Ireland is one step closer to what left liberals and wokes across the world hanker after—a country and a region where they can impose their principles and warped sense of morality while possessing the power of prosecuting those who do not agree with their worldview.
The European country has recently passed a controversial law, the Criminal Justice Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences Bill, which grants sweeping powers to the government to charge individuals under the guise of curbing ‘hate speech’.
The revised legislation is set to establish groundbreaking regulations for addressing hate crimes, criminalize the denial or trivialization of genocide, and extend safeguards to encompass gender identity and disability.
The legislation will provide for ‘hate crimes’ by introducing enhanced versions of specific existing criminal offenses, if such offenses are driven by bias against a safeguarded characteristic, such as race, color, nationality, religion, ethnic or national origin, sexual orientation, gender, and disability.
Besides, the revised legislation will introduce a “demonstration test,” allowing prosecutors to utilise the utilisation of derogatory or biased slurs, actions, or symbols during the time of the offence to facilitate obtaining convictions.
In layman’s terms, the newly enacted legislation will make it illegal to deliberately or negligently engage in communication or conduct that is expected to provoke violence or animosity towards a person or persons based on their association with a “protected characteristic”, with the onus of proving one’s innocence on the accused and not on the prosecutor to prove the guilt.
The aggravated offences will entail a more severe penalty than the standard offence. A person who is deemed ‘hateful’ by the perceived victims of inciting hatred with respect to race, colour, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation or disability could be held guilty of an offence which could carry a penalty of up to five years in prison.
In other words, the law is so radical and sweeping that merely possessing content that is deemed ‘hateful’ by the perceived victims could be enough to face prison time. Besides, the burden of the proof rests on the shoulders of the accused, who is expected to prove they didn’t intend to use the material to ‘spread hate’.
The radical new law predictably kicked up a furore, with politicians and policymakers from across the globe raising concerns and warning against the misuse of the said legislation.Donald Trump Jr responded by calling Ireland’s new hate speech legislation as ‘insane’.
It’s insane what’s happening in the “free world” https://t.co/BXEJoR1ios
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) April 30, 2023
Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who describes himself as free speech absolutist, responded to a tweet about Ireland’s new hate speech legislation, terming it “very concerning”. Musk had been a vocal critic of Twitter’s previous regime, which was notorious for enforcing shadow bans, de-platforming voices that did not conform to the company’s political and philosophical ideology, and using the pretext of curbing hate speech to silence dissenting opinions.
Very concerning
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 30, 2023
Others, too, believe that such a radical new law aimed at curbing hate speech might prove counterproductive, extinguishing dissent from public space—a thing regarded as the lifeblood of thriving democracies—where disagreements often lead to course correction and veers nations toward progress while keeping a check on human rights enshrined in their respective constitutions.
In any case, vilifying and punishing the opponents are tried and tested liberal methods to obtain obedience, with innumerable cases of arrests reported in the name of hate speech, misgendering, racial slurs, etc. Those who do not toe the liberal line often find themselves either being cancelled, vilified and ostracised for their maverick views, or subjected to prison time.
However, with the passage of the hate speech legislation by Ireland, with its broad definitions as to what constitutes an offence and stringent provisions to criminalise it, liberals are endowed with a lawful sanction to arbitrarily prosecute their ideological rivals and tangle them in legal matters.
But for the liberal and woke ecosystem, such a country would be an ideal paradise, where they can prosecute and punish their ideological rivals and opponents, merely by labelling their views as ‘hateful’ and making them liable to be charged under the new hate speech legislation.
The wokes and the liberals, through their conduct, have long treated the rule of law and basic morality with disdain, supplanting them with their twisted notion of what’s right and wrong to support their narrative. This perversity results in the subjective application of key definitions, including that of hate speech, whereby any opinion that runs odd with the dominant leftist view gets labelled as hate speech and its purveyors condemned and stigmatised.
However, with the new law, the liberals will have yet another tool to beat their opponents: the legal sanction that the hate speech legislation provides to prosecute those perceived as ‘hateful’ by the alleged victims.
For instance, liberals in India had deemed ‘The Kashmir Files’, a movie that chronicles religious persecution faced by Kashmiri Pandits at the hands of Islamic fanatics, or the more recent one, The Kerala Story, a film that showcases the covert but rampant love jihad and indoctrination of Hindu girls underway in Kerala to turn them into ISIS fighters, as an expression of ‘hate speech’ because it brought to fore the unvarnished reality of how Islamists, whether in Kerala or Kashmir, have been hunkering down on their mission to Islamise India and irreversibly alter its pluralistic character.
If the makers of these two movies were residing in Ireland, they would have been liable for prosecution for disseminating ‘hate speech’ simply because the new law has a provision to prosecute those accused of spreading hate. The liberals would have then filed cases against these filmmakers for merely depicting the reality and busting the narrative that liberals put up to shield Islamists and their nefarious activities.
Thus, the law passed by Ireland is not only flawed but bears grave implications for the democratic world, which cherishes individual rights, welcomes dissent, and above all, respects and honours the truth. However, the passage of the new hate speech legislation renders all these aspects null and void, turning a thriving democracy into what could be described as a ‘liberal paradise’, where individual rights are susceptible to suppression, dissent could be punished, and the truth be labelled as ‘hate speech’.
