We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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“Is Israel Weaponizing the Tragic Deaths of the Bibas Children?”
Dear God. I don’t know where to start.
Is
Israel
Weaponizing the Tragic Deaths of the Bibas Children?
Is Israel
Weaponizing
the Tragic Deaths of the Bibas Children?
Is Israel Weaponizing the
Tragic Deaths
of the Bibas Children?
The children.
The tweet is by Mehdi Hasan, quoting Muhammad Shehada, who describes himself as a “Gazan Political Analyst & Writer.” Mehdi Hasan is a former senior political editor at the New Statesman and is the author of a book called Win Every Argument.
Officers of the Swedish Police have made an announcement regarding the 30 or so bombings in the country in January 2025, attributed to extortion of businesses by criminal gangs, and have said that they can’t cope and they need all of society to mobilise to help them. However, they don’t appear to say how this should be done, or what with, so there might be some misinterpretation and I don’t think that the posse is a thing in Sweden, reported by the independent, reader-funded Nordic Times.
Swedish Police: “Everyone must take responsibility for the bombings”
This puts me in mind of a character in The Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple column, who, as a fore-runner of today’s DEI activists would roundly proclaim ‘We are all guilty!’, a chilling vision of the climate today.
However, coming back to Sweden, we are told:
– The whole society must be mobilized. Everyone must take responsibility and do even more, said Tobias Bergkvist, deputy regional police chief for Stockholm.
During a press conference on Wednesday, the police emphasized the urgency of the situation and the need to take action to stop the wave of violence.
– We have a very serious situation, not only in Stockholm but also nationally, Bergkvist emphasized.
The Nordic Times has its own take on the matter, citing, as the BBC would probably point out, ‘without evidence’ networks of immigrant criminals.
The police do not seem to have gone that far in terms of specificity:
– What we are seeing now is an escalation of violence, but also a change in the problem. The majority of the bombings we have suffered in December and January have rather financial incentives, are strategic acts targeting companies and often for extortion purposes, says Hampus Nygårds, Deputy Head of the National Operations Unit (NOA).
“Criminal ecosystem”
He explains that the purpose of the attacks is to intimidate business owners into paying to stop the threat.
– Money is demanded to stop the violence and threats.
The police describe how a “criminal ecosystem” has emerged, where the recruitment of new perpetrators has now moved to digital platforms. Young people are offered money to commit acts of violence – including murder.
But there is a plan, nothing so far like what appears to be happening in the USA, this is Sweden after all, but the plan is an increased digital presence of the police.
The police are now mobilizing, especially in Stockholm but also nationally. We are taking measures such as reinforcements from different police regions, Bergkvist explains.
An important part of the strategy is said to be to increase the police’s digital presence and competence and to focus more on identifying and stopping bomb makers before the explosions are carried out, but the police believe that crime prevention work cannot be done by the authorities alone.
“We are seeing anti-medical, anti-science narratives everywhere – how can doctors like me respond?”, writes Dr Mariam Tokhi in the Guardian. She starts with the heartrending story of an eight year old Australian girl called Elizabeth Struhs who died of diabetic ketoacidosis due to the withdrawal of the insulin she needed to live. Her family belong to a religious sect called “the Saints” that believes that medicine should not be used. Her father, mother and brother, alongside several other members of this sect, have been found guilty of her manslaughter. Dr Tokhi then writes,
I am seeing the rise of anti-medical, anti-science narratives everywhere. A patient in my clinic tells us that she has stopped her HIV antiviral tablets, because her pastor told her she has been healed by prayer. A parent rejects mental health treatment for his impulsive, suicidal teenager, telling me that ADHD and major depression are made-up, modern conditions. A pregnant mother asks me to sign her Advanced Care Directive, saying she declines blood products in the event of a life-threatening bleed during birth, worried that she could receive “vaccine-contaminated” blood. Another tells me she will “free-birth” without midwifery or medical care.
During the Covid pandemic, conspiracy theorists distributed junk maps of Covid-19 cases connecting them to 5G mobile phone towers. As a result, I spent countless hours doing community outreach, health promotion work and endless individual consultations trying to debunk pseudoscience and explaining (often unsuccessfully) the risk-benefit ratios of vaccines. In the last year, we have seen outbreaks of pertussis, measles, chickenpox, hepatitis and influenza, often linked to pockets of vaccine refusal.
