The Great Hate Crime Hoax

By Douglas Murray For The Mail On Sunday
26 October 2019

Do you feel ten per cent more hateful than you did this time last year? Do you think the British public as a whole are ten per cent more unpleasant in 2019 as compared to 2018?

If you believe the latest ‘hate crimes’ stats, then you may come to such a ludicrous conclusion.

Figures compiled by the Home Office claim that there were 103,379 hate crimes committed last year. A record number, and up ten per cent on the year before. Various campaign groups disguised as charities insist that this is merely ‘the tip of the iceberg’.

To which one might say simply: ‘Of course they do.’ For if you are sane and reasonable you will realise that all of this is nonsense – nonsense, in fact, of the purest, most disgraceful kind: professional nonsense, cooked up to serve a political purpose.

It is time that purpose was identified and named.

The foundations of the hate crime hoax started 20 years ago with the Macpherson Report on the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence. As well as its good effects, that inquiry had a number of negative consequences. Two stand out. The first was that an offence against a person of sexual or ethnic minority became a crime of greater seriousness than a crime against someone of no minority group.

So if an old woman was hit over the head for her purse, that was just a crime. But if someone who was gay or black was hit over the head then that was not just a crime but a hate crime. A two-tier system of offence was created in which some crimes (with an identical effect upon the victim) were deemed worse than others.

But the second development was more damaging, still: Macpherson stated that a crime was a hate crime if it was ‘perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated by malice or ill-will towards a social group’.

So if I get hit over the head I might be the victim of a bog-standard crime. But if I am hit over the head and think, or pretend to think, that it is because of my homosexuality, then we are in the realm not just of crime but of hate crime. And that means the sirens of the modern police force can really go off.

In the years since the Macpherson Report, the British police have done everything they can to prove that they are on the beat with this new orthodoxy.

They don’t just want to find hate crimes. They need to find hate crimes. Some years ago a friend of mine was accosted on a train late at night by a couple of rowdy drunks. Reporting the matter to police at the next station, the officers positively begged him to report it (once they found out he was gay) as a ‘hate crime’. He insisted that there was no such element to their abuse. The police seemed desperate to persuade him otherwise.

That is just one of the reasons why the statistics on hate crimes keep going up and up. The police want them. They want to be able to report them. They positively advertise for them.

In case anyone thinks that is an exaggeration, consider the pathetic video released by DCC Julie Cooke of Cheshire Constabulary. It took the form of an online message for ‘pronoun day’, which she described as ‘a day which is particularly important to people who identify as transgender or gender non-conforming’. Cooke wittered on: ‘Being misgendered can have a huge impact on somebody and their personal well-being. It can also be used as a form of abuse.’

And here is one of the problems of this form of touting for business. The Home Office’s statistics claim that, in the past year, ‘transphobic hate crimes’ rose by 37 per cent. That is a pretty horrific number – like all the other rising hate crimes numbers. Until you dig one centimetre beneath the surface. What exactly constitutes a transphobic hate crime? Murder? Mugging? Burglary? Well, once again we have to remember that these crimes are in the eye of the beholder. And consider just one such beholder from only a few days ago.

Ria Cooper is a glamour model based in Hull, who ten years ago (at the age of 15) became Britain’s youngest transgender woman. Other than that, there is no reason why the nation at large should have heard of her. Except that earlier this month it emerged that Ms Cooper recently contacted Humberside Police to tell them of a set of WhatsApp messages she had received she was reporting as ‘transphobic’. What were these messages? Well, they were from a photographer whom Cooper accuses of trying to scupper her modelling career.

The photographer reportedly pointed out that Cooper has a penis, which was not the sort of lady he was after. Cooper calls this ‘f****** disgusting behaviour’ and deemed it ‘transphobic’. So there is another ‘hate crime’ just there.

Of course, campaigning groups long-ago cottoned on to the fact that all of this suits their interests. I suspect that sometimes that interest is commercial.

The remaining LGBT organisations in Britain have relatively little to do with their time. Their battles are largely won, and presumably their careers and pension plans are at risk from this success.

So ‘rising hate crimes’ must provide a massive business opportunity for these groups. Other groups also benefit from this marketplace of grievance.

