OSCE Unbound

OSCE Should NEVER Have Observed the Belarusian Elections

 

Ok, surprise, surprise, not a single opposition candidate won in the "fell short" Belarusian elections! -- says Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

I'm shocked, shocked, to discover there is a flawed election in Belarus!

"Your winnings, sir!"

And what are those winnings? Business and pipeline thoroughfares for Germany? Keeping good relations with Russia? What *is it, really* that keeps Europe so timid on really cutting the cord on Belarus?! Oh, for fear of "isolating" this dictatorship or "pushing it into the arms of Russia"? But it's already heavily embraced by the Kremlin and already isolated -- but inconsistently.

Why on earth the OSCE -- both the Parliamentary Assembly and the Office of Democratic Elections and Human Rights -- graced the tyrant Lukashenka with their presence by observing elections is beyond me.

Shouldn't OSCE have learned by now?!

OSCE used to deliberately *not* send observation teams at all in order to make a point -- "you are so far below our standards that we can't even observe you."

So why did OSCE even observe this election?! If you didn't "get it" after all the alternative presidential candidates and all their staff and supporters and human rights monitors were locked up and beaten and held for more than a year -- and some are still held -- why would you think there was something "different" about the parliamentary elections?!

I marvelled at how once again, Western democracy promoters and consultants and advisers and supposedly friendly democratic governments supporting their counterparts (in principle) could tell  the weary and tattered Belarusian opposition to go play Lucy and the football once again -- although with far more serious consequences. Why does the West engage in such high-handed cruelty?!

Interestingly, the one group that sat out the presidential elections and whose leaders tended not to be arrested -- the Belarusian Popular Front -- went into the parliamentary elections, as did some other groups, whether independent and in good faith or coopted. And it didn't work. Any alternative candidate did not win.

Could we stop the cruelty and stupidity now, please? Isn't the definition of insanity banging your head against the wall over and over again?

The State Department said today:

The September 23 parliamentary elections in Belarus fell short of international standards and their conduct cannot be considered free or fair. The preliminary assessment of the OSCE election observation mission found that the elections were “not competitive from the start.” The observer mission cited the limitation of choice for voters, the lack of impartiality on the part of the election commission, and the lack of proper counting procedures.

The United States urges the authorities to take steps to meet Belarus’s international commitments to hold genuinely democratic elections and to foster respect for human rights. Enhanced respect for democracy and human rights in Belarus, including the release and rehabilitation of all political prisoners, remains central to improving bilateral relations with the United States

But why did the US even sign off on the OSCE observation under circumstances were there were political prisoners -- and non-rehabilitation of people like Andrei Sannikov, who is not free to resume his work or independent candidacy in elections?

OSCE said:

Many OSCE commitments on citizen’s democratic rights to associate, to stand as candidates and to express themselves freely were not respected in yesterday’s parliamentary elections in Belarus, concluded the international observers from the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) and the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (OSCE PA).

The elections were not administered in an impartial manner and the complaints and appeals process did not guarantee effective remedy, the observers found.

“This election was not competitive from the start,” said Matteo Mecacci, Special Co-ordinator, who led the short-term OSCE observer mission. “A free election depends on people being free to speak, organize and run for office, and we didn’t see that in this campaign. We stand ready to work with Belarus to take the steps forward that are in our common interest.”

OK, guys, if these elections were "not competitive from the start" -- and you could see that "by daylight, with a fire" as the Russian idiom has it, why the hell were you observing them and thereby giving them credence and validation?

It can be hard to dislodge dictators who basically hold everybody's paycheck over their head in a quasi-communist society like Belarus. The West may feel it has little leverage with Russia (although it  could do more, and the European Union's probe into Gazprom's monopoly is a good start). But when all else fails, you can always withhold validation, which is what dictators crave. Don't give it to them! No winnings, sir!

Some of the opposition called for boycotting the elections -- don't vote in them, don't run in them, and by extension presumably, don't monitor them.

Why wasn't that opposition -- the real democrats of Belarus -- heeded?

The West, which is awfully wishy-washy with Russia these days -- thinks it knows better. Patronizingly and condescendingly, it tells Belarusian opposition leaders that they should take part in elections to "practice" and to "build constituencies" and to "get their name and program out there".

