Lynch-Mob Justice
Leftist ideology is replacing the rule of law in Britain and America.
In both Britain and America, ideological prejudices are coming to undermine the rule of law. In a number of incidents, people who have committed criminal acts have been acquitted or had their cases dismissed purely because they represent a politically correct cause or belong to a "powerless" victim group.
An English jury decided in September 2008 that causing more than £35,000 of damage to a coal-fired power station was justified as a protest against man-made global warming. The jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage after they argued that they had a '"lawful excuse" to trash property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater harm caused by climate change.
The jurors arrived at this decision having sat through a propaganda barrage by prominent advocates of the man-made global warming theory, including the pioneer green evangelist James Hansen and the environmental campaigner and newly elected Tory MP Zac Goldsmith. The court case was thus effectively turned into a platform for tendentious ideological propaganda, which appears not only to have been endorsed by the jurors but to have persuaded them that it even justified destroying someone's property.
In a similar English case last month at Hove Crown Court, seven activists were acquitted after causing £180,000 in damage to an arms factory owned by a company that sold military equipment to Israel, when they argued they were seeking to prevent "Israeli war crimes" against Palestinians.
The activists had broken into the factory at night, having previously videotaped interviews declaring their intention to smash it up. Yet with hostility to the Jewish state now at white-hot levels in Britain, such otherwise criminal activity is deemed to be justified by a jury if it is committed in the cause of damaging Israeli interests.
Even the judge in this case, George Bathurst-Norman, appears to have agreed. In his summing-up, he instructed the jury that "you may well think that hell on earth would not be an understatement of what the Gazans suffered in that time." He also highlighted the testimony to the court by Caroline Lucas, a Green member of Parliament, who argued that supposedly "all democratic paths had been exhausted" before the activists had embarked upon their action. What "democratic paths"? Israel was trying to prevent Hamas—considered a terrorist organization even by Her Majesty's government—from firing rockets at Israeli civilians.
Whatever one's view of that conflict, it is a political opinion. It surely should have nothing to do with the exercise of English law designed to protect people's property against criminal damage. It really has come to something when a British judge appears to be encouraging a jury to excuse criminal activity because he sympathizes with the political motive behind it. Thus the impartial administration of justice is now giving way in Britain to bias, bigotry and ideology.
Something very similar is happening in America, too. In May, the U.S. Justice Department suddenly dismissed a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party. Dressed in black uniforms and jackboots, with one of them menacingly tapping a baton, they stood at the entrance of a Philadelphia polling booth on the day Barack Obama was elected president, hurling threats and insults at people turning up to vote, such as "white devils" or "You're about to be ruled by the black man, cracker."
Despite witness testimonies and even video footage proving their guilt, all charges were dropped against three of the defendants and a mild restraining order was applied to a fourth. The only reason given by the Justice Department was that "the facts and the law" did not support proceeding with the indictment. The lead attorney on the case, J. Christian Adams, resigned in protest. In his eyes, this was an open and shut case of voter intimidation. "It doesn't get any easier than this," he said.
To Mr. Adams, there was no doubt about the real reason for the abandonment of this case. There is a "pervasive hostility to bringing these sorts of civil-rights cases" where the victims are white and the perpetrators are black. This opposition within the Justice Department to a "race-neutral enforcement" of voting-rights laws stretches back to the Bush administration, according to Mr. Adams.
How remarkable that in its neuralgic sensitivity to charges of racial prejudice, the American Justice Department should decide whether or not to proceed with a case on the basis of the color of a defendant's skin. But that is precisely the moral and intellectual inversion that has resulted from "politically correct" ideology. Over a wide range of issues—such as racism, environmentalism or anti-Zionism—truth and lies, justice and injustice, victim and victimizer, have all been turned upside down.
Based on the Marxist dogma that power is synonymous with oppression and powerlessness with virtue, such ideology has also given self-designated "powerless" groups a free pass. Whatever wrong they may do or disadvantages they may suffer from are never their fault or their responsibility. It is always the "oppressor" group that is to blame.
The effects of this have been felt across society's institutions—education, family life, employment, the media. Far from eradicating intolerance and injustice, it has led to bigotry and reverse discrimination against majorities or demonized "oppressor" groups.
So in Britain, it is becoming ever harder for Christians to be allowed to live according to their religious ethics. There has been a string of cases in which Christians have been forced to step down from their jobs as marriage registrars or from adoption panels because they refuse to officiate at gay partnership ceremonies or hand children for adoption by gay couples.
In such cases, it seems there is no longer any room for the exercise of religious conscience. Until now, the law has not required someone to act against their religious beliefs. Doctors, for example, can conscientiously opt out of performing abortions. Similarly, in instances of gay partnership or gay adoption, the Christian officials should have been allowed to stand down in those cases. But it seems that the demands of the "oppressed" gay groups require the extinction of any contrary interests.
This is an abuse of power and the antithesis of a free and liberal society. Furthermore, what is under assault is not some minority creed but the moral codes that lie at the very root of British society and Western civilization.
Now this onslaught appears to be subverting the rule of law itself. Objectivity and neutrality are being replaced in the justice system by subjectivity and bias. Feelings are being allowed to trump facts. Sympathy with the perceived underdog is being allowed to take precedence over the laws that define society's benchmarks of tolerable behavior.
If you belong to an "oppressed" group, such as black people, or espouse an approved cause, such as environmentalism, you are now above the law. But if you belong to a despised "oppressive" category, such as Israelis, white people or the coal industry, you can no longer look to the law for protection.
An impartial and objective justice system is fundamental to a free society. When ideology replaces the rule of law, the ultimate result will be rule by lynch mob.
Ms. Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist. Her new book, "The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God Truth and Power," has just been published by Encounter.
Posts
