Tel Aviv University Collating All Global Anti-Racism Laws

Islam Versus Europe
December 17, 2013

We are just normalizing the standards, goyim.
We are just normalizing the standards, goyim.

Much has changed since the 2001 Durban Conference in South Africa turned into a platform for anti-Semitism. European countries have enacted ambitious anti-discrimination legislation, as well as laws governing incitement to racism, xenophobia, Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism and genocide.

Israelis have now taken the effort forward: Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry has published two of four volumes collecting the world’s laws against discrimination and racism. The effort began in 2010.

Last week the university marked the publication of the first two volumes of “Legislating for Equality: A Multinational Collection of Non-Discrimination Norms.” Dutch company Martinus Nijhoff is the publisher. The volumes on Europe and the Americas have come out, and the Kantor Center expects to complete the parts on Africa, Asia and Australia next year.

To collect the vast amount of material, five senior Kantor Center researchers and two law students examined reports by governments and human rights groups in multiple languages, as well as computerized databases of government authorities. There was also information released by embassies and research institutions, along with interviews with experts.

The result can assist jurists, legislators and diplomats around the world understand different countries’ laws on racism and discrimination. The books, for example, tell the story of the rise of nationalism in Hungary, which in 2011 passed laws limiting civil rights and freedom of speech.

Note that virtually all of the laws collected in these volumes “limit civil rights and freedom of speech”. But somehow that doesn’t count as long as you’re a “goodie”. When the laws are enacted by lefists intending to suppress indigenous resistance to the colonisation of their country by alien peoples, those limitations of freedom are good. When the laws are passed by right-wingers, however, that’s bad and has to be categorised separately.

By contrast, Germany and France have used legal tools to cope with the difficulty in enforcing bans on hate speech on the Internet. In central and eastern Europe, the law considers Nazi crimes on par with Communist crimes, something the Israeli researchers see as relativizing the Holocaust and diminishing its importance.

I’ve never understood the pejorative use of the word “relativise”. Surely the only way we can assess the significance of anything is by placing it in the context of the most closely comparable things? It has never been clear to me why Hitler is considered worse than Stalin or Mao, even though they each killed more people. That is to say, the rational grounds for that being so have never been apparent to me. Of course I can see why leftists and Jews would like it to be that way. Leftists like it because they can demonise “the Right” as being somehow especially sinister and associated with violence, even though their own bodycount is far higher, both historically and in the present day. Jews like it because they themselves bear a key moral responsibility for the triumph of Bolshevism in eastern Europe and therefore the atrocities that followed from it. This is a moral responsibility they have never been called upon to bear, allowing them to indulge their endless sense of victimhood without the slightest acknowledgement of fault, and continue to disproportionately embrace similar anti-European ideologies unabashedly into the present day, in forms such as multiculturalism and immigrationism.

Would any commenter like to make a rational argument explaining why the murder of millions of Jews by Hitler matters more than the murder of millions of Gentiles by Stalin or Mao? Or does anyone have a link to an article that makes this case in a rational way? Generally, when I have seen the matter discussed before, it is all done in the Oriental style, eschewing rational argument and simply accusing anyone who doesn’t agree of having some moral taint in their soul.

France, Belgium and the Netherlands have all passed laws banning women from wearing the burka in public, and Switzerland has banned the construction of minarets. The tensions between European countries and the Muslims who have immigrated to them appear to have increased in recent years.

“We’re certainly witnessing the beginning of an anti-Muslim trend led by Christians, including the desecration of mosques,” said Israeli historian Dina Porat, who heads the Kantor Center and is chief historian at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum. “For the first time in 20 years a report on anti-Muslim activity has landed on my desk.”

Yet again we see Jews taking the side of the Muslims, Israeli Jews this time, who ought to know better.

Talia Naamat, a lawyer who coordinated the Kantor Center project and is editing the books with Porat and Nina Osin, also a lawyer, said Germany was the country most focused on passing laws against racism. “The prohibitions there are very strict,” she said. “A very low threshold is needed for an action to be considered incitement to racism. That’s not a consistent thing on the rest of the continent.”

For instance, Germany’s 16 states have initiated a plan to make the neo-Nazi NPD party illegal. The states addressed the issue in a petition to the constitutional court; they criticized the party for encouraging racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and anti-democratic ideology. In the country’s September election, the NPD won 1.3 percent of the vote, too little to win representation in the Bundestag. But some party members belong to local parliaments across the country.

The cruelty-to-animals issue

An interesting case of alleged incitement in Germany reached the European Court of Human Rights last year. It began in 2004, when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals launched a campaign equating the Holocaust to the murder of animals. Campaign ads showed prisoners in death camps standing next to caged animals, below the words “Holocaust on your plate.”

