Austria's New Hate Speech Law

Over the past few decades it was not unusual for laws and regulations in numerous European countries to be selectively applied without logical, common sense reason (ie a state of lawlessness)

Unfortunately one particular group constantly received such exemptions with monotonous regularity.

It is distinctly possible that the Avia law in France and NetzDG law in Germany will be applied selectively.
More specifically will Islamic teachings promoting hatred of Jews, Christians etc be exempt from prosecution and its consequences.

If the answer is yes, then be prepared for the end of true free speech in France and Germany and rapidly increasing Islamisation of these countries.... and tyranny.

My wife is a legal immigrant from Austria because she couldn't stand to be there anymore. Her grandmother was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp as a young girl simply because her family didn't support Hitler. History has a way of repeating itself. Incidentally, she was freed from a railroad boxcar on her way to a death camp by the US Army and was overjoyed that her granddaughter (my wife) married an American.

Thank God they have these laws. One cannot be "not nice" to anyone -- except involving Jew hatred. This is, of course, allowed.

With all speech censored, truth, when inconvenient, will be censored. Who decides what is fake news? Here in the USA, the Leftist media, the Leftist Social media platforms, and the Leftist politicians now say any criticism of their voting bloc, their globalist agenda, their push to rewrite the Constitution is hate speech or inflammatory, or somehow destructive.
The masks we wear are not just about a bit of protection against the CCP virus, they are symbolic of the censorship all citizens will suffer in the days agead.

I wonder if the legislative attempts to deny the right of free speech could be classified as "hate speech"?

What hate speech can become is anything not submissive to Islam, criticism of the Prophet or even cartoons that are sarcastic, but results in a person being murdered? Speech does not impose hate in a people's heart accepted as a cultural norm and murder to be expected as an act of propriety.
For me this is misdirection the new norm would have us believe saying certain religiously offensive or opposed to socialist globalist ideals is a sin and punishable by death, that is hate it is n their hearts produced by Islamist radicalism and globalist idealism and both are only capable of making tyrannical pronouncements on freedom..

In America we do not have an absolute right of free speech. Our Supreme Court has stated that shouting "Fire" in a crowded theatre, when no such fire exists, is not allowed. It will be interesting to see what the rules will be as to how we actually limit what can be said. This likely will be on a case by case basis. Like beauty, it may be in the eye of the beholder. As one court has said "I can't tell you exactly what it is, but I will know it when I see it".

This is going to be interesting.

"Leftists" have for long used the word 'violence' with dangerous vagueness, covering some kinds of speech. As long ago as the 1960s William Buckley had to respond to an interlocutor with a remark something like, "you use the word violence with such slovenliness as to render yourself unintelligible."

It is social media, not people's right to free speech, that has become the problem. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok should all be either left wide open or shut down all together. Their owners are zealots.

Let's hope these new laws will take a close look at online Islamic hate speech which is promoted on many platforms. Even the Koran contains racist hate speech. Will quoting from it be a criminal offence?

Here, in the United States, we cherish the Freedom of speech; it is our First Amendment to the Constitution. But it has never been without restrictions. Just as you may not cry "Fire" in a crowded theater for fear of creating a panic, so one should not be allowed to publish hate speech on social media. With freedoms go responsibilities - one truth too often forgotten! IMO, hate speech consists of irresponsible rantings most often based on blatant lies.
In addition, I do not believe that hate speech qualifies as "free exchange of ideas." It has been amply shown on college campuses that the haters never 'yield the floor," so to speak, to opposite opinions.

I am very saddened to see such measures being enacted; on the surface it seems reasonable, but look more closely. Whose beliefs will determine what is hatred or insult? This is important because humans follow a pattern when they dictate anything other than discussion and debate. This globalism movement is walking right up to Heinrich Heine's 19th-century prophetic warning that "where one burns books, one soon burns people," walking up to it and walking past it to light the bonfire. Suppressing free speech as opposed to recognizing and personally "dealing with" differences of opinion or doltish name-calling should be frightening to the people of every nation, as France recognizes. With the suppression of speech comes the attempt to suppress thought, not only in 1933 but in every communist/socialist nation of today.

The Austrian government's introduction to this proposal contains a serious flaw.
It calls online speech and writing "a new form of violence". This is rubbish. Speech and text are not violence.
The proposed edifice of control rests on a false foundation.

Lets be real clear here, these Laws are not about protecting speech laws but rather its about protecting Muslims, even though this religious group can say whatever they wish against us, in print, in Newspapers, on TV or Radios.

Very important article.
Introducing such hate speech laws is playing into the hands of the radical Muslims.

Bye bye freedom.

