Thursday, July 12, 2012

The Death Throes of Free Speech in Europe

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Below is the prepared text for the speech given by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff on July 9, 2012 at the Brussels Conference.


The death throes of free speech in Europe
by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff


I appear here before you in the city of Brussels in the year 2012, almost five years after I appeared in the same place, and for the same purpose.

Brussels is the “capital of Europe”, and by all rights should be an enlightened city in the heart of an enlightened continent.

Yet this is not so. The unaccountable bureaucracy of the European Union is now widely considered to be a “soft” totalitarian regime — and getting harder all the time.

This should not have been possible. Our basic freedoms have long been guaranteed — first by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as passed by the United Nations in 1948, and then buttressed by the Council of Europe in 1950 through the European Convention of Human Rights, which was later affirmed by the European Union. Our individual countries have additionally codified the same basic rights in their own constitutions.

These rights include the freedom of individual conscience, the right to assemble peaceably, and the right to practice our religion freely, or to have no religion at all. And, perhaps most importantly of all, they include the right to voice our opinions freely and to publish them without hindrance.

Yet freedom of speech is under attack today all across Europe. I have experienced the full brunt of it in my own country, Austria — I was prosecuted, convicted, and fined for telling the simple truth about the prophet of Islam.

Today, in 21st century Western Europe, our right to free speech is being shut down quietly and systematically with an effectiveness that the commissars in the old Soviet Union could only dream of.

These legal provisions making all of this possible are detailed in the EU’s public documents, and they enjoy the full force of law in all EU member states as of midnight tonight. The nations of Western Europe have obediently complied with the EU’s “Framework Decision”, and have enacted laws criminalizing speech that offends Muslims.

The death throes of free speech in Europe have already begun.

In the fall of 2009 I was made aware that “hate speech” charges might be filed against me — I had “denigrated religious teachings” by giving one of my public lectures on Islam.

The possibility of my prosecution was not communicated to me directly, but through articles in the press. The evidence used against me was a transcript of a tape of my lecture, provided to the court by the same socialist newspaper. It included words that were not spoken by me, and words that were not spoken in public, which therefore were not a violation of the law.

But my case was not really about the law. It was a political trial, and like the trials of Geert Wilders and Jussi Halla-aho, it was intended to silence someone who speaks out against the barbaric nature of sharia law.

Above all else, it was intended to discourage anyone who might consider following in my footsteps. The oligarchs who rule Europe are determined to prevent any frank discussion among their citizens about Islam and its legal doctrines.

These are the methods of a totalitarian state.

They are more successful than those of the Nazis and the Fascists and the Communists because they are accomplished quietly and peacefully, with no need for concentration camps or gulags or mass graves or the shot in the back of the neck in the middle of the night.

We are systematically being silenced.

We Europeans desperately need our own version of the First Amendment. We need leaders who are wise and courageous enough to compose and implement legal instruments that affirm the same fundamental rights that are guaranteed to all citizens by the United States Constitution.

We must decide to reclaim our continent and our nations. We will take our countries back from those thieves who sneaked them away from us while were lulled into somnolence by our wealth and our pleasant diversions.

If we lose our freedom of speech, then we are lost forever.

I am not a victim. I intend to stand up for what is right. I will defend what needs to be defended. Above everything else, I will exercise my God-given right to speak freely about what is happening. Freedom of speech is the single most important freedom we possess.

This is our time. This cup will not pass from us.

I am reminded of a passage in J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous trilogy, The Lord of the Rings.

It is an exchange between Frodo the hobbit and Gandalf the wizard, and it concerns the perilous quest on which Frodo and his friends have been sent.

Frodo says: “I wish it need not have happened in my time.”

Gandalf responds: “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

It is time for us to decide what to do with the time that is given us.

How many examples have to be set before the rest of the European population understands the new rules, and is cowed into submission?

And we must remember to whom our children will be submitting in the end. They will be submitting to our successors in Europe. They will be submitting to our replacements.

We must remember that the word for submission in Arabic is Islam.

When there are enough Muslims living in Europe — and it doesn’t have to be a majority of the population, just somewhere around fifteen or twenty percent — we will be living under Islamic law, and not the laws that presently govern us.

We will no longer enjoy what constitutional rights remain to us now. Our rights will be completely prescribed and delimited by sharia. Women will become the virtual chattel of men. Christians and Jews will be driven out or forced to convert to Islam. Atheists and homosexuals will be killed.

The European Union would consider these words to be “hate speech”. Under the Framework Decision, they are classified as “racism and xenophobia”, and we can be prosecuted for saying them.

But they are in fact the simple truth.

Anyone can verify them by studying history. Anyone who chooses can read the Koran and the hadith and the Sunna of the Prophet.

Widely available official treatises on Islamic law confirm that my description is not “hate speech”, but a plain and accurate reading of the tenets of Islamic law.

It has become obvious that to tell the truth about Islam is now considered “incitement to religious hatred”.

It is now clear that non-Muslims who reveal the tenets of sharia law to the public are “denigrating religious teachings”.

If we meekly accept these rules, then we are acquiescing in the imposition of sharia law in our own nations. And I, for one, will not sit silently while this happens.

I don’t want my daughter to live under sharia.