The Jewish community in Germany asked the courts to ban the campaign. Their request was accepted; the constitutional court ruled that PETA’s efforts were insulting to Holocaust survivors and must be stopped, even though this limited the animal rights activists’ freedom of speech.

More Jewish activism against free speech.

The judges ruled that mentioning the Holocaust in an ad campaign “means deflating the importance of the Holocaust and turning the cries of Holocaust survivors into something routine, as well as impinging on the honor of Jews who survived the Holocaust and live in Germany.”

The European court, which was pulled into the matter, upheld the German ban and addressed a similar case in Austria. There too, the Jewish community had asked the courts to stop the campaign, but the Austrian courts refused, saying animal rights and free speech were important values. The European court did not compel Austria to overturn its ruling.

“This is an example of an identical situation in two countries that led to opposite results,” said Naamat. “Despite Europe’s attempt to create harmony and set uniform standards on the matter, there are nuances between the countries, in keeping with their historic past.”

The United States and Canada have a totally different approach to hate speech because their history is different from the aggressors’ of World War II, “so their attitude to legislation on the matter is totally different,” said Porat. While in Europe the trend is to act against racist comments, not just racist actions, North American law sanctifies freedom of speech. “Holocaust denial is not outlawed there,” said Porat. “There is a whole empire of denial.”

And yet again. What harm has been caused to America by the fact that people have free speech there and can deny the Holocaust to their heart’s content? None. Jews flourish in that country and have a disproportionate or even dominating presence in many sectors of society. But you can sense that the yearning to suppress freedom there too.

Porat said the law does not always reflect the reality in any given country. “The constitution can have these wonderful words,” she said. “The nicest constitutions are those of Libya and the worst countries in terms of their attitude toward human rights .… If you examine Iran’s constitution you’ll feel like you’re in heaven. But in practical terms, the day to day, the situation is reversed. The constitution is wonderful, but the day-to-day life – I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

This is actually a powerful argument against the whole concept of “human rights”. Textual enactments mean nothing. By controlling the appointment of the judges who interpret the ambiguous language in these declarations, elites can make them mean whatever they want them to mean.

The series’ final volume, on Asia, will include a chapter on Israel. “Israel’s legal system is similar to the one in Europe – it has laws banning discrimination in the civil realm, like access to services or public places, and has a law banning incitement to racism,” said Naamat. Her team will soon be taking a deeper look at anti-discrimination legislation in Israel.

Porat recalled that it wasn’t until 1986 that the Knesset passed a law banning incitement and racism. “Before then, they didn’t think such a law was needed,” she said.

So what prompted the change? It was Meir Kahane, the ultra-nationalist leader of the Kach party who joined the Knesset in 1984, not long before his party was banned under the new law.

Source: Haaretz

That should certainly be interesting, assuming it is pursued with the same degree of thoroughness as elsewhere.

There was an interesting case in Israel a few weeks ago. Jewish nurses were banned from working nightshifts in hospitals in case they came into contact with Arab men and ended up wanting to have sex with them.

Jewish women have been banned from working night shifts as a part of their national service at hospitals in Israel in order to avoid “contact with Arabs,” Israeli Channel 10 reported on Wednesday.

Israeli National Service Administration Director Sar-Shalom Jerbi issued the directive two weeks ago banning any volunteer shifts past 9 p.m. for women fulfilling their national service duties.

The director explained that “we reached the decision based on concern for our volunteers, and Minister [Naftali] Bennett gave his blessing.”

Naftali Bennett is the leader of the far-right Israeli political party “Jewish Home,” and is currently the minister of religious services.

Many young Jewish women in Israel choose to volunteer at hospitals in order to fulfill their national service requirements. The national service is an alternative to service in the Israeli army, which is required for most Israeli Jews.

The decision marks a victory for an intense campaign led by religious Zionist rabbis and other right-wing groups within Israel to prevent contact of any sort between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, especially between Jewish women and Palestinian men.

According to the Channel 10 report, these groups began a campaign against women’s night-time service last year after reports surfaced of “intimate relations” between some Jewish volunteers and Palestinian doctors at hospitals.

In response to the decision, the director of the Lehava organization which was involved in the campaign issued a statement lamenting that the move did not go far enough. “Unfortunately, this is too narrow and too late a step. National service should be terminated anywhere there are non-Jews,” he said.

Lehava is an Israeli organization that campaigns to prevent relationships between Jewish women and non-Jewish men. The main targets of their campaigns tend to be Muslim and Christian Arabs.

Among the leaders of the campaign was Rabbi Dov Lior, the Chief Rabbi of Hebron and Kiryat Arba settlements who was in 2011 arrested for incitement against Arabs.

Lior has previously made numerous controversial and racist statements towards non-Jews, and called Baruch Goldstein, the perpetrator of the 1994 Cave of Patriarchs massacre which claimed the lives of 29 Muslim worshipers, “holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust.”

Source: Maannews.net