Wait, so that poem is the thing I read about not while ago?
Today, the Turkish vice-premier Numan Kurtulmus called the poem a "crime against humanity".
More like "crime against satire".
The way I see things, satire is excellent tool of critique, delivering both entertainment and discussion material... if used correctly. Satire is a type of humor that needs special amount of care, more than other types, if you want to keep quality.
Erdogan deserves all the critique we can shove down his throat. That poem? Yeah, well, it was a collection of obscenities made to rhyme in German. It was crude, simplistic and low-brow. A jab. A jab with a pointy, rusted spike dipped in shit. A satire? Hardly.
We must do better. Satire must be such that the target of mockery at worst is left wondering if we are serious or not and at best he/she must revel in our mockery, mistakenly thinking we are singing a praise. Satire is always insulting, but it's always a veiled insult otherwise it's
just an insult. And why not just insult Erdogan, even if he deserves it? Because if we want to take the moral high ground, we must show him we are truly smarter than him, not engage in a lowly pub-knife-fight.
That's my stance on this.
It is a tasteless poem. A poem nonetheless. It rhymes, and it has metric (at least the german original version does).
It should fall completely under the freedom of arts. If this guy gets convicted for this, it's a big loss for the german constitutional state.
It's tasteless nonetheless, and infantile. It deserves a lot of criticism. But no legal action.
More or less, yeah. Besides, prosecuting him would fuel both "anti-establishment" right wing and feed into Erdogan's ego. Message must be sent to Böhmermann none the less. He is no John Stewart of poetry. So he should strive to do better.
If I understand you correctly, you want to persecute crimes differently depending on who they hurt. That violates fundamental judicial norms.
would you demand equal punishment for a kid who pushes a classmate during recess and a guy who pushes a frail old lady in a stairwell? ...or someone who distributes genocidal leaflets in a mosque and a guy who insults the ego of megalomaniacal dictator?
your idea of equality before the law is skewed by your conservative catholic liberalism, helgo
Sorry, but I too will have to agree this comparison is a bit off.
What you are describing are different crimes, different situations, different aoutcomes.
What Helgoland is talking about (or so I understand) would be more like:
1. [insert race/religion/social status etc.] kid pushes a classmate during recess
2. [insert different than 1. case race/religion/social status etc.] kid pushes a classmate during recess
... where you would punish kids differently given their "[insert]" differences. Instead you should be punishing them both equally, that's what Helgoland is on about.