Helen Thomas - Lets move to Germany and Poland

[Skybird]

Offending some person in public by calling him harsh names or showing him obsecene gestures can bring you to court, at least in germany. Even easier that could happen if that person wears a police uniform.

You can also be brought to court for defamation of character (Rufmord), or slander (Verleumdung, üble Nachrede).

Racism, ignoring the origin of it in a person'S thinking, is all that in one, generalised for a whole people. Why not bringing people to court if insulting a person with active racist behaviour? By "active" I mean that the offender really must have done something active like approaching a person and then calling him names, or making racist statements in public. Passive behavior like just being there, or just in your habits refusing to deal with somebody you do not like, should not be persecuted. It also would be a huge unvitation for what we see happening with Islam so often these days: to be accused of racism for just refusing to like it and insisting of wanting to behave not in accordance with it.

The term racism today is abused and mis-defined a lot these days, but that does not chn age the fact that it has a clearly defined, well laid out meaning, which - if limited to this basis - serves well as a reason why to bring somebody to court if he shows active behavior that qualifies as racist offending.

Not douj ng so would also deplete us of one weapon to piush back Islamic crowds in German cities who often are openly racist against Jews.

thgat the laws are not used agai8nst Islamic antisemitism and racism, or that racism is allowed to get hijacked by politcal correctness brigades for enforcing collective Islamophilia, is a problem that we have to accept responsibility for, and that is home-made, by ouselves.Nobody forced us to gio this way. But these failures of ours, these abuses of relatively clear, strict defintions of what it is, do not chnage the fact that active racism under many circumstances can be seen and is being seen as a punishable crime.

The call often may be hard to make, and it may be difficult for a court to correctly identify where the line is set that differs what is punishable from what is not. Nevertheless I think it is important that courts embark on this challenge, becasue I see in our modern every-day present where it leads to when every diffamation and offence and lie is accepted because precious claims that these acts are motivated by a religion make them untouchable. so, yes, the difference between what is covered by freedom of speech, and racism, may be hard to make, but I think in a social community there must be rules to make living-together as smooth and conflict-free as possible in such acrowd, and while there can be a relatively huge ammount of freedom being achieved, I certainly do not want an anarchy with total, unlimited feedom for everybody that only gets decided by who is stronger, yells louder and gets out his gun faster. That kind of Wild West freedom really is the last thing we could need on a planet with 6 billion people, counting up.

Civilisation and culture is not about having total freedom for everybody, that simply is impossible. It is about giving everybody the highest possible ammount of freedom without that being at costs for others that are higher than the costs to you, it is about legal protection of basic rights no matter whether you are strong or weak, and justice.

Without justice, freedom is worth not much. Without freedom, justice is not worth much. You want both, and thus you have to accept that you cannot have total freedom for yourself - because at the cost of all others that necessarily would be.