MICHAEL MORRIS: Police failure in pro-Israel rally taints hate crimes bill with pretence - Business Day
Michael Morris
An all too familiar atmosphere of pretence pervades the inexorable progress of the Prevention & Combating of Hate Crimes & Hate Speech Bill through the legislative process, sharpened somewhat by recent evidence of the state’s inability — even unwillingness, perhaps — to do much in the way of protecting citizens’ rights.
Of course, if a state is keen to step in and act against the hateful, an atmosphere of pretence might well be preferable to an atmosphere of single-minded determination. Better by far — as colleague Sara Gon, director of the Free Speech Union of SA (a unit of the Institute of Race Relations), argued at the weekend — is a social and political environment in which the law imposes “the least possible limitations on free speech”.
Where the common law is reliable in contending with crime, hate or otherwise, speech is another matter. As Gon argued: “However hateful speech may be, it is better to know what people think and express in words, than not to know. Ignorance can only mean that we may be ignorant about serious threats to society and can’t confront them if not forewarned.”
This isn’t a free pass for a state directed by our constitutional democracy to protect our rights with scrupulous disinterest. So it is ironic that just days before the draft hate speech law trundled along its legislative track, protesters wishing to make their voices heard in the difficult and demanding argument about conflict in the Middle East were silenced — in effect, by the state itself.
As fellow Business Day columnist Tony Leon wrote in TimesLIVE last week there were two protests on the weekend of November 11 and 12. The first was a “massive pro-Palestinian march — starring the ANC, PAC, Muslim Judicial Council and others — [which] proceeded peacefully and without interruption, even if the rhetoric was, at times, hateful and incendiary”.
Attacked organisers
He went on to describe the fate of the second, pro-Israel rally, like this: “By contrast, the Sunday Sea Point prayer rally for Israel organised by Christian churches and groupings was violently disrupted hours before its scheduled commencement by protesters carrying Palestinian — and Hamas and Isis — flags.”
The police, “after battling protesters who destroyed the podium and attacked the organisers and the police themselves, cancelled the rally before it started, ‘in the interests of safety’”.
For any democratic state, especially one keen to protect us against those who hate, this is not good enough.
As must have been obvious from my column of two weeks ago, and others, I am not persuaded that defending a liberal democratic proposition in the Middle East will succeed purely by choosing the “right” side out of nationalistic, strategic or ideological proximity. Terror can only ultimately be overcome by its opposite, never its semblance, however unavoidable brutal choices may be from time to time.
Which is why I believe Leon is right to say it’s not good enough for the rest of us to overlook the kind of failure demonstrated by the summary cancellation of that Sunday Sea Point prayer rally, being “perhaps in current times ... too scared of being branded ‘pro-Israel’, too fearful of being caught offside, too woke or else [thinking] that the most controversial and contentious events are best addressed by someone else”.
And who could fault him for remarking with such smarting astringency, “What an intellectual abdication and moral hollowness at their core, then”?
We could not have wished for a more timely reminder of where the responsibility lies for sustaining freedom, and confronting hate.
• Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.