Tag: free speech

Israel seeks bill to allow police to probe ‘incitement to terrorism’ without approval

A new bill advancing through the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee would allow Israel Police to investigate suspected incitement to terrorism without needing approval from the State Attorney’s Office.

According to the Times of Israel, this proposal has raised alarms among civil rights groups and opposition MKs, who argue it could limit free speech.

Currently, such investigations require State Attorney approval to prevent overly broad interpretations of the law that could infringe on free expression. In July, State Attorney Amit Aisman revealed that police had initiated several investigations into incitement or speech-related offences without proper authorisation, bypassing his office’s directives.

Introduced by far-right MK Limor Son Har Melech, of the ultranationalist Otzma Yehudit Party, the new clause in the legislation is part of a broader bill that aims to tighten restrictions on incitement, extending the ban to include praise for individuals who commit terrorist acts, not just the acts themselves, reported the Times of Israel. 

If enacted, the law would enable police to act on formal complaints “or in any other manner.”

The bill passed its first reading in the Knesset in July, but Son Har Melech is now pushing for even stricter measures. A committee hearing on the bill, scheduled for today, was postponed due to scheduling conflicts with officials from the State Attorney’s Office and the National Security Ministry. The hearing is expected to be rescheduled soon.

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Crazy Nutcase Tim Walz Wants to Ban Free Speech in America if Kamala Wins – Elon Musk Weighs In

Democrats want you silenced!

On Monday twice-failed presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton joined MSNBC’s chief conspiracy theorist Rachel Maddow to discuss the 2024 election.

Hillary Clinton immediately launched an attack on President Trump and said he is a danger our country and world just one day after a second assassination attempt against him.

“The press needs to create a consistent narrative about how dangerous Trump is,” Hillary Clinton said.

Hillary Clinton then suggested that those who spread misinformation should be charged with a crime!

Hillary Clinton then suggested jailing Americans for posting “misinformation.”

Clinton was whining about so-called Russian propaganda when she launched an attack on Americans and the First Amendment.

“There were Russians engaged in direct election interference and boosting Trump back in 2016, but I also thing there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda and whether they should be civilly or criminally charged would be something that would be a better deterrent,” Hillary said.

Hillary is not alone.

Minnesota nutcase Tim Walz also wants to ban speech in America.

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Hillary Clinton Calls Free Speech ‘Propaganda’, Wants to Jail Americans for Speaking

Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told bespectacled lesbian Rachel Maddow on MSNBC that Americans who post news and other information she doesn’t like, or that goes against her political agenda, are posting foreign propaganda and should be dragged in front of kangaroo courts for civil and criminal proceedings.

Hillary Clinton told Rachel Maddow this week on MSNBC that the US government needs to use a “deterrent,” like suing citizens into oblivion or throwing them in prison to crackdown on free speech and regain a firm grip on the national cultural and political narrative.

“There are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda,” Clinton told Maddow as she called for mass censorship.

“And whether they should be civility or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrent,” she said.

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French EU Official Thierry Breton, Who Threatened Elon Musk With Arrest, Resigns

The French EU official Thierry Breton, who is responsible for the ‘digital environment, and who took on Elon Musk and threatened him for allowing free speech on Twitter, has resigned.

This whole incident smells like a ‘test run’ for us, as we decipher the globalist tea leaves. The EU was pushing to see how far they could push humanity in its drive for censorship of the masses.

The European Union’s top digital enforcer tried to take on Elon Musk. Within hours, he faced accusations of meddling in American politics and his own staff were back-pedaling hard, wrote Politico a months ago.

Thierry Breton, who oversees the bloc’s enforcement of new social media rules, sent Musk a letter posted on X that warned the tech mogul about spreading “harmful content,” ahead of Musk’s livestreamed interview with Donald Trump.

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Behind Closed Doors: The UK and US Plot Global Speech Crackdown

America First Legal (AFL) has pulled back the curtain on yet another government meeting that makes “free speech” sound like some quaint idea from the past. AFL has released documents from a 2021 interagency get-together where the UK’s top experts on “disinformation” offered a master class in censorship, all under the guise of “protecting democracy.” And because nothing screams transparency quite like a secret strategy session on silencing opposing voices, the revelations come with just a hint of irony.

