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Permalink-Antwort von Netcon am 8. Juni 2010 um 9:17pm

[ http://europenews.dk/en/node/30098 Hat-Tip VladTepes ]

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff at the Freedom Defense Initiative
Gates of Vienna 22 February 2010

From the launch of the Freedom Defense Initiative, which was organized by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. Elisabeth spoke at length about the hate-speech case mounted against her by the Austrian authorities, and also recounted some of her experiences living and working in Iran, Kuwait, and Libya. Thanks to UAC, Elisabeth’s appearance at the FDI event is now available on video:

[Lenght 14'] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lILsrhsFZjQ

Permalink-Antwort von Kinana am 29. Oktober 2018 um 1:41pm

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff responds to EU court’s ruling that speech insulting Muhammad is prohibited

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/10/elisabeth-sabaditsch-wolff-respo...

OCT 27, 2018 10:17 AM BY CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS75 COMMENTS

Yesterday, Jihad Watch covered the troubling ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that “an Austrian woman’s criminal conviction and fine for her statements accusing the Prophet Muhammad of pedophilia did not breach her right to free speech.”

Insulting Muhammad is now forbidden, according to the ECHR, which has conceded to Sharia imperatives. This ruling is important not only for the “Austrian woman” who was not even named in the Daily Sabah article, but for all who support free speech. According to the ruling, Austrian courts had “carefully balanced her right to freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected.”

Consider the impact of this ruling when weighed with what Pakistan’s President Imran Khan said: that he was “taking the matter [of blasphemy] to the United Nations, saying that few in the West understand the pain caused to Muslims by such activities.” Pakistan is well known for its cruel blasphemy laws.

The next step for the expansion of Sharia provisions in Europe will be the prohibition of all speech that is considered to be broadly offensive to Muhammad’s established religion — Islam — and offensive to the feelings of Muslims.

Robert Spencer wrote:

This is clearly the case of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, who was fined and given a jail sentence for calling Muhammad a pedophile. He married a six-year-old and consummated the marriage when she was nine, but “the Austrian courts had held that ES was making value judgments partly based on untrue facts and without regard to the historical context.

I had the privilege to meet Elisabeth in Warsaw last month at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Human Dimension Implementation Meetings. The Center for Security Policy states:

For the last decade, a civil society delegation led by Austrian patriot and freedom fighter Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff has attended ODIHR [OSCE Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights] meetings to express concerns that especially European countries were potentially unwittingly facilitating these Sharia-compliant practices, to their great and increasingly obvious detriment.

Elisabeth is a powerful advocate for freedom. The ECHR ruling on her case bears grave implications for everyone worldwide who supports freedom and genuine human rights. Elisabeth sent me her statement on the ECHR ruling this morning. We owe her much gratitude and support for her fight for the freedom of speech, the hallmark of democracy:

On Thursday, 25 October the ECHR ruled that my conviction by an Austrian court for discussing the marriage between Prophet Mohammed and a six year old girl, Aisha, did not infringe my rights of freedom of speech.

I was not extended the courtesy of being told of this ruling. Like many others, I had to read it in the media.

The ECHR found there had been no violation of Article 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights and that right to expression needed to be balanced with the rights of others to have their religious feelings protected, and served the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace in Austria.

In other words, my right to speak freely is less important than protecting the religious feelings of others.

This should ring warning bells for my fellow citizens across the continent. We should all be extremely concerned that the rights of Muslims in Europe NOT to be offended are greater than my own rights, as a native European Christian woman, to speak freely.

I am proud to be the woman who has raised this alarm.

I am also optimistic. Since giving my seminars in Austria in 2009, we have come a very long way.

Ten years ago the press labeled me a “confused doom-monger” and I was compared to Osama Bin Laden. Now, Islam is being discussed in every sphere of life and people are waking up to the reality of a culture so opposed to our own.

The cultural and political threat posed by Islam to Western societies is now widely recognized and discussed. It is fair to say European society, as well as the political realm, is undergoing an enlightenment, as it is more awake than ever to the need to defend our own Judeo-Christian culture.

I believe my seminars in 2009, and subsequent work have contributed to strong push back against an Islamic culture which is so at odds with our own. And note with interest that only one sentence out of 12 hours of seminars on Islam was a prosecutable offense. I assume the remaining content is now officially sanctioned by our Establishment masters.

It is obvious to me that public education and discourse on the subject of Islam can have a fundamental and far-reaching impact, even if our state or supra-national authorities try to stifle or silence it, in order to appease a culture so foreign to our own.

This fight continues. My voice will not and cannot be silenced.

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff

 

Permalink-Antwort von Kinana am 30. Oktober 2018 um 2:01pm

NOW IT'S OFFICIAL: EUROPEANS CAN'T CRITICIZE ISLAM
The European Court of Human Rights goes full dhimmi.
October 29, 2018

Bruce Bawer

Founded in 1949 and headquartered in Strasbourg, the Council of Europe – which today counts every European state except Belarus and Vatican City as a member – is supposed to be a guardian of democracy and human rights. That's its official raison d'être. It is separate from the European Union, and its court, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), whose judges are elected by the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly (a legislative body whose 324 members are drawn from Europe's national parliaments), should not be confused with the EU's European Court of Justice (ECJ). It began hearing cases and handing down verdicts in 1959.

