Category Archives: Freedom of Speech

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Denmark's Prime Minister calls the deadly shooting on a cultural centre a terrorist attack and says the country is on high alert.

A gunman on Saturday fired shots into a Copenhagen cafe that was hosting a public event on freedom of speech, featuring a Swedish artist who had received death threats for a 2007 cartoon he drew caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad. The Danish police said that one man, age 40, had been killed and three police officers wounded but that the gunman had been unable to enter the Krudttoenden cafe.

The Danish Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, said on Saturday that the shooting had been a terrorist attack and that the nation was on high alert.

An image released by police of the suspected Copenhagen gunman.

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Shooting at Copenhagen event attended by controversial artist, Lars Vilks

GORHAM Facebook and freedom of speech are at the center of a dispute between a resident and the towns police chief that now also involves the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire.

According to Robert Balon, his beef with Chief PJ Cyr goes back to 2009, when he raised questions about the departments shooting range, adding that while Cyr is often the subject of postings on his Welcome to Reality Facebook page, anyone who gets my tax dollars is fair game.

Cyr agrees that Balon can say anything about him in his official capacity, but he drew the line at his family, which he says has been maligned by Balon on several occasions.

On Feb. 17, in an attempt to stop Balon from posting further comments about his family, Cyr gave Balon a letter, written on the Gorham PDs letterhead and signed by Cyr as chief, in which Cyr wrote that Balons Facebook postings represented a course of conduct that evidences a continuity of purpose to annoy and alarm me and my family.

Pursuant to RSA 644:4(f), consider this letter official notice that I and my immediate family do not desire any further communication from you, Cyr wrote, adding that in a recent NH Supreme Court decision, a copy of which he also gave Balon, the court upheld the convictions in Rockingham County Superior Court of Brian Craig on charges of criminal threatening, witness tampering and stalking.

Craigs victim, who knew Craig only as a customer at the restaurant where she worked, complained to Exeter Police that Craig had sent two letters to her place of employment that had alarmed her. Exeter Police subsequently served Craig with a letter warning him that future stalking behavior would result in his being charged for that offense.

On that same day, Exeter Police served Craig with a no-trespass order at the victims employer and two days later, a temporary order was issued against Craig, which ordered him to have no contact with the victim. Nonetheless, Craig continued to post messages on his Facebook page directed to the victim, and he was subsequently arrested, tried and convicted.

Balon, although he acknowledges being one of Gorhams most outspoken gadflies, maintains that Cyr was not only wrong but way out of line to try to stop him from talking about the chief on Facebook.

On Feb. 18, Balon said Cyr provided no specific examples of the alleged improper postings, adding that unlike in State v. Craig, his postings have never been threatening, nor has he ever been served with a restraining order that barred all communication with Cyr.

Several hours after receiving Cyrs letter on Feb. 17, Balon sent emails to Gov. Maggie Hassan and the Attorney Generals Office, as well as to media outlets, claiming that Taxpayer paid Gorham NH Police Chief Paul S. Cyr Jr. is abusing his power, threatening, harassing, oppressing me, violating my rights and putting me in harms way by desiring/ demanding in writing that he does not want any further communication from me, etc.Balon wondered How can this take place when he works for me as a taxpayer-paid employee in the town of Gorham N.H. in which I live!?

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Facebook and freedom of speech subject of dispute between citizen and police chief

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Dylan Moran, photographed in the Lake District for the Observer. Photograph: Gary Calton

Dylan Moran is an energetic man. When we speak, hes whizzing around the Lake District trying out material (to scare myself) before he embarks on his extensive Off the Hook tour. But the one place you wont find him is on any kind of panel show. Maybe its because hes Irish, he explains, but he just cant abide what he sees as a peculiarly British trait: Theres an institutionalised love of games, an institutionalised passion for parlour games, a kind of ludic obsession with passing time in a non-threatening way. And that just gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies, the vapours; it makes me want to shriek, running over the hills, picking up my clothes. I have an absolute horror of that people sitting around on the radio making puns; the panel shows where you get a load of blokes who are trying to out-monkey each other, and the room is throbbing with testosterone and hatred for other people and for themselves. I cannot take it.

Lucky, then, that the 43-year-old comedian, who grew up in West Meath, in the Irish midlands, and now lives in Edinburgh with his wife and two children, loves live work or, as he describes it, when you find out what it is youre after. Having just returned from Lithuania, hell be on the road in the UK from now until the end of May, with tours planned for Ireland, mainland Europe, Australia and the US.

