@SeraphimDawn
The problem with hate speech is that we also can’t ignore the concept and say that nothing is hate speech and/or nobody should be prosecuted because commited hate speech.
If someone hires a killer to murder someone, nobody would say that the hirer didn’t commit a crime and should be prosecuted. Some people will argue that the hirer should even be more harshly punished than the hired killer.
If someone incites others to kill, or to harm, he is also responsible for the deaths and harm. Money doesn’t need to be involved, as it can promise virgins in paradise, or say that killing that niggas before they kill us is the only way.
The things get even harder because the inciter maybe won’t say straightforward things like ‘kill all christians/niggers’, but will have an exalted rethoric that tries to dehumanize a group of people and make them more probable of being attacked (they all are the problem).
About the site you linked. I don’t believe that the rant itself should be harshly punished, or maybe even punished at all. Nevertheless, such questions are best discussed with statistics, as without statistic knowledge people can arrive at premature conclusions and began to discriminate an entire group, what is a bad thing (I will assume you all agree that discriminating of an entire group of people is a bad thing).
If there’s two or three muslins that commit crimes for each swede that commit crimes, and there’s fewer muslins than swedes, people can say that the muslins are much more prone to crime, what would be right, but it’s myopic. If 0.01% of the swedes commit crimes, then about 1% of the muslims will. Any swede you find randomly in the street will have a 99.99% of chance of not being a criminal. Any muslim you find randomly in the street will have a 99% of not being a criminal. Treating them differently will hardly have any positive effect (the absolute difference is less than 1%), and will only create unecessary tension, what can lead to violence. There’s yet a much bigger chance that a random muslim is a innocent person, than a criminal. It’s the same reason HIV tests with a 1% chance of false positive are shitty, you will get much more false positives (people without HIV thinking that they have HIV) than true prositives (people with HIV knowing that they have HIV) because there’s very few people (in %) that have HIV.
It’s also myopic because it doesn’t consider
confounding variables. There is the probability that any migrants will have high crime rates, not only muslims. Migrants are often in a situation of social/economic vulnerability and people in those situations are more prone to crime. It was to be expected, and it was probably considered when they discussed the migrant policy.
The news article is complete oblivious to all of that. They link the muslims that commit drug crimes (caused mostly by need of money or dependency) and rape (caused by rape culture) to terrorism, that is has also roots in their culture/religion but is caused by very small (in %) radicalized group of people created and sustained by the own hate speech concept that they criticize (but in the opposite direction, i.e. against christians/infidels). The phrase “But we’re sure it’s nothing…just a bunch of cops who suddenly became xenophobic hatemongers right around the same time, by pure coincidence of course, that a bunch of foreign migrants showed up and started plowing trucks through crowded public squares and blowing up buildings.” is, in my humble opinion, not only untactful, as it is myopic, naive, and simplistic.
I do agree with the officer that says that “When he acts in his professional capacity, he should be extremely careful with issues of ethnicity. If he wants to talk about the problems of crime among immigrants in his spare time, he has freedom of expression like any other, […]”.
Again, “Turns out the U.S. isn’t the only place where providing actual facts/statistics about crime can result in a person being labelled a racist.” is a little forced. The post was a rant without many real data. I will always welcome a deep statistic analysis about such topics. That doesn’t lead to premature conclusions and cause unecessary tension.
