Gerry McCann Speaks Out About Internet Sickos

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/do-the-right-thing-madeleine-mccanns-father-urges-pm-to-act-8371404.html

'Do the right thing': Madeleine McCann's father urges PM to act

The father of Madeleine McCann has urged David Cameron to “do the right thing” and accept the Leveson blueprint for press regulation, insisting it is the “minimum” required by victims of press abuses.

Lord Justice Leveson highlighted coverage of the youngster's 2007 disappearance on a family holiday in Portugal as an example of how stories were allowed to run "totally out of control".

Her parents, Gerry and Kate, were treated like a commodity as an "insatiable" hunt for headlines led to the sacrifice not only of the search for the truth but of their "dignity, privacy and well-being", he said.

Mr McCann, who gave evidence to the inquiry, welcomed the results of the 16-month inquiry, but said it should have gone further - ending self-regulation and making journalists and photographers more accountable.

And he said he opposed the Prime Minister's stance against any statutory underpinning.

"I would have liked to have seen a properly independent regulation of the press, whereas I think he has given the press another opportunity of self-regulation," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today.

"The other thing I find a little disappointing from the report is that we don't have a clear roadmap and timescales for implementation which I would have liked to have seen laid out a bit more clearly."

While the couple were paid damages for some of the coverage, no-one was "brought to task", he said, adding that there should also be more accountability of individual reporters and photographers.

"Many of the newspapers almost certainly knew what they were writing was not correct, or at least they certainly could not verify it, but the pound signs made them print it," he said.

But without such additions "full implementation of Lord (Justice) Leveson's report is the minimum acceptable compromise for me and I think for many other victims who have suffered at the hands of the press", he added.

"The Prime Minister and our other elected politicians have an opportunity now to do the right thing. And if they do the right thing, for the public, then it will help restore a little confidence.

"I clearly respect his opinion but I personally disagree with the viewpoint and Lord (Justice) Leveson, as a senior law judge of our country, has made clear that what he is proposing is not a state-run press.

"It is a fine distinction but without the statutory underpinning this system will not work."

He said "ludicrous" press coverage of the case - which suggested there was strong evidence to link the couple to their daughter's disappearance - continued to cast a shadow over their family.

"Thankfully, for us, I would say the vast majority of the British public did not believe what was written.

"It doesn't mean it wasn't damaging and could have destroyed our life. And if you go on to the internet there is still a tremendous amount of vile (sic) written about us that was fuelled by those stories.

"We have to face that going forwards on a daily basis and our twins, who are almost eight, will have to deal with that, particularly as they start to access the internet and Google themselves and their parents and Madeleine."

Mrs McCann said yesterday that Mr Cameron should "embrace the report and act swiftly".

"I welcome Lord Leveson's report and hope it will mark the start of a new era for our press in which it treats those in the news responsibly, with care and consideration," she said.

Giving evidence to the inquiry last November, Mrs McCann said she felt like "climbing into a hole and not coming out" when the News of the World printed her intensely personal diary, which she began after Madeleine disappeared.

The diary, which was so private Mrs McCann did not even show it to her husband, was published in the News of the World on Sunday September 14 2008. The newspaper later apologised.

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well done Mr. McCann.

It is clear that something needs to be done, Pedro.

However, I can actually agree with Mr. Cameron on this issue when he said, "We should, I believe, be wary of any legislation which has the potential to infringe free speech and a free press.”

You embark on that road and it has the potential to end in a very bleak place.

lily wrote:It is clear that something needs to be done, Pedro.

However, I can actually agree with Mr. Cameron on this issue when he said, "We should, I believe, be wary of any legislation which has the potential to infringe free speech and a free press.”

You embark on that road and it has the potential to end in a very bleak place.

Britain is already a very bleak place, Lily, and The Government aren't controlling anything. Other than their Expenses.

I know, Sabot, but I do favor fining the media.

I remember when this happened in the US. I could not understand how any sane, caring person could let this march go ahead, but it did. This is simply an example of upholding free (not libellous) speech.

I believe that the UK group Liberty has commented?