Medical doctors and scientists now face a barrage of anti-science, anti-medicine narratives, and it feels like we are losing the battle. We are no longer trusted instinctively. So how do we engage with people who mistrust us?
It is a heartfelt piece. I don’t doubt her sincerity. My answer to her question is also heartfelt and sincere: start by admitting what you, the doctors and the medical profession as a whole, did to lose so much trust.
Remember how so many of you said that complete social isolation was vital for the duration of the pandemic except for those attending Black Lives Matter protests? Remember how distinguished doctors, epidemiologists and virologists were denounced when they said that, for much of the population, the risk of harm from Covid-19 was less than the risk of harm from lockdown? Remember how you declared the theory that the Covid-19 coronavirus strain came from a laboratory leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a racist conspiracy theory, and cheered when Facebook deleted posts that discussed it? Remember how you self-censored discussion even among yourselves of the side effects that the Covid vaccines, like all vaccines, have – thus degrading the system of reporting adverse reactions that was once universally understood to be a vital tool to improve the safety of medicines?
For the record, I have taken every vaccine offered to me, including the Pfizer and the Astra Zeneca Covid-19 vaccines, and I am happy with that decision. But the unquestioning faith I once had that I would be given all relevant information before I chose to accept any medical procedure has gone. Some of it departed alongside the faith that I would be given a choice at all. Such faith as I now have in the medical profession as a whole is in its residual ethics. Most doctors were trained in better times, and according to better precepts. I trust old doctors more than young doctors. Lest I offend any young doctors reading this, that’s still quite a lot of trust. It’s not that I think any significant number of doctors set out to harm people. It’s that I do think a significant number of doctors refused to consider many serious and well-founded policy and treatment proposals regarding Covid on no better grounds than that they might have helped Donald Trump’s electoral chances, and an even larger number never even got to hear about such proposals in the first place, except at second hand as the ravings of folk in tinfoil hats. These proposals were not necessarily correct. But excluding them from discussion for political reasons gnawed away at the edifice of trust in medicine.
And the gnawing persists. When termites infest a property, they eat the walls from inside, so that if you tap the walls they sound hollow. If all else is quiet you can even hear the rustle of tiny jaws directly. That is a metaphor for how millions of people feel about the house of medicine now: not that it has fallen down with a crash – it is still their shelter – but that the walls have hollow patches and that sometimes one hears a soft scratching noise . . . and if you tell the owners of the house about it, they say you are imagining things or just trying to make trouble.
The Guardian‘s (pre-moderated) comments burn with outrage at the medical misinformation that comes from religious people and right-wingers. At medical misinformation coming from left-wing New Age practitioners, not so much; and at medical misinformation coming from the medical profession itself and enforced by censorship, none at all. Maybe some comments that pointed out that the medical establishment itself had some responsibility for the loss of public trust in medicine were made, but the Guardian censored them so we’ll never know what they said.
“The national party has made it so that they’ve set up a standard where if Donald Trump doesn’t literally ruin democracy in a very visible way that people feel, then they’re proven wrong. It wasn’t as bad as we thought, so they’re liars again. They have set themselves up for failure”
– Carly Hammond, a Saginaw city councillor and former trade union organiser who campaigned for Kamala Harris, quoted in this Guardian article from 18th January: Democrats in denial over Trump defeat, voters say: ‘Haven’t learned the lessons’
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Tech billionaire wades into controversy after shooting right arm on upwards diagonal during celebrations of Trump
– subheading to Guardian article on Donald Trump’s second inauguration, 20th January 2025: Elon Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally
On 28th September 2018, the fantasy author Niel Gaiman tweeted,
“On a day like today it’s worth saying, I believe survivors. Men must not close our eyes and minds to what happens to women in this world. We must fight, alongside them, for them to believed at the ballot box & with art & by listening, and change this world for the better.”
