MY VERSION - Commentary of November 30, 2005

Pernicious "hate crime" laws and the death of civil liberties

When Truth Is No Defense

Not so long ago, some doomsayers were predicting that the onrushing tide of immigrants into the United States eventually would make moot the subject of civil liberties. After all, what would people nurtured in foreign lands, where there is not even a hint of those citizen's "rights," which Americans claim as their natural heritage, know about "We the People" ordaining and establishing a Constitution?

As the "replacement" population grew in numbers and native-born Americans died out, according to this theory, the Founders' legacy of a constitutional republic would drift into the distant past, to be replaced by an amalgam of decrees, statutes and edicts stemming from the cultures of people not accustomed to participatory democracy. Soon, there would be no protestations against government abuse of due process or any other so-called constitutional guarantees, because few people would know or care about such vagaries.

As it turns out, we did not have to wait for that replacement population. It's been here all along. Remember those man-in-the-street interviews, where a cross-section of Americans were read excerpts from an unnamed, anonymous document--sometimes from the Declaration of Independence and sometimes from the Constitution--and then asked for their opinions of those excerpts? The responses were often shocking, with the citations that were read being labeled "un-American" or even "communist" in nature.

That was a sign of trouble. I remember another sign that was more personal. One day, in conversation with a friend who had always deemed himself a "conservative," we spoke of the legal actions of a mutual acquaintance. "Oh," my friend exclaimed indignantly, "he's hiding behind the Constitution!" Surprised by this statement, I asked what the heck did he think the Constitution was for? "It's exactly for that purpose," I insisted, "it's what we're supposed to hide behind. It's all we've got for protection." What my friend saw as a cop-out to avoid punishment by the state, I viewed as the blessing of this Republic.

So, why was I surprised and even pained upon learning of the José Padilla case? I should have been prepared for the total indifference on the part of most Americans to the news that an American citizen was plucked off the street and held for 3-1/2 years, with no charges brought against him, while denied contact with an attorney, incarcerated by a system that literally threw away the key. It was everything we had been taught to despise about the Soviet Union--the "disappeared" prisoner whose location no one knew, who could be exterminated under any pretext.

Nor should it have been surprising to witness the docile acceptance over the years, in one municipality and state after another, of "hate crime" laws, whereby some citizens--depending on their ethnicity or gender--are considered more important, when victimized in a crime, than other citizens. We have written much on this site about the danger to civil liberties of "hate crime" legislation. [See here and here. ] It is hard to understand how calls for enhanced penalties for certain actions against members of particular groups, based on the thoughts in someone's head, can be entertained in a land so recently embroiled in struggles for "equal rights."

No thanks to the apathetic American, we just escaped the passage of a federal "hate crime" bill, which would do to us that which such legislation is currently doing to Canada, Australia, England, France, Germany, Austria, Denmark, and other members of that illustrious European Union. Under the umbrella of their "hate crime" laws, the governments of these countries are proudly prosecuting and imprisoning writers and researchers for expressing views on historical or current subjects (eg., immigration) that are contrary to some fixed "official" proclamation.

Picture a special deference being granted to blacks in this country, whereby no one could research or report on slave history outside of an "official" text. Imagine a law that makes it illegal to write articles or books about the thousands of freed blacks who owned and traded in slaves for the same reasons and purposes as did white slave holders. Since such information, if disseminated widely, might "hurt" the feelings of particular blacks, and could be perceived as an "attack" on all blacks, a writer who proceeded to publish such data would be charged with "inciting racial hatred" (a common charge made in Europe), and thereby arrested and put on trial.

This is the kind of scenario now being played out in Europe and other places. It is through the application of various kinds of "hate crime" laws that some of the greatest injustices are being perpetrated in the name of justice. The existence of such laws in traditionally authoritarian societies, like Turkey, for example, would be expected and certainly not surprising. Today, in that country, a prominent novelist, Orhan Pamuk, is on trial for having mentioned in writing that which the government has decreed a taboo subject--the murder of millions of Armenians by Turks in 1915.

In Australia, France, Germany, Austria and Denmark, it is taboo for anyone, historian or otherwise, to offer historical evidence that suggests that fewer Jewish victims died during World War II than the "official" figures cited by "official" sources. It is also illegal to question the methods by which these victims might have died. Whereas in Turkey it is illegal to mention any numbers of dead Armenians, if the killers cited are Turks, in the European countries, one has to stick to the "correct" set of figures, if the victims cited are Jews.

If convicted of "insulting Turkish identity" (yes, that's the "crime"), Pamuk faces a jail term of six months to three years. There was a time when a Westerner would hear such news and scoff, "Well, what do you expect of Turkey?" Those were the days when Americans derided the Soviet Union for its laws that punished citizens who dared to "criticize the state."

