Tag: moshe kantor

Andrew Joyce Ph.D.

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Editor's Note: This is the second in a brilliant three-part sequence first published by the Occidental Observer on 14th July 2020 at https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2020/07/14/secure-tolerance-the-jewish-plan-to-permanently-silence-the-west-part-2/

Reproduced by kind permission of The Occidental Observer.

2012–2015: The National Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance

Between 2012 and January 2015, Dinstein and three other experts on
constitutional law, backed by Kantor’s ECTR developed a draft 12-
page pan-European “tolerance law” for adoption by the European
Union. The law was intended to “criminalize ‘group libel’, such as
negative stereotyping, target group-to-group intolerance, and ban neo-
Nazi and other discriminatory organizations in Europe”.

On January 27, the draft legislation debuted at the European Jewish
Congress, then meeting in Prague, with Kantor presiding and
throwing his “support” behind the proposal, which would
grant harsher punishments for hate crimes against Jews, Muslims,
Roma, women, and LGBQT alike across the continent”.

Minor complaints came from Alan Dershowitz and Bernard Henri-
Levy, who believed that an educational (indoctrination) strategy
would be a more effective (safer for Jews) way of pursuing an end to
anti-Semitism. Dinstein (and, one would presume, Kantor), according
to Times of Israel, was “undeterred by the criticism, insisting that he
would continue to promote the legislation to European governments,
in the hopes that like Holocaust denial criminalization, which he said
was initially perceived as a ‘pipe dream’, the tolerance law will
ultimately take root.”

Dinstein’s document, innocuously titled “A European Framework
National Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance,” [full text here] but
also known by the name “Model National Statute for the Promotion of
Tolerance” was designed to legally implement Kantor’s ideological
proposals as outlined in the 2011 Manifesto for Secure Tolerance, and
made provision for the explicit criminalization of “overt approval of a
totalitarian ideology, xenophobia or anti-Semitism”.

It proposes to make “education in tolerance” mandatory from
elementary school to college. All governments will be legally obliged
to ensure their schools “introduce courses encouraging students to
accept diversity. … It is very important to start such courses as early
as possible in the educational programme, i.e. in elementary school”.
The same measures will have to be imposed in the education of the
military and the police, and for the entire professional class within
society.

The statute also makes it a legal obligation for every EU country to
ensure that public broadcasting “devote a prescribed percentage of
their programmes to promoting a climate of tolerance”. It asserts a
legally binding commitment that: “The production of books, plays,
newspapers reports, magazine articles, films and television
programmes – promoting a climate of tolerance – will be encouraged
and, where necessary, subsidized by the Government.”

Mass media will be completely given over to the development and
dissemination of pro-diversity propaganda:

• The Government shall ensure that public broadcasting (television
and radio) stations will devote a prescribed percentage of their
programmes to promoting a climate of tolerance.
• The Government shall encourage all privately owned mass media
(including the printed press) to promote a climate of tolerance.
• The Government shall encourage all the mass media (public as well
as private) to adopt an ethical code of conduct, which will prevent the
spreading of intolerance and will be supervised by a mass media
complaints commission.

In short, the proposals aim to make “commitment to tolerance” a total
and legally binding principle, bringing about a revolution in culture.
In other words, nations will be punished if their TV stations do not
produce pro-tolerance propaganda, if they fail to indoctrinate their
children in pro-tolerance propaganda, and if they fail to aggressively
prosecute and imprison dissidents. In fact, it provides for the
establishment of “special administrative units” dedicated to the direct
surveillance of all individuals or groups deemed to possess “intolerant
views”.

The statute develops a framework of “concrete and enforceable
obligations that ensure tolerance and stamp out intolerance”. The
proposals were also designed by Kantor and Dinstein to include
explicit, special protections for Jews. Dinstein, for example, remarked
at a 2012 presentation of an early draft to then-EU President Martin
Schulz, that “Whilst current definitions of tolerance would preclude
racism and religious-based bigotry, anti-Semitism must be
individually stated as a separate definition. Holocaust denial should
be a crime.”

