UK: Charges for "Racism against Muslims" dropped (but what about Islamist Racism?)

Video: All charges against UK blogger Lionheart dropped
International Free Press Society - 06 July 2009
From Lionheart’s blog

I have been on police bail for 18 months on suspicion of ’stirring up racial hatred’ through written material on this blog.
When my impending arrest first came about, I was in America and was advised by several American organisations and respected individuals that I should apply for political asylum there, but decided after speaking to my lawyer Mr SBLM (not Anthony Bennett who turned on Mr & Mrs McCann), that the best plan of action was to return to Britain and go through the motions of arrest and interrogation.
I was arrested, interrogated, then released and have spent the last 18 months backwards and forwards on police bail, awaiting the CPS to decide whether or not they were going to charge me and put me on trial for my words.
My next bail date was Friday 3rd July, but I have just received news from my solicitor that all charges against me have been dropped, so there is no case to answer over my blog.
Freedom of Speech has won, over the politically correct brigade who have tried silencing me, and members from their pet project British Islam who have wanted me prosecuted and silenced from speaking out against them and their religion. British Islam is a threat to every man, woman and child upon the British Isles, based upon 1400 years of experience and knowledge, and people like me, have a right and responsibility to talk about it openly, freely and honestly without fear of state persecution, prosecution or imprisonment.
May God bless each and every person who has supported me over the past 18 months, and beyond.

The battle for the heart and soul of Great Britain has begun!
“Deus Vult”

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x707nv_lionheart_news
Lionheart
by Lionheartuk

Commentary from Dymphna at Gates of Vienna:

Lionheart sent an email the other day with a link to his post about being free, finally, from the threat of charges of “racism” and a possible jail term. Was it the police or the CPS who decided to stop harassing him? He didn’t say, but I’m glad it’s over.
While he was in America, a Good Samaritan gave him a place to live. The Baron was working then, so we donated a small monthly stipend for a while until his situation was such that he was able to work…which depended on his being granted asylum.
That avenue was investigated but looked perilous. It might take years for them to process his case, during which time he would be in limbo.
If memory serves, it was March 2008 or thereabouts when he decided to return to the UK.
I was most upset. My main concern (my only concern, really) was the chance of his being jailed in a prison population full of those who would kill him without thinking about it. But Lionheart’s decision to go home was his to make, though I was sure he wouldn’t survive. He flew back to the UK, leaving a few heavy hearts behind.
I am glad that this trial by fear is over. What the police did to him during that year and a half of mental torture with the prospect of jail hanging over him was cruel and unnecessary. Lionheart had been chased out of his home neighborhood by Pakistani drug dealers because he dared to stand up to them, especially on the issue of enslaving young women.
On his blog, he described what they’d done to his neighborhood, his home, and his business. As a result of what he wrote, the Pakistani drug thugs filed a complaint against him for racism. It was this complaint for which he was to be “investigated” by the Hate Crimes Unit from Christmas 2007 until this week.
I learned a lot while Lionheart was here and after he went home.
First and foremost and most unfortunate was my education about the UK police. I heard the tapes of them talking to Lionheart and it was eerie. They had no idea where he was, claiming they thought he was in Scotland. They didn’t seem to care one way or another about his possible fate if he came in to be interrogated.
They just kept repeating, in a kind of bored tone, that he needed to present himself in order to be questioned. They refused to grant him safety of any kind. Their conversation with him was so cool, casual, unconcerned. The whole thing was straight out of Kafka.
I also learned that real Brits cared what happened to him even if the police and the judicial system didn’t give a fig. When he got home, he was given a place to stay. Legal counsel was obtained. People helped him.
Another lesson was a deep understanding of the tenacious bulldog character of the English. Lionheart could not be budged from a position once he’d decided on a course of action. Churchill had nothing on Lionheart when it came to digging in his heels and preparing to stand his ground!
Here he is, eighteen months later, having survived his ordeal, still trying to make people pay attention to his original concern about his country:

Freedom of Speech has won, over the politically correct brigade who have tried silencing me, and members from their pet project British Islam who have wanted me prosecuted and silenced from speaking out against them and their religion. British Islam is a threat to every man, woman and child upon the British Isles, based upon 1400 years of experience and knowledge, and people like me, have a right and responsibility to talk about it openly, freely and honestly without fear of state persecution, prosecution or imprisonment.
May God bless each and every person who has supported me over the past 18 months, and beyond.
The battle for the heart and soul of Great Britain has begun!

Bloody but unbowed, that’s Lionheart. He gives me hope for England.

Source: europenews.dk

Levant in Focus: 'I'm leaving and I'm not coming back'

A World Association of Newspapers Interview with Mohamad Ali Al-Abdallah, Blogger, Syria. Other interviews, editorials and photographs exposing the harassment, threats and censorship journalists face worldwide, can be seen on this page.

The lack of press freedom in Syria has defined the life of Mohamad Ali Al-Abdallah. He has been detained, his brother is serving a five-year sentence in a secret location, and his father is finishing a one-year prison term. He recently fled Syria and received refugee status in the United States. Al-Abdallah is an outspoken advocate for human rights through his widely followed blog, "I'm leaving, and I'm not coming back." Al-Abdallah is now exploiting the blogosphere to fight for change from across the world. He talks to the World Association of Newspapers.

How is your work contributing to the establishment or defense of press freedom in Syria?