Thanks again for another important piece making us aware of the problem of censorship by governments and the media giants. I'm sure you are well aware of the censoring/blocking of the US President's and his Press Sec's Twitter and Facebook feeds and Google's directing of internet searches and ephemeral messaging to remind Dem voters but not Conservative or R voters to vote. The Google revelation came from a professor with 750 people being monitored as they used computers. The Prof is Dr Robert Epstein, (link to the Fox News spot)

It seems Progressive policies always, over time, go totalitarian. These speech laws are weaponized and benefit the Progressive agenda and their allies, some of these allies have very questionable motives.

Laws limiting freedom of speech are only made for one reason, to close down opinions that the state does not agree with because the opinions expressed endanger a planned course of development for the state. The state, the executive, are fearful that if such ideas are expressed a body of opposition to the planned course of action of governments will develop and hinder whatever it is the government and the institutions want to achieve.

Today, governments and institutions across the Western world and Anglophone sphere are firmly in the grip of a Marxist mindset. A general vision of an homogenised world, or at least Western world, is being pursued and this entails huge changes in the way of life of the people. It involves importing huge numbers of peoples with alien cultures, destroying societal norms regarding sexual behaviour and sexual identity, reshaping the church into an organisation acceptable to all comers, rewriting history to accommodate the new character of the diverse population and the control of activities hitherto regarded as natural and beneficial.

The organisations behind this expect the populations to object and the development of technologies makes it a lot easier to publish anyone's opinions to the whole world. It is believed that this will generate enough support and alarm to endanger the left wing project.

The obvious solution is to criminalise speech that is not in accord with the general vision for societies. Creating "hate speech" was a first move. It is a flexible provision, one that can be stretched and shaped to fit any type of expression the state finds challenging. So anything and everything can be hate speech and because the public are not sure what can and cannot be said the idea is that most will not say anything. Those that do can be isolated. This is working, as we know. Totalitarian ideology is always afraid of speech. Thought precedes speech, ban speech and thought is also banned; thought that cannot be expressed is dead.

We all know that there have always been things that cannot be said because they break sensible laws to protect society and individuals in certain limited circumstances so there is no need to reiterate that. This censorship should have been strangled at birth by totally dismissing any concept of 'hate speech" . It is now too late and I suspect free speech, in its purest form, is actually dying.

Will the "Avia" law in France and NetzDG law in Germany ensure that online portions of the Koran and various hadiths containing written vile traditional anti-semitic remarks and false accusations be removed from these online platforms? Otherwise will massive fines be imposed and collected?

Or will the legal bureaucrats ignore the existence of such breeches, in order not to offend the special privileges of followers of " religion of peace"?

In the past few years I seem to be constantly saying to myself "thank goodness I was born in 1952" and I won't be around for too much longer, to witness the changes in my world. Being white, British or European, is fast becoming a sin in itself as we become more and more outnumbered by either those that censor us and hate us, yet long to be us! A pox on the lot of them. Merry Christmas!...or is that classed as "hate speech" ?! If it's not now...it soon will be.

French constitutional court ?
France does not have a constitutional court. There is a Constitutional Counsel Agency without any power a court would have. They have wrongly regularly presented themselves as a court since one of their past presidents, Jean-Louis Debré, made a coup d'Etat against the French President Nicolas Sarkozy. This Constitutional Counsel Agency was created by the Fifth Republic headed by the General De Gaulle, with the help of Michel Debré, father of Jean-Louis. The General De Gaulle was saying specifically that the only Supreme Court in France were the French citizens! He meant that the referendum process was the ultimate decider.

Hate speech are every Friday in mosques: "Kill the Christians..."

For the first time I believe Gatestone has got the wrong end of the stick. The danger that Germany and Austria face is any resurgence of their own extremist past in which media hate propaganda against certain groups paved the way for public acceptance of extreme discriminatory acts leading to state sponsored genocide. It is to guard against such incitement re-emerging that these laws were enacted and rightly so. I also believe that there is definitely a grey area in France's free speech protecting ridiculing and insulting the veneration of a pillar of the faith of a large but minority of its citizens, the Charlie Hebdo affair was a deliberate affront to Muslims while knowing full well the hurt it would cause. Free speech must never protect hate mongering.

"A comprehensive strategy and a set of measures are required that range from prevention to sanctions. " This gives government employees huge levels of control (big budgets, guaranteed jobs), and gives the established internet companies safe monopoly markets, in that huge barriers now exist for any upstart competitor. Of course this is all intentional. Multi-cultural societies are just an excuse, a tool, that allows this to happen. European governments need anti-western immigration to ensure that this continues.