Today, when we travel northward from Turkey to Austria, we find similar atrocities in progress. Here, historian David Irving, having dropped in to speak at a conference, was arrested and jailed for the ideas contained in his many books that he has written over 30 years--texts once considered perfectly bona fide and used in classes by major academic institutions. Now, however, singled out by the world's Anti-Racist Watchdogs as an "extremist" (a label not difficult to earn these days), Irving, an Englishman, is declassé all over Europe. He faces up to 10 years in an Austrian prison for disseminating his views on historical events of World War II.

In France, a member of the European Parliament, Bruno Gollnisch, has been indicted and charged with "denying crimes against humanity" (another of the many cute euphemisms coined by the Watchdogs). Not only has Gollnisch, who is also a professor at the University of Lyon, questioned details of the sacred canon of the "official history" of events that took place during World War II, he publicly proclaimed that all historians should have the right to do research without fearing loss of their civil liberties. A criminal trial date has not yet been set.

In Germany, Ernst Zundel, persecuted for years in Canada, then betrayed by American authorities who tricked him back to the land of the North, where he was extradited to Germany, to be punished for the same "crimes" as Irving, has been sitting in a jail cell in Mannheim prison since March. Under pressure from the Watchdogs, Canada began harassing Zundel as far back as 1985, when he first published his historical research in journals and pamphlets, and was charged with the crime of "publishing false news."

Throughout Europe, it is illegal for bookstores to carry the publications of those accused of writing on certain subjects, who express views contrary to state teachings. A citizen is on safe turf when he asks, "Who really wrote Shakespeare's plays?" But he risks a possible decade in prison for asking, "Who really wrote Anne Frank's diary?" You can safely set about researching the Shakespeare question (as many do), but woe to him who presumes to apply historical inquiry to the latter question. Refusing to accept the government dogma on statistics and other historical details can get one charged with the crime of "Defaming the memory of the dead."

The stories of criminal arrests for engaging in nothing more than writing or speaking are so numerous in the civilized West that one soon loses track of them. These cases should be important to Americans, not only to add to our knowledge of how easily Western man devolves backwards towards repression and tyranny, but also because we are faced with the kind of legislation that might some day be used to prosecute and imprison our own American versions of a Pamuk or Irving or Gollnisch.

We should be disabused of such sentimental maxims as, "Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again." Don't count on it. In Canada, the judiciary comes right out and says it: "The truth is no defense." In all these cases mentioned above, the people charged with harboring different views on the history of certain events are eager to show the evidence they've discovered through research, but are not allowed to present said evidence at their trials, because they have already "offended society" by presuming that the official dogma is false. The truth is no defense, they are told. Did you think you'd live to witness such convoluted Soviet-ese boldly applied against free citizens in the "freedom-loving" West?

Here in the United States, the framers of the "hate crime" law that recently failed in Congress--the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act of 2005--first had to justify their need for such a bill with the colossal lie that existing laws are not adequate to deal with criminal violations. From there they moved into that strange realm of newspeak, which makes it possible to justify punishment of an individual on the basis, not of what he has done to another individual, but the damage he supposedly causes to the ethnic or gender group with which his victim is affiliated:

Sec. 2(5) -- The prominent characteristic of a violent crime motivated by bias is that it devastates not just the actual victim . . . but frequently savages the community sharing the traits that caused the victim to be selected.

Clever wording, isn't it? So, if I'm selected out and hit over the head by someone who is not black, I can claim that ALL blacks are "savaged" by that act, and can expect the perpetrator to serve a longer prison term than he would if he hit a member of his own group over the head.

From there, it is a quick skip to appropriating the very right to define just what constitutes a "crime" against a federally protected group. Will it only be limited to actual physical violence? If so, then why the need for new laws? Since every state in the union has more than enough laws to deal with felonious crimes, there is no need to keep intruding newer, possibly sneakier laws, that might very well have broader designs and intentions. Are devious laws being proposed today, so their reach can be extended tomorrow? Will a "racist" or "anti-Semitic" act be confined to actual physical harm to person or property, or will our society head down that slippery slope already being trod in Europe and other countries, where intangible "injury" to the sensibilities of a group can be deemed to stem from "hateful" words on paper or "hostile" speech?

These are important questions primarily due to the principal promoter of all the "hate crime" statutes in over 40 states in the USA, as well as the laws abroad--that is, B'nai Brith's Anti-Defamation League director, Abraham Foxman. It is Foxman who has drafted and in some cases actually written the final copy for many of these laws that end up as the products of legislative bodies. It is Foxman who brags about the unprecedented role he plays in the formulation of such statutes. And it is Foxman's ADL that fiercely supports the grave injustices now being inflicted by these laws upon people who merely write and speak in places like France, Germany, Australia, et. al.