Oh, stop it. These same people have been practicing since 1997 when Lukashenka consolidated power and closed the parliament, independent radio stations and groups and began a decades-long onslaught against all aspects of the opposition and civil society. They truly have had enough "practice" at this point through numerous elections they've taken part in and paid the price for. It's appalling to tell people who were clubbed on the head in the square in December 2010 in the failed presidential elections to go out and get clubbed again. In fact, it's collusion. This should be stopped. Never again should OSCE monitor any election in Belarus or seat any delegation that comes out of this flawed process into the OSCE PA.

And I suspect that's what this is really about. The pro-Russian forces in OSCE PA think that if they don't monitor the election and "try to make it better" and "engage," they aren't doing their best to make a delegation better that they themselves can never find a way not to seat lately (although at one time, they didn't, and would even invite the opposition for talks). If OSCE PA didn't observe the parliamentary elections on principle, then how could they seat the delegation to PA that results from it? That's certainly the logic. But it's a perverse logic that leads to validating the invalid.

OSCE technocrats live for silly things like this:

On a positive note, political parties could, for the first time, nominate candidates in constituencies where they maintained no regional office, increasing the number of political party nominations. Nonetheless, overly technical application of the law resulted in the exclusion of one in four nominees.

Of course, this is patently ridiculous, because of course the Belarusian Bolsheviks are going to use every trick to disqualify candidates, and nominating candidates where there isn't a regional office to build constituencies -- in a situation with no free press and little access to national TV -- is a lose/lose anyway.

As OSCE admitted:

The election campaign was barely visible throughout the four-week campaign. Although the Constitution guarantees freedom of expression and there is a high number of media outlets, coverage of the campaign did not provide a wide range of views. Candidates who called for an election boycott had their free access to media coverage denied or censored. Media coverage focused on the President and government, with minimal attention given to candidates.

Gosh, you don't say!

Really, for OSCE bodies to participate in this sham is a travesty. They should simply have a rule that if a country won't allow an OSCE mission -- and Belarus expelled the OSCE mission! -- no election will ever be allowed -- full stop. No reconnaissance missions, talks, forrays, assays -- nothing. And certainly no limited monitoring or full-fledged observation -- nothing.

The US State Department and all state-funded programs assisting democracy like IRI or NDI or NED, etc. should all be prevented from involvement in elections in Belarus. Can't this be made a term of the Belarusian democracy aid legislation? Because it is money thrown down the rat hole, that in any event, primarily goes to our own American consultants and infrastructure anyway. We shouldn't be "training" people to be taking part in these hugely flawed elections when they cannot win, and where, as OSCE finally called it in stronger words than they ever have in decades:

This election was not competitive from the start.

When elections are "not competitive from the start," you don't play. You spend money on other things like helping NGOs stay alive and get the news out, circumvention and proxy technology for Internet freedom, help for exile groups, radio broadcasting from abroad and so on. Let's get our heads straight on about all this, and stop thinking we're going to have the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

It's still not too late for OSCE PA to say: we're not seating the delegation from Belarus that resulted from this election that was not cometitive from the start. And it's never too late for ODIHR to finally say: no more observations, monitoring, assessments, trips -- nothing, until Lukashenka is gone and the Belarusians supply some minimal rules of good faith in allowing the OSCE mission and monitors -- as well as opposition -- to function freely.

Keeping the Helsinki Flame: US at OSCE HDIM Should Stay Strong on Free Speech and Real Internet Freedom

NGO colleagues stand up to call for Ales Bialiatski's release from jail at the HDIM meeting last year. Photo by FIDH.

And so the annual Human Dimension Implementation Meeting of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe begins again, the meeting with one of those strange multilateral acronyms "HDIM" which you hope doesn't stand for "hope dim" -- because in fact this important gathering of both diplomats and activists, unique of its kind, is a hope for many to try to publicize ongoing and even massive human rights violations in Eurasia.

Yes, I single out Eurasia rather than North America because in North America, there scale and magnitude of the violations are indisputably less, and more importantly, the remedies for addressing them with an adversarial bar, independent judiciary, freely-elected parliament, vibrant civil society sector, and free press are immeasurably greater.

I'm unable to go to the meeting, unfortunately, this year, because of other work and family commitments, but the meeting is in good hands.

The US delegation illustrates both the continuity of human rights concerns and diplomacy over the generations as well as decades of dedication to the cause of human rights.