I presume the “day like today” referred to the fact that the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as a U.S. Supreme Court judge had been forwarded to the Senate that day. The previous day, 27th September 2018, Kavanaugh himself and Dr Christine Blasey Ford had both testified to the Judiciary Committee. In her testimony Dr Ford said that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her approximately thirty six years earlier at a party when both were teenagers. I say “approximately” because although Dr Ford said that the assault was “seared into her memory”, she could not say in which year it happened, nor in whose house the party took place.
*
There are times when the message “You’ve reached your monthly article limit” is very welcome. I got it from New York magazine’s Vulture blog. That means I cannot re-read Lila Shapiro’s exposé of Gaiman’s sexual behaviour. Good, I’d rather not read that again. It is clear that he used his fame and status to sexually exploit young women who came into his orbit as fans or employees in a manner that is no less disgusting for being a tale as old as time. Some of his deeds may have reached the level of crimes.
Many now say, “Who cares about the “may”? Let Gaiman be hoist on his own petard! Let those making accusations of sexual assault against him be believed automatically, as he wanted to happen to Kavanaugh.”
I do not say this. The presumption of innocence is a universal principle. That means it applies to everyone, including those who would deny it to others. I used to think it was a settled principle; that anyone in the political mainstream understood its importance. That particular delusion died for me as I watched Justice Kavanaugh’s nomination hearings and read hundreds of tweets and opinion articles like Gaiman’s that said that Ford should be believed because she is female, and Kavanaugh disbelieved because he is male.
The #MeToo movement had ceased to be concerned with justice.
I want the presumption of innocence to be re-established as a universal principle of justice. Justice demands that both sides be heard and that potentially exculpatory evidence be seen. And there are some things in the Vulture exposé to which Gaiman could point in his defence if this comes to a trial. I have talked a great deal about the evils of automatically believing women (or whites or blacks or rich people or poor people or any other category considered as a lump of virtue or vice). But there is an equal and opposite evil, that of assuming that adult women cannot be believed when they say “I consent”.
I had been groping towards a way to express this when Sarah Hoyt of Instapundit pointed me to a writer who had already expressed it better than I could. The piece in question is by Kat Rosenfield and is called “On what women want”. Rosenfield writes,
By this point in the article we’ve been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can’t assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. “Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do,” Shapiro writes in one section. In another, she explains that it doesn’t matter if the women played along with Gaiman when he asked them to call him “master” or eat their own feces because “BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms” to which Gaiman didn’t strictly adhere (as the meme goes, it’s only BDSM if it comes from the BDSM region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling feces-eating sadomasochism.)
Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich’s behavior (including the “it was wonderful” text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that’s just because women do be like that sometimes.
Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I’m more interested in what happens to women when they’re cast in this role of society’s unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.
The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they’ll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it’s not just sex they can’t reasonably consent to. It’s medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world’s adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.
Related posts:
“A point that has to be made again and again about high profile sexual abuse cases”
“No evidence will ever be enough for those determined not to believe”
Further to my previous post, I was pleasantly surprised to see this comment by “MJuma2018” to a Guardian piece called “A new era of lies: Mark Zuckerberg has just ushered in an extinction-level event for truth on social media”:
Part of the reason SM has become a source of news for many is declining trust in traditional media platforms including liberal ones that set out to subtly manipulate readers. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Who holds the media accountable for manipulating readers rather than reporting news? Should they also be held responsible for misleading/manipulative content like the Hunter Biden laptop story and Biden’s cognitive status?
What’s so surprising about that comment? The fact that it has been up for four hours despite including the words “Hunter Biden’s laptop”. My most recent attempt to mention Hunter Biden’s laptop on a Guardian comment was on 6th November 2024. It was instantly deleted, as was any comment – however polite, however on-point – containing any combination of those three words over the four years since the controversy began. I presume this was automatic. Comments that referred to the Laptop from Hell using circumlocution were also inevitably deleted after a slightly longer time, with the phrase, “This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.”
I relieved my feelings by immediately following up my deleted comment with this one,
I just demonstrated to myself that even now, four years later, the mere mention of a certain electronic device that featured in a news story broken by the New York Post brings swift euthanasia to a comment on this website. Guys, stuff like that makes people lose trust in the media.
