UK Men Arrested For Anti-Semitic Tweets After Football Game

magic maverick writes "Reuters reports that three men were arrested for posting anti-Semitic comments on Twitter following the English Premier League match between Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham United in October, police said on Friday. 'Two men, aged 22 and 24, were arrested on Thursday in London and in Wiltshire, while a 48-year-old man was arrested at his home in Canning Town in London last week on suspicion of inciting racial hatred. The investigation following the match on October 6 was triggered by complaints about tweets that referred to Hitler and the gas chambers.' I guess it goes to show, you'd be stupid to use your real name or identifying details on Twitter. Perhaps the British should also work on reforming their laws on free speech (or lack thereof)."

Comments

Re:Perhaps not

[Charliemopps]

Making "racism" illegal is no different that declaring thought crime. When the state can govern your speech and your thought, alls well, as long as you agree with the state. Once you don't, you're fucked. I've always argued, you can easily determine if a law is a good one by the simple thought experiment: "Once we inevitably elect the next tyrant, will this law help or hurt his ascent to power?" What do you think Hitler would have done with such a law? I think it's rather clear.

Re:Perhaps not

[ShanghaiBill]

This! It's always the racist Republicans in the USA that whine constantly about free speech.

But where do you draw the line? If the government has the authority to arrest someone for hating Jews, then why can't they also arrest you for hating Republicans?

Re:Perhaps not

[TubeSteak]

Making "racism" illegal is no different that declaring thought crime. When the state can govern your speech and your thought, alls well, as long as you agree with the state.

Europe has some rather strict hate crime laws because of a certain incident that happened during the 30s and 40s.
It'd be nice if they had strong free speech laws, but their history has led them down a different path.

This was the offending tweet

Spurs are on their way to auschwitz
Hitler's gonna gas em again
We can't stop them
The yids from tottenham
The yids from white hart lane

There's also some other related tweets, but they link to pictures that are now gone.

Re:Perhaps not

[Entropius]

The way I would prefer to make sure that nothing like the Holocaust ever happens again is to publically ridicule the neo-Nazis, not send the police after them. The entire country pointing and saying "You people are crazy and dangerous" is a better safeguard than throwing some folks in jail. (Hitler got thrown in jail too, and look what happened to him...)

You cannot ban your way into removing things from society.

Re:Perhaps not

[Dunbal]

Someone who would put someone else in a cage for being rude or for having a different point of view deserves no civility.

Re:Perhaps not

[nbauman]

if you know anything of history you'll realize it's the Democrats who are the party of hate and bigotry.

Quick history lesson.

Up to the 1960s, the southern Democrats (the Dixiecrats), were the party that supported the Confederacy, Jim Crow, discrimination, etc. The northern Democrats were completely opposed, and they had big fights in the nominating conventions. The Republicans were also opposed.

When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which started us on the way to ending discrimination, he said that it would probably cost the Democratic Party the South.

He was right. Nixon adopted the "Southern Strategy" for the Republican party, which was to appeal to the racist southern whites. It was successful. They won elections, and racist Democrats went over to the Republican Party.

So the Democrats were the party of Southern racism. They are (imperfectly) not today. When they reformed, the Republicans eagerly took their place as the party of Southern racism, which is where they are today.

Re:Perhaps not

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

look: it's easy for americans to grandstand and showboat on this issue, because they didn't have something happen in the usa within 80 years ago which consumed the lives of millions of people because of a hateful, racist ideology.

Ever think the reason we didn't have that happen is because of freedom of expression? That the worst that's happened here never got to those proportions because people were free to talk about it both to blow off steam and to have their hate publicly refuted?

The one thing that the US does better than any European state is cultural integration. Freedom of expression is a big part of that, we air our dirty laundry right out there in public for all to see, to duke it out in the marketplace of ideas. It ain't pretty at all, but there is no pretty solution, only varying degrees of effectiveness and they are all ugly. We let those assholes have public freak-outs so that the people on the fence can hear the response from the sane ones.

When you censor speech it doesn't go away, it only goes underground where there is no voice of reason to point out the flaws. The cure for bad speech is good speech, not silence.