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Comment by eznzt | Hacker News Reader

"In Europe, Speech Is an Alienable Right: [the European Court of Human Rights] upheld an Austrian woman’s conviction for disparaging the Prophet Muhammad."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...

Is this really what you want?

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Here's the actual judgement from ECHR: [1]

It is an interesting reading - it gives a very different impression than the article.

According to the document, she claimed Muhammad was a pedophile in a series of seminars "Basics of Islam" that pretended to be objective courses but were organised by a far-right political party.

The judgement also mentions that saying something offensive or untrue on purpose and then claiming "it was just my opinion" doesn't protect you from repercussions, that you are allowed to criticise current practices of religion but not on bases of what someone allegedly done hundreds of years ago when societal standards were different, and that fine 480 Euro is on the low end of a range and not disproportionate.

So as I understand it, a far right person was deliberately shit-stirring in a propaganda seminar and got slap on the wrist (fine of ~ 15 % median wage) to be more careful next time.

[1]: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{"itemid":["002-12171"]}

EDIT: the link doesn't seem to work properly, you'll have to copy-paste it.

> but not on bases of what someone allegedly done hundreds of years ago when societal standards were different

Guess we can't legally criticize people for owning slaves now.

Oh I'm sure you can. The ruling doesn't say that.

The ruling says that when you do it in context of pretend-seminar that's far right propaganda, and you do it mostly to to anger and hurt people to divide society - then when you get fine of 480 EUR your human rights are not violated.

> The ruling doesn't say that.

Your post does however.

"She held “seminars” in which she presented her view that Muhammad was indeed a child molester. Dominant Islamic traditions hold that Muhammad’s third wife, Aisha, was 6 at the time of their marriage and 9 at its consummation. Muhammad was in his early 50s. The Austrian woman repeated these claims, and the Austrian court ruled that she had to pay 480 euros or spend 60 days in the slammer. The ECHR ruled that Austria had not violated her rights."

So it appears that she set out to attack Islam and then received a relative slap-on-the-wrist for it. Neither of those affect the principles, but still....

There should be nothing illegal about “attacking” a religion with words, all the moreso if those words are factually accurate.

Going out of your way to piss other people off is a poor idea.

You may feel that it should be legal (at least until it affects you). Other people may feel otherwise.

All of those things are true and are common knowledge among those with even a modicum of knowledge about the religion.

All religions are frankly horrific at one point or another. And all of the countries (that I'm aware of) that are officially atheist are rather unpleasant, I think you might agree. Everyone's family tree is not an acyclic graph, and contains some ugly people. All of this up, in detail, is true, and everyone knows it. Having "seminars" on it simply makes it a club to be used to beat on someone you don't like. (Doing that here will likely get Dang to rough me up, perhaps even before I have pissed you off. And rightfully so; see the guidelines.)

The bottom line is, the Moslems I've known have been better people than anyone I've met who believes rights and truth are the only limits on what they would say.

She said Muhammad was a pederast, which is correct, according to the Quran.

Out of curiosity, what do she plan to do with that information? Why did she say it?

According to the Bible God "came over" a 12 year old Mary, sneaking into her bedroom at night like some creepy uncle, to "pop her cherry" before her newly wed husband Joseph could.

The child of that came to be known as.. Jesus.

Which should be a stark reminder that all Abrahamic religions have their roots based in such absurd and ancient practices that none of them hold up much to scrutiny under modern standards except when framed solely around an entirely fictional "Good guy miracle making baby Jesus".

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