wrote:How do we tell a threat from reality?
Thats what the legal system is for, it works pretty well here.
The thing is if telling your winged monkey minions to kill people isn't a crime then it doesn't matter if you can prove that they kill everyone you tell them to. Because, well you never actually killed anyone, you just gave a speach, speach is free right?
I mean Hitler he was all smoke and mirrors and public speaking really. But that public speaking was an obvious and direct criminal act, right? Or was it OK for him to say and write all those things that resulted in the deaths of so many people? How many did he kill using words alone? He certainly didn't use kung fu.
In the lead up to the race riots in Sydney we had various famous radio personalities spouting a great deal of trash including creating a platform for and congratulating people openly advocating exactly the kind of violence that ended up happening.
We have some state laws that apply and one of those high profile radio personalities was taken through the courts and found guilty.
We seriously had a variety of these guys on radio day after day in the lead up to the riots doing a number of things.
Spreading outright slurs and insults like how all arabs were stupid, violent, inferior, criminal, and in one infamous case supposedly so inbred that in the rather strange words of the fool saying it they were "diseducationable" (or some such similar word he unknowingly invented on the spot)
They were spreading some rather thick lies and propaganda villifying a racial minority. It was so bad that many of the idiots involved in the initial riots actually believed a lot of it, including the following.
1) The specific event sparking the riots involved a Lebanese gang that severely beat a single brave life guard who, on duty, intervened to save an innocent young girl (sometimes a white girl, sometimes a Lebanese girl) from their indistinct evil deeds.
2) Muslims arabs and brown people in general rape women, like all the time, and think its cool. And the Australian muslim community had tried to have court cases involving young muslim rapists tried in their Islamic courts because rape is not a crime to them.
These being insanely stupidly false because,
1) The incident that sparked the riots involved an off duty life savers surfy gang slinging racist insults back and forth with a group of lebanese youths until a scuffle broke out between the gangs. This is not entirely an uncommon event either, the surfy gang for one is known to be highly violent and territorial. There was also no girl involved at all.
2) There is no higher incidence of muslim or arab rapists in Australia. The Islamic community did not condone the crime in question, and did not try to have those court cases tried under Islamic law. The very idea of an Islamic legal system opperating parrallel to our regular legal system is a laughable falsehood. And rape is still a crime under Islamic law, which lets remember we don't actually have here anyway.
But worst of all these guys were on air encouraging large scale racial violence, people were ringing in talking about how they were going to ignore the police and take matters into their own hands to give the "Lebs" some of their own (often lets remember entirely fictional) medicine and sweep the scum off the Sydney beaches and back to where they came from by force and worse.
And these guys were there just yukking it up, laughing along with whatever nazi like suggestion that came up next was, agreeing, encouraging and providing a soap box for a movement run in large part by violent neo nazi gangs, including a major one based in my own home region of Newcastle that pushed for and succeeded in sparking violent riots.
Now you can talk about exactly where you draw the line but society draws lines like this all the time, using courts. And its pretty clear that sooner or later you draw the line somewhere well before you allow major free to air mainstream radio to be used as a tool to promote organised violent riots.
And therefore there are some things that it is criminal to say on the radio or in the media, and on that basis perhaps elsewhere on the stage of life as well.
The sad thing here really is that our hate speach laws aren't applied as vigorously or often as they should be. If they were our Prime Minister would be in jail. Man he says some BAD things. But then the bad things he does are far worse.