LET FREEDOM REIGN ON YOUTUBE
By Harmony Grant
16 Dec 08
As everyone knows, old media faces a revolution. Today, anyone
can set up a blog or post a video. More and more people glean news
from a screen, not a paper. As a result, those who want to control
speech and thought face a much bigger job—and they’re
tackling it head-on, determined to control what people think and
believe.
The Anti-Defamation League now
brags that this powerful Jewish supremacist organization is advising YouTube.
Great. ADL, to refresh your memory, is run by a man who considers the New Testament
a virulent source of hate. On its path to banning the Bible, ADL now supplies
user-friendly guidelines on how to deal with hateful content on YouTube,
a site so popular it was worth $1.65 billion two years ago.
YouTube already has its own hate speech law. Its community
guidelines say, “We encourage free speech and defend everyone's right
to express unpopular points of view. But we don't permit hate speech (speech
which attacks or demeans a group based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability,
gender, age, veteran status, and sexual orientation/gender identity).”
This guideline is, of course, practically identical to Canada’s awful Sec.
13 hate speech clause, Germany’s federal hate law, and other federal hate
speech laws that have shattered freedom in dozens of nations.
And YouTube promises to make good on the threat. We are assured its staff “review
flagged videos 24 hours a day, seven days a week to determine whether they violate
our Community Guidelines. When they do, we remove them.”
If Jesus was on earth today and His disciples posted His sermons on YouTube,
the videos would definitely be flagged (He called a Samaritan woman “dog,” for
Pete’s sake). So would the salty words of most of history’s greatest
leaders and change-makers. They assaulted popular currents of religion and racial
identity and expressed unpopular ideas about sex, gender, etc. (That’s
why their movements created change.)
Allowing any one group to decide what is hateful—especially when the definition
is as sweeping and general as “speech which attacks or demeans a
[protected] group!”—sets them up to censor people who could save
society. It creates tyranny.
To change this, we need a grassroots movement. We need individuals willing to
risk their own freedom to challenge the draconian laws of most western nations
(and now YouTube).
In Germany, an intrepid 36-year-old father and husband, Dirk Zimmerman, is doing
just that. Outraged that dissident historian Ernst Zundel—and his
lawyer—are in German prisons, Zimmerman is daring the thought police to
take away his freedom, too. He
posted a short video to YouTube announcing his personal doubts about Nazi
methods in the Holocaust.
“I am also a freethinking thought criminal and I deliberately hazard the
consequences,” he says. Zimmerman believes there is room for questions
about the Holocaust narrative. In his words, intentional mass genocide of Jews
is a narrative that there is reason to doubt. “I do not believe, and although
public doubts are a punishable offense, I doubt.”
Zimmerman speaks slowly and deliberately, sitting before a photo of his two small
children. He has light hair and a kind, everyday face. His actions are brave.
What if more of us did this? What if more citizens produced videos speaking the
whole truth about Jewish supremacism, about hate law abuses, about freedom?
Tiny points of light can spring up everywhere in the darkness, too many to count,
too many to resist.
Harmony Grant writes and edits for National Prayer Network, a Christian/conservative
watchdog group.
National Prayer Network, P.O. Box 828, Clackamas,
OR 97015