When I started [in comedy], it was like putting pirate in your career-choice box

Part of the enjoyment is meeting comedians from other countries; at last years Edinburgh festival, Moran, Eddie Izzard and promoter Mick Perrin brought a group of comedians over from Germany, Italy and France to perform for the first time in English.

Edinburgh is where things really got going for Moran, who at 24 was the youngest-ever winner of the Perrier comedy award, back in 1996. It was a stellar start to a career that went on to encompass Black Books, the Channel 4 sitcom that saw Moran create and play the miserabilist bookshop proprietor Bernard Black, as well as parts in films such as Notting Hill, Shaun of the Dead and Calvary.

When I started [in comedy], it was like putting pirate in your career-choice box, he says, explaining that the tail-end of 1980s comedy, with its influences from America, was still very exciting and fresh and rebellious. Now, he concedes, referring to the rise of stadium tours and DVDs, its a little more like when the chain shops pop up around the country.

Thats why he likes to stay under the radar. Hes still winnowing material for Off the Hook, for which hes written and illustrated some pamphlets that he describes as squibs. Hes unsure that theres an overarching theme to the tour beyond, perhaps, the vantage point of his time of life. I dont imagine Im alone in having over the past few months maybe years, even felt like I have to check with my friends and peers all the time that this [stage of my life] is quite as extraordinarily unstable and mad and changeable as it seems to me it is, he explains. Because a lot of the time people wonder, is that just my age, is that just time passing by, and me being more aware of whats going on everywhere?

I ask him how the instability of the times and the threats faced by freedom of speech and satire has affected what comedians do. You dont have any choice, he replies. You just have to laugh at it. The alternative is saying nothing, going quiet Thats not going to happen.

Off the Hook tours nationwide until 30 May

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Dylan Moran: Panel shows I have an absolute horror of those

Last weekends shootings in Copenhagen are a test for Denmark. Its tempting to argue that Denmarks soft approach to dealing with radical Muslims has been found wanting. In truth, its the countrys conflicted approach to freedom of expression that demands closer scrutiny. In the wake of this years terror attacks on cartoonists who have mocked the Prophet Muhammad, what the West needs above all is clarity and simplicity in its policies dealing with integration and free speech.

As thousands of Danes laid flowers at the two sites where a lone gunman named by the local press as 22-year-old Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein shot a filmmaker and a synagogue guard and wounded several police officers, a few others brought their bouquets to the place cops shot El-Hussein himself. On that street in Norrebro, the area sometimes known in Copenhagen as Little Arabia, one of the mourners told Danish TV2 it was unfair that cartoonists were allowed to draw the prophet with a bomb on his head, while when a brother puts a smiley face on Facebook, hes a terrorist and he should be in prison.

This remark would ring true in France. After the deadly attack on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo last month, the French government arrested 54 people for hate speech. The best-known of them, comedian Dieudonne Mbala Mbala, was recently ordered to pay a $37,000 fine for condoning terrorism in a Facebook post that appeared to express solidarity both with the terrorists and their victims. This was clear evidence that France was willing to tolerate and defend Muhammad cartoons, which offend most Muslims, but not anti-Semitism, of which Dieudonne has been repeatedly guilty, or public apologies for Islamist terror. The French attitude toward hate speech is thus unapologetically selective. People who point out the contradictions are treated to lengthy explanations about how blasphemy shouldnt be treated as hate speech in a secular country. Muslims might understandably reply that the offended party knows better whats offensive and what isnt.

Unlike France, Denmark has laws not only against hate speech but also against blasphemy. In several high-profile cases, however, the country has refused to apply them to anti-Muslim expression. When, in 2005, the newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 Muhammad cartoons, including one by Kurt Westergaard that depicted the prophet with a bomb on his head, Muslim organizations lodged a complaint with the prosecutors office but saw it dismissed on the grounds that the papers editorial freedom in matters of public interest justified the publication. Then, in 2012, the Supreme Court of Denmark acquitted Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard of hate speech. Hedegaard was initially ordered to pay a fine after a blogger reported that he had said that Islam permitted Muslim men to rape women. But he appealed the decision and the Supreme Court decided he was not guilty since he was not explicitly speaking for publication.