One single federal statute in this country would not only keep at bay any challenges to the credibility of the various states' "hate crime" laws, but could later be amended to include additional prohibitions, as has happened abroad. With a single national law, one could better target for punishment a scholar like Professor Norman Finkelstein, whose writings and speeches expose the corruption and sheer hucksterism of organizations like the ADL that operate by intimidating the public and manipulating the legal system. As things now stand in the U.S., Finkelstein's books cannot yet be declared illegal, but bookstore owners can be bullied into keeping his materials off their shelves, while the editors of mainstream newspapers and magazines, in concern for their advertising dollars, can be terrified from reviewing his works.

And, needless to say, under a federal law, any other bothersome types, who are perceived to deviate from the doctrines and party lines promoted by the Watchdogs, could be treated in the same fashion as dissenters abroad. Some observers believe that the reason it has taken so long to institute a national "hate crime" law in the U.S. is due to the Founders' troublesome First Amendment, a hindrance not encountered in other, less fortunate societies.

In an extensive report on self-appointed "Anti-Racist Watchdog" groups, in the 1990s, researcher Laird Wilcox turned his attention to the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. He demonstrated how the undermining of constitutional rights by these authoritarian groups (or "cults") override any benefits to society. About the 1960s, he writes, "What I did not realize at that time was the peculiar attraction of 'anti-racism' as an ideology that could explain all things and justify almost any course of action. As specific problems are solved new problems are defined and created to keep the movement alive. . . A great many sins disappear when one becomes an 'anti-racist' activist." Within these professional Anti-Racist groups, he saw in their policies and approach to dissent "a callous disregard for the civil liberties of their opponents and critics." Wilcox asks, "Who's watching the Watchdogs?"

In 2004, the New York Press, a popular weekly newspaper in the city, named Abe Foxman among the "50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers," for a plethora of reasons: for using his organization to spy on Americans (for which the ADL had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines in the 1990s), for succeeding in manipulating a "cowed media," for being "at the highest echelons of U.S. thought crime enforcement," where he "smears critics with allegations of anti-Semitism," for working to block the publication of Professor Finkelstein's books, and for being a "superhumanly self-righteous gasbag."

It is clear that a major motive of the advocates of a federal "hate crime" law is to empower the federal government to supersede states' verdicts in cases. One Section of the recently failed law actually gives the feds the ability to set aside a state's decisions in cases, if it appears that "the State . . . does not intend to exercise jurisdiction." This means, if a state rejects the use of "bias" or "hate" in prosecuting cases, the federal government can override such decisions. The feds also are given such power, if the verdict or sentence in a case "obtained pursuant to State charges [is] left demonstratively unvindicated." And just which mob of lobbyists gets to decide on the "correct" form that vindication should take?

The good news is that the "hate crime" bill was defeated this year in Congress. The bad news is that this bill eventually will be passed, if not in the forthcoming session, then in the next. A major reason to expect future passage, is that the bill's clever designers added a cash inducement to the states' policing agencies. The U.S. Attorney General promises to award hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to officials of such agencies, whenever they claim to need financial assistance to allay "the extraordinary expenses associated with the investigation and prosecution of hate crimes." This law gives power to the police, not the courts, to determine what constitutes a "hate crime." Want to take bets on the likelihood of crimes labeled by the police as "hate" doubling or even tripling over a very brief period of time?

Elizabeth Wright
email: editor@issues-views.com
http://www.issues-views.com

One more thought . . .

"Law and order conservatives" wrongly believe that the justice system is run by liberal judges who turn the criminals loose. In actual fact, the system is so loaded against a defendant that very few people, including the totally innocent, dare to risk a trial. Almost all (95-97%) felony indictments are settled by a coerced plea. By withholding exculpatory evidence, suborning perjury, fabricating evidence, and lying to jurors, prosecutors have made the risks of a trial too great even for the innocent. Consequently, the prosecutors’ cases and police evidence are almost never tested in court. Defendants are simply intimidated into self-incrimination rather than risk the terrors of trial. . . . Americans in their ignorance and gullibility think that only the guilty would enter a guilty plea. This is the uninformed opinion of the naive who have never experienced the terror and psychological torture of the US criminal justice system.

-- Paul Craig Roberts, from "Guilty When Charged," on the Lew Rockwell site.

Visit Issues & Views - The Blog and leave feedback on the Commentaries or other relevant topics.

We are grateful to our Subscribers whose contributions help to keep us on the net. If you would like to donate at this time, please follow this link to PayPal - or use our mailing address: P.O. Box 467, New York, NY 10025

Issues & Views is a 501(c)3 tax-deductible organization.

Copyright © 2010 Issues & Views