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff.
All by itself, this prospect should be enough to validate the wisdom of the British public in the Brexit plebiscite of 2016, when they rejected by democratic ballot the project of total immersion of Britain’s identity in Europe’s
There should be no need for British libertarians to crank up a mighty public campaign against the creeping accommodations of British intellectuals to the clamoring of Muslim activists. All that is needed now is for British politicians to carry through on their commitments to lead the British people out of the European Union.
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The Bayview Review 