EU Phobia: more Crimes against the Ideology!

There's no ducking it. The new EU Council Framework Decision on Combating Racism and Xenophobia adopted last week is another step towards Liberal totalitarianism and is already dubbed 'an appalling piece of legislation' by The Brussels Journal.

The EU Justice Ministers have been haggling and compromising over curtailing nothing less than our basic freedom of speech. The legal framework deals with the harmonisation and the E.U. proper's legal ability to combat "forms of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law", "against publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising the crimes directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin when the conduct is carried out in a manner likely to incite to violence or hatred against such a group or a member of such a group."

Trust the E.U. not to see the ethical problem of what they're doing, and to come up with a subtle text that outlaws bad jokes and the Jewish Shoa, but doesn't cover the Armenian holocaust, or Stalin era communist crimes against the civilian populations.

Since the member states' existing legislation differs wildly, full harmonisation of criminal laws isn't yet possible.
But more stringent laws, such as in Germany and Austria, remain applicable in the member states.

Especially noteworthy is the EU's ability under the framework to prosecute cases of their own accord, and without the victim's consent. Crimes can carry sentences of upto three years in prison and forfeiture of employment as well as benefits. The latter is simply unheard of in post World War II Europe and a measure of the wrong way it's going.

The following may sound like linguistic nitpicking, but is indicative of the gross imprecision in these Liberal morality laws. Phobia means fear, not hatred, and fear isn't a matter of free choice. Depending on the underlying cause of the phobia - and I don't know that hatred is always of free choice either - but you can rest assured I have an almighty phobia for Islam ... what with terrorist attacks and Al Qa'ida's media manipulation that is specifically tuned to disseminating as much fear as possible. That is the whole point of it, and the reason it's called terrorism, which derives from the Latin word terrorem meaning great fear or dread.

While they should be prosecuting intolerant organizations the EU is potentially punishing the victims. But far from it, under the Four Freedoms they have a positive duty to keep their citizens from Fear! For terrorism is worse than war: it is an act of war against unarmed civilians.

In "You Can't Make an Omelet Without Breaking Eggs" we have already seen the tendency in the West to elevate Left Liberal ideology to moral standards across the board. These tenets don't foster equality, but on the contrary, victimhood and inequality so as to "compensate groups for their inequality in proportion to their difference."

In a post "Victim obsession leading to more oppression, not less in modern Britain" former University teacher John Ray from Brisbane, Australian gives a review on a book called, "Religious Discrimination and Hatred Law", in which practising barrister Neil Addison provides the first comprehensive survey of legislation concerning religion in diverse areas such as criminal law, discrimination, employment and harassment, and charts the growing role of courts in regulating this messy dimension of society.

Addison is concerned about the legal expansion into a complicated moral aspect of human life, and fears that a new generation of laws will remove people's powers to criticise, challenge or defend their religious (or non-religious) views.

He "sees the expansion of law into the terrain of religion as part of 'a new type of philosophy': 'We used to have laws because we considered them necessary, but now it seems we have laws because they are desirable. If something is regarded as good or bad, we use the law to direct it. In effect, we're trying to legislate morality.' For Addison, the law has now become a tool for some groups to impose their moral positions on others, whether it is the ban on smoking or the ban on foxhunting or restrictions on what we can say about minority groups.

We have to ask ourselves if any group's activism and victimhood outweighs the loss of a society that respects the freedom of speech! Instead of overcompensating for the Left Liberal lack of universal equality, in treating all religions as 'identical', it would be right, fairer and wiser to convince those minorities that hold excessive views, that living in a free world means furthering tolerance and respect for the freedom of others, and that there's no place for violent forms of self-assertion.

What the E.U. is in the process of doing, is making our societies less free, so as to accommodate intolerant minorities. By adopting their standards, we are getting it backwards.

As for gays and women's libbers, they need to develop a sense of responsibility: Oh, grow up!