It was deleted too, of course. Dunno what quality to melt the censor’s heart MJuma2018’s comment had that my very similar one of two months ago lacked, but I am glad to see someone at Guardian Towers woke up.
The Guardian reports,
Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content
Meta will get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.
X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add caveats and context to contentious posts.
Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. The tech firm’s content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.
A reminder that on February 8th 2021, Facebook’s own blog announced:
Today, we are expanding our efforts to remove false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines in general during the pandemic. Since December, we’ve removed false claims about COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts. Today, following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines. This includes claims such as:
– COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured
– Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against
– It’s safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine
– Vaccines are toxic, dangerous or cause autism
Emphasis added.
On May 21st 2021, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s “VP Integrity” posted an update reversing the above:
Update on May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT:
In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps. We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.
The first of the claims that were described as “debunked” in the earlier post and banned from being made on Facebook, that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured”, is now the mainstream view. The next claim, about vaccines (vaccines in general, not just Covid-19 vaccines) not being “effective”, is a matter of degree. Some vaccines are more effective than others, which means that some vaccines are less effective than others. Turning to the third claim, for some categories of people, particularly children, it was indeed safer to get Covid-19 than the vaccine against it. The fourth claim is the only one that I would confidently say is simply false. Obviously, my confidence in its falsity, previously close to 100%, has been damaged by that claim being bracketed in with other claims that were described as obviously false and debunked by experts, but which have turned out to be probably true. When Zuckerberg said that the “fact-checkers” he hired “have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”, he was right. Censorship always destroys trust. Better late than never in admitting it.
“Jeremy Corbyn egging: Brexiteer jailed for 28 days”, the BBC reported on 25th March 2019.
“Woman sentenced for hurling milkshake at Farage”, the BBC reports today.
Notice that the BBC report about Jeremy Corbyn’s attacker specified in the headline exactly how long John Murphy was sent to jail for. In contrast, today’s BBC report about Nigel Farage’s attacker, Victoria Thomas Bowen, just says she was “sentenced”. Most people read only the headlines of news stories, and therefore are probably left with the impression that she was sentenced to jail time, as John Murphy was for a similar crime. She wasn’t. Victoria Thomas Bowen was given a suspended sentence.
Oh, and one mustn’t forget that she must complete 15 “rehabilitation activity requirement days”, which usually means something like an anger management course, and pay Farage a massive victim surcharge of £154.
Two British MPs, Jo Cox and Sir David Amess, have been assassinated in recent years. After both murders we heard fervent declarations that attacks on politicians were utterly unacceptable in Our Democracy. Of course we now know that neither Murphy or Thomas-Bowen intended to kill or seriously injure their victims. But when a person is struck by something thrown at them, they do not know at the moment of impact that the missile is harmless.
UPDATE: When I first saw people on Twitter pointing out the judge’s South Asian name, I dismissed the comments as the sort of snide racism that bedevils right wing Twitter. However Toby Young has assembled a list of six judgements by Senior District Judge Tan Ikram that are more than enough to give a rational person cause to doubt his impartiality.
He was last in the news six months ago:
A senior judge has been handed a formal misconduct warning for ‘liking’ a Linkedin post calling for a free Palestine, shortly before he oversaw the criminal trial of three women who displayed paraglider images at a protest.
Deputy Chief Magistrate Tan Ikram found defendants Heba Alhayek, 29, Pauline Ankunda, 26, and Noimutu Olayinka Taiwo, 27, guilty of a terror offence at a pro-Palestinian march in central London, a week after Hamas had carried out the October 7 attack in Israel.
The judge’s handling of the case came in for criticism after he handed conditional discharges to the women and commented that they had “well learned” their lesson.
His impartiality was then called into question when it emerged he had previously ‘liked’ the LinkedIn message from a barrister which read: “Free Free Palestine. To the Israeli terrorist both in the United Kingdom, the United States, and of course Israel you can run, you can bomb but you cannot hide – justice will be coming for you.”
(While I was making this update, commenter John independently brought up the topic of Judge Ikram’s record.)
