It's no longer Moroning In America
Good God, Michael Savage is on the Home Secretary's list of arseholes not welcome on these shores. American readers, come one, come all to this blessed isle, where Rush Limbaugh is hardly known and Michael Savage is not allowed at all.
Frankly, though, I have a great deal of sympathy for Savage's reaction. He is, to be clear, a horrific moron, and given to some of the most stupid and demagogic ranting I've ever heard in the back of a cab. But I don't believe he's ever specifically advocated violence, and the fact that nobody's dug up a specific instance on which he did so in the context of this ban confirms me in this view. And surely this ought to be the standard - being hateful and unpleasant is not in itself a crime.
It makes me suspect that quite a few of the Arabic names on that list which I don't recognise are basically Muslim versions of Michael Savage; belligerent ranting halfwits, but not actually violent people. The general vein of thinking that digs up passages from the Hamas Covenant and uses them as a reason to no-platform anyone anywhere with a six-degrees-of-separation link to the Muslim Brotherhood is not one of which I'm a fan, and its legal expression is bound to suffer from the equivalent of grade inflation over time.
"I don't know what its gonna take for you to finally welcome what the troops are doing, what the interrogators were doing until you finally recognize the enemy, the true face of the enemy and what its gonna take to break this death grip that they seem to have on the minds of the Democrats. ...
ReplyDeleteThese people don't fear death, they fear humiliation. The only way to humiliate them is take their deepest fear, the pig, the dog, the woman with the leash, and use it on them to break them!
... Instead of putting joysticks, I would have liked to have seen dynamite put in their orifices and they should be dropped from airplanes. How's that? You like that one? Go call somebody that you want to report me to, see if I care. They should put dynamite in their behinds and drop them from 35,000 feet, the whole pack of scum out of that jail."
Michael Savage on the Abu Ghraib prisoners, May 2004
"these primitives can only be treated in one way, and I don't think smallpox and a blanket is good enough incidentally. Just before -- I'm going to give you a little precursor to where I'm going. Smallpox in a blanket, which the U.S. Army gave to the Cherokee Indians on their long march to the West, was nothing compared to what I'd like to see done to these people, just so you understand that I'm not going to be too intellectual about my analysis here in terms of what I would recommend, what Doc Savage recommends as an antidote to this kind of poison coming out of the Middle East from these non-humans."
ibid, on Arab Muslims
"If you are a God-believing, God-fearing person, I am sure at some point you ask yourself, wait a minute. The epicenter of this earthquake and the resulting tidal wave was adjacent to the sex trade island of Phuket, Thailand ... and then it knocked out many, many regions of Indonesia, some of which are the most vicious recruiting grounds for Islamic terrorists. That's a fact of reality. Then going the other way, it hit Sri Lanka, ex-Ceylon. And as you well know, Sri Lanka is a viciously anti-Western nation, the home of the Tamil Tigers, who are not only separatists but anti-Westerners, anti-Christians, etc. You could argue, maybe this is God's hand, because some of their brethren struck Christian America. Maybe God speaks the truth but waits."
ibid, on the victims of the Boxing Day tsunami - not, unlike the others, a direct advocacy of violence
...enough? Because there's lots more.
Yes, as I say, he's a moron and a cunt. But we went through this during all the "incitement to religious hatred" and "glorifying terrorism" debate - the level at which the state ought to get involved in interfering with people's speech is when they are either advocating specific acts of violence (which is the historical and uncontroversial standard), or they're carrying out so much incitement that violence will be a predictable and direct consequence (the new and controversial standard).
ReplyDeleteThe stuff you've quoted is clearly in the second category rather than the first, and (although it's obviously possible to argue both ways) I don't think it actually reaches the required level with respect to the second either. Savage is not a serious figure and this hateful rhetoric is too vague and unspecific to credibly be part of a causal chain; it's more on the level of the Pigdogfucker blog demanding that somebody be sandpapered to death. There just isn't a law against being a cunt and there probably shouldn't be.
I realise that this is exactly what people said about Hitler in the early days, but come on, sample size n=1.
Fair enough, arguing for biological warfare against the entire Middle East is probably too vague and unserious. But how about arguing that Abu Ghraib prisoners should be chucked out of aircraft? That's a specific and entirely credible act of violence (see South America, passim).
ReplyDeleteSurely if he had argued "I think that Mexican immigrants [say] should be burned alive" that would count...
Yeah, because a lot of his listeners are in a position to burn Mexicans alive and are stupid/evil enough to have a go. One hopes his listeners don't have access to helicopters, dynamite and prisoners' orifices, and that's probably the case.
ReplyDeleteDave, I think that's a very dodgy position to take. For a start, Savage has ten million listeners, and it's entirely possible that some of them are US soldiers on leave, or National Guardsmen, who do indeed have access to both Iraqi prisoners and explosives (and helicopters, sometimes).
ReplyDeleteSecond, I think it's safe to say that we should ban the entry of, for example, a hypothetical foreign agitator who calls for the extermination of every Jew in Britain - even though none of his potential listeners are in a position to carry this out?
"Calls for" is a particularly troublesome and ambiguous phrase here though - there is that notorious verse in the Koran which does talk about exterminating Jews, do we per se want to ban every imam who has mentioned it? (I like my joke too much not to repeat it about Ian Paisley having really rather modest practical program for a man who believes that 17.5% of the world's population are ruled by the AntiChrist).
ReplyDeleteI think Savage would have a case for saying that his comment about helicopters and dynamite was stupid and intentionally ridiculous hyperbole not meant to be taken seriously - this wouldn't actually necessarily be a defence under a charge of incitement to hatred because the standard is "intended or likely", but I think it might be thought to temper the case for prior restraint.
FWIW, some rentagob libel lawyer in the Times thinks Savage might have a case for libel against Jacqui Smith.
"Advocating specific acts of violence" was the standard you set; if there was an imam saying "The Koran says we should wipe out all the Jews, and I for one think this is a great idea and one that British Muslims should put into practice, starting now" then, yes, I reckon he should be banned - even though, judging by recent events, the tiny number of British Muslims inclined to follow his suggestion would be far too gormless to actually achieve anything along these lines.
ReplyDeleteThe trouble with a hyperbole standard is that it automatically permits calling for all sorts of horrible violent actions, as long as those actions are violent enough to be unachievable.
I'm sure Savage (or Weiner, to give him the name he was born with) has a case for libel. Anyone does under English law. Weiner v. Smith would be one of those Iran-Iraq War situations where your only regret is that they can't both lose.
If you'll take the Westboro Baptist crowd off our hands into the bargain, you've got my full support.
ReplyDeleteWe could even try taking in some of those Moslemen for a bit in return; they seem to be a bit less strident in USia, for some reason.
I will gladly sponsor the visa application of Rev Fred Phelps just as soon as I can get Graham Norton to sign on the line for the sitcom pilot I'm writing for the two of them.
ReplyDeleteGiven Weiner's utter obscurity in the UK, I'd be curious to know if he was planning a visit, and if so, which arseholes invited him.
ReplyDeleteApparently he wasn't and never has - it's just a totally symbolic ban. A couple of the Russian weirdoes on the list have also never expressed any interest in coming to the UK and since they're in prison serving quite long sentences, the urgency of banning them wasn't apparent.
ReplyDelete