Public Access TV hate-speech

Today while channel surfing I landed on the “Judaism” programme screening on BCAT (Brooklyn Community Access TV). The speaker was the Orthodox Rabbi Mordechai Friedman.

It was a sickening programme. Friedman and his co-host described a long list of African Americans (including Bill Cosby, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Al Sharpton) as “Simians”, and just to disambiguate, then held up a picture of gorillas describing the only difference between that picture and the people mentioned as that the gorillas were not “anti-semitic”.

Today while channel surfing I landed on the “Judaism” programme screening on BCAT (Brooklyn Community Access TV). The speaker was the Orthodox Rabbi Mordechai Friedman.

It was a sickening programme. Friedman and his co-host described a long list of African Americans (including Bill Cosby, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Al Sharpton) as “Simians”, and just to disambiguate, then held up a picture of gorillas describing the only difference between that picture and the people mentioned as that the gorillas were not “anti-semitic”.

Prior to this hate-speech, Friedman’s co-host had called on all viewers to write to the president and congress to call for the death penalty for homosexuals. This was justified by quoting a line in the Torah prohibiting men marrying men, then followed by the co-hosts lengthy tirade about prohibition of men marrying animals.

The entire performance would have been laughable if it were possible to believe no viewer would have agreed with it. Instead it was absolutely sickening.

Now, this is clearly a very warped, very extremist view, unfortunately matched by other extreme pontifications by some commentators from other religions. It clearly doesn’t speak in any fashion for mainstream Jewish thought (as I understand it, having two room-mates of Jewish background), or would I assume, even for minority orthodox Jewish philosophy.

It did however raise two issues for me, the first, the degree to which the victim can become the oppressor. That is, a commentator so clearly identifying with a persecuted society, most recently by Nazism, can adopt the same language of those persecutors. To describe African-Americans as monkeys is to adopt the ideology and language of Nazi uber-menchen, of distinguishing greater and lesser races of people. To adopt a persecutional stance towards homosexuals is to forget that homosexuals too were persecuted alongside the Jewish people by the Nazis, using the same claim as Friedman of “purging decadent behaviour”.

It is almost as if, in many documented cases, a child molested grows up to be a child molester, a member of a society unjustly persecuted and denounced can then adopt his own stance of persecution and denouncement in a quest to understand the Jewish tragedy. There is no solution in such vitriol, only perpetuation of the evil acts.

The second more problematic issue is to what degree such positions are allowed to be broadcast without comment. I certainly don’t condone outright censorship, although such a programme must be examined for the degree to which it’s statements constitute hate-speech. If such broadcasts do constitute race-baiting and hate speech, the principles of public-access broadcasting have been broken. I need to look into the FCC requirements for public access TV broadcasting.