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| Alicia's hateful speech with no right of reply |
Whilst fighting a battle to get the recognition of discrimination in the expulsion of my kids from a dratted Steiner School, the opposite critics have turned on us and mauled us savagely on several occasions. This arose simply from one person, Melanie Byng proposing initiatives that she was unable to take responsibility for and she has then allowed those personal things to bleed into the area of "Steiner criticism", using the social confirmation bias of her friends, to our detriment and also noticably to the detriment of the British campaign to halt State-funding.
Trying to destroy whistleblowers is not the action of serious campaigners and it will be obvious to anyone who looks beyond the superficial that Melanie Byng, along with other critics, has sacrificed her drive to prevent funding on the altar of her own narcissism. It's ironic that this group of critics, who constantly decry the Steiner movement for not being honest about what they're up to, have fallen into the exact same trap.
I've stated publicly before that Alicia Hamberg's statement that it was an "elegant solution" to expel bullied children due to our "behaviour" was hate-speech.
It's worth stating again that this statement was made about a situation under consideration by the Human Rights Commission under Family Status Discrimination. i.e. were the children discriminated against because we are their parents, and were the two younger children also discriminated against because they are the sisters of the older child? Clearly this is the case and the school have even boasted that there was no problem whatsoever with the children. Their problem, as in so many other cases documented by critics, was that we simply continued to observe their worrying and damaging lack of attention to the severe bullying taking place in the class with 5 girls and 17 boys.
In making the statement that the school was right to penalise the children because of the parents' advocacy, she is discriminating against them in exactly the same way the school did if any discrimination took place.
The critics' statements are not only discriminatory, but also un-evidenced and therefore libellous - also being the subject of a Human Rights enquiry. Since my protest, there have been numerous whining back-pedallings on her blog, to the effect of acknowledging that all that is written there is merely speculative and that in saying that a school found an 'elegant solution' in expelling them rather than addressing the bullying, that they don't mean to attack the children. This was framed in such a way as to amount to a further attack on us in the 'it's not critic's fault you're their parents' variety.
Nevertheless my describing the statement as hate-speech was predictably ridiculed and the sentiment re-endorsed by other critics, including the serial mobber Diana Winters. Hate-speech can only be about race, opined this group of white people,
Wikipedia defines hate-speech as "communication that vilifies a person or a group on the basis of color, disability, ethnicity, gender, nationality, race, religion, sexual orientation, or other characteristic", and it seems entirely logical that it should apply to any hateful communication.
It would be hard to characterise the pronouncements of Alicia and her cronies as anything but hateful, including, as they do, mental health smears, disability abuse and the overt and sustained anti-feminist attack on a woman through her children.
Nevertheless freedom of speech requires that we allow others to express opinions about us that may be offensive and the simple fact is that WordPress operates a very free policy on free-speech. They encourage protest and dissent and feel that offensive material should be talked about more and more not less and less.
So even though I'm totally blocked from commenting in those places where hateful and libellous stuff has been written about me, and where people delight in the havoc that Steiner education has wreaked in our lives, there is really nothing I can practically do about it at the moment either.
Even though many of Alicia's and other critic's statements are certainly actionable, she takes advantage of WordPress free-speech policy, which is that they won't issue a take-down notice unless there is a court order from the States. This is too difficult for me to achieve from New Zealand, so it just sits there.
If I was in the States, I would have followed it up obviously, because it would illuminate exactly the differences between free-speech, hate-speech and libel. Alicia Hamberg's actions are certainly designed to negatively affect my reputation and she is very open about this, expressing her belief that she must warn others about having anything at all to do with me, or my husband Steve, both personally and in a professional context.
Alicia Hamberg and the critics, including Dan Dugan, have taken it upon themselves to defame Steiner whistleblowers as a "public service".
So although it's clearly defamatory, I can't take the actions which might lead to Ms Hamberg being asked to behave more responsibly and not simply use her blog to give vent to her personal vendetta dressed up as critical thinking about Steiner Education, and the same goes for the Dan Dugan's Waldorf Critics list, where he was apparently persuaded by Diana Winters to break all his own ad hominem rules (clearly stated on his front page) to mob, defame, block and ban us.
The Steiner critics, as skeptics, or whoever they align themselves with in criticising "quack" behaviour from others are demonstrably doing exactly the same thing, i.e. they have shown that they have no argument whatsoever and can only appear to 'win' by totally silencing criticism, i.e. blocking me, whilst at the same time writing very offensive personal insults where I have no right of reply and circulating them around their followers.
Yet whenever Steiner people refuse to debate or just lapse into insult, this group is very quick to point out the paucity of argument that prompts that kind of behaviour. It doesn't say much for their critical thinking ability that they then go and do exactly the same thing themselves and get their friends to collude.
But it's totally useless being the target of something like this unless it can serve some useful purpose.
So for the moment, I'm just saying that, vile as it is, for Alicia Hamberg to be able to write her hateful speech about me as a parent, a woman, a disabled person, a mother, a film-maker, I too support freedom of speech and do not believe people should be prosecuted for making a tasteless joke, because that road leads to narrow-minded gate-keeping rule-makers, just like Alicia, Diana, Melanie and the rest, distorting the idea of free-speech even further.
But what's clear that, given the censorship that these hypo-critics want to practise, and in view of WordPress policy, I should continue to go for the only other option - to talk about their mobbing, blocking, smearing and defamatory behaviour more and more, and to try and bring awareness to it.
These actions are not only personally necessary. Clearly, if this group are prepared to attack us like this, simply for expressing the point of view that it is not acceptable to knowingly leave a hole in the road for others about abusive schools, then other whistleblowers stand a good chance of being mauled as well, if they don't toe the line of this unreasonably authoritarian group - no matter how garishly wide the welcoming smiles might initially be.
Their hateful actions have produced a situation in which I must now use my own right to free-speech to express my disgust at this behaviour to the very limits of the law - and this I will do, to point out exactly where they have gone beyond them.
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