How many Europeans are even aware of the Council of Europe's existence – or, if they are, could explain what it does? How many know the difference between the ECHR and the ECJ? Relatively few, I suspect. But this is par for the course in Europe, where the elected governments, in the decades since World War II, have built up a network of international bodies that wield considerable power while operating in the shadows with little or no accountability to the people. Guardian of democracy, indeed.

All of this dry information is by way of prefacing news of a sensational and sobering verdict that was handed down by the ECHR last week. Although the full name of the petitioner is not mentioned – she is identified only as an Austrian woman with the initials “E.S.” – the case, as Robert Spencer has noted, is obviously that of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, who in 2011 was convicted in her native country of “disparaging religious doctrines” for having stated, in seminars entitled “Basic Information on Islam” that she held in October and November 2009, that Muhammed, the prophet of Islam, was a pedophile. Of course, any minimally knowledgeable student of that religion knows that, according to the canonical records of Muhammed's life that are known as hadith, he wed his wife Aisha when she was a child of six and (perfect male role model that he was) waited until she was nine to consummate the marriage.

Not only is it acceptable under Islam for a true believer to acknowledge these details, which theological scholars consider incontrovertibly factual; it would be sheer heresy to deny them. Also thoroughly factual, of course, is that the word “pedophile” means someone who is sexually attracted to children and who, in some cases, acts upon that attraction. But when Sabaditsch-Wolff put two and two together and called Muhammed a pedophile, an Austrian court found her guilty of insulting a legally recognized religion and fined her 480 euros ($548). Sabaditsch-Wolff appealed the court's judgment, but the Vienna Court of Appeals upheld it and the Austrian Supreme Court dismissed it, whereupon she took her case to the ECHR. As she told Front Page editor Jamie Glazov in 2011, the appeal would “cost a lot of money and...take a lot [of] time (6-8 years minimum).”

Well, she was right about how much time it would take. After seven years, a seven-judge panel of the ECHR has issued a ruling in her case. And what a ruling it is – nothing less than historic. The ECHR admitted that, yes, it is permissible in Europe (for now!) for one citizen to refuse to share another's religious beliefs. But to go very far beyond that is another matter, especially in “particularly sensitive” cases and especially when one is making “value judgments” rather than stating the plain facts. Sabaditch-Wolff's statements, the ECHR ruled, had gone “beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate” by making “an abusive attack on the Prophet of Islam which could stir up prejudice and threaten religious peace” and which was “capable of arousing justified indignation.” By finding Sabaditch-Wolff guilty, maintained the ECHR, the courts in Austria had “carefully balanced her right to freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected, and served the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace in Austria.” Hence, the ECHR concluded, Sabaditsch-Wolff's comments about Islam were not protected by her freedom of expression.

Let's unpack all that a bit. What made this case “particularly sensitive”? At one point does a statement of fact become a value judgment or indignation become justified? Why doesn't your or my or Sabaditch-Wolff's indignation over the tenets of Islam matter as much as the indignation of Muslims? What are the “permissible limits of an objective debate”? How can a court in the Western world speak, with a straight face, of someone in the twenty-first century mounting an “abusive attack” on someone who lived and died 1400 years ago?

As for the ECHR's concern that stating an uncomfortable truth about Islam risks “religious peace” – well, on that score the judges certainly had a point. But is it Sabaditsch-Wolff's fault that Austrian authorities have filled their country with people who are so touchy about insults to their religion that a statement made at some obscure seminar is viewed as being capable of sparking major social discord? As for “balanc[ing]” free speech with “the right of others to have their religious feelings protected” – when, in the post-Enlightenment West, has there ever existed such a thing as a right to have one's “religious feelings protected”? What does that even mean? Protected from what? From facts? And of course, as some Americans still seem to recognize (even if many Europeans don't), once you start “balanc[ing]” free speech with other considerations, you've already started to raze the edifice of liberty.

The bottom line here is grimly clear. The ECHR has totally capitulated to Islam. It has dealt a major blow to freedom of speech in Europe. At this point, indeed, the ECHR might as well be a sharia court. When it comes to voicing unpleasant truths about Islam, it can no longer be claimed with any legitimacy that Europeans under the jurisdiction of the ECHR – which is to say, every European except for the thousand-odd residents of the Vatican and the nine million inhabitants of Belarus – still enjoy freedom of expression. In one fell swoop, the ECHR has put an end to that. And some Americans wonder why Donald Trump is so determined to keep the United States out of the jurisdiction of international courts.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271763/now-its-official-europeans-...

Permalink-Antwort von Alan Lake am 30. Oktober 2018 um 2:34pm

As for “balanc[ing]” free speech with “the right of others to have their religious feelings protected” – when, in the post-Enlightenment West, has there ever existed such a thing as a right to have one's “religious feelings protected”? What does that even mean? Protected from what? From facts?

Priceless.