Finland’s Supreme Court has found a prominent politician guilty of defaming Islam for “Islamophobic” comments he made on his personal blog.

The ruling represents a major setback for free speech in a Europe that is becoming increasingly stifled by politically correct restrictions on free speech, particularly on issues related to Islam and Muslim immigration.

The Helsinki-based Supreme Court ruled on June 8 that Finns Party MP Jussi Kristian Halla-aho was guilty of “inciting hatred against an ethnic group” for blog posts he made in 2008 which compared Islam to paedophilia, and for sarcastic comments which insinuated that immigrants from Somalia are predisposed to stealing and living off welfare.

In its ruling, the court said that hate speech does not fall under the protections afforded by the freedom of speech, even though Halla-aho said his comments were a protest against public policy and not against Islam and Mohammed per se.

Halla-aho, who has become well known in Finland and elsewhere for his well-argued essays criticizing multiculturalism and runaway immigration, was ordered to pay a hefty fine and delete the comments from his blog.

Halla-aho maintains a blog called Scripta, which deals with issues such as “immigration, multiculturalism, tolerance, racism, freedom of speech and political correctness.” His blog attracts thousands of readers every day, and the Tampere-based newspaper Aamulehti has described him the best-known political blogger in Finland. Halla-aho’s notoriety has placed the guardians of Finnish multiculturalism on maximum alert.

In a blog post in June 2008, Halla-aho wrote that the Islamic prophet Mohammed was a paedophile, and that Islam is a religion of paedophilia because Mohammed had sexual intercourse with his wife, Aisha, when she was only nine years old.

According to Halla-aho: “This sentence is related to a discussion where I criticize the idea of the subjective offensiveness of some sentence as being sufficient criteria for its judicial offensiveness. In other words, if some group is offended by sentence X, sentence X is illegal irrespective of whether it is true or not. In my opinion, stating of facts cannot and must not be criminal, even if they offend someone. This is also a problem of equality. For example, a Muslim is offended by criticism of his religion far more easily than an average Christian. If subjective offensiveness suffices as the elements of a crime, the law protects a Muslim with greater force than it protects a Christian.”

He continued: “My sentences about Mohammed and Islam were not opinions, but inescapably logical conclusions based on known facts. I did not use the word ‘paedophile’ as psychopathological concept, but in its popular meaning of a person having sex with children. The traditional Muslim knowledge, the Hadith literature, tells us that Mohammed had sex with his wife Aisha when she was nine years old. A nine-year-old is seen as a child today, and physically she was a child in 7th century, no matter what her judicial status was. Therefore, if Mohammed had sex with Aisha and Aisha was a child, Mohammed had sex with a child. That Mohammed is a holy figure to Muslims cannot make him immune to criticism in West, especially if criticism is based on undisputed facts.”

In another post, Halla-aho responded to a Finnish columnist who wrote that drinking excessively and fighting when drunk were cultural and possibly genetic characteristics of Finns. In order to show the double standards of such arguments, Halla-aho asked sarcastically if it could be stated that robbing passersby and living at the expense of taxpayers are cultural and possibly genetic characteristics of Somalis.

According to Halla-aho, “I turned the newspaper Kaleva‘s sentence into parody where ‘Finns’ were replaced by ‘Somalis.’ My hypothesis was that Somalis are under the special protection of the media and government officials, and my argument is that what is permissible to present about Finns becomes impermissible when it is about Somalis. My own version was as follows: ‘Robbing passers-by and living as parasites on tax money is the national, maybe even genetic characteristic of Somalis.’”

He also wrote: “In order to poke fun at The Council for Mass Media in Finland, I mentioned in the text that I present this argument as supposition, not as a fact. In addition, I proved that by using crime statistics, the argument about Somalis can be proved just as effectively as Kaleva’s argument about Finns.”

The IDF website reports a decline in the number of army recruits this year, pinning the lowest recruitment rate in eight years on slower immigration and a low birth rates in 1994, when the 2012 generation was born.

This year manpower shortage in the IDF will reach a peak, after a steady decline of 7.5 percent in recruiting both men and women since 2004.

