Malema hate speech case has ripened the Equality Act for higher scrutiny as the ANC falls foul of its own law

Judge Colin Lamont’s judgment in the Julius Malema hate speech case is genuinely interesting and useful.

In the first place, it administers a well-aimed rebuke to an irresponsible young rabble-rouser (see postscript below) who no one in their right mind believes was nostalgically intoning struggle songs. The advocacy of hatred on the basis of (inter alia) race and ethnicity constituting incitement to cause harm is immunised from the protection of the free speech right in section 16 of the Constitution precisely because no utterance that could result in genocide (as in Rwanda) or in the instilling of fear and apprehension (as with the song Ama ’Ndiya) should be protected speech under the Constitution.  The Broadcasting Complaints Commission of SA limited (but did not ban) the broadcast of the song on the grounds that Indian South Africans in KZN would feel fear given a past history of violence in that province. Read more ...

Dene Smuts, DA Spokesperson on Justice and Constitutional Development
13 September 2011

Postscript

The Courier - Die Koerier is reminded of a passage in Whispers of betrayal by Michael Dobbs: “Democracy is based on a number of fallacies, the grandest of which is to believe that public opinion is the sum of all individual wisdom. It assumes that individuals are capable of arriving at informed and balanced opinions, which may be true, but completely ignores the fact that when those same informed and balanced individuals come together in large numbers, logic and reason are often cast aside and any gaps left in the framework of opinion are filled with raw, undisciplined emotion.”