Last month, when Parliament returned to spend a couple more days bickering about Brexit, Labour MPs used the opportunity to attack the Prime Minister. On what? Why hate crimes of course. The ridiculous, fulminating MPs kept pretending that Britain is in the midst of a hate crimewave and that the PM himself is responsible.

Labour MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi and others insisted that Boris’s column last year defending the right of Muslim women to wear the burka (a column his opponents deliberately misrepresented) in fact caused a ‘spike’ in anti-Muslim hate crimes. They claim that such hate crimes rose 375 per cent in the week after his column.

Which sounds impressive until you realise this is a rise from eight reported incidents in a week to 38 reported incidents. Scepticism has been poured on these figures.

Labour MPs who were attacking the Prime Minister with these bogus statistics were only using the favoured tactic of recent years.

For the fact is that since the Brexit vote there has been a huge number of ways in which people opposed to the result have assailed the British public.

We have been called stupid, ignorant, gullible and more. But perhaps the favourite claim of all has been the claim that the Brexit vote unleashed a tidal wave of hate in the British public. Anti-Brexit campaigners repeatedly pretended that the tragic murder of a Polish man called Arek Jozwik in Harlow in August 2016 was a result of the referendum. The resulting trial found that the murder was a squalid and mundane event with no link whatsoever to Brexit. But that is par for the course.

In the wake of the referendum there have been claims that British voters celebrated the result by a wave of hate crimes against ethnic and sexual minorities. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no country in the world more tolerant than this one. Yet time and again in the past 20 years – and never more so than since the referendum – we have been slandered and smeared.

Political campaigners have used bogus statistics to push their own political and sectarian interests. It is time that people named and shamed the smear-merchants. There are bigots out there, as there are in every country. But this is not a bigoted country. And we have the right to vote how we want to vote without being defamed as such.

If there was one wave all sensible people should wish for in the near future it should be a wave of scepticism about the claims of campaigners whose only interest is in doing down this country.

A country which has justifiable pride in our tolerance and should exercise a healthy dose of scepticism towards our critics.

Source: The Great Hate Crime Hoax

Now trans and gay hate crime will mean SIX months in jail after judges are ordered to crack down with harsher sentences than those that are given for domestic burglaries

By Steve Doughty / Daily Mail

Transgender hate offences to get harsher sentences than domestic burglaries Judges ordered to hand out tough jail terms in a crackdown on hate crimes

Figures revealed that transgender hate crimes up 37 per cent on the year before Sentencing Council denies the guideline is 'politically influenced or motivated'

Judges have been ordered to hand out tough jail terms in a crackdown on transgender and homophobic hate crimes.

Offenders found guilty of stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexuality should get at least six months in prison, new sentencing guidelines state.

And there should be a six-year jail sentence for those convicted of the worst cases of intolerance against gay or transgender people.

The instructions, released yesterday by the judge-led Sentencing Council – the statutory body that recommends punishment levels – mean transgender hate offences will receive harsher sentences than domestic burglaries.

It comes after police figures revealed reports of hate crimes soared last year, with transgender hate crimes up 37 per cent on the year before.

Mr Justice Julian Goose, of the Council, said the guidelines would help the courts take a ‘consistent approach’ to sentencing the offences, adding: ‘Public order is essential for the safe-functioning of society and the law seeks to protect the public from behaviour which undermines this.’

The instructions, which will come into effect on January 1, follow a series of cases in which police have been accused of launching heavy-handed investigations into transgender hate crime allegations.

This year Surrey Police quizzed a Catholic mother-of-five after she was accused of ‘misgendering’ the trans daughter of an activist on social media by using the pronoun ‘him’.

Last week Thames Valley Police launched an inquiry into possible public order hate crimes by demonstrators who put up stickers in Oxford with messages such as: ‘Woman: noun. Adult human female.’

The guidelines, which judges and magistrates must follow unless they can show doing so would run against justice, are the first to apply to public order offences – which include the offence of ‘stirring up hatred based on race, religion or sexual orientation’.

This is the only public order offence for which offenders can be convicted for what they say, write, broadcast or post on the internet or social media.

