Week 4 Foreign paper-

This week's comments deal with an article I discovered in the Capetown Dispatch. The link is:

http://www.dispatch.co.za/2006/02/03/Easterncape/cpos.html
DA poster not hate speech says human rights body
By MAYIBONGWE MAQHINA

This article just goes to show us that 'political correctness" is everywhere; certainly it is alive and well in South Africa. The poster in question merely said "End ANC Racism", hardly an incendiary statement. Regardless of whether the ANC is racist or not, the question actually is, is what was said really "hate speech"? Is it truly hateful to say ‘end racism’? What is "hate speech" anyway? It seems that the definition of it, much like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. Obviously some types of speech can incite people to commit crimes, but is that what is going on here? No one is being urged to do anything illegal, just to end racism, surely a lofty goal. This seems to fall more into the category of banning unpopular speech, at least to the ANC, who seem to resent being mentioned in the same sentence as ending racism. But if speech that is just unpopular can be eliminated, it endangers the very idea of free speech. The ANC in this case just wants to muzzle their political opponent. In much the same way many groups here desire to muzzle their political opponents by throwing the verbal hand grenade of calling something “hate speech”. We should be very careful what we call “hate speech”, sooner or later we all may espouse something that is unpopular, and we will be just as surely silenced.