However, the next decade will see a gradual increase in rates of recruitment. The IDF Manpower Management Section’s Planning Division and Personnel Management (HATUMHA) is working on various projects designed to address the issue, such as  special tracks for religious women, a multi-year recruitment plan for technicians, expanding the scope of Ultra Orthodox recruitment and the recruitment of special populations.

“It is a time of draught, when resources are fewer, but it will change the future,” noted Head of Combat  Resources Planning Maj. Kobi Levi, who pointed out that “precisely at this time the army is undergoing significant intensification and its need for growth is expanding.”

The Guardian reports that French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen switched her campaign back to immigration on Sunday, by claiming all meat in Paris was halal, as she tried to head off President Nicolas Sarkozy’s attempts to lure her supporters.

At a congress of her National Front party in Lille, Le Pen said she had proof that all meat in Paris was halal and that she would lodge legal complaints against distributors for misleading consumers.

“This situation is a real deception and the government has been fully aware of it for months,” she told reporters at the conference. “All the abattoirs in the Paris region sell halal meat without exception.”

The main meat industry association, Interbev, denied the allegation and said most meat in Paris was not slaughtered under halal or kosher practices.

New legislation targeting illegal immigration passed its second and third readings in the Knesset on Tuesday. Among the measures included in the bill are the power to detain illegal migrants for up to three years without charge, prison terms of up to 15 years for anyone convicted of aiding migrants involved in smuggling humans, weapons or drugs into Israel, faster construction of the border fence with Egypt, and a new detention facility.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahi, who had called the issue “a national calamity” and made the legislation a cornerstone of his plan to tackle illegal immigration, cast a vote in favor of the legislation.

Detractors claim the bill is undemocratic and runs counter to Israel’s obligations to human rights. But Likud MK Zeev Elkin stressed that there were similar laws on the books in many other countries, and that the legislation was required to stem the growth of illegal immigration. According to figures, there were 52,487 illegal immigrants in Israel at the end of last year, most of whom arrived from Africa.

I had just finished reading The Prime Ministers (Toby Press) and enjoyed every one of its 700-plus pages.  Yahuda Avner’s “fly on the wall” account spans the governments of Levi Eshkol (Six-Day War), Golda Meir  (Yom Kippur War), Yitzhak Rabin (Entebbe, Oslo), and Menachem Begin (peace treaty with Sadat, attack on Iraqi nuclear reactor, Lebanon invasion), describing sensitive, frightening and sometimes hilarious events, mostly of the kind you will never read in a newspaper.

Avner had served in various capacities – adviser, speechwriter, ambassador, consular diplomat – to all of the above-named prime ministers and as such was present at meetings and privy to conversations between Israeli officials and their counterparts around the world.

I thought it would be instructive to speak with Avner; though aware that The Jewish Press had published a lengthy interview with him shortly after the book was published a little more than a year ago, I was curious as to how the book had been received since its publication.

He agreed to set aside some time to meet with me while on a visit to New York. The ambassador is a genteel man. His demeanor is that of an elegant European diplomat, equally comfortable at an official state function and at a humble beis medrash.

Avner disclosed that he was able to remain as the senior Foreign Service officer on “loan” to the Prime Minister’s Office through four administrations because he had become the “institutional memory” of that office. He was always apolitical, walking out whenever the discussion turned to parochial politics. He recorded every conversation using his own shorthand, and after every meeting dictated the minutes of the proceedings for posterity.

When I asked him about the reaction his book had garnered, he told me he was besieged by demands on his time for speaking engagements all over the world, to the extent that he had to hire a publicist who handles his speaking engagements and schedule.

I wondered whether there had been complaints from any of the individuals mentioned and/or quoted in the book.

“To the contrary,” he replied. “I made it a policy that before I published any incident or quoted any person, I would send a draft manuscript to the protagonist for his or her comments, but only as it related to the accuracy of a particular incident or quote.”

Thus, every story and quotation was “vetted” by those involved, and the reaction has been very favorable.

