Rita Panahi: Satire is now criminalised in repressed United Kingdom
ANY nation that criminalises speech to such an extent that a UK YouTube prankster is convicted of a criminal offence for a joke involving a “Nazi pug” has lost its way, writes Rita Panahi.
Rita Panahi
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THE United Kingdom is broken and descending deeper into censorship and illiberalism.
Any nation that criminalises speech to such an extent a YouTube prankster is convicted of a criminal offence for a joke involving a “Nazi pug” has lost its way.
Scottish man Markus Meechan, known as Count Dankula, could face a stint in jail after being found guilty of a hate crime last week for teaching his girlfriend’s beloved pug puppy to salute Hitler and to react with excitement to the vile phrase “gas the Jews”.
Now, it may not be champagne comedy but plenty of people, including many Jews, found the video funny.
What’s more important is it’s abundantly clear that the video is a work of satire and Meechan isn’t a Nazi or promoting anti-Semitism.
Indeed, it is clear that he loathes Nazis. At the start of the video, which has seen Meechan subjected to a two-year legal ordeal that could ultimately land him in prison, he explains the motivation behind the joke.
“My girlfriend is always ranting and raving about how cute and adorable her wee dog is and so I thought I would turn him into the least cute thing that I could think of, which is a Nazi,” he said.
There you have it. Surely, that should be case closed.
Even if you support totalitarian limits on free speech, the context and intention of the material in question should be critical factors in determining whether a person is guilty of inciting religious hatred.
However, in a Scottish courtroom, the judge, Sheriff Derek O’Carroll, agreed with the prosecution that “context and intent are irrelevant” and the video’s satirical nature “is no magic wand” in avoiding a conviction.
He found the video to be “racist and anti-Semitic”. Never mind that the joke was designed to aggravate a single person, Meechan’s girlfriend, and the only group it denigrated were Nazis.
Meechan is now a convicted hate merchant who will be sentenced in court on April 23.
The two-minute, 23-second skit is still on YouTube and has been viewed more than three million times.
Watch it and judge for yourself whether the creator should be hauled off to prison or have two years of his life hijacked by criminal proceedings.
Meechan is already a victim of a dysfunctional system that prioritises offence taking, no matter how irrational, over the fundamental human right of free speech and expression.
Stand-up comedian Andrew Doyle is among the few artists taking a stand against the “sinister” and “absurd” prosecution.
“The joke had to be wilfully misunderstood in order to justify the conviction,” he wrote. “One would be forgiven for concluding that the prosecutors and police involved in this case must have the combined intellectual capabilities of a jellyfish.”
Jewish funnyman and novelist David Baddiel has called out the illogicality of the case.
“An actual Nazi would not be teaching his *pug* to Hitler salute. Because in 1940s Germany, that would have got you arrested and murdered for taking the piss,” he tweeted.
Comic icons Rowan Atkinson and Ricky Gervais have also been outspoken about tyrannical laws in the UK but these principled men are in the minority; the overwhelming majority of comedians have maintained a cowardly silence — something that was noted by satirist Tom Walker, better known as fictitious and enraged British news reporter Jonathan Pie.
“Where are the artists, the writers, the comedians, where are they? Why are they not up in
f---ing arms?” he raged.
“Find me one neo-Nazi that is using that YouTube clip as a recruiting tool, it’s a pug mimicking their glorious leader, so, yes, it is offensive … to f---ing Nazis.
“This judge has basically said we are not allowed to make fun of Nazis in case it is misinterpreted.”
Atkinson has been campaigning for more than a decade against laws that supposedly further social cohesion by limiting free speech.
In 2004, he warned that such legislation would create “a society with a veneer of tolerance concealing a snake pit of unaired and unchallenged views” and that “the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended”.
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Sadly, the powers that be have not listened. It says something about the twisted priorities of British authorities that there has not been a single conviction for female genital mutilation in Britain despite thousands of victims being treated every year.
There were more than 9000 cases of FGM treated by the NHS in England between April 2016 and March 2017. That’s 25 cases a day and not a single person convicted or imprisoned.
For a kingdom that once ruled much of the free world, “the empire on which the sun never sets”, Britain’s inglorious descent into censorship is a tragic warning of what happens when you allow grievance-pushing ideologues to dictate public policy.
RITA PANAHI IS A HERALD SUN COLUMNIST
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