The delegation is headed by Amb. Avis Bohlen who has had a distinguished career in arms control as well as diplomatic service in Eastern Europe. She is also known for her famous father, Amb. Charles "Chip" Bohlen, who dealt with the Soviets in the height of the Cold War. If you read the Wikipedia version, Bohlen was said to differ from George Kennan in the strategy for coping with the Soviet challenge, favouring accommodation rather than containment. The story is more complicated than that, but it is a never-ending challenge for the US today, and what the delegation's leadership tells us is that we still have American officials willing to accept this challenge and deal with it in an informed way.

Also on the delegation is Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett, Chair, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, also known for her famous father, the late Congressman Tom Lantos, for whom the Congressional human rights committee is now named. Dr. Lantos has continued the tradition of taking up vocal defense of cases in Russia even when it is not politically expedient, such as that of Sergei Magnitsky. Putting CIRF in a leadership role on this delegation signals the seriousness with which the US takes religious freedom, which is one of the themes emphasized this year.

Others on the delegation such as Amb. Michael Kozak, Amb. Ian Kelly, Amb. Suzan Johnson Cook all represent decades of solid US experience dealing with the daily challenges posed by the continual defiance of human rights norms in one half of the Helsinki space in particular -- that dominated by Russia. There's a lot of equivocating and acknowledgement that "we all" have human rights problems, such as racial profiling or discrimination against minorities -- and we do. Still, let's hope there aren't going to be apologies for any situation in the US that has that ample civil society I just mentioned to address it, unlike Russia, which crushes civil society: one only has to look at the tides of immigration to the US, somewhat diminished and facing more difficulties in some places like Arizona though they might: it's a 7-lane Texas highway coming in, and a cowpath going out.

The HDIM meets at a time of unprecedented challenge to its very functioning -- Belarus (Belarus!) aided and abetted by the usual suspect in the post-Soviet space and unfortunately, some Europeans who should know better -- is trying to shorten the length of the HDIM agenda and days of meeting -- already over-packed -- and dumb down the agenda.

This is just like what Russia is doing here in New York at the UN with the intergovernmental working group set up to make the treaty bodies more "effective" and more "efficient" (read: with less independence as their members are intimidated and forced to submit to a "code of conduct" and without NGO input as their role is challenged and diminished and the role of new media covering the sessions with livestreaming facing resistance.)

Russia has just kicked out the innocuous USAID office from Russia, supposedly for interfering in elections or even espionage, although USAID has trouble interfering even with its own considerable bureaucracy and expense to get the job done, or even spying an opportunity to actually act in the real world. Putin may be surprised to discover some of his own cronies may have just been decoupled from their hook-up.

Putin's representatives at this meeting will feel smug and self-satisfied that they have removed an obvious interference of questionable intent and will snarkily point to America's own tragic losses last week as its ambassador to Libya and three of his fellow diplomats were killed apparently by a terrorist faction in the very course of establishing democracy abroad -- with the apparent acquiescence of the locals. The Russians endlessly make hay over this but can never explain why so many hundreds of thousands of their own citizens have slipped the leash to challenge Putin's managed democracy, and why it is necessary club and jail and ban so many of them if it's really only Hillary Clinton's funding that sustains it all.

Let's hope the American delegation stands up to this insidious narrative and double standard  by pointing out that human rights are universal, in the Helsinki context in particular, promoting and protecting them was long ago disavowed as any "interference in internal affairs" and the Russians and their allies are clearly backsliding.

Say, detentions of partisan American journalists around the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, always marked by civil disobedience and challenged by lawfarers, and breaking-up of demonstrations by Canadian students whose tuition went up can be seen as counter to the spirit of Helsinki and scrutinized with our anti-Western magnifying glasses as human rights violations, but I'll tell you what's far, far worse: getting a bullet in your head and dying for your exposure of torture and disappearances in Chechnya, like Anna Politkovskaya.  So let's keep it in perspective, shall we?

I'm worried about how two issues will fare at this meeting, especially under the Obama Administration, which has not been very sturdy on them and has caved to various faddish politically-correct notions in the air.

The first is all issues around religious freedom, tolerance and free speech. The US Embassy in Cairo did not take the right approach on this as I've explained (and James Kirchick has explained better) and let's hope our diplomats in Warsaw get this and understand why the State Department rightly withdrew it.

You never know how much cross-pollination takes place between multilateral bodies in the US government, which isn't always so friendly to them on principle, but they should read up on the UN resolution 16/18 at the UN Human Rights Council, which was hard-won language that essentially made the distinction between mere "insult" in hate speech and the more precise concept of "incitement to imminent violence".