Crucially, the statute provides for the legal protection of all standard
Jewish historical narratives, not just that of the Holocaust. It asserts,
for example, that “It must be understood that the ‘group libel’ may
appear to be aimed at members of the group in a different time
(another historical era) or place (beyond the borders of the State)”.
Based on one of his most recent speeches, Kantor’s own interpretation
of history leaves a lot to be desired: “Historically, Jews were always
among the most loyal citizens of their countries, and did their best to
integrate and to become pillars of society in all walks of life.”

Presumably, anything outside such a fantasy would be considered
criminal hate speech. In other words, if a modern-day Italian made the
claim that Jews were dominant moneylenders in England during the
medieval period, and that they contributed to the hostility
demonstrated against them during that time, and which resulted in
their expulsion in 1290, this individual could be subjected to the same harsh legal penalties as someone who made “anti-Semitic” criticisms
of Israel today, or “denied the Holocaust.” And these penalties are
harsh.

The document argues there is “no need to be tolerant to the
intolerant”. Group libel, “Overt approval of a totalitarian ideology”,
xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and public approval or denial of the
Holocaust, are all to be treated as “aggravated crimes”. Juveniles
“guilty of intolerance” will avoid prison, but are to be brainwashed
via “a rehabilitation programme designed to instil in them a culture of
tolerance”.

Since first presenting a draft to Martin Schulz in 2012, Kantor’s
ECTR has presented the Model Statute in a series of meetings and
seminars with international organizations, including the Council of
Europe and the OSCE, as part of an intensive lobbying effort to have
it written into law throughout Europe. There is currently a joint
ECTR-European Council task force which is working on its
implementation.

Kantor has ensured his measures are massively incentivized. He has
launched a $1 million “Kantor Prize for Secure Tolerance”, an ECTR
annual European Medal of Tolerance, and a research fund offering
grants of “20–50 thousand Euro each” for experts who can advance
the legal and cultural enforcement of diversity.

2016–2018: Kantor, the ADL, and the War on “Cyber Hate”

Beginning in late 2015, Kantor began accelerating a more global
approach to “Secure Tolerance” by building a more intensive
relationship with the ADL and focusing more heavily on internet
“intolerance.” In January 2016, Kantor’s European Jewish Congress
and the ADL announced “a partnership to cooperate on advocacy
work within European Union institutions,” that would involve
lobbying for the implementation of the Model Statute and for
heightened levels of internet censorship.

At a meeting of the EJC’s General Assembly in Brussels, it was announced that the move would “enable the ADL to have a greater
impact on E.U. policies and programs”, while providing Kantor’s
policies with a pathway to U.S. legislators. ADL Director Jonathan
Greenblatt boasted that “Working together, we will leverage our
respective strengths to pursue our common goals more effectively.”
An enthused Kantor replied, “I am delighted that we are partnering
with such an august institution as ADL which has a longstanding
record of fighting for greater tolerance and against the scourge of
hatred, racism and anti-Semitism.”

Ultimately, of course, it meant the further dilution of democracy in
Europe, with an unelected and unsolicited gang of American Jews
now free to engage in “advocacy work within European institutions
such as the European Parliament and the European Commission”.

By 2018, Kantor’s effort at international Jewish co-operation to bring
about “secure tolerance” had settled on the internet as a matter of
major concern and as a potential springboard for further movement on
repressive international legislation. There had been earlier
grumblings. In 2015, then ADL Director Abraham Foxman, and also
Yoram Dinstein, had called for measures to end internet anonymity
and therefore expose the “intolerant” to “the censure of society. … If
you want to be bigot you have to take responsibility for it”. But by
2018 this had evolved into the quest for more systematic, legal
solutions to online dissent.

In March 2018, the sixth biennial meeting of the Global Forum for
Combating Anti-Semitism convened in Israel. Run by the Israeli
government, hosted by Benjamin Netanyahu, addressed by former
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, and staffed by a large cast of
Jewish academics from around the world, the Global Forum made a
priority of “fighting cyber hate”.