Freedom of expression is perhaps the most fundamental right, because without freedom of expression we can't demand any other right. However, it goes hand in hand with press freedom, since the press is the most organized and institutionalized voice of the people. Defending journalists and the press is then tantamount to defending our own voice, our own ideas, and most importantly, their expression in the public forum. From attending court hearings to supporting the family of imprisoned journalists, everyone can contribute in their own way, on their own scale.

Of course, my activities as a press freedom supporter were putting me at risk of government retaliation. It eventually hit home when my father was sent to jail after being tried three times in three years, but that has only increased my involvement because I can truly relate to the pain and the fear.

Have blogs and new media in your country been able to bypass government censorship to expose human rights abuses, corruption or taboos? If so, how?

In Syria, blogs, and basically anything on the Internet, are under strict scrutiny by the government, and they will not hesitate to use censorship whenever they can. My brother is in jail for expressing his views online and, two months ago, my blog was censored by the government. I guess we are able to bypass the government thanks to our numbers: anyone can blog and a lot of people have access to the Internet, so censoring everything is impossible. In the face of censorship, quantity is more important than quality

Are bloggers the new actors in the public sphere and how are they challenging traditional media practices?

I think bloggers are not here to challenge traditional media but rather to complement view points, offer different sides to a story, and, to an extent, act as a check on traditional media's historic monopoly over information and fact. For me, the biggest difference between bloggers and journalists is that there are no rules or censorship in blogging. You don't have to worry about the word count of your article and editors hanging over your shoulder telling you what's good and bad. Most importantly, you publish exactly what you want. No one picks your words except yourself. Anyone on the street can now break the story; it's no longer solely in the hands of a media elite.

You also have the ease, online, to create different identities to protect yourself and your work. Journalists still use pen names but it is hard to have twenty different ones; the sky is the limit online. Another important point that has definitely contributed to the legitimacy of bloggers is the fact that we are getting arrested, like traditional journalists, and although it is shameful, it means that we are doing something right. Finally, I think an obvious difference or rather evolution is technology and more specifically access. It takes very little, even in developing nations, to get information out to the world, we can post pictures instantly from the streets with our cell phones, and we can text our article while we are being shot at.

Source: JP 'Blogs
H/T: As In The Days of Noah

The world's bravest bloggers

Bloggers are taking on Iran's mullahs and winning. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, bloggers are on the front line of the struggle for freedom. Today, there are about 80,000 bloggers in Iran living under constant threat of surveillance, harassment and imprisonment. One such blogger, Mojtaba Saminejad, 28, was arrested and tortured along with 30 others in 2004. He spent three months in solitary confinement in Iran's notorious Evin Prison. Two weeks after he was freed, he was arrested again for complaining on his blog about the mistreatment he had endured. He was held for 21 months on the charge of showing disrespect to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

We recently conducted an exclusive interview with Mr. Saminejad, translated by Ladan Yazdian. He told us Iranian blog sites have proliferated as a direct consequence of the regime's restrictions on other forms of public expression. "In Iran, people need to get a permit to publish any piece of information, including a book, an article or a song," he told us. "Therefore, with the government's total control over people's minds, it is difficult to bypass the government's numerous filters, and even more difficult to access information. Such boundaries do not exist in the blogosphere." He said blogs are "an ideal forum to express private thoughts" in a county where privacy is increasingly scarce.

The Iranian blogosphere took off in 2001 and has since faced a continually escalating war with the regime. "Monitoring all the blogs is not possible," Mr. Saminejad said, "so the government shows its frustration by imposing pressure and intimidation." Tehran began filtering Web sites, and bloggers responded with filtering countermeasures. Then bloggers were arrested, "frequently jailed for 'un-Islamic' content, which is against the national security interests of the country," so the opposition began to form closer, more cooperative support networks and continued to post on the arrested bloggers' sites. The regime responded by sponsoring pro-regime bloggers and held a "Festival of Web Logs and Web Sites of the Islamic Revolution."

The regime also sanctioned hacker groups, such as the Hadid Hacking Team and IHS (Iran Hackers Sabotage), which launched attacks on dissident blog sites and Western, frequently Israeli, targets. In response, dissidents moved to alternate platforms, utilized e-mail and RSS distribution, stood up mirror sites and joined invitation-only online communities such as Google's Orkut.

In 2006, the regime proposed a national Internet structure that would host all government and nongovernment sites inside Iran and cut out Western and especially U.S. servers. In 2008, the regime reached the pinnacle of blogger oppression with a draft law that imposes the death penalty for facad - undermining the authority or stability of the state - which is a dangerously vague and sufficiently elastic charge that could slip any blogger's head into the noose. "Under this law," Mr. Saminejad told us, "any freedom-seeking blogger can face the death penalty for promoting illegal activities."

Some never even get their day in a kangaroo court. Twenty-five-year-old Omid-Reza Mirsayafi died in Evin Prison in March under mysterious circumstances. The next day the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was unleashed on bloggers and made mass arrests. Tehran claimed "these detainees are part of organized networks who are working on evil projects that insult the holy Koran, spread pornographic material and advertise the 'sale' of Iranian girls."

The future is difficult for Iranian bloggers like Mr. Saminejad, but he and his compatriots see no alternative but to continue their dangerous activities. There is no other alternative. As Mr. Saminejad says, the blogosphere is "the main outlet to receive the news and analysis from Iran." And so long as their sites survive, the world will know freedom's flame still burns in Iran.

Source: Washington Times