The shoddy hate video produced by some strange characters who may or may not be part of a larger hoax does not qualify under the definition of that resolution and other international law as "incitement to imminent violence" (a concept taken straight out of Ohio v. Brandenburg in the Supreme Court.

That's because the movie, as crass and nasty as it is, doesn't call on anybody to beat or kill or harm Muslims.

That the result of this hate movie is violence by those insulted doesn't mean that the "incitement" test was met -- that's not how the jurisprudence works. I've written about this at length here, and explained why we need now a resolution on "insult violence," just as we attempted with "honour killings," rather than accept at all anything that remotely goes into the badlands of "defamation of religions". Let's hope that each and every member of the US delegation gets this, and doesn't cave on this in any language anywhere, because it means conceding victory to years of hostile effort by the Organization of Islamic Community at the UN to impose a global blasphemy law on the world's countries and prevent criticism of abusive theocratic states.

There will be enormous pressure to have some kind of statements of conciliation or understanding or condemnation of hate speech, but the key is to focus on the speech itself, not on its outcome and to insist that the "incitement to imminent violent" test be met for the speaker, not the insulted. Nothing justifies violence -- one right doesn't trump another. Under no circumstances should anyone begin mumbling about how we need "responsibilities as well as rights" -- such "responsibilities aren't defined at Helsinki and can't be with the hostile actors there are there.

The solution to bad speech is more speech, not more creeping notions of "responsibilities as well as rights" that are not contained in domestic or international law for good reason: they are too easily abused by states to curb basic civil and political rights. If we're going to talk responsibilities, let's talk first about the males fired up with machismo who think they get to kill people over insult to their manhood wrapped around their religious figures. The purpose of Helsinki isn't to define rules for duels by insulted people, but to uphold universal principles of freedom of speech, association and religious belief as matters of international law, and advocate non-binding paths of education, dialogue and exchange as "baskets" that help these rights to have meaning and civility.

The other issue I hope won't suffer any damage is on Internet freedom. Not much progress was made at all in the non-official meeting in Dublin organized by the chair-in-office on the perfectly decent US draft resolution on Internet freedom -- it does not have full support from all OSCE members, but only something like 27 backing it, which lets us know the problem isn't just the post-Soviet states -- Ireland itself didn't support it.

Mercifully, there was no formal concluding document out of Dublin -- it wasn't an official conference -- but this being the era of faddish new media, there were tweets and a  virtual conclusion provided by the summary record on a Youtube which skipped over the hard parts -- like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan blocking the Internet and beating up Internet journalists -- and focused unnecessarily on Western issues that are frankly about redistribution (socialism) like "net neutrality" and "Internet development".

Horribly, the version of the Internet freedom resolution that came out of the UN Human Rights Council mentions "Internet development" three times where one would have been too many as I explained-- because in UN-speak, "development" means the state becomes involves and "develops" itself and its own goals. Like the Tibetan once asked the Chinese bureaucrat rambling on about "development": "Who develops?"

Emotions can be played on with things like "oh, poor children need laptops" or "we need broadband in rural areas," but for that, you just have to see the rows of dutiful Turkmen children in their stiff native costumes and hair bows and ties sitting at their shiny Chinese-provided new laptops that....don't hook up to the real Internet. Or see the broadband that even Uzbekistan gets to rural areas but which blocks anything that might give anybody any ideas about the Arab Spring. Cuba has all those free innoculations, you know? But they also put in jail people who point out the whole society it sick...

The US should stick to its lasts, which amount to saying "offline rights apply online" -- and call it a day. No magic woo-woo about autonomous spaces, borderless realms where rights don't apply -- er, like copyright -- because we must "innovate" -- by which is meant that California companies should have right of way to make giant platforms that everyone depends on, enable free accounts and untrammelled uploads even of infringing content, then make intellectual property holders chase them with DMCA notices -- all the way scraping our privacy to sell to marketers.

And a shout-out to that US diplomat who complains to me when I stump on these issues that he has VPN to tunnel to his favourite American TV shows -- hey, whose going to keep making the TV for you for free? You can buy it on Google Play now, you know. And Google, bring home your taxes from Ireland! We need them in this country. Oh, and everybody please note: all your efforts in committees and commissions and plenaries to hammer out notions of hate speech and how to act on it are actually irrelevant: Google is now the world-wide adjudicator of these matters by its outsized and unaccountable intermediary row in "safe harbours" and if you complain about how this is done, you are threatened with not only a mute and ban out of an influential Google engineer's stream, but banning from G+ and all Google-related products to boot. Our new town halls are being run by cranky and oppressive neuralgic geeks who don't take kindly to challenges from the norms.