On August 10, 2021, the Biden-Harris National Security Council (NSC) hosted a cozy little chat with the United Kingdom’s “Counter Disinformation Unit” (CDU). The occasion? An instructional session on how to manage—read: censor—COVID-related speech in the US. But why stop at the pandemic when there’s so much more to control? This wasn’t just about virus talk; it was a step-by-step guide on how to choke off the flow of any inconvenient truth that might muddy the government’s preferred narrative.

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FLASHBACK: Kamala Harris vows to use DOJ to ARREST people exercising FREE SPEECH

Daily Mail political reporter Charlie Spiering has unearthed a speech of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, vowing to have the Department of Justice(DOJ) move against “misinformation” and “hate” on social media platforms.

During a 2019 speech at the NAACP Fight for Freedom Dinner in Detroit, Michigan, Harris promised that, if given the power, she would hold social media companies responsible for spreading what she termed “misinformation” using the DOJ as a key tool.

The resurfacing of the said video on X, formerly Twitter, came amid a growing number of free speech advocates raising the alarm over what the vice president would do to censor social media platforms if she wins the election.

“We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy,” Harris said, emphasizing the DOJ’s role in enforcing accountability. “We’ll put the Department of Justice of the United States back in the business of justice. We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy.”

She told technocrats that she would double the Civil Rights Division and direct law enforcement to address the spread of extremist ideologies and misinformation. “If you profit off of hate, if you act as a megaphone for misinformation or cyber warfare, if you don’t police your platforms we are going to hold you accountable as a community,” Harris added.

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Free Speech and the Department of Political Justice

In 1966, two famous Russian literary dissidents, Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, were tried and convicted on charges of disseminating propaganda against the Soviet state. The two were authors and humorists who published satire abroad that mocked Soviet leaders for failure to comply with the Soviet Constitution of 1936, which guaranteed the freedom of speech.

Their convictions sparked international outrage. Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, and then America’s U.N. ambassador, Arthur Goldberg called the charges and the trial “an outrageous attempt to give the form of legality to the suppression of a basic human right.” When a secret transcript of the trial was circulated in the West, it became clear that Daniel and Sinyavsky were convicted of using words and expressing ideas contrary to what Soviet leaders wanted. They were sentenced to five and seven years, respectively, of hard labor in Soviet prison camps.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Political Justice took a page from the Soviets and charged Americans and Russians with disseminating anti-Biden administration propaganda in Russia and here in the U.S. What ever happened to the freedom of speech?

Here is the backstory.

The Framers who crafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, both under the leadership and the pen of James Madison, were the same generation that revolted violently against King George III and Parliament and won the American Revolution. The revolution was more than just six years of war in the colonies. It was a radical change in the minds of men – elites like Thomas Jefferson and Madison, as well as farmers and laborers generally untutored in political philosophy.

Untutored they may have been, but they knew they wanted to be able to speak their minds, associate and worship as they pleased, defend themselves, and be left alone by the government. The key to all this was the freedom of speech. Speech was then, as it is today, the most essential freedom. The late Harvard Professor Bernard Bailyn read and analyzed all the extant speeches, sermons, lectures, editorials and pamphlets that he could find from the revolutionary period and concluded that in 1776 only about one-third of the colonists favored a violent separation from England. By the war’s end in 1781, around two-thirds welcomed independence.

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Brazil Leads Largest Free Speech Rally In History

Thousands of supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro flooded Sao Paulo’s main boulevard for an Independence Day rally Saturday, buoyed by the government’s blocking of tech billionaire Elon Musk’s X platform, a ban they say is proof of their political persecution.

A few thousand demonstrators, clad in the yellow-and-green colors of Brazil’s flag, poured onto Av. Paulista. References to the ban on X and images of Musk abounded.

“Thank you for defending our freedom,” read one banner praising the tech entrepreneur.

