How to fight intolerance

Legislation that criminalizes intolerance is liable to achieve the opposite outcome – a popular outcry in defense of the most abhorrent views.

By JPOST EDITORIAL
Golden Dawn supporters in Athens 370 (R) (photo credit: Yorgos Karahalis / Reuters)
Golden Dawn supporters in Athens 370 (R)
(photo credit: Yorgos Karahalis / Reuters)
This week in Athens, the European Jewish Congress’s executive body awarded Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras a medal “in recognition of his courageous leadership in protecting tolerance and human rights.”
The EJC representatives were acknowledging Samaras’s crackdown on Golden Dawn, a political party that uses neo-Nazi rhetoric and whose members have brutally attacked migrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Egypt.
Golden Dawn’s unprecedented success in the June 2012 parliamentary election, in which it received 7 percent of the vote, complicated efforts to investigate and prosecute members of the party, since several of its leaders became lawmakers and enjoyed parliamentary immunity. But when a Golden Dawn member stabbed to death Pavlos Fyssas, a 34-year-old anti-fascist rapper and ethnic Greek, in the port city of Piraeus, Samaras launched a broad criminal investigation of the political party and indicted several of its lawmakers, despite opposition from some of his advisers who feared doing so would hurt New Democracy, the center-right party Samaras heads.
With Samaras slated to become president of the Council of the European Union in January, the EJC, headed by businessman, philanthropist and Jewish activist Moshe Kantor, would like to see him expand the crackdown on Golden Dawn to additional extremist groups across Europe. The European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation, an organization Kantor established in 2008 composed of former heads of European states and Nobel Peace Prize laureates, has drafted the Model Law for Promotion of Tolerance with help from legal experts including Yoram Dinstein, professor emeritus of international law and human rights at Tel Aviv University.
The legislation is meant to define, in binding legal terms, principles of tolerance. The EJC, the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation and other organizations are pushing to get all 28 EU member states to adopt the measure.
While members of the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation such as José María Aznar, former prime minister of Spain, have good intentions, enforcing tolerance via legislation is problematic.
First, drafting legislation designed to target specific political groups is liable to be perceived as a witch-hunt, particularly by groups susceptible to conspiracy theories. The example of Golden Dawn is instructive. Greece did not need to draft any new laws to indict members of the party.
And the charges brought against them were criminal allegations, not more nebulous, difficult to define claims of “intolerance” or “anti-Semitism.” Nevertheless, opinion polls held in recent weeks report that support for Golden Dawn has grown, in part due to perceptions that the party has been unfairly singled out. And if the indictments end in acquittals, Golden Dawn’s popularity is sure to grow even more. If political parties, movements or individuals begin to be indicted for their opinions, there will surely be a backlash of backing for precisely the sorts of extremist views the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation seeks to eliminate.
Second, if the European Parliament adopts the legislation in its current form, freedom of speech and expression are liable to be compromised in the name of tolerance.
Section 2 (d), for instance, states that the purpose of the statute is to “condemn all manifestations of intolerance based on bias, bigotry and prejudice.” And an explanatory note to Section 2 states that “religious intolerance is understood to cover Islamophobia.” But since Islamophobia is left undefined, all critical scrutiny of Islam, including of attempts to implement Shari’a law, could be defined as Islamophobia.
And even if the EU courts in the end do not deem legitimate criticism of Islam as Islamophobia and therefore punishable by law, there is a real fear that individuals and groups will censor themselves and refrain from expressing opinions or moral views in order to avoid lengthy court battles. We share with the ECJ and the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation a desire to eradicate all forms of bigotry – including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
But these terms are notoriously difficult to define.
And legislation that criminalizes intolerance is liable to achieve the opposite outcome – a popular outcry in defense of the most abhorrent views.