Even if a US judge ruled that the anti-Muslim hate video shoud come down -- and I don't believe he should or could if he were consistent with US Constitutional law -- it wouldn't matter because Google's very affordances would make it impossible to suppress. It would appear again and again like the Kanye West videos that Google stamps out reluctantly (because it loses ad revenue) when large record companies come calling with lawyers.

Google shut down the hate video in some countries even without any government or court request "just because" Google knows best. The Irish have let this enormous camel's nose in under the Helsinki tent: how will the Helsinki states cope with the giant non-state actors who run our entire lives which all moved online? How can we make them sign the Copenhagen agreement and stop their arbitrary mutes and bans?

Because their gloves are now off and the mask has slipped. While once the companies hid behind human rights coalitions like the Global Network Initiative pretending they were just about not letting Chinese dissidents go to jail (although they focused on their copyleftist agenda), today they've all banned together in a frank lobbying group in Washington openly working on "net neutrality" and against copyright in legislation like SOPA/PIPA. These should not have been subsumed into the human rights agenda and the international human rights movement is to blame for letting this happen.

An Internet run by government agencies redistributing broadband and undermining commercial businesses with intellectual property isn't free.

OK, enough from me, and here's a suggestion for every single NGO speaker: mention two people who used to be side by side with you, literally sitting at the same HDIM table year after year, and who are now in jail:

o Ales Bialiatski, head of Spring or Viasna, the Belarusian human rights monitoring group. Year after year Ales devotedly brought to the attention of the Eurasian publics the sad story of his oppressed country. Now he himself is in jail on an utterly trumped up case, acknowledged by Western governments as contrived for political reasons, involving funds to support the NGO sector. This issue is one that the Western states have capitulated on -- it's telling that a Polish and a Lithuanian bank cooperated with Lukashenka's henchmen

To start a resolution negotiation process on "foreign" funding for the NGO sector is only to regulate it and let it into the hands of unfriendly states out to kill NGOs. So that's off. But what's possible is to go on affirming that rights need...development! Yes, development from government and private sector to be implemented for all, and in the Helsinki family, no one actor promoting the goals of Helsinki financially or on a volunteer basis should be viewed with suspicion or hostility. There are no foreign spies in the Helsinki space, unless the Russians decide there are. Projecting much?

o Vladimir Kozlov, the head of the Al'ga! Party in Kazakhstan, whose trial, along with other opposition party members, is under way now and is being monitored by Freedom House. They're charged with "attempting to overthrow the government of Kazakhstan through agitation and organization of striking oil workers in the western city of Zhanaozen" -- although the oil authorities are the problem, and government troops are the problem, for shooting dead several scores of unarmed demonstrating workers last year.

I starkly remember in 2010 how Kozlov was reprimanded by the then chair-in-office of Kazakhstan at the HDIM in 2010. He read off a long littany of human rights violations, beatings, jailings, closures. He said calmly at the end something to the effect of: "We will seek accountability for these terrible violations. When we come to power, we will come after you," meaning -- as he explained afterward -- holding them to account.

The chair hysterically took this to be a call to violence and told him he would be prosecuted under incitement laws in Kazakhstan for his speech. What a way to run a Helsinki meeting! This Kazakh ambassador and her fellow delegation members and fellow travellers in the GONGO world did this again and again throughout the meeting. When Kozlov and colleagues from Kazakhstan and Poland's Solidarity held a joint meeting, the Kazakh head of delegation came bursting into the briefing room and demanded to have the floor immediately, because "it wasn't fair" that NGOs were speaking without a government official on their platform (!). I didn't know whether to be more appalled at her outrageousness, or the inexplicable support she got even from some American and European officials who should know MUCH better. She could have asked a question at the end like anybody else, NGO or official. There's no rule that you have to give equal time to the government at your NGO side meeting!

I wrote all these incidents down and addressed a letter to Philip Gordon, in charge of Europe in the State Department, and other OSCE-related officials and urged them that to intervene because after Kazakh stepped down from the chair, it would crack down on Kozlov and others.

Surprise, surprise, it did just that. The reponse from the West, resopnsible for the awful validation that chairmanship gave Kazakhstan, has been tepid in following up. To be sure, Evgeny Zhovtis is finally out of jail, but near the end of his term and in straightened circumstances of continuing intimidation of all civil society actors.