A modern day meeting of the Elders of Zion, the number of
representatives from various Jewish organizations totaled just over
one thousand, including leaders from the ADL; Simon Wiesenthal
Center; American Jewish Committee; Conference of Presidents of
Major American Jewish Organizations; Conseil Représentatif des
Institutions Juives de France; the International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance; B’nai B’rith; World Jewish Congress; and the
Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy.

The Global Forum, in common with so much of what we have seen so far, is essentially a central “think tank” for the campaign to introduce
internet censorship throughout the West. It devises intellectual and
political strategies styled as “recommendations” for Western
governments to restrict the freedoms of their respective populations.
The ‘recommendations’ of the 2018 Forum included a demand that all
governments adopt “a clear industry standard for defining hate speech
and anti-Semitism” the latter being achieved quite quickly since the
IHRA definition of anti-Semitism was devised in 2016.

The Global Forum called for the introduction of an international legal
ban on “Holocaust denial sites”, and its plan to “eliminate anti-
Semitism” is comprehensive. Among its more recent
recommendations were proposals to establish national legal units
responsible for combating ‘cyber hate’; making stronger use of
existing laws to prosecute ‘cyber hate’ and ‘online anti-Semitism’,
and enhancing the legal basis for prosecution where such laws are
absent.

In much the same way that Kantor’s “secure tolerance” policy
proposes that “restrictions are necessary for freedom”, many if not all
of the Jewish intellectuals involved in the campaign to end free
speech on the internet do so while shamelessly and hypocritically
posing as the truest defenders of freedom and liberty.

A classic example in this regard is Raphael Cohen-Almagor, author of
Confronting the Internet’s Dark Side (2015) and a key figure in the
Global Forum as well as perhaps the leading anti-free speech
intellectual active today. Cohen-Almagor received his D. Phil. in
political theory from Oxford University in 1991, and his B.A. and
M.A. from Tel Aviv University. In 1992–1995 he lectured at the
Hebrew University Law Faculty. From 1995–2007 he taught at the
University of Haifa Law School, Department of Communication, and
Library and Information Studies University of Haifa. He is a very
strongly-identified Jew, having acted as Chairperson of “The Second
Generation to the Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance”
Organization in Israel. He also shamelessly but aggressively postures
himself as a “defender of democracy”, acting as Founder and Director
of Center for Democratic Studies at the University of Haifa. He is
currently Chair in Politics at the University of Hull, United Kingdom.
As with other aspects of the “think tank” strategy, this is
“democracy”, but not as you know it.

Cohen-Almagor’s most recent significant production, titled “Taking
North American White Supremacist Groups Seriously: The Scope and
the Challenge of Hate Speech on the Internet”, appeared in 2018 in
the International Journal of Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy. [1]
Along with an earlier piece from 2016 [2], the article is an excellent
sample and summary of Cohen-Almagor’s work to date, and also acts
as a remarkable and important example of Jewish manipulation of
discussions of free speech and the politics of White advocacy.

The article’s basic argument is that American so-called “White
supremacist” websites are a hotbed of dangerous hate speech which
can be conclusively linked to criminality. Since hate speech “can and
does inspire crime”, it is incumbent upon governments to introduce
legislation banning such speech under harsh legal penalties.

We will never know how Charlottesville might have been
remembered without the incident involving James Fields and Heather
Heyer, but there is little doubt that it was perhaps the greatest propaganda coup that Jewish organizations could have hoped for. It
therefore comes as no surprise that Cohen-Almagor should open his
article with this:

“On 12 August 2017, James Alex Fields Jr rammed his car into a
crowd of anti-fascist protesters united against a white
supremacist rally, Unite the Right, in Charlottesville, Virginia,
United States of America (USA).”

Despite the extreme rarity of violence from the Alt-Right, and the
many singular aspects of this particular episode, Cohen-Almagor
employs the most sweeping generalizations to assert the incident
“illustrates the danger that the white supremacist movement poses to
American society, and the close connection between hate online and
hate crimes.”