Saturday’s march was seen as a test of Bolsonaro’s capacity to mobilize turnout ahead of the October municipal elections, even though Brazil’s electoral court has barred him from running for office until 2030. It’s also something of a referendum on X, whose suspension has raised eyebrows even among some of Bolsonaro’s opponents all the while stoking the flames of Brazil’s deep-seated political polarization.

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The Folly of Criminalizing “Hate”

Many people were shocked when over 1,000 protesters were arrested in the UK and jailed for various offenses including “violent disorder” and stirring up racial hatred. Most shocking were the cases of those arrested for posting social media comments on the riots, despite not being present at the scene and there being no evidence that anybody who joined in the riots had read any of their comments.

In societies which uphold the value of individual liberty, the only purpose of the criminal law should be to restrain and punish those who commit acts of aggression against other people or their property. The criminal law should not be used to prevent people from “hating” others or to force them to “love” each other. In announcing yet another raft of laws “to expand the list of charges eligible to be prosecuted as hate crimes,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul said that “During these challenging times, we will continue to show up for each other. We are making it clear: love will always have the last word in New York.” To that end, she introduced “legislation to significantly expand eligibility for hate crime prosecution.”

Attempts to promote love between different racial or religious groups in society, for example, by charging people with stirring up “hate” when they protest against immigration, misunderstands the role of the criminal law. Threats to public order entail violating the person or property of others—as happens in a violent riot—not merely the exhibition of “hate” towards others. Yet increasingly, public order offenses are linked to hate speech or hate crimes.

Laws prohibiting hate speech and hate crimes typically define “hate” as hostility based on race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, or religion. Often, hostility is understood simply as words that offend others. For example, in the UK, the Communications Act 2003 prohibits sending “a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character.” The Online Safety Act 2023 targets illegal content online including both “inciting violence” and the publication of “racially or religiously aggravated public order offenses.” Conduct online includes writing posts or publishing blogs or articles on websites.

Given that inciting violence is already a crime—“conduct, words, or other means that urge or naturally lead others to riot, violence, or insurrection”—there seems to be no discernible purpose in adding the concept of “hate” to such crimes. To give an example, writing “burn down the store” on social media might be seen as inciting violence, but writing “burn down the Muslim store” in the same circumstances would be categorized as a hate crime. Arson (actually burning down the store) is a crime, but based on the racial or religious identity of the store owner arson is deemed to be a “worse” crime—a hate crime—even though the harm in both cases and the loss suffered by store owners who are victims of arson does not vary based purely on their race or religion.

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UN Secretary-General António Guterres Complains About “Misinformation” and “Hate Speech,” Calls for “Effective Governance”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has managed to work fearmongering over the perceived proliferation of misinformation, hate speech, and deepfakes into his message issued on the occasion of the upcoming International Day of Democracy.

Not only that but as far as the UN is concerned, this year’s Day of Democracy is focused on – of all things – (at this point in time, upcoming at some later point in time) artificial intelligence (AI).

Though the press release might look like a “politically correct word salad,” it does show a purpose – and that’s pressing for global AI regulation.

The way is, perpetuating the fear that AI, such as it is today, is truly a possible threat to “democracy, peace, and stability.”

According to the UN website, Guterres took this opportunity to frame the problem of erosion of free speech, civil liberties, rule of law, and diminishing trust (ostensibly in legacy media and institutions) as the consequence of that “proliferation of harm.”

The Guterres statement starts off reasonably enough: on International Day of Democracy, these now-under-threat values are the ones that need to be promoted.

But then he descends into explaining why that is by parroting what has been heard a myriad times thus far from many governments and global political and business elites.

For example, what makes free speech so fragile these days? Censorship? Government censorship? And by the same token, is that what’s burdening civil rights in general?

Guterres appears to believe – no. It’s all somehow revolving around “AI” and specifically how to control it – as “a tool for good governance.”

The UN, born after the devastation of the Second World War as a forum to make sure that never repeats, has been losing in influence over the past decade in particular.

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