UK blogger “interviewed” by police…
…for blogging about one Stephen Sizer, who does rather appear to be quite the anti-Semite:
Stephen Sizer, whose political opposition to Israel is at least supported by his theological ideas about Israel being a ‘rejected vineyard,’ as you can hear in this sermon. Sizer has also said he ‘fears another exile’ for Jews in Israel. His book Christian Zionism alleges Israeli complicity in 9/11.
According to Sizer, Palestine must be liberated from the Jews, He has forwarded emails from Holocaust deniers and Christian antisemites, given interviews to and promoted the work of those on the American Far Right, and shared a platform with various Islamists and antisemites
It was apparently Sizer himself who put the police on to Seismic Shock, the blogger who wrote the above.
Last Friday, in fact, for the fourth time in recent months, I had a meeting with CID officers and they confirmed that they regard these attacks against me as harassment. They also confirmed that in their detailed investigation I have committed no criminal offence. Indeed they asked me to help advise them in similar cases, as have officers from the Metropolitan police monitoring religious groups promoting religious extremism.
Now, it would appear that no criminal penalties ultimately came out of the police involvement (amen for that, at least):
This just in: “A West Yorkshire Police spokesman said: “As a result of a report of harassment, which was referred to us by Surrey Police, two officers from West Yorkshire Police visited the author of the blog concerned. The feelings of the complainant were relayed to the author who voluntarily removed the blog. No formal action was taken.”
…but notice the penultimate sentence. Seismic Shock opted to self-censor, and for this reason alone (apparently) was spared criminal prosecution. Which is in and of itself really damn wrong. Absent the material to review, it’s impossible to say whether the posted material(s) actually did contain anything which could be construed as harassment. It’s possible that this was the case…but who now can say?
Roger Pearse, I think, has essentially the correct attitude about all this:
I find myself torn. A case of genuine harassment — of net-stalking — is a different matter from issues of free speech.
In the UK, only the rich can go to law. Everyone else is basically without options. If someone started a campaign of vilification against me, designed to intimidate me from expressing my views, I would have few options but to go to the police. It seems that this may be what has happened here. What else could Sizer and McRoy do? Material pumping out on the web, designed and arranged to smear them, drip drip drip?
But … I am still uncomfortable with this. Do we want bloggers being vetted by the police? Yet, what do I do, if some anonymous swine sets up a hate site directed against me, and designed to ruin my reputation, cost me my job, my career, whatever? What would you do?
The most obvious response would be to fire right back, answering smear with fact, and then doing as much as I could to drive traffic to my responses. It’s 2010: anyone can start a blog! And a twitter/StumbleUpon/Delicious/YouTube/Facebook/whatever account! For free, even!
If someone gets on the Internet and starts writing crap about you, you get on the Internet and start writing against that crap, using those other sites listed above as ways to get the word out a little more, a little further. And you do that in order to drown out the hater, to get more traffic to your truths than goes to his lies.
You don’t go the cops like a whiny little somethin’-somethin’.
(hat tip)
Stephen Sizer, The Police And The Barbra Streisand Effect « ModernityBlog (January 25, 2010, 1:18 pm).
[...] Update 28: Kenneth Hynek in Canada has some interesting comments. [...]
We wish to show our solidarity with Seismic Shock who has been the victim of intimidation for shining a spotlight on the anti-Zionist theology of Reverend Stephen Sizer. | eChurch Christian Blog (January 25, 2010, 1:23 pm).
[...] Kenneth Hynek – UK blogger “interviewed” by police… [...]
I do believe that Google cashe can show you material from the deleted blog. As a long-term reader of both seismics blogs in my opinion this was not net stalking, it was reporting what Sizer wrote, said, did and preached & reported on his blog and others (to a lesser extent it mentioned McRoy). This was not “designed to smear them”, it was holding them accountable to what they were saying and doing in public. Sizer promptly closed down the comments section on his blog when people started to interact with him directly about these issues. Not long after this Seismic Shock came on the scene and Sizer himself used to comment on the original blog though none of his answers were satisfactory and he took the hump that Seismic would not meet him for a coffee and decided to smear him on his own blog claiming he was Israeli intelligence and various other people. So in fact Sizer did do what you suggest, but also from the very start he showed real intolerance to anyone daring to criticise his public pronouncements on Israel.
I may take a run through the Google Cache later on today, if I can find time for it. But thank you for the suggestion…and for the breakdown of events and article contents, as well.
Thanks for your kind words. Yes initially I went into this with the CHRC in my mind. But I had to backtrack as I learned more about this.
Your strategy might work, for someone net-savvy with lots of time. I’m not sure it would work against a gang of smearers. I pretty sure people doing that will eventually precipitate official censorship online, drat them.
I was pleased to see you follow the Canadian HRC issue as well, as I do. Isn’t it a pity that Ezra Levant isn’t writing as much as he did?
You’re quite welcome, Roger! And thanks for stopping by.
I do agree that this is a somewhat different case than what we’re dealing with in regard to the CHRC, though it is still obviously a case of censorship. I do agree that it’s a pity that Ezra Levant is not as prolific a writer, on this issue, as he was this time last year. But then, he has other issues to take care of now, so I don’t begrudge him his lower overall output either.
As to the strategy, I do admit it has some pitfalls. It also reflects a bias I have, which is that it is becoming less and less excusable for a person (at least in Western society) to be lacking in “net-savvy.”