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http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/strwhe.html


When the Nazis Came to Skokie

Freedom for Speech We Hate

Philippa Strum

184 pages, 5-1/2 x 8-1/2
Landmark Law Cases and American Society
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-0940-6, $25.00
Paper ISBN 978-0-7006-0941-3, $12.95

HONORABLE MENTION: AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION'S 2000 SILVER GAVEL AWARD
Recognizing outstanding efforts to foster public understanding of the law

In the Chicago suburb of Skokie, one out of every six Jewish citizens in the late 1970s was a survivor--or was directly related to a survivor--of the Holocaust. These victims of terror had resettled in America expecting to lead peaceful lives free from persecution. But their safe haven was shattered when a neo-Nazi group announced its intention to parade there in 1977. Philippa Strum's dramatic retelling of the events in Skokie (and in the courts) shows why the case ignited such enormous controversy and challenged our understanding of and commitment to First Amendment values.

The debate was clear-cut: American Nazis claimed the right of free speech while their Jewish "targets" claimed the right to live without intimidation. The town, arguing that the march would assault the sensibilities of its citizens and spark violence, managed to win a court injunction against the marchers. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union took the case and successfully defended the Nazis' right to free speech.

Skokie had all the elements of a difficult case: a clash of absolutes, prior restraint of speech, and heated public sentiment. In recreating it, Strum presents a detailed account and analysis of the legal proceedings as well as finely delineated portraits of the protagonists: Frank Collin, National Socialist Party of America leader and the son of a Jewish Holocaust survivor; Skokie community leader Sol Goldstein, a Holocaust survivor who planned a counterdemonstration against the Nazis; Skokie mayor Albert Smith, who wanted only to protect his townspeople; and ACLU attorney David Goldberger, caught in the ironic position of being a Jew defending the rights of Nazis against fellow Jews. While the ACLU did win the case, it was a costly victory--30,000 of its members left the organization. And in the end, ironically, the Nazis never did march in Skokie.

Forcefully argued, Strum's book shows that freedom of speech must be defended even when the beneficiaries of that defense are far from admirable individuals. It raises both constitutional and moral issues critical to our understanding of free speech and carries important lessons for current controversies over hate speech on college campuses, inviting readers to think more carefully about what the First Amendment really means.

"A meticulous and graceful narrative of one of the most gripping free speech conflicts of modern times."--Rodney A. Smolla, author of Free Speech in an Open Society

"Strum succeeds brilliantly in telling the two stories of Skokie-the constitutional struggle over free speech and the human agony and conflict that permeated it. In clear, rigorous, and vivid prose, she recreates the legal and political culture when the case arose in the 1970s and then shows how more recent intellectual theories bear on what happened. A simply wonderful book."--Norman Dorsen, Stokes Professor, NYU, and president, ACLU, 1976–1991

"Strum paints a remarkably complete picture of the entire Skokie controversy and helps put the debate over the First Amendment protection for 'hate speech' into meaningful perspective."--David Goldberger, Ohio State University College of Law professor and former ACLU attorney for Frank Collin and the National Socialist Party of America

"A book that students will read eagerly and that teachers will find a pleasure to use."--Melvin I. Urofsky, author of Affirmative Action on Trial: Sex Discrimination in Johnson v. Santa Clara

PHILIPPA STRUM, professor of political science at the City University of New York–Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, is author of numerous books, including Brandeis: Beyond Progressivism, Brandeis on Democracy, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People, The Supreme Court and "Political Questions," and Presidential Power and American Democracy.

Apologies for posting about America and the First Amendment but it is a good example of why freedom needs protecting.

In response, the American Civil Liberties Union took the case and successfully defended the Nazis' right to free speech.

I simply do not agree with that sort of reasoning, Lily. It's the kind of woolly-minded liberalism that helped the Nazis to power in the first place, IMO.

Moreover, it gives equal moral value to an organisation that seeks to destroy the rights of others, as it would to an organisation which seeks basic human rights.

From a European viewpoint, it looks bizarre that an organisation which supposedly protects human rights gives aid to an organisation which seeks to destroy those rights.

It's dangerously close to Ghandi's nuttiness over Nazis.

Ghandi nuttiness over Nazis:

Gandhi's views came under heavy criticism in Britain when it was under attack from Nazi Germany, and later when the Holocaust was revealed. He told the British people in 1940, "I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions... If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them."[152]
In a post-war interview in 1946, he said, "Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs... It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions."[153] Gandhi believed this act of "collective suicide", in response to the Holocaust, "would have been heroism".[154]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi

I just can't see how printing what is provably true can be affected by Legislation, Lily.