Danny Cohen was once the Director of BBC Television. When he writes in the Telegraph about the way that the BBC currently reports on Jewish and Israeli issues, one can sense the anger of someone who has been let down by former colleagues. In his latest article he writes,
This week the BBC has been reporting live from Syria as the wretched Assad regime collapsed. It is not clear yet whether Syria is destined for a democratic future or will fall prey to jihadists previously affiliated with the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
It seems though that the BBC is optimistic. Reporting live from Damascus, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet said the following: ‘‘This is one of the most diverse countries in the Middle East with multiple Christian and Muslim sects. And you can see it here in the Old City, all the different Quarters – Jewish, Muslim, Christian. They’re all here. They want to believe they have a space now as Syria embarks on this new chapter.”
For anyone with the slightest knowledge of the 20th century history of Jewish people in the Arab world, this statement is both ignorant and offensive.
There are believed to be three Jews left in Syria. That’s right, three Jews. The rest fled for their lives. After Syria gained independence from France in 1946, Jewish people and their property were repeatedly targeted. In 1947, the Syrian government organised and encouraged Arab inhabitants of Aleppo to attack Jews. Pogroms followed. Synagogues, Jewish schools and orphanages were destroyed. From that point on it was clear that Jews were not welcome in Syria. The community fled to Israel and elsewhere and now there are just those three Jews left in the whole country.
Related post: Examples of spectacular historical ignorance. I will take the liberty of quoting one of my own comments to that post:
…the holes in the knowledge of innocent dupes are frequently – in fact almost always – the evidence that someone in the past succeeded in deliberately fostering a myth, or blanking out a truth.
The Daily Mirror has an exclusive: “EXCLUSIVE: Farmer protest organiser was behind racist and homophobic posts online”
An organiser of this week’s Farmers’ protest in London wrote historic messages including racist and homophobic language online attacking Labour voters, it can be revealed.
“It can be revealed” – this looks like it’s going to be spicy.
Clive Bailye, one of the five farmers who organised the march in the capital, is founder of online community The Farming Forum.
But a Mirror investigation found Mr Bailye had posted a series of remarks using racist language, and disparaging remarks towards people with disabilities, the unemployed and LGBT people.
During the 2019 general election, Mr Bailye suggested “only a disabled, unemployed, black, LGBT, transgender, non tax paying, homeless, vegan immigrant in immediate need of NHS help” would vote for Labour.
I’m waiting for the part where Mr Bailye actually says that being a disabled, unemployed, black, LGBT, transgender, non tax paying, homeless, vegan immigrant in immediate need of NHS help is bad. Unless the Mirror thinks that voting Labour is bad?
In other disparaging comments about race, gender, religion, and disabled people, Mr Bailye suggested “the way to get something done is to claim […] you tripped an suffered injury […] maybe throw in something about being a disabled, transsexual, black, muslim, vegan with learning difficulties while your at it”.
Again, that is an assertion about how claiming to be any of those things gets more favourable treatment, not an actual insult to the groups concerned.
In more recent posts, this summer – in the fall out of riots across England – Mr Bailye posted asking whether “if accused of being far right / anti immigrant hate speech in court do we think saying “i’m on the spectrum” would get you off ?”.
Well, would it? The question is not unreasonable. The official guidelines of the Sentencing Council for England and Wales on sentencing offenders with mental disorders, developmental disorders, or neurological impairments state that the fact that an offender has such a condition should always be considered by the court, although it will not necessarily have an impact on sentencing. It is certainly commonplace for people in the dock to put forward their autism as a mitigating factor.
He also repeated a conspiracy theory in the same post, saying “We have two tier law in this country it seems”.
If belief in the existence of “two-tier law” in the UK is a conspiracy theory, it is one that half the country shares.
A German man named Stefan Niehoff used a parody of a shampoo advertisement to put forward the view on Twitter that Germany’s Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Robert Habeck, was a moron – or a “Schwachkopf” in the original German.
That did not please Mr Habeck. As has become customary for German government ministers since the Covid pandemic, he decided to retaliate against an ordinary citizen who had mocked him by filing a criminal complaint against Mr Niehoff for “hate crime”, and arranging for two cops to turn up at the latter’s house at six fifteen one morning.
