The Count Dankula trial in which Mark Meechan aka Count Dankula is accused of ‘hate speech’ crimes because he made a joke that some found offensive, has been going on for two years now and looks like it’s finally starting to reach its conclusion. Count Dankula could face a year in prison for a joke in which the target was his girlfriend and which involved the Count teaching his partner’s pug dog to raise his right paw when he heard the words ‘Seig Heil’ or ‘gas the Jews’. Do I like or approve of his joke, well no I don’t, do I approve of it, no I don’t, but do I believe that he has the right to make such a joke even if I find it offensive, yes I do.

Of course Count Dankula obviously had no intention of feeding or encouraging neo Nazis or promoting anti-Semitism, there is to my knowledge nothing in his background or output that would lead me to believe that he had hateful intentions. He was merely trying to wind his girlfriend up by teaching the cutest thing he knew, the pug, to react to the most offensive and nasty things he could possibly think of the Nazis and their utterances. The joke and the accompanying video was plainly made in jest and Count Dankula stated this on the video when it was made public. However this was not enough to put off the hell hounds of increasingly bent British or, to be more specific, in this case the Scottish police and justice systems.

To recap, the complaint about Count Dankula and his ‘Nazi Pug’ video came originally from a representative of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities. This group as you can see from their ‘who’s who’ page on their website is made up of individuals with close connections with an increasingly Left wing devolved Scottish government under Nicola Sturgeon, members of the middle class Left along with those involved to various degrees in the ‘diversity industry’. As many regular readers of this blog may know I am Jewish myself but these clowns of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities do not represent me or my concerns. I can well imagine that they’d run a mile if I approached them and said ‘Now what is going to be done about all this murderous anti Semitism being promoted in Britain’s mosques?’

This group has made a huge mistake in bringing this case, as not only has it brought Count Dankula to the point where he may be gaoled for a year for a mere joke, has promoted the film more than it would have been promoted, but also because they are going to bring derision and scorn down on ordinary Jews. There are some Jews, such as myself, who are not as ‘left aligned’ or as keen on such outrageous censorship as the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities appear to be, and this lot don’t represent us. I also consider that the unwelcome and damaging negative publicity that this case has brought to the Scottish Jewish community is, in Yiddish, a ‘Shanda fur de goyim’, or in English, creating a scandal in front of non Jews and thereby making the whole community look bad, in this case censorious.

This blatant attempt to censor and intimidate the likes of Count Dankula by the use of the police and judicial systems is most definitely in my view the sort of behaviour that should be considered as both a scandal, along with being incompatible with the sort of free society that we all, whether Jew or non Jew, should be standing up for. The outcome of this trial whether it results in the gaoling of Count Dankula or not, will be that more people will think ‘censorship’ and ‘oppression’ when they think of Scottish Jews in general and the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities in particular. This is not a good image to have, believe me on that.

Now of course I can understand why bad taste jokes involving Shoah imagery or statements are offensive, I can concede that point, I also, like one of the chief prosecution witnesses Ephraim Borowski, find the joke offensive. Many of us belong to families that lost people in the Death Camps and it may seem to some that Holocaust jokes are an insult to the dead. However, neither mine or any other person’s sense of ‘offence’ or ‘insult’ should end up with the result that a man’s liberty is removed from him. This is the prospect that faces Count Dankula. Naturally I find Count Dankula’s video offensive but it is plain from my viewing of clips from the video that this was in now way intended to promote Nazism or Jewish genocide. Many of us both Jew and non Jew are perfectly able to discern the difference between ‘joker’ and ‘genocide promoter’ and Count Dankula obviously comes into the former category. Count Dankula merely tried to make the cute into the definitely uncute and this context should have been noted by all those concerned in bringing this case, a case that in my view has no place in any court anywhere in the nations that make up Great Britain.

This case should never have come before the courts, it is based on a misreading of the intent of Count Dankula and is yet another example of how ‘hate speech’ laws are being used by those of ill intent to curtail the rights of Britons to speak freely. This right to speak should be both inalienable and self evident, people should be allowed to speak the contents of their minds and their hearts even if some would find what is said offensive, insulting, stupid or wrong because to do otherwise is tyranny. As the academic Stephen Pinker says:’Free speech is a cardinal virtue’ and that it is because of free speech that we know more today than we did in the historical past. Bad ideas such as submission to arbitrary authority, the unquestioning belief in scripture or ideology and superstition as Mr Pinker has said have all been been beaten and have lost their power by the exercise of freedom of speech.

Count Dankula has been subjected to, in a phrase popularised by the blogger Ambush Predator, a legal process that is in itself a punishment. ‘The process is the punishment’ is the exact phrase that she uses. He has done nothing wrong apart from making a bad taste joke of the sort that I would not personally make and for that has been pushed from pillar to post by the policing, ‘diversity’, legal and political Establishments in Scotland. Count Dankula has lost two years of his life to this twisted farce of a court case brought by people who should have known better than to give this video any further publicity and which is being eagerly pushed by an Establishment who are using the Count Dankula case to frighten others into shutting up. This Establishment wants to shut down anything and everything that challenges their narrative or their views no matter what way shape or form that challenge may be. There is little difference in the behaviour of those who have pushed for the trial of Count Dankula and those from this nation’s past who shouted ‘Witch’ at those who were unpopular or behaved differently from the social norm.

