Scottish police, it appears, are the real victims of the nation’s new hate-crimes laws.
Since the first week that the new law went into effect, the Telegraph reported, they’ve fielded some 8,000 complaints. The number is so high that supposed hate crimes will outnumber real crimes by year’s end.
The reason for the upsurge: The law has criminalized “stirring up hatred,” which includes anything from an offensive comment to an offensive public play or other performance.
The leftist Guardian blames “neo-Nazis and far-right agitators” for encouraging the hurricane of false reports.
The Law
The new law took effect on April Fools’ Day, appropriately enough.
Section 3 of the law “creates an offence of stirring up racial hatred,” the bill’s explainer says:
It provides that it is an offence for a person to behave in a threatening, abusive or insulting manner, or communicate threatening, abusive or insulting material to another person, with either the intention to stir up hatred against a group of persons based on the group being defined by reference to race, colour, nationality (including citizenship), or ethnic or national origins, or where it is a likely consequence that hatred will be stirred up against such a group.
The bill also criminalizes behaving “in a threatening or abusive manner, or communicate threatening or abusive material to another person, with either the intention to stir up hatred against a group of persons based on the group being defined by reference to one of the listed characteristics, or where it is a likely consequence that hatred will be stirred up against such a group.”
The list of protected people includes “a social or cultural group; perceived religious affiliation; sexual orientation; transgender identity; and variations in sex characteristics.”
But the bill gets even worse.
It forbids publishing “offensive material” not only “through websites, blogs, podcasts, social media etc., either directly, or by forwarding or repeating material that originates from a third party; through printed media such as magazine publications or leaflets,” but also by “online streaming, by email, playing a video, through public performance of a play, etc.”
As well, “making the material available to another person in any way e.g. through the spoken word, the written word, electronic communications, etc, either directly (as the originator of the material), or by forwarding or repeating the material.”
In other words, Dave Chappelle had better stay out of Scotland.
The 8,000 Reports
If the pace of hate-crime reporting continues, the Telegraph revealed, by year’s end their total “would surpass the entire annual total of 416,000 crimes reported to police.”
As well, hate-crime reports will surpass “overall crime within 36 weeks, or at least by the autumn, and dwarf the annual 58,000 reported assaults, the most common offence in Scotland, by a factor of 10.”
A top police union official, David Threadgold, told the BBC that cops “cannot cope” with the surge. “Officers have been brought back in to do overtime shifts and the management of that is simply unsustainable,” he said.
Amusingly, he continued, the public has “‘weaponized’ the new law to pursue personal and political vendettas, and that messaging to the public urging them to report all possible instances of ‘hate,’ potentially anonymously, had backfired.”
The gumshoes at the leftist Guardian fingered the culprits behind the reports.
Blaming unnamed “neo-Nazis” and “far-right agitators,” the website reported that “a prominent figure in England’s white nationalist movement is among those urging followers to spam Police Scotland with anonymous online reports.”
The unidentified “leader of a far-right group” promoted mass reporting on the Telegram social-media app.
“Posts in the channel instruct members to log cases of supposed ‘anti-white’ hate, which they say includes a statement on the police force’s website that ‘young men aged 18-30 are most likely to commit hate crime,’” the Guardian continued:
“This public targeting of a group deeply offended us and thus we will report it as a racially motivated hate crime,” the channel administrator wrote.
Messages have also been posted directing the group’s 284 members to mass report tweets from members of the public, including one from a former local councillor who said that those most impacted by hate crime were “people of colour, disabled people, LGBT+ people, because it’s probably happened to them.” The administrator of the “hate crime reporting” group said the message was “offensive” and “singled out white men as evil.”
Scotland’s first minister, Pakistani Muslim Humza Yousaf, was the main force behind the law, and likely for good reason. He just might want to silence commentary about mass immigration to Great Britain, as well as the Islamic beachheads established in major cities such as Birmingham, England.
In an interview with Holyrood that described him as “tackling hate head-on,” Yousaf said that after the Muslim terror attack in the United States on September 11, 2001, high-school chums asked him “why Muslims hate America.” He also complained about anti-Muslim discrimination.
Rowling Voids Law?
Happily, Harry Potter scribe J.K. Rowling might have single-handedly voided the law. On April 1, she ridiculed “trans women” on X and called them what they are: men.
“Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal,” she wrote. “I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.”
Police confirmed that she did not commit a crime.
H/T: Breitbart