I really don't know about inflammatory marches. They have been going on in Ireland for years and years, and no one interferes with those. But I don't see that as Free Speech. More as a right to one side of a two sided opinion. Unless it leads to violence, in which case the police have to act.

Bonny, you have no idea how I felt when this was going on but Jewish lawyers explained to me why it had to be that way. I had argued and argued but it didn't matter what I felt and thought as that was the law of the land.

I was using the Skokie incident as a severe example of free speech under horrendous circumstances.

Jewish people, generally speaking, have a tendency in the US to be liberal.

However, the UK is the place where I do not live and so in that regard should say nothing. So I will apologize for my remarks.

This bit is interesting:


The debate was clear-cut: American Nazis claimed the right of free speech while their Jewish "targets" claimed the right to live without intimidation.

IMO, Europeans and Americans are always going to see 'free speech' differently, if only because no-one born in the US has ever lived in fear of their lives because of fascists or communists, though their parents and grandparents may well have.

To the Jewish population of Skokie, marching Nazis aren't a matter for civilized debate, they are a horrible warning from history. I can see why so many left the ACLU over this.

Aw Lily, please, no apologies It's a fascinating debate, wherever people are from.

Something else just occurred to me - there isn't really any such beast as the 'British constitution'. Nothing is set in stone here, and laws are different, in different parts of the UK.

It can't be argued here that, because a ruling was made in Parliament at the end of the 18th century, that that ruling should never be challenged or changed, as is argued with the US constitution.

Which is not to say one is right and one is wrong, but they are different, and the way people see things is different.

I don't see why you should apologise, Lily. We are all entitled to an opinion. This current issue isn't about opinions. It's about the right or not to print Libel.
Libel shouldn't need elucidation, but apparently it does. Libel is Lies, including scurrilous unproven theories and opinions that accuse.

I think that your Jewish Lawyers were right on balance, just as I think that The Orangemen have a right to march in Ireland, much as I despise them.

When I was in The Wrens, I once painted my toolbox Green, just because I liked the colour, and I was threatened by some Protestant arsehole who threatened to smash my face in. I have to say that he scared me, but never being one to give in to intimidation, I told him to try if he dared, and deliberately tucked a very large wrench in my overall pocket where I could get at it easily. He never came anywhere near me again.

Re: Gerry McCann (and Dowlers) REFUSE to meet Culture Sec.
Justiceforallkids Today at 10:07 am

does anyone else think kates coat looks like a straight jacket??

No, they don't. What they do think is that that is just the kind of pointless, vicious remark that Gerry McCann had in mind....

You've got to be eaten up with unreasoning hatred to imagine that a rather smart navy, pea jacket:



bears any resemblance to a straightjacket. Not that many of us have experience of straightjackets.

There is very little doubt that some Journalists were forced to produce Stories for fear of losing their Jobs. So who should be held accountable for that? It takes a brave man to refuse when he has a family to care for.

It's a great pity that there appears to be no effort in Portugal, publically, to find out which particular scumbag helped themselves to a copy of the diary, in defiance of a judge.

I am sure we all have our suspicions about which disgraced ex-cop did it, but suspicions aren't proof. Though I am also sure the PJ know exactly who it was....

bb1 wrote:It's a great pity that there appears to be no effort in Portugal, publically, to find out which particular scumbag helped themselves to a copy of the diary, in defiance of a judge.

I am sure we all have our suspicions about which disgraced ex-cop did it, but suspicions aren't proof. Though I am also sure the PJ know exactly who it was....

Goncalo Amaral was most definitely in charge of the paperwork as Coordinator. Who could have stolen it from under his nose without him knowing? Unless he was permanently drunk, of course.

Jacqueline Cowan ‏@ThePlebian
Seems even on home ground the #mccann don't garner much support these days. Not one positive comment posted http://bit.ly/VliIlZ
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20m AnnaEsse ‏@AnnaEsse
@ThePlebian Amazing. Never seen so many negative comments in the Leicester Mercury.

cherry berry ‏@cosyring
@annaesse @theplebian more and more people are becoming wise to the facts in this case, PJ files, Gasper statements etc.

Really? Let's see who's been posting them, shall we?

Oh, what a surprise:

by cherry1

by LeicesterEye

by PeterMac

Just the usual goon squad, nothing of any importance at all.