Many such incidents of repression in Germany have been chronicled by the German blogger “Eugyppius”. In his latest article, simply titled “Schwachkopf”, Eugyppius writes,
Our Green Minister of Economic Affairs Robert Habeck has been bringing criminal speech complaints against his critics for years. As of August 2024, he had filed 805 such charges – well over half of the total raised by all cabinet ministers since September 2021 combined.
Even in Germany as it now is, on its own that attempt to bring the criminal law down on someone for insulting a politician might have provoked enough ridicule to deter Mr Habeck from proceeding. But Habeck had another card up his sleeve – or rather, his membership of the ruling class gave him the power to keep turning over cards until he found one he could use.
In the course of the trawl through Niehoff’s Twitter history that Mr Habeck got his friends in the police to carry out in support of his hate crime prosecution, some bright spark turned up something that they could twist against Niehoff in the fashion of the American media talking about Donald Trump.
Some time before calling Mr Habeck a “Schwachkopf”, Stefan Niehoff had posted another tweet, this time in opposition to a boycott by left-wingers of the dairy brand Müller. Niehoff posted a pair of pictures of stickers plastered over supermarket shelves that urged people not to buy Müller products, juxtaposed against a historical photo from the Nazi era showing a man in SS or SA uniform holding a placard with the words “Germans, do not buy from Jews!”. Niehoff gave the whole group of photos the caption “We’ve seen it all before!”.
Do you think that Mr Niehoff’s use of a picture of a Nazi in that tweet demonstrated that he (a) did, or (b) did not admire the Nazis?
Any normal person would say (b). I have no doubt that the German authorities know perfectly well that Niehoff’s tweet was anti-Nazi. But they could suck up to Habeck and make his charges look less moronic by pretending to think (a). So that’s what they did. They announced that they were not just investigating Niehoff for insulting a member of the government, but also for incitement. Anti-semitic incitement. As Eugyppius writes,
Plainly, Niehoff meant only to compare the Müller boycott to Nazi boycotts against Jews by way of rejecting both of them. That might be in poor taste and I certainly wouldn’t argue this way, but I also can’t see how this tweet has anything to do with criminal statutes against incitement.
What happened here is clear enough: Insulting cabinet ministers may, if you squint, count as online “hate speech,” but it does not remotely qualify for the Eleventh Action Day Against Antisemitic Internet Hate Crimes. To improve their enforcement statistics against the kind of crimes that really generate headlines, while at the same time persecuting the Green Minister’s online detractors, our Bamberg prosecutors went poking around Niehoff’s account for a minimally plausible post that would justify putting him in the precious antisemitism column.
There is an amusing silver lining to this dark cloud of moronic malice. Click on the link to the word “Schwachkopf” above to find out what it is.
Sometimes the journalist really is the story: “Telegraph journalist faces ‘Kafkaesque’ investigation over alleged hate crime”, reports the Telegraph.
A Telegraph journalist is facing a “Kafkaesque” investigation for allegedly stirring up racial hatred in a social media post last year.
Allison Pearson, an award-winning writer, has described how two police officers called at her home at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to tell her she was being investigated over the post on X, formerly Twitter, from a year ago.
In an article for The Telegraph, she said she was told by one officer that “I was accused of a non-crime hate incident. It was to do with something I had posted on X a year ago. A YEAR ago? Yes. Stirring up racial hatred apparently.”
When Pearson asked what she had allegedly said in the tweet, the officer said he was not allowed to disclose it. However, at this time last year, she was frequently tweeting about the October 7 attacks on Israel and controversial pro-Palestinian protests on the streets of London.
The officer also refused to reveal the accuser’s name. Pearson recalled: “‘It’s not the accuser,’ the PC said, looking down at his notes. ‘They’re called the victim.’”
An accused person is not told what crime they are alleged to have committed nor who is accusing them, but the police speak as if the crime is already proven. There was a time when Britain defined itself as a place where this could not happen.
Here is another account of the same events from GB News:
“Fury as police officers spend Remembrance Sunday knocking on journalist’s door over social media post: ‘A day celebrating freedom!’”
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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