"…Judge Jones understated the truth, for we in Europe have gone beyond the point where the truth is merely no defence against race hate charges, the truth itself is now the crime."
Last Thursday a court in Vienna found lecturer and human rights activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff guilty of one count of “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion” and she was fined the sum of €480. A relatively small sum, but she now has a hate crime conviction against her name.
Sabaditsch-Wolff’s crime was to state, at a series of seminars about political Islam, that the Prophet Mohamed had sex with a child, his nine year old wife Aisha. Although acquitted of the more serious charge of inciting racial hatred, she was also convicted of being a “serial offender” despite this being her first offence.
Elizabeth is a regular writer at the Gates of Vienna who have written extensively about her case, links to their various articles can be found here, meanwhile American writer Diana West who runs the Death of the Grown Up blog has addressed the case in a recent posting “Willkomen to the Caliphate”, where she effectively argues that the conviction was in fact on the basis of Sharia law, not European law or what still passes for Austrian law.
It is interesting to note that the court did not find that the defendant had lied, at one point the judge stated that Aisha was 18 but later acknowledged that she had in fact attained that age at the time of Mohamed’s death. Indeed the fact that Mohamed married Aisha while she was a child is largely undisputed and accepted as fact by most Islamic scholars. Marriage between an older man and a pre-pubescent girl was not unusual in Islamic culture during the prophet’s life and remains so today in some Islamic countries.
The truth of the claim was irrelevant to the court. To convict Sabaditsch-Wolff, it was not necessary to demonstrate her claims were untrue, they were true, but merely to prove, as the court did, that she told a truth which some Muslims found offensive.
This was by no means an isolated case. Also last week French journalist Éric Zemmour was found guilty of incitement to racial hatred after telling a TV chat show that drug dealers were mostly "blacks and Arabs".
Once again, the truth or otherwise of Zemmour’s claim was irrelevant to his conviction for he spoke a truth which French law bars him from speaking. It is illegal in France to reveal the race of criminal offenders, or to report rates of ethnic offending, presumably because to do so would be to reveal the truth of Monsieur Zemmour’s illegal words.
Meanwhile in Holland it has been announced that the trial against PVV leader Gerrt Wilders for discrimination and inciting hatred will recommence on March 14th. As in the other cases mentioned, the truth or otherwise of Mr Wilders’ words will have no bearing on his prosecution, all that matters is that they have offended Muslims and questioned the state dogma of multiculturalism.
Like Sabaditsch-Wolff and Zemmour, Wilders could join the growing group of people convicted of, and punished for, telling the truth.
http://sarahmaidofalbion.blogspot.com/