13 october 2012, right versus right

Some may find this connection odious, but I do see an echo of the awful case of 14-year old schoolgirl malala yousafzai being shot in pakistan, and barry thew, sentenced last week to 4 months in jail for wearing a t-shirt revelling in the deaths of 2 manchester police. Where the taliban justice system summarily shoots a minor, the british puts an adult in jail after due process of law, so there's much to distinguish there. However, the basic alleged crime is the same: one person causing gross offence to another by expressing their views. There have been many cases of this acutely difficult issue of my right to free speech against yours not to be grossly offended, including azhar ahmed, who got 12 weeks community service for a facebook post saying all soldiers should die, liam stacy, 8 weeks in jail for a drunken racist tweet making fun of fabric muamba ("I have no choice but to impose an immediate custodial sentence... you must learn how to handle your alcohol better"), matthew woods (19), 3 months jail for a drunken explicit tweet about missing toddler april jones and paul chamber prosecuted and threatened with jail (though eventually let off) for a frustrated tweet after hours of delay in nottingham airport, in which he menacingly threatened "Crap! Robin hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high !". This recent history is littered with social media incidents, which clearly our justice systems have not quite worked through yet, but goes back via the jyllands-posten cartoons lampooning the phrophet muhammed and their many successors, through david irving and the holocaust deniers, to the grandpa of them all, the fatwa against salman rushdie for his satanic verses. Uncertain, I have been listening carefully to the discussions over the years. On the one hand, totalitarian regimes through the ages have forcibly stopped people expressing views now considered entirely mainstream, and still do today. Yet, in our open and permissive democracy, we have an equal problem with views the mainstream finds offensive; there are alternative views we also silence and punish. If someone lost a daughter though, a more cogent commentator recently posited, and someone phoned them up and abused and made fun of their dead 4 year old over the phone, that is an actual and surely a moral crime. Modern media means that the heartbroken mother might wake up today faced with a public message that does just that, albeit by an entirely unconnected teenager through a drunken tweet to friends last night. There is law to be brought to bear, including against inciting violence and racist abuse, and I guess my view is that the justice system must deal, as it does, with each individual case on its own merits. Consensus and consistency, as with most things, are probably a little too much to ask for.