This week, China has once again shown the world that there is nothing quite so ugly as its ongoing struggle to bar basic rights and freedoms to its people. The authoritarian government’s effort took a particularly bizarre turn when it reportedly stopped Canada’s China-born Miss World, Anastasia Lin, 25, from boarding a flight to the beauty pageant finals in China. Lin is a member of the repressed Falun Gong movement and just testified in Congress on Chinese repression in July.
Category: Society
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
This month we revealed the artwork of Leonard Pelteir, who was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1975 murder of FBI agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams, was being displayed at the Washington Department of Labor and industries during a Native American art and culture event. After the article, KING-5 News broadcast a news segment concerning the controversy which led to the immediate removal of the art.
The artwork in question has found a new home for its display and promotion.
Continue reading “Controversial Leonard Peltier Art Now Displayed In Grocery Store”
I recently raised concerns on PBS Newshour about a lawsuit by Israelis who are suing in the United States to force Facebook to take down violent, anti-Jewish sites. While I believe Facebook can and should take down the sites, the use of the government to close such sites raise serious free speech questions in where to draw the line on such censorship or regulation of speech. I noted that such lawsuits like the recent successful action against Twitter by Jewish students are part of a comprehensive attack on free speech that uses such civil actions as a form of speech regulation or retaliation. Saudi Arabia has again stepped forward to make this point more powerfully that I could ever hope to. The Saudi justice ministry has announced that it will sue a Twitter user who compared the death sentence handed down on Friday to a Palestinian poet to the punishments meted out by Islamic State. I have drawn the same obvious comparison in the case of Ashraf Fayadh as have readers on this site and other sites. Rather than stop acting like ISIS (which would require a greater recognition of due process and human rights in the Kingdom), Saudi Arabia is seeking to threaten people to stop them from making the analogy. However, the beheadings of nonbelievers will continue. For many, the Saudi Foreign Ministry sounds like it is putting out the word “if you say we are like ISIS again, we will behead you.”
The Russians appear to be moving in the aftermath of Turkey shooting down one of its fighters: it has targeted Turkish history in a new and abusive criminal law. Russian lawmaker Sergei Mironov said that his Just Russia party has proposed a bill that criminalizes the denial that the 1915 killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turkish forces was a “genocide.” I previously wrote about a similar law passed in France as not just a denial of free speech but academic freedom. The law was later struck down. The Russians are moving just weeks after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Switzerland also violation freedom of speech for its criminalization of the denial of the killings of Armenians as genocide.
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. We are in Durham, North Carolina with my in-laws to celebrate my favorite holiday. We will begin the day as the Turleys have for over 40 years with our Turkey bowl football game, though this will be a smaller affair since we will not be in McLean this year. We will then get to watch the Chicago Bears play the Packers! What else could one wish for? Turkey, family, football. The pilgrims never had it so good.
We have been discussing the rapid erosion of free speech on our campuses. That trend started a long time ago in our high schools where officials have steadily attacked the exercise of free speech by teenagers. Few however have reached the level of censorship and content-based punishment as Revere High School in Massachusetts. Cheerleader Caley Godino has been banned from her team because she tweeted political comments that her teachers did not like about illegal immigration.
We have another outrage against women in Afghanistan where Shirin Gul, 26, was reportedly flogged to death in the Shahrak district of Ghor after being accused of running away from home. What is fascinating is how the greatest concern is not that a woman can be publicly flogged but whether the flogging proved too excessive under Islamic law. Recently, a 19-year-old woman was stoned to death in Ghor.
As we have discussed, there seems to be a rising level of intolerance in academia and campuses for opposing views. A recent international conference showed this intolerance in the response to former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court Justice Rajinder Sachar in his speech on “Radical Islamism.” In an effort to address stereotypes and intolerance shown Muslims, Sachar noted that 95 per cent of beef traders in India are Hindi. The reaction was an immediate walk out with some academics demanding that Justice Sachar not be allowed to continue and turning off the lights and fans.
The growing intolerance shown on campuses continues this week with a new controversy at Warwick University in Coventry, England where second-year George Lawlor, 19, has been publicly harassed and denounced for questioning rape awareness sessions. While universities have embraced the ill-defined concept of “microaggressions” and pursued speech deemed insulting or harassing against different groups, there appears to be little protection for those who espouse opposing views. The Warwick case raises an interesting example of legitimate and less legitimate responses to controversial views. I happen to disagree with Lawlor on critical points, but I am disturbed by reports of his being effectively prevented from going to class.
Police have arrested the man allegedly shown in a despicable and disgusting attack in New Orleans. The man was caught on a surveillance camera dragging a woman down a street Friday morning and then shooting fourth-year medical student Peter Gold, 25, when he tried to help the woman. Gold is a genuine hero and is recovering for a gunshot to the stomach. The man on the videotaped has been identified as Euric Cain, 21. Cain’s signature or mark appears to be a profane gesture for anyone coming across his Facebook site.
We have long discussed the rapid decline of free speech protections in the West. I have long argued that the West appears to have fallen out of love with free speech, which is more often viewed as a rising scourge rather than a defining value in some countries. A recent poll of the Pew Research Center shows just how many people we have lost to those calling for greater censorship and criminalization of speech. It is not surprisingly more prevalent with younger age groups, though Democrats are almost twice as likely favor censorship that Republicans. The largest (and most alarming) group is the millennials — 40% of whom favor government censorship of speech offensive to minority groups.
Continue reading “Forty Percent of Millennials Favor Censorship of Offensive Speech By Government”
The Obama Administration has responded critically to the decision from an Israeli court to give an Israeli border police officer just community service for his entirely unjustified attack on an American teenager. Tariq Khdeir, 15, a Palestinian-American, was beaten by the officer, whose name has been withheld by the courts to avoid any further repercussions for him or his family. The beating was filmed after the officer caught the teenager near a riot in East Jerusalem in July 2014. Despite this evidence (and no evidence of just cause) the Israeli court gave the officer just 45 days of community service and a suspended prison term of four months.
We have long discussed our close alliance with Saudi Arabia despite that country’s denial of the most fundamental human rights for women, non-Muslims, journalists, and political dissidents. While the State Department continues to vaguely reference “reforms” in the Kingdom, the Saudi Sharia courts and religious police continue to generate shocking medieval cases where people are flogged or executed for exercising free thought or associations. The latest outrage is the death sentence given Ashraf Fayadh, a Palestinian poet and leading member of Saudi Arabia’s contemporary art scene. He has been sentenced to death for renouncing Islam, being an atheist (which he denies) and insulting Saudi Arabia. Many view his real offense as being his embarrassment of the infamous religious police (mutaween) in Abha after he posted a video of their lashing a man in public. As is often the case in the pseudo, “courts” of Saudi Arabia, he was denied counsel and any real opportunity to present a defense.
Princeton University has agreed to explore the removal of the name and images of former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson from buildings and school programs under a deal signed with protesters who objected to Wilson’s support of segregation, which was legal at the time. This action occurs as Harvard Law students have demanded the dropping of the school seal due to a connection to a slaveholder.
Harvard Law students have started a campaign to drop the historic seal of Harvard because it is tied to an 18th-century slaveholder. The students organization, Royall Must Fall, have held campus demonstrations demanding the removal of the seal. The three sheaves of wheat on the seal come from the Royall family crest (which raises the compromise possibility of just replacing that portion of the seal attributed to the Royall family). Third-year law student Alexander Clayborne insists that the effort is part of “[o]ur larger goals include decolonization of the law school in general and decolonization of the law school curriculum.”