I can see how a Muslim might view these judicial decisions as unjust. On the other hand, the Danish government also doesnt prosecute radical Islamists for their beliefs (much less smiley faces on Facebook). In fact, it has the worlds mildest attitude toward fighters returning from Syrias battlefields. They arent prevented from entering the country; nor are they arrested, or even surveilled. Instead, they are offered public assistance to get job training.

Aarhus, the countrys second-biggest city, has 30 residents who fought in Syria, a third of the countrys total. A majority of them had attended a single radical mosque that openly supports Islamic State. Instead of closing it down or harassing its leaders, Danish police and local officials have been meeting with the returning fighters at the mosque to survey their feelings about being in Denmark again. The strategy has been to keep up a dialogue with the clerics and their flock to dissuade more people from going over to fight for the caliphate.

Denmarks approach to integration allows most people, regardless of their religion or heritage, to pursue their own preferred way of life. Residents of Denmark including Muslims generally appreciate this framework. In 2011, two Danish academics, Marco Goli and Shahamak Rezaei, conducted a survey to find out whether radical Islamist sentiment among young Muslims ages 15 to 30 was somehow correlated with the degree of their integration into Danish society. They found no meaningful connection: The 5.8 percent of their sample they identified as radical Islamists mostly spoke Danish at work or at school and had a higher proportion of Danish girlfriends and boyfriends than their less radicalized peers. The group was not overrepresented among the poor or educationally disadvantaged.

The radicals, however, appeared to be more sensitive to what they saw as discrimination, and they were more likely to have a history with the police. Goli and Rezaei could only conclude their stand was a matter of personal attitude and free choice, something for which the Danish culture has an ingrained respect. The results from this study while not supporting a link between migrant integration and radicalism do appear to be quite compatible with the core liberal (in the non-partisan sense of that term) notion that for the individual, integration is a right, but not an obligation, the researchers wrote.

Its understandable that attacks like those perpetrated by El-Hussein would give rise to discussions of how a country allowed them to happen. But I would argue that the Danish authorities did nothing wrong. No one would have benefited from more restrictions on Muslims, more police harassment, more attempts to force radicals to become assimilated or leave. A lone wolf terrorist can evade the most severe government dragnet.

In fact, Denmark would have done well to repeal its blasphemy and hate speech laws, since they are barely used against anyone, anyway. They only create confusion and suspicion, while a simple and clear policy of absolute freedom of speech would be easy to explain. (One could even evoke a quote from Sigmund Freud: The first human to loose an insult at his enemy rather than a weapon was the founder of civilization.)

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Free speech didnt cause Denmark tragedy

Jan M. Olsen and Karl Ritter, The Associated Press Published Sunday, February 15, 2015 7:32AM EST Last Updated Sunday, February 15, 2015 9:04PM EST

COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- The slain gunman suspected in the deadly Copenhagen attacks was a 22-year-old with a history of violence and may have been inspired by Islamic terrorists -- and possibly the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, Danish authorities said Sunday.

Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt mourned the two people killed and vowed to protect freedom of speech and Denmark's Jewish community.

The suspect was killed in a gunbattle with a SWAT team early Sunday. He had opened fire Saturday at a cultural centre hosting a seminar on free speech with an artist who had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad and then later at security forces outside a synagogue, police said.

A Danish filmmaker was killed in the first attack. Nine hours later, a security guard protecting a bat mitzvah near a synagogue was slain. Five police officers were wounded in the shootings.

Jens Madsen, head of the Danish intelligence agency PET, said investigators believe the gunman "could have been inspired by the events in Paris." Last month Islamic militants carried out a massacre at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo followed by an attack on Jews at a kosher grocery, killing 17 people.

"He could also have been inspired by material sent out by (the Islamic State group) and others," Madsen said.

Copenhagen police made no mention of Islamic extremism and said the Danish-born suspect had a history of violence and weapons offences and connections to a criminal gang. They didn't release his name.

"Denmark has been hit by terror," Thorning-Schmidt said. "We do not know the motive for the alleged perpetrator's actions, but we know that there are forces that want to hurt Denmark. They want to rebuke our freedom of speech."

Chief Rabbi Jair Melchior identified the security guard as Dan Uzan, a 27-year-old member of Denmark's 7,000-strong Jewish community. Two police officers who were near the synagogue were slightly wounded.

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Danish filmmaker identified as 1st Copenhagen shooting victim