Our time is short. If you and I do not envision an Islamic future for ourselves, then we must speak out now.

If we wish to preserve the right to speak and publish freely, then we must exercise it now.

I wish this need not have happened in my time. But it has.

We must make full use of the time that remains to us.

Thank you.


Previous posts about the Brussels Process:

2012 Jul 11 Beginning the Brussels Process
    11 The Brussels Declaration
    11 What is Sharia?
    11 The Brussels Conference
    11 Conference Agenda
    11 Conference Speaker Bios
    11 Brussels 2012 Defender of Freedom Award
    11 Proceedings — Brussels 2012
    11 Interview with Tommy Robinson at the European Parliament
    11 Press Release: Brussels Process Launched
    12 Pointing the Way for Freedom of Speech and the Press
    12 Brussels 2012: Prof. Hans Jansen’s Speech
    12 Tommy Robinson Speaks at the European Parliament

16 comments:

Anestis Canelidis said...

I really wonder if Obummer gets a second term how close we will be to losing our free speech????????

Anonymous said...

ChristianInfidel says:

Thank you, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff and Gates of Vienna! Well said, Ms. Sabaditsch-Wolff! I applaud your courage. May God bless you, protect you, and accomplish more through you than you can imagine.

Anonymous said...

This could all be fixed if the people demanded withdraw from the EU and it's German masters.

But they won't. Not even Europe's football - Greece has enough nerve to leave. The people are stupid enough to vote back in politicians who want the status quo to continue.

They got what they wished for.

And here's the funny part. The EU has no teeth, no military, not even a EU police force. They are totally dependent on their host nations security forces for the enforcement of EU laws. All it takes are countries willing to sell out their Sovereignty for funny money loans from nasty German bankers.

Evidently there are plenty of people quite happy with the situation. As long as that's the prevailing mood nothing will change barring a economic collapse.

Gleaner1 said...

The continued stealthy attempts by the unelected dictators in Brussels to islamify Europe at the cost of freedom of speech and therefore the ability to reverse this trend of certain destruction, is the most serious assault against Europe's interests since 1945.

Who are these thugs to dictate to us. The Istanbul process is bad enough and will lead to war unless it is arrested and destroyed.

The fascism of Himmler never had a religious dimension. The members of the Brussels politbureau have succeeded with their collectivist dogma in making Europe less free, less wealthy and more insecure. They must be hounded until prosecution can give us the justice we deserve.

Anonymous said...

"Christians and Jews will be driven out or forced to convert to Islam. Atheists and homosexuals will be killed."

Judging by what happened i the past, it won't be so. More likely there will be a low-level pressure to become Muslim in order to get all advantages (to have all rights and opportunities in the new Islamic states). Of course, if this occurs, and I doubt it, because things do not go as men wish, but as the Divine Ruler ordains. Ever heard of divine providence?

Anonymous said...

The UN is more and more being controlled by Islamic elements and yes slolwy the doors of feedom are closing....as a Christian I see the rise of World Government under the banner od Sariah Law (Islamic domination world wide)all the signs are pointing in that direction, Europe is to late and an other Spanish Inquisition seem to be unlikely.Yes a bloddy terro will come and beheadings of Christians and Jews will be normall thanks to the biggest Islamic lie.......Islam is a peacefull religion

Anonymous said...

What you're fighting though is the "Neil Kinnock" effect.

Failed politicians want to ride that European gravy train just as long as they can. They'd ride it for another five minutes, even if it cost a thousand lives (not theirs obviously).

They're that self-centred, that callous, that incompetent that they can't defend what they say and do on a level playing field.

They may be incompetents, but watch them turn into vicious beasts once they're threatened.

Never mind Islam - they're our true "enemy".

Anonymous said...

“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” Speech Virginia House of Delegates— March 23, 1775 - Patrick Henry, American Patriot

Anonymous said...

"Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty."
"No country and no people can be free and ignorant at the same time."
“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”
Thomas Jefferson

Anonymous said...

"If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter." George Washington
"Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves." Abraham Lincoln
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing." Edmund Burke

Anonymous said...

Here is a little food for thought.
Hannah Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). She coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe Eichmann. She raised the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness—the tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without critically thinking about the results of their action or inaction.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana, in Reason in Common Sense, The Life of Reason
"The greatest threat to liberty will come from government officials claiming to be acting for noble purposes." Justice Louis Brandeis

Anonymous said...

"We, the people, are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow men who pervert the Constitution." Abraham Lincoln in 1859, from Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol.3

Anonymous said...

"How lucky for the rulers that men do not think." Adolph Hitler
“The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.” -- Winston Churchill
"...if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves." Winston Churchill

Anonymous said...

"They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither" Benjamin Franklin
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
"Liberty NEVER came from government. The history of Liberty is a history of resistance. The history of Liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, NOT the increase of it." Woodrow Wilson (only US President ever to have earned a doctoral degree; prior to the White House he had presided Princeton University)

Anonymous said...

"Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." James Madison
"If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance we must provide a safe place for their perpetuation." Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address to the National Education Association, June 30, 1938
“A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.” Dwight D. Eisenhower

Anonymous said...

Since 9 / 11, practicioners of the "religion of peace" have carried out at least 19,264 deadly terror attacks all over the world, about 5 a day.