Italy’s media unites in anger
Silvio Berlusconi plans to jail journalists who distribute the contents of bugged conversations. Giulio D’Eramo reports
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Thailand: website director faces “computer crimes” trial
Chiranuch Premchaiporn, director of Thai website prachatai.com, is to face the court on Monday 31 May in a procedural hearing in a case brought against her under the country’s Computer Crimes Act. The case relates to comments posted on the site, rather than anything Chrianuch wrote herself.
According to Peter Noorlander of the Media Legal Defence Initiative, “the authorities seem to intend through this prosecution is to remove a thorn in their side”. An increasing number of independent and critical media have faced censure in Thailand since the military coup of 2006. Under the Computer Crimes Act, Chiranuch could be found guilty od “intentionally supporting or consenting to an offence”.
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Apple iPad versus free speech?
Steve Jobs wants the iPad, which goes on sale in the UK today, porn free. He’s said so. And unlike most people, he can make this sort of thing happen. Approval for Apple’s App store involves passing the censor — and the threshold is quite high: Germany’s Stern magazine recently failed because it runs topless photographs.
It’s not clear whether this just applies to visual porn — nor how this is defined. Are the works of the Marquis de Sade pornography? Will there be an iPad app for Last Exit to Brooklyn?
Well, no one has to buy the iPad or any other Apple product. So this seems to be fair enough. There are plenty of alternatives at the moment. Google, for example, in contrast to Apple seems committed to openness. But what if Apple grew and completely dominated the market? What if just about every e-book or e-magazine publisher chose to do exclusive deals with them? Suppose Apple decides on a whim that it’s not just porn they want to control but anything that might be deemed “offensive”? We’d end up with Steve Jobs or his successor as a de facto online censor, and self-censorship being the route to e-publication readable on the device everyone is using. Is this the future we want? Are we happy that Jobs is controlling iPad content so carefully already?
BNP teacher ban a slippery slope
A campaign for a BNP teacher ban smacks of the thought police; people should not be punished for their private thoughts, however repugnant, argues Brendan O’Neill
One of the central pillars of a free, democratic society is that people should never be penalised or discriminated against on the basis of their beliefs. The state and society have the right to demand that all of us obey the law and perform our public duties to a high standard, but they have no right to tell us what to think; they have no right to invade our minds or to exclude us from the public realm on the basis that we have the “wrong beliefs”.
Yet today, trade union officials and apparently liberal commentators seem determined to demolish this pillar of democracy. They want members of the British National Party to be denied the right to teach in schools, not because they are professionally unfit, or lack the right qualifications, or have been recorded making racist speeches to their pupils, but because their private thoughts, their personal belief systems, are deemed to be unacceptable. This is a new kind of McCarthyism, aimed at the far right rather than the far left.
On Tuesday, the General Teaching Council cleared Adam Walker, a former teacher and BNP activist, of racial and religious intolerance. While he was a teacher in Sunderland in 2007, Walker had used a school laptop to post vile comments in an online forum. He described immigrants as “savage animals” and said Britain had become a “dumping ground for the filth of the third world”. It was nasty stuff, yet the GTC said its main concern is the fact that Walker had used school property during school times for personal reasons — which it has every right to be concerned about — rather than the idea that he is unfit to teach because he is racially intolerant.
Some commentators are outraged. Joseph Harker at the Guardian scoffs at the idea that “it is okay to have BNP members teaching our kids” and hopes that our new prime minister, David Cameron, will sort this problem out. After all, Cameron once said: “Any good headteacher would not have a member of the BNP within a hundred miles of a school. They should be able to fire someone for that reason.” This echoes last year’s claim by a group of GTC members that “it is not possible, in our view, for a BNP member to be a registered teacher”.
The extraordinary intolerance and illiberalism of these arguments seems to have passed people by. Discriminating against individuals on the basis of their beliefs is no better than discriminating against them on the basis of their religion or sexuality. Commentators are calling for “BNP teachers” to be banned from teaching in schools not on the basis that they are failing to stick to the curriculum or have attempted to indoctrinate students with racist thinking —which would indeed call into question their professional capabilities — but simply because, in everyday life, outside of the classroom, they adhere to a political belief system that many of us find obnoxious.
Bizarrely, many of the anti-“BNP teacher” campaigners justify their arguments in the language of “rights” and “diversity”. Harker says every parent has the “fundamental right” to know that their child is not being taught by a racist, while some GTC members justify their opposition to “BNP teachers” on the basis that their presence in schools is “fundamentally inconsistent with the ethos [of diversity]”.
This is a warped and Orwellian use of language. In the name of “parents’ rights”, the real rights of adults to believe what they want and to not be punished for it by the state is being undermined. For all their talk about “celebrating diversity”, teaching officials are sending the clear message that there are limits to diversity— it cannot possibly include, for example, allowing individuals whose views are judged to be beyond the pale to work in the education sector.
However much these commentators and activists try to hide behind the language of rights and tolerance, there’s no disguising the fact that they are explicitly arguing for the policing of people’s thoughts and the state-enforced exclusion of people from the public sector if their thoughts are deemed unpalatable. Treating individuals as sub-citizens simply because they support a certain political party is far more anti-democratic than anything the BNP has yet come up with.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of Spiked Online