Cohen-Almagor, along with the 18 Jews from the ADL, SPLC, and
similar organizations he interviewed for the paper, are aware of the
objections of classical liberalism to restrictions on speech:

“[C. Edwin] Baker (1992, 1997), for instance, argues that
almost all of the harm inflicted by free speech is eventually
mediated by the mental processes of the audience. The audience
decides its reaction to speech. The listeners determine their own
response. Any consequences of the listeners’ response to hate
speech must be attributed, in the end, to the listeners. The result
is the right of speakers to present their views even if
assimilation by the listeners leads to or constitutes serious
harm. Baker (1997, 2012), like many American liberal
philosophers and First Amendment scholars, wishes to protect
freedom of expression notwithstanding the harm that the
speech might inflict on the audience. … Consequently, many of
my interviewees argue that American liberals thus tend to
underestimate the harm in hate speech.”

The key Jewish counter-argument is to assert that speech itself can be
harmful and that “the audience” can be harmed merely by exposure to it. In practical terms, Cohen-Almagor contends that James Fields
drove his car into a crowd at Charlottesville solely because he was
exposed to hate speech — not because of his mental health,
situational factors that day and immediately prior to his conduct in the
vehicle, or because of catastrophic policing failures.

Why everyone else “exposed” to “White supremacist hate speech”
didn’t engage in similar conduct is left unexplained. Instead, we are to
agree with Cohen-Almagor and his Jewish colleagues that

“hate speech should not be dismissed as ‘mere speech.’ … The
preferred American liberal approach of fighting ideas with ideas,
speech with speech, is insufficient. Hate speech needs to be taken
more seriously by the legal authorities than it currently is.”

Just as the James Fields episode is extrapolated exponentially to
define an entire movement, so the issue of “hate speech” and
censorship is based on an extremely small number of exceptional
cases. Cohen-Almagor claims that “internet hate can be found on
thousands of websites, file archives, chat rooms, newsgroups and
mailing lists,” so one might assume that his methodology and
argument would involve a wide range of examples where these
thousands of sources are linked to thousands of instances of violence
and criminality — particularly since Cohen-Almagor argues that
“White supremacist” websites are “like terrorist groups”. The
problem, however, is that he does no such thing, because there are no
such examples.

In order to present even the most tenuously relevant research, Cohen-
Almagor relies purely on unsophisticated comments from a handful of
the most extreme and obscure racialist sites on the internet, and even
here the author fails to provide a single instance where a White
racialist website has suggested any acts of violence. So
inconsequential and amateurish were such sites that by the time of
writing his article Cohen-Almagor has to concede “quite a few sites
discussed here are now defunct”. Having initially made a small
directory of such sites, he admits the “vast majority of the web pages in that directory are no longer operative”.

It is surely a damning indictment of the state of modern peer-reviewed
academic journals that someone could publish an argument against
the principle of free speech solely on the basis of the putative content
of obscure and minuscule internet sources which are no longer even in
existence.

In fact, Cohen-Almagor can’t even come to a fixed and satisfactory
definition of “hate speech” or “hate sites.” This is presumably by
design, with the intention that the topic is plagued by so many gray
areas that any future legislation in the area is, like all existing
examples of hate legislation, destined to be rhetorically capacious
enough to ensure easy arbitrary interpretation by those in control.

Early in his essay he asserts that “Hate speech is intended to injure,
dehumanize, harass, intimidate, debase, degrade, and victimize the
targeted groups, and to foment insensitivity and brutality against
them.” But he also later endorses a definition of the Alt-Right, which
is routinely portrayed by Cohen-Almagor and his Jewish allies as a
body of “hate groups”, as merely “critical” of “multiculturalism,
feminists, Jews, Muslims, gays, immigrants and other minorities”.
Criticism thus becomes conflated with hate.

It goes without saying that there is a crucial difference between the
two definitions, and it is in the gulf between these two definitions that
these activists seek to destroy freedom of speech. Mere criticism may
not “injure, dehumanize, harass, intimidate, debase, degrade, and
victimize” anyone, but the existence of a legislative framework
privileging minority interpretations of such criticism will surely
consign it to hate speech categorization.