Avner has heard from readers from every part of the globe who have praised him for his candor and his remarkable ability to quote, verbatim, occurrences of a half a century ago.

I asked Avner how he could quote persons on the other side of a phone call while he was present in the room on the Israeli side. He told me a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, who happens to be a good friend, shared with him notes he had sent to the State Department based on conversations on the other side of these phone calls which had became known to him through his own channels.

We discussed the challenge of Avner’s being strictly shomer Shabbos in an environment that, at least until Menachem Begin became prime minister, was not particularly sensitive to “Shabbos” issues.  Avner noted with a laugh that he found that most political and governmental crises occurred Erev Shabbos. He cited as an example the time Henry Kissinger and Yitzhak Rabin engaged in a rather stormy meeting in Jerusalem late one Friday afternoon.

Kissinger stormed out, slammed the door to the Prime Minister’s Office, and prepared to complain to the world press about Israel’s obstinacy. Rabin immediately ordered Avner to prepare and distribute a press release relating Israel’s version of the collapsed talks. On the grounds that “a press release was not a vital Israeli security matter but only hasbara” – public relations – Avner said he would not desecrate Shabbos by writing one.

Miami Beach was certainly a fitting choice as the site for this month’s reunion of passengers from the ill-fated SS St. Louis, the ship of Jewish refugees that sailed from Nazi Germany in May 1939. As children, they gazed at the lights of Miami as the St. Louis hovered off the Florida coast, hoping desperately for permission to land.

In the 70 years since that tragic voyage, the story of the St. Louis has been told and retold, taught and studied, researched and pondered. It has been to Hollywood, in the 1976 film “Voyage of the Damned,” starring Faye Dunaway. It was the subject of a U.S. Senate resolution expressing remorse over what happened. It was featured in a full-page political cartoon in the Washington Post (by Art Spiegelman of “Maus” fame and this author). It was the focus of a project by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to trace the fate of each of the more than 900 passengers.

And it continues to fascinate historians – including an Israeli scholar who has uncovered a new document that sheds light on President Franklin Roosevelt’s attitude toward the St. Louis.

The Saddest Ship Afloat

Hans Fisher, today a professor at Rutgers University, grew up in the German city of Breslau. He still vividly remembers the torments he and other Jewish children endured there in the early years of the Hitler regime.

“When my friends and I would come out of our school building, members of the Hitler Youth would be waiting nearby,” he recalls. “They would chase us, and if they caught us, they would beat us.”

His father, George Fisher, was one of the tens of thousands of Jewish men arrested during the November 1938 Kristallnacht program and sent to concentration camps. After nearly two months in Buchenwald, George was released on condition he leave the country within two weeks. He secured a visa to Cuba and immediately upon his arrival there began making arrangements for Hans, his sister Ruth, and their mother to join him. They purchased tickets to sail on the SS St. Louis in May 1939.

Hans’s grandparents, Wolf and Emma Gottheimer, chose to stay behind.

“My grandfather was convinced that since four of his sons had given their lives for Germany in World War I, the Nazis would never persecute him,” Hans explains. “In fact, my grandparents had gone to Palestine in 1935, but then returned to Germany, to the shock and amazement of their friends.”

Hans’s grandparents would eventually perish in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

The two-week voyage from Hamburg to Havana proceeded without incident. “I was young, I was happy that we were getting away from Nazi Germany, I certainly couldn’t appreciate how tenuous our position was,” Hans says.

“When we reached Havana, all of our suitcases were brought up to the deck as we got ready to disembark. It was a terrible shock to be standing there by the rail, our suitcases in hand, and told we could not get off the ship.”

All but thirty of the passengers held documents granting them entry to Cuba as tourists, which they had purchased in Germany, at the astronomical sum of $500 each, from an unscrupulous Cuban government official. Cuba’s authorities, furious at the backroom profiteering and sensitive to domestic anti-Semitism, refused to recognize the validity of the entry documents.

The St. Louis remained in the Havana port for several days as officials of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee negotiated with Cuban leaders. Meanwhile, relatives of the passengers rented small boats and rowed close to the St. Louis, hoping to catch a glimpse of their loved ones.