Most cases of hate crime sentenced in the courts are convictions for ordinary offences – considered aggravated – because the criminal targeted a victim from a minority group.

The Sentencing Council said the least serious offences of stirring up racial hatred, in which people spread hate ‘recklessly’ without intending to do so, should be handed community punishments rather than jail time.

But the same does not apply to spreading hatred on religious or sexual orientation grounds.

The number of hate crimes reported to police has reached 100,000 a year for the first time.

Home Office figures showed a 10 per cent increase this year, with a surge in allegations of homophobic and transphobic abuse.

Police must record an incident as a hate crime if a victim believes they were targeted over their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender.

There were 103,379 such reports in England and Wales in 2018/19, up from just over 94,000 in the previous 12 months. Transgender hate crimes jumped 37 per cent, to 2,333, and there were 14,500 cases involving sexual orientation, an increase of 25 per cent.

The number of incidents has more than doubled since 2012/13 when just 42,255 hate crimes were logged.

The Home Office said the rise was partly down to improvements in recording methods, but admitted it could also reflect a ‘real rise’ in crime levels.

There were 79,000 reports of race hate crimes, up 11 per cent, and incidents involving religious hate rose 3 per cent to 8,500.

For these offences, the new rules say the least serious offences should attract a six-month jail sentence.

For those who commit the hate crime from a position of authority, or plan to incite serious violence or whose activity was persistent and widespread, the typical jail sentence should be three years and as much as six.

By contrast, the Council’s rules mean burglars can avoid jail with a community sentence.

The Council said it wanted to reassure ‘concerned respondents the guideline is not politically influenced or motivated’.

But prison charity The Howard League criticised judges for advocating short jail terms.

It told the Council’s consultation: ‘The guidelines should be encouraging the use of effective community programmes rather than expensive, ineffective short-term prison sentences.’

Offenders found guilty of stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexuality should get at least six months in prison, new sentencing guidelines state. And there should be a six-year jail sentence for those convicted of the worst cases of intolerance against gay or transgender people.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7577477/Now-trans-gay-hate-crime-mean-SIX-months-jail-judges-ordered-crack-down.html

Holocaust Denial Not Protected by Human-Rights Law, Court Says

By Hugo Miller October 3, 2019,

Photographs of [alleged] holocaust victims at the Auscwitz-Birkenau concentration camp museum in Poland.

Denying that the Holocaust ever happened isn’t a form of freedom of expression protected under the European Human Rights Convention, a top court has ruled in a case that stretches back nearly a decade.

Udo Pastoers, a German who suggested in a 2010 speech that the Holocaust never occurred, was fairly convicted under the country’s laws against the intentional defamation of Jewish people, the European Court of Human Rights ruled while rejecting his complaints.

Pastoers’ argument that his statements were protected by Article 10, which protects freedom of expression, was “manifestly ill-founded,” given that he “had intentionally stated untruths in order to defame the Jews and the persecution that they had suffered,” the Strasbourg, France-based court ruled on Thursday. His complaint that he was denied a fair trial in Germany was also rejected by the ECHR.

Pastoers had given a speech a day after Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2010, saying that the “the so-called Holocaust is being used for political and commercial purposes” and also referring to a “barrage of criticism and propagandistic lies” and “Auschwitz projections.” He was first convicted in 2012 by a German district court, and then a regional court rejected his appeal of the verdict less than a year later.

Anti-semitism has again been on the rise in Europe, statistics show, with France reporting a rise of 74% last year in acts motivated by such religious hatred. In Germany where some of the strongest rules against hate speech were designed to discourage such behavior, anti-semitic offenses climbed by 10% in 2018 with violent acts climbing by 60%.

The ECHR noted in its Thursday ruling that the German court had been thorough in its examination of Pastoer’s comments and hadn’t taken his remarks out of context. The tribunal said the German had deliberately obscured some of his remarks to try to get his message across more subtly.

“The impugned part had been inserted into the speech like ‘poison into a glass of water, hoping that it would not be detected immediately,’” the court said.

Source: www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-03/holocaust-denial-not-protected-by-human-rights-law-court-says