The Chinese dissident whom Yahoo helped put in jail served his whole sentence of 10 years, as the old Soviet zek saying had it, "from bell to bell". So many others in the OSCE space are doing the same, notably religious prisoners in Uzbekistan. I hope with the accent on the religious theme this year that these devout Muslims tortured and jailed after trials behind closed doors without adequate defense get not only a shout-out, but some real serious plan for how they can be released and re-integrated into society. Let's not be harping only about the difficulties of how you take former jihadists and release them from Guantanamo, which had a fraction of the number of people Uzbekistan thrown in cruel dungeons.

 

 

Why Does the OSCE Director of SG's Office Take Sides in An American Political Fight?

I was appalled to see Paul Fritch, the [former] director of the Secretary General's office and therefore a [former] spokesman for the OSCE, take sides in this debate on Facebook (below). (UPDATE: turns out that despite his misleading Facebook profile that makes it seem as if this position is still current, Fritch is no longer in this job--CAF.]

The debate was about whether or not Romney is "wrong" and is supposedly "factually incorrect" in criticizing Obama over the obvious apologetics in the Middle East -- not only with the US Embassy statement in Cairo, since repudiated by the State Department, but going all the way back to the Cairo speech in 2009.

What's just so outrageous about these "progressives" on the international justice jet-set network is how they believe they can make reality come about just by affirming it in hortatory fashion at every turn.

But they can't. Just because somebody doesn't share your anti-American lefty views doesn't mean they are "factually wrong," good Lord! [UPDATE: turns out that Fritch, also a former NATO employee, is an American who served in this international position. Seems like he leaves up a description where he can invoke the power of office in a Facebook fight to me.]

What Paul Fritch has to realize is that perfectly intelligent, liberal normal people who voted Democrat all their lives, like me, who are human rights advocates, who have no justification for this hate film and work for tolerance, like me, do not think Obama is serving human rights and do think it was an apology. It was right, proper, legitimate and necessary for Romney to step up under these circumstances and call out this weak and unprincipled position. (BTW, read this article from my avatar on my Second Life blog for my reasons for switching to a candidate outside my registered party.)

People like Fritch think support for the kind of views Romney expressed about the terrible attack on our people abroad is just a "neocon" problem or a "Sarah Palin" problem of a factor of, oh, shopping at Wal-mart, being overweight, and driving an SUV.

This exchange is SOOOO emblematic of every debate these days on The Atlantic or The New York Times or anywhere, where journalists and commenters alike assert with smug assurance that people who don't share their assessment of a situation are "factually wrong". It's truly disgusting.

Fritch can mix into a political fracas like this with such smarmy self-confidence and faux sincerity because he really thinks it's a "just the facts, ma'm" problem that he can "set people straight on". It truly is a moral horror.

For one, it puts an automatic chill on every debate because every debate can only be seen in terms of "fact-checking" and "the facts" --which are meaningless terms in the era of Politfakt and the hugely biased "fact-checkers" in places like Politico or the Washington Post or the New York Times.

There's a literalism and a narrow-mindedness here that truly is worrisome for the fate of democracy and pluralism.

People like this have to understand that liberal Democrats like me are voting for Romney regardless because we have seen just too many assaults on liberty under this Administration to countenance it as a trend for four more years. People like me aren't thrilled with Romney and certainly don't agree with him on gay rights and social issues like that, but on the central problem of Obama's failure to stand up to the tyranny of states as well as Islamist non-state actors, he's on the right page.

Let the Democrats spend the next four years in chastisement finding a non-socialist candidate willing to stand up for civil and political liberties as much as he is social and economic rights. Socialism doesn't work in this country; and yes, community-organizing is stealth-socialism, and you cannot "fact-check" me out of that basic knowledge I have had since attending the same Socialist Scholars' Conferences that Obama attended in the 1980s. So there.

The Cairo statement was an apology. "Apology" means expressing regrets and making a bow to an injured party. But while hate speech occurred, the type of violent injured response that occurs in response is not justified and cannot be condoned. And yes, such violence does indeed have to be pre-emptively called out -- especially with the track record we've had on this with Koran burnings never done intentionally leading to the deaths of journalists.

The focus in these cases should not be on apologizing -- yes, apologizing -- for a hurt, which is a subjective concept at best and easily manipulated. The focus should be on condemning the speech and not pre-anticipating what victims should feel. The focus should be on calling for the positives of tolerance and non-violence.

