Laws to be introduced this week include up to two years in prison for distributing, displaying or reciting prohibited phrases to harass or offend
Laws to be introduced this week include up to two years in prison for distributing, displaying or reciting prohibited phrases to harass or offend
If your slogan implies genocide, as your example also does, yes it is hate speech. You cannot undo colonization by disposing the occupiers. Any nation is occupying some native land in one form or another.
You’re going to have to elaborate on how “from the desert to the sea” implies genocide.
It means there won’t be any Israelis left between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Hamas’s stated purpose for existing is to vanquish not only the state of Israel, but all Israelis and more broadly all Jews. That’s overtly genocidal.
And before you call me a zionist, I don’t support the Israeli government. What it’s doing to Palestinians is atrocious. But I’m capable of discerning between Israelis and the the Israeli government, just like I’m capable of discerning between Palestinians and Hamas.
Israelis and Palestinians alike deserve peace, justice, security, autonomy, and self-determinism, just like every other human being in the world deserves these things.
The Israeli government and Hamas, on the other hand, are both genocidal organizations and need to be replaced with something more civilized.
The history of harassment, Palestine, and israel is largely irrelevant.
If a law prescribes (proscribes?) specific phrases regadless of intent and context, they should be chosen very, very carefully.
Im not an expert, but i think other states require a context like “intended to incite hatred”.
By prescribing this particular phrase, even if you are correct, it allows harassment to portray Palestine as ignored and persecuted - the very intention of terrorism.
Should people be allowed to use nazi slogans at protests? What about racist slogans?
I understand it’s dicey to draw a line somewhere, but do you really believe hate speech should be protected as political speech? It’s a slippery slope either way, the trick is to find the point of balance.
And repeating a phrase which initial intent is to call for the eradication of an entire ethnic group is, in my opinion, on the side of the line that should be considered hate speech, promoting violence, and shouldn’t be protected.
The history of the conflict is indeed relevant. And the proscription of the phrase isn’t being done “regardless of intent and context.”
(By the way, ‘proscribe’ means to condemn something; ‘prescribe’ means doctor’s orders)
I’m not following the logic of your last paragraph.
It doesn’t, any more than “from the river to the sea”.
The only way you can think “river to sea” slogan implies genociding the Israeli occupiers is if you can’t possibly imagine any other way to transfer ownership than brutal imperialistic colonizer-like expansion. You know, like what Israelis are currently doing to Palestinians.
Framing it as “you’re calling for genocide” is just another way zionists try to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
It seems to me like people like this are telling on themselves that they’re stuck in Colonial/imperial mindsets and lack imagination.
In the 1960s and 70s it became the signature phrase of the Palestine Liberation Organization to indicate the replacement of the State of Israel with a State of Palestine extending “from the river to the sea,” including the expulsion of Jews.
Hamas have since called for the expulsion of all Jews.
Hamas proclaims it in its 1988 founding, charter document, The Hamas Covenant. The second paragraph declares to all the world that, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” The introduction section promises “[o]ur struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious” and will only end when “the enemy is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realized,”
It refers to genociding the Jews to get back the area. Technically it doesn’t, like saying ‘all lives matter’ isn’t technically anti-black, but it is. Wearing a swastika might mean you support the Hindu notion of well-being, but it doesn’t.
Symbols have meaning and hiding behind technicalities allows dog whistling and regressive behavior.
Yes, Israel is abhorrent in its actions in Gaza, and a form of shared peaceful cohabitation in the area would be ideal. But allowing slogans that are known to represent genocide, doesn’t help.
Sure. But at some point the symbol takes on a new meaning. No one (in the west) is wearing a hindu peace symbol, thats no longer the intent/meaning of that symbol.
And I’d say 99% of people in Australia saying river to the sea aren’t supporting the original intent of the Hamas documents and ideals.
They know the connotation. They are supporting Hamas. If they had an aversion to supporting Hamas, they’d steer clear of it. It’s clear dog whistling.