In my view this case also goes against the principles of free and honest justice as outlined in the Jewish Torah. In the Torah it is forbidden to buy or sell justice or to weight the scales of justice one way or another, whether for the rich or the poor, the powerful or the powerless. It is plain for me to see that the Count Dankula trial is one of those cases that do go against the Torah rules about equal justice. This is because a powerful entity well connected to the movers and shakers in the Scottish political system, have used their muscle and the muscle of those in public service and in the press who agree with the whole ‘hate speech’ idea, to weight the scales of justice against Count Dankula.

According to some accounts of the more recent parts of this lengthy trial, such as those provided by Lauren Southern, the prosecution has really over stepped the mark. They have been making emotional and emotive appeals to the Airdrie Sheriff Court for a severe punishment for Count Dankula and ranted on about how ‘dangerous’ Count Dankula’s ‘offence’ is. The prosecution has also been trying to make it seem, completely erroneously and dishonestly, that Count Dankula is a Nazi and not the truth which is that he is a joker. The press in Scotland have also seemingly taken the prosecution’s line on this and according to Ms Southern the reporters from the mainstream press seemed to be lapping up the prosecutors emotional harangue to the court . These reporters sat po faced whilst the reporters from the alternative media tried to suppress laughter at the cringe-making and laughable attempt to paint Count Dankula as a Nazi sympathiser and promoter. Whatever the outcome of this trial it’s plain to see that this is a bent trial and as a human being and as a Jew who aspires to a fair justice system, such bent trials and the equally dodgy ‘hate speech’ legislation that they are acting under, both offends and angers me.

‘Hate speech’ laws have created a situation which is anathema to the idea of equal justice with everyone treated the same when they come before the court, an idea that goes back to antiquity. These laws have created different ‘protected’ classes of people whether by dint of religion or race, gender or sexuality and as such they should have no place in any legal system that desires not only to be fair but also desires to be seen as fair. ‘Hate speech’ and ‘hate crime’ laws create classes of people which the law treats advantageously just as previous laws in Britain treated members of the aristocracy more leniently than the peasant. ‘Hate speech’ laws offend me as I don’t desire specific protection by the law for being exposed to opinions that I dislike, in fact I find it unnecessary and indeed insulting that because I’m Jewish the state treats me as some special vulnerable snowflake who will crumble in the face of a bad taste joke. Bollocks to that. The Jewish people have survived much more than a few insulting words or bad taste jokes. A people that survived and saw the collapse of the empires of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans and others including that of the Soviets and the horrors perpetrated by the Uni-Testiculed Austrian, is not going to be destroyed by the fact that an internet commentator has made a joke, a joke that I don’t even have to be exposed to if I don’t want to be exposed to it. There’s lots of stuff out there humour-wise and some of it I like and some of it I don’t and some if it disgusts me, but I should not be the arbiter or judge of humour as it is a very very personal thing. What offends one person may make another person piss themselves with laughter.

This case represents as the journalist Tim Pool said ‘the criminalisation of humour’ in the United Kingdom. This has been a direct result of successive governments succumbing to demands from various minority and political groups that ‘hate speech’ laws should be used to crush free speech. These patently unjust and oppressive laws not only bring normal human interactions such as speaking an opinion or telling a joke into the realms of illegality but also promote the false idea that words are violence. The reality is that words are not ‘violence’ even if you may disagree with the words being spoken, they are just words. Violence, especially unjust violence is very easy to discern, to identify and to punish, but how people use or receive words when they hear them is highly subjective. No two people will take the same information from the same words, they will nearly always interpret them differently because every individual is different, with varying upbringings and backgrounds. Treating words as violence as has become fashionable in some circles and which has influenced the content of ‘hate speech’ law is the path to injustice as a single word or series or words can have different effects on different people.

You may be of the opinion that the Count Dankula case is of no real importance, it’s merely someone getting in trouble for being a bit of a dick, but this case is of very great importance. Today the state, the Left and the sort of diversity Establishment busybodies that have done so much damage to this nation already, have come after a person who made a poor choice of joke. Tomorrow it could easily be you or a member of your family who is hauled before the courts because they told a joke that someone overheard and didn’t like. It could also be the case that the person, you or a family member, may have uttered an opinion that although important to the speaker, nevertheless went against the view of someone from a ‘protected’ group. Under ‘hate speech’ law the ‘offended’ person could go to law and have the miscreant punished, even if the protected group member was wrong and the ‘offender’ was being factually correct. This is neither just nor fair.

Count Dankula’s fight is everybody’s fight. His fight concerns basic matters of freedom of speech and the fact that he has been hauled before the court and subjected to a two year nightmare, highlights just how much of that right to speak British people have lost already.