There were ways, consistent with US policy, UN resolutions, and past statements, as I've pointed out here and here to condemn the speech as hateful, and distance the US from it, without taking on the additional moral burden of characterizing victims or their experiences -- which is only inflammatory itself, especially in a context where no universals were affirmed. That's pre-emptive subjectivity that really is out of place.

Whenever I hear all Catholic priests characterized as pedophiles or responsible for AIDS deaths in Africa, I don't experience "hurt feelings" or feel I get to beat or kill someone. I take it for what it is: an exaggeration that has some cases of truth on the issue of pedophiles, and actually no basis for the claim about Africa. It requires patient and earnest debate and citing of facts and efforts to build tolerance of dissent against not Catholic hegemony but "progressive" political correctness.

Each influential figure like Fritch who converts a disagreement over policy into a factology is undermining freedom of speech and legitimate debate. This is getting very, very common and it has to be called out and pushed back at every turn.

If you think there was no apology and Romney doesn't get to call it out as an apology, you are creating blasphemy law in the United States - no one can criticize the president in times of emergency. If you think there "facts" in this story that definitely point to any non-apology, why, you have to ask yourself why the State Department itself retracted the statement! Hello, Mr. Spokesman, get that! And if you think there wasn't an apology, you are in fact arguing the content of the US Embassy Cairo statement all over again, as James Kirchick explains on Index on Censorship. Knock it off! It's time for the liberal democratic men in the West to stand up to the neuralgic machismo of the few but determined Muslim men in the Islamic World, particularly in the Middle East and South Asia, willing to kill over their sense of insult and indignation -- or, what is more likely,  cunningly willing to hoist liberals by their own petards and guilt-trip them with this trigger as a cover for jihad.

Dunja Mijatovic recommends an article on Site Comments.

3 hours ago ·

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  Free speech in the real world

  www.latimes.com

  Mitt Romney was wrong (and, of course, politically motivated) when he insinuated that the U.S. government had offered an "apology for America's values" by criticizing "Innocence of Muslims," the now-infamous film that mocks the prophet Muhammad. While it is true that in a statement issued before pr...

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    Jasna Jelisic "...Our country does have a long tradition of free expression, which is enshrined in our Constitution and our law, and we do not stop individual citizens from expressing their views no matter how distasteful they may be", Hillary R. Clinton

    3 hours ago · Like
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    Paul Fritch Dunja, this is an excellent and balanced piece, but this particular case has a few unusual aspects that continue to intrigue and trouble me. The actors in the infamous clip were ap...See More

    2 hours ago · Like
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    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick Unless you think there's a blasphemy law in the United States that says you can't criticize the president, especially in times of national emergency or mourning over slain diplomat...See More

    

    "Incitement of Imminent Violence" - Wired State

    ‎3dblogger.typepad.com

    I have felt so devastated all day at the thought of our ambassador in Libya and

    his staff killed by an angry mob, supposedly because of a hate video. It has the feel of the Carter administration and the hostages in Iran to me, and I pray it doesn't escalate....

    34 minutes ago · Like · Remove Preview
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    Paul Fritch Catherine, Romney was wrong factually in characterizing the statement issued by Embassy Cairo before the attacks as a "response" to the attacks. He was wrong substantively in characterizing that statement as an "apology" and an attempt to "sympathize" with those who stormed the embassy, and in describing it as a statement of administration policy. And he was wrong politically (and morally) to double down on these ridiculous allegations when the facts of the timeline (and the fact that Ambassador Stevens and his colleagues had been killed in Benghazi) had already come to light.

    28 minutes ago · Like
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    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick No he was not factually wrong. That's just leftist Fisking and word-search literalism. You lefties have gotten into the habit of characterizing every statement that doesn't share high-fidelity with your "progressive" views as needing "fact-checking" and being "wrong" and needing even reports to [email protected] He is right indeed *substantively* in characterizing this *pandering* and pre-emptive validation of machismo over insult as apology, Indeed it is. He was not at all "wrong" politically or morally to double down on what is in fact the moral position to take in the fact of this shocking weakness and failure to stand up for principles by our government. When he made the statement, in fact the killings hadn't come to light, but no matter, he didn't stick to his embargo. James Kirchick got it absolutely right on Index on Censorship (http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2012/09/blasphemy-islam-free-speech-riots/): "The New York Times, America’s left-wing pundits, and the rest of those who have criticized the Romney campaign are missing the point, which is that it is no more appropriate to apologise for the First Amendment before a raging mob attacks an American embassy than it is to apologise for the First Amendment after such an attack occurs".

