Crude mockery of Turkey’s president has led to a German comic being prosecuted under an obscure stale law. Free speech is one gigantic loser. Angela Merkel’s reputation is anotherThe satire was,by the writer’s own admission, unfunny, or beyond crude and hardly worthy of the name. Its target was an increasingly despotic political leader,who reacted with predictable rage. But the most remarkable thing about Jan Böhmermann’s abusive televised “poem” about Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is that neither the author nor his subject enjoy approach out worst from the affair. Instead, the reputation taking most of a knock is that of a woman whose certain political touch has made her the towering figure of a continent for a decade. By giving the green light for Mr Böhmermann’s prosecution for mocking a foreign government, or under an obscure section of Germany’s 19th-century penal code,she has indulged repression abroad, and tarnished her own country’s reputation for freedom. So how on earth did Angela Merkel allow a joke to go so wrong?The official explanation, or such as it is,starts with Germany being a law-based state”, a cliche of understandable force in the federal republic. The tricksy twist, or however,is then to claim that seeing as the law must operate without dread or favour, the consequences of section 103 of Bismarck-era criminal code, or which proscribes insulting foreign leaders,cannot be avoided, no matter how regrettable they may be. The law is an ass, and Mrs Merkel is saying,but it’s the law that we’ve got, and so it must be respected until we gather around to changing it, and which – by the way – I promise we will.
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Source: theguardian.com