Cohen-Almagor and his co-ethnic activists are equally vague in
explaining exactly how “White supremacist” websites are morally or
legally wrong. Despite its initial claims and promises, much of the
article is in fact taken up with banal observations. White racialist
websites, Cohen-Almagor informs us, often have “forums, discussion groups, photos and videos”. They offer “eye-catching teasers such as
symbols and pictures”. Readers of such websites “talk to each other,
thereby reinforcing their commonly held views, empowering people
who share their beliefs.” A key strategy involves “encouraging
interpersonal socialization in the offline world”. Members “use
cyberspace as a free space to create and sustain movement culture and
coordinate collective action”. Website proprietors can also “make
appeals for funding”. Perhaps this is quite terrifying to Jews, but as a
philosophical argument for the annihilation of free speech it is
catastrophically lacking.

Cohen-Almagor provides no evidence suggesting a link between even
the most incendiary racial commentary on the internet and acts of
violence. The only two examples he attempts to provide are almost
two decades old, and concern individuals with clearly unsound mental
health — spree-shooter Benjamin Nathaniel Smith having exhibited
all the signs of conduct disorder and psychopathy in adolescence prior
to his 1999 rampage, and Buford O. Furrow having been hospitalized
a number of times due to psychiatric instability and suicidal
tendencies prior to his shooting spree at a Jewish community center,
also in 1999.

Even the most basic critique of such a proposed link would ask why,
given the proliferation of the internet and social media between 1999
and 2018, there has been a decrease in violence from the far right.
Indeed, if one can excuse the continued use of the “racist” and “hate”
buzzwords, it’s difficult to disagree with one University of California,
Berkeley study that pointed out:

“Although White racist groups have proliferated on the Internet
in recent years, there appears to have been no corresponding
increase in membership in these groups or in hate crime rates. In
fact, one might argue that the prevalence of racist groups on the
Internet works to reduce hate crime, perhaps by providing less
physical, more rhetorical outlets for hate.” [3]

The entire foundation of Cohen-Almagor’s argument — that there is a link between internet activity and White racialist violence — is a total
fabrication.

It is a fabrication that is being used in conjunction with some of the
biggest international Jewish organizations and, via the Global Forum,
the State of Israel, to blackmail and deceive Western populations via a
specious sense of morality (i.e., a “morality” that denies the legitimate
interests of White populations in maintaining political, cultural, and
demographic control) coupled with activism in the media and
financial pressure on politicians.

Christopher Wolf, Chair of the Internet Task Force of the ADL, argues
shamelessly in an interview with Cohen-Almagor: ‘The evidence is
clear that hate online inspires hate crimes’. Cohen-Almagor writes:

“Overly permissive and tolerant attitudes towards hate speech is
a form of akrasia, whereby people act against their better
judgment. Not just those who post but also those who allow
such postings on their servers are culpable for their akratic
conduct. Whether through ignorance, indifference or insistence
on clinging to freedom of speech without caring about
dangerous consequences, these are unjustifiable. Internet
service providers are expected to abide by a basic code of
conduct, one that objects to rather than celebrates violence and
its promotion. When it comes to hate speech on the Internet,
society and its regulators cannot continue to remain akratic and
avoid responsibility for the harm that is inflicted.”

[1] R. Cohen-Almagor, ‘Taking North American White Supremacist Groups
Seriously: The Scope and the Challenge of Hate Speech on the Internet,’
International Journal of Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 2
(2018), pp.38-57.

[2] . Cohen-Almagor, ‘Hate and Racist Speech in the United States: A critique,’ Philosophy and Public Issues, Vol. 6, No.1, pp.77-123.

[3] J. Glaser, J. Dixit & D. Green, ’Studying Hate Crime with the Internet: What Makes Racists Advocate Racial Violence?’ Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 58, No. 1, 2002, pp. 177–193 (p.189)