    

    Islam blasphemy riots now self-fulfilling prophecy | Index on Censorship

    www.indexoncensorship.org

    The protests against controversial film “Innocence of the Muslims” follow a patt

    ern familiar since the days of the Satanic Verses fatwa, says James Kirchick. And so do the reactions of many western liberals 

    19 minutes ago · Like · Remove Preview
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    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick And what an awful thing that the director of the Office of the Secretary General now thinks he has to take sides in American politics and stump for Obama. You are wrong. If you're so worried about unlawful incitement to imminent violence, and you think that the act of putting it on Egyptian TV meets both the universal/international test AND Egyptian law, then go and condemn your OSCE partner Egypt, Paul, instead of dumping on Romney and trying to put Americans in their place. Shame on you.

    2 hours ago · Like
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    Paul Fritch Catherine, I'm neither "stumping for Obama" nor "dumping on Romney." Nor am I speaking for the OSCE, where I recently completed my term of office. As an American citizen, and as someone who joined the Foreign Service the same year as Chris Stevens, I thought it was tasteless and insensitive for Romney to repeat on Wednesday morning what he by then knew to be falsehoods. And what an awful thing that such a passionate advocate as free expression as yourself doesn't seem to recognize that right for people who disagree with you.

    about an hour ago via mobile · Like
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    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick a) If you are no longer in this position, maybe you should remove it from your title? It's on your Facebook. 2) It wasn't tasteless and insensitive at all, that's merely your subjective -- and I might add tribal -- opinion on the matter -- what's tasteless and insensitive is not demanding to know why our leaders aren't taking a line to withstand such violence against our embassies abroad instead of capitulation! c) Romney didn't "know" this to be "falsehoods" that's ridiculous. As you yourself admitted, he doubled down. There is nothing false in this statement of his, and again, as James Kirchick points out, it doesn't matter whether you make the statement before or after mob violence, it still is wrong not to affirm the First Amendment and it is still wrong to pre-emptively kowtow to "hurt feelings" and validate them when they have the capacity for murder -- d) What's truly *most awful* in your statements here is that typical forums trolling gimmick -- that chilling, oppressive effect!!! -- claiming that if someone criticizes your speech, they somehow "didn't recognize that right for people who disagree with you." That's atrocious, Paul Fritch, and you know it. I never once claimed you don't have the right to your opinion. On the contrary. I pointed out that with your aggressive "factology" here you are in fact undermining the right of others to have an opinion, implying that they are "factually wrong" merely because they disagree how to interpret a set of facts. Indeed, you're stumping for Obama and dumping on Romney. That's your right, at least be honest about it. Once again, the key reason I am voting against Obama isn't even so much Obama himself, who is forced to move to the center to govern, but all the supporters justifying him like yourself, who adopt these oppressive and chilling tactics to suppress legitimate debate. Surely the worst among these tactics is claiming that someone else "hadn't recognize your right" when in fact you're busy doing that non-recognition yourself under the guise of "setting people straight on the facts". Shame, shame, shame.

    13 minutes ago · Like
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    Paul Fritch Nice try, Catherine, but you did tell me that I shouldn't express an opinion on this matter ("go and condemn your OSCE partner Egypt, Paul, instead of dumping on Romney and trying to put Americans in their place"), and "shame on you" is not a substantive argument, no matter how many times you repeat it. I have no interest in conversing with someone who's not interested in an honest, civil exchange of ideas, but out of respect for Dunja (whose wall this is), you might want to tone down the vitriol a bit if you continue on your own.

    about an hour ago via mobile · Like
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    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick Oh, please. The record right here shows I did know such thing! What an outrage! Telling you to condemn the OSCE partner Egypt instead of dumping on Romney isn't telling you that you have no right to express your opinion! Can you truly not grasp that obvious distinction? It's merely calling out your hypocritical stance, obsessing with conservatives in the US instead of where they are really the problem, in Egypt or Libya. "Shame on you" is all one can say when these basic intellectual norms of debate are so grossly trampled on. And there you go with the typical Obama Age's "chilling effect" -- oh, you must be "civil," oh, you aren't "honest" if you don't agree with me. As for vitriol, of which there is none here in fact, Dunja can handle it. If she can't, she can close her wall. The record of what you have done and how you are stands on my blog, however, even if taken down here. Good!

    a few seconds ago · Like