Finland’s Supreme Court has found a prominent politician guilty of defaming Islam for “Islamophobic” comments he made on his personal blog.
The ruling represents a major setback for free speech in a Europe that is becoming increasingly stifled by politically correct restrictions on free speech, particularly on issues related to Islam and Muslim immigration.
The Helsinki-based Supreme Court ruled on June 8 that Finns Party MP Jussi Kristian Halla-aho was guilty of “inciting hatred against an ethnic group” for blog posts he made in 2008 which compared Islam to paedophilia, and for sarcastic comments which insinuated that immigrants from Somalia are predisposed to stealing and living off welfare.
Halla-Aho är medlem av Sannfinländarna. Domen omskrivs i Yle: Supreme Court orders Halla-aho to pay for hate speech.
In a blog post in June 2008, Halla-aho wrote that the Islamic prophet Mohammed was a paedophile, and that Islam is a religion of paedophilia because Mohammed had sexual intercourse with his wife, Aisha, when she was only nine years old.
According to Halla-aho: “This sentence is related to a discussion where I criticize the idea of the subjective offensiveness of some sentence as being sufficient criteria for its judicial offensiveness. In other words, if some group is offended by sentence X, sentence X is illegal irrespective of whether it is true or not.
In my opinion, stating of facts cannot and must not be criminal, even if they offend someone. […]
He continued: “My sentences about Mohammed and Islam were not opinions, but inescapably logical conclusions based on known facts. I did not use the word ‘paedophile’ as psychopathological concept, but in its popular meaning of a person having sex with children.
The traditional Muslim knowledge, the Hadith literature, tells us that Mohammed had sex with his wife Aisha when she was nine years old. A nine-year-old is seen as a child today, and physically she was a child in 7th century, no matter what her judicial status was. Therefore, if Mohammed had sex with Aisha and Aisha was a child, Mohammed had sex with a child.
Så Halla-Aho har alltså dömts för att han sagt något som är odiskutabelt sant. Detta borde oroa alla vänner av ytttrandefrihet.
Biträdande riksåklagare Jorma Kalske kommenterade:
“Halla-aho had uploaded to the Internet and submitted writings to the general public, in which Islam and its sacred institutions were combined with paedophilia, and in which was also presented the robbery of pedestrians and the looting of tax revenue by a certain national group or with a specific genetic characteristic.”
Skulle något sådant kunna ske i Sverige? Hur kan lagen om hets mot folkgrupp tillämpas när det gäller islam?