Title: The Borders of Inequality: Where Wealth and Poverty Collide

Author: By Iñigo Moré

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

   In chapter 3 we learn that from 2003 through 2011 the South Central Border unit of the Israeli border police seized 10 tons of marijuana, 14 tons of contraband tobacco, 6 kilos of hashish and 750 grams of heroin, and had arrested 88 people, most of whom are Israeli citizens or Egyptians. Coincidentally, our own country – The U.S. – has a problem with the illegal importation of an hallucinogenic drug, Ecstasy, which is one of the current “Club Drugs” of choice – resulting in quite frequent arrests of American and Israeli drug dealers by both American and Israeli drug enforcement agency personnel, often working in collaboration.

Most critics of The New York Times are well aware of the liberal bias on its news pages that is as pronounced as the leftward slant on its opinion pages. But the Gray Lady’s sports section is just as bad.

In the past several years, the “Sports of the Times” has had two egregious examples of politicized coverage. One was the campaign for changes at the private golf club that hosts the Masters tournament. The other was its disgraceful coverage of the rape accusations lodged against the Duke lacrosse team.

Long after the rest of the media acknowledged the Duke story was a hoax, the Timescontinued piling on the falsehoods. After the dust settled and there was no longer even a shadow of doubt about the innocence of the young men the Timesreporters and columnists had done their best to besmirch, there were no apologies.

Being the Timesand imbued with a sense of high liberal moral purpose means you never have to say you’re sorry.

So it was hardly surprising to see the Times lead its sports section last Saturday with a highly politicized piece by author Jonathan Mahler seeking to incite protests against the Major League Baseball All-Star Game next month.

Mahler’s problem with the Summer Classic is that it is being held at the home ballpark of the Arizona Diamondbacks. We’re told that’s a bad thing because Arizona passed a law calling for local law enforcement agencies to ask people (already being questioned about possible misbehavior) about their immigration status.

The law may be unnecessary, but it is neither racial profiling nor a modern equivalent of Jim Crow. Even those of us who believe illegal immigration is not a lethal threat to the nation believe the laws concerning entry into the country should be enforced.

But the law, which has yet to be enforced due to court challenges, offends the sensibilities of some Hispanics. That is enough for some to justify a boycott of the entire state until it cries uncle the way it did 20 years ago over its resistance to the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

The Hispanic contribution to our national pastime has been enormous. It is even more important these days since so many Americans seem to have abandoned baseball for basketball and football. Yet Mahler considers baseball insufficiently politically correct on Hispanic issues especially when compared to the National Basketball Association and the National Football League.

As Mahler notes, Hispanic players had a tough time for many years but the sometimes unhappy history of their experience (which was never as bad as the discrimination suffered by African-Americans) would not justify the sport intervening in the Arizona case as Mahler suggests.

The author is determined to build a case against Major League Baseball, but at times blames it for things that are the faults of others. Recent scandals about the recruitment of players in Latin America were actually the fault of local Hispanics, not greedy gringos, who exploited and lied about prospects.

The problem with his piece, as well as his whole argument, is that it is premised on an assumption based on a political point of view he merely assumes but does not prove. Some Hispanic players may disagree with the Arizona law, but does that, as Mahler seems to imply, mean all of baseball must agree or be guilty of racism?

Most Americans support enforcement of laws against illegal immigration, including the Arizona statute. If baseball were to take sides on one side of that battle, what would Mahler have players do who disagree with a boycott of Arizona?

Mahler’s attempt to analogize the disagreement over the Arizona law with the breaking of baseball’s color line also doesn’t hold up. As he himself notes, this is the 100th anniversary of the first Hispanics to play in the big leagues. Nor is there any comparison between Jackie Robinson and the late Roberto Clemente, who was a great player and died tragically but does not deserve the same place in both baseball and American history that Robinson does.

Americans can disagree on what should be done about illegal immigration, but the best place to hash that out is in the halls of legislatures, the courts and most of all the ballot boxes. Despite the desire of the Times to incite division and anger, baseball should stand clear of that fight.