The spectacle of angry Islamists and their useful idiots on the Islamo-Left spouting anti-Israeli, antisemitic and anti-Western hate on our streets has shocked many Europeans. There are loud demands for other governments to follow the lead of France, where the authorities banned pro-Palestinian protests after the Hamas massacres of Israeli civilians on October 7th.
Over here in London, the Metropolitan Police have come under fire for refusing to ban the big march demanding ‘Ceasefire Now’ (aka ‘Immediate Israeli Surrender’), planned for Armistice Day, Saturday November 11th. There is no doubt that the Met is a cowardly, institutionally-woke body, whose double standards mean it will arrest ‘gender-critical’ feminists for daring to suggest that a woman cannot have a penis, yet indulge Islamist hate-mongers because ‘jihad’ can supposedly have a peaceful meaning. On this occasion, however, it appears that, on balance, London police have made the right advance decision—albeit for all the wrong reasons.
It might be good to imagine that we could simply ask the authorities to wave a public order law or a policeman’s riot baton and make all the hatred and political poison go away. But in reality, there are both principled and practical reasons why we should not immediately turn to state censorship as a solution, even when faced with stomach-churning public celebrations of Jew-hatred.
In principle, we should defend the bedrock democratic liberty of freedom of speech. And in practice, we should allow the antisemitic Islamists and the West-hating Left to speak out and show their true colours, so that we can see and hear where everybody stands and where the battlelines are drawn.
In short, free speech is not our problem. Forcefully wielded, it remains our best weapon in the existential political war we are engaged in today.
To start with the principle. Alongside Israel’s life-and-death war in the Middle East, we in the West are waging a political and culture war against those who despise Western democracy so much that they will side with genocidal Islamists. Like the Israelis, this is a battle we cannot afford to lose.
If we are to stand up for our democratic civilisation, however, we need to defend its precious liberties. The most important of those is freedom of speech, the lifeblood on which democracy and all other liberties and depend. It is an indivisible freedom that we defend for all or for none at all.
Once you forget that principle and try to draw a new line limiting free speech, the question is always: who decides? Should we really entrust the knee-taking, rainbow-flag waving, woke-colonised Metropolitan Police or the European courts with even more power to control what we can legitimately say, see, or think? That is a dangerous ploy which, history suggests, is sure to backfire. The cancel culture warriors, who are temporarily posing as champions of free speech for anti-Israeli activists, would truly love nothing better than to see yet more restrictions on anything that can be deemed ‘hate speech.’
So, does defending free speech have to mean tolerating expressions of extremism and hatred? Contrary to today’s liberal-left orthodoxy, free speech must include the freedom to hate and the right to be offensive. Hatred, after all, is a human emotion we all feel one way or another; not sure about you, but I hate the genocidal death cult of Hamas. So long as we are dealing with thoughts and words, not violent deeds, the state has no more business telling us who we can or can’t hate than dictating who we should love.
As for policing ‘extremist’ speech, in the end we surely must accept that it is only those words and ideas deemed extreme or offensive that need defending from censorship. The mainstream and the mundane can look after themselves.
Whether we like it or not (and we won’t), that means allowing free speech even for our enemies, such as those who try to defend the pogrom in Israel as a Palestinian war of liberation. Of course, we have no interest in defending the right of malicious morons to spout antisemitic filth. But we do have an interest in upholding the other side of free speech—our right to hear them and judge for ourselves, without having our ears and eyes protectively covered by a nanny state.
Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation in Europe, so that it is a crime to belong to Hamas or actively solicit others to join or support it. UK home secretary Suella Braverman has now asked chief constables to widen the scope for police action against protestors on the grounds of harassment or incitement. She suggests that in current circumstances, chanting the genocide-implying slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ or even waving a Palestinian flag might be considered a ‘racially-aggravated public order offence.’
As Braverman says, “context is crucial” in matters of free speech. Screaming anti-Semitic abuse in a Jewish family’s face is not the same thing as chanting a slogan outside an Israeli or U.S. embassy. But we need to keep the definition of harassment or incitement as narrow as possible, and hold the line between words and deeds, between waving flags and physical violence, between offensive chants and criminal offences.
When should words be criminalised as incitement to violence? Here, at least, Europe might swallow some pride and learn from America. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution enshrines the right to freedom of speech and of the press in American law. As interpreted by the Supreme Court for more than 50 years, the First Amendment deems that expressing hateful or inflammatory views is not enough to break the law. Instead, a speaker’s rights are protected unless his words were deliberately intended towards “inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and were also “likely to produce such action.”
Before anybody says that the pro-Hamas protestors are a different case, we might recall that the U.S. law emerged from a 1969 case where the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader for spouting racist bile about black people and Jews at a rally full of armed Klansmen. Only if anti-Israeli protestors exceed that high bar for incitement to violent disorder should the law get involved.
So much for the principle. The practical reasons for not the banning anti-Israeli lobby seem equally pressing today. Let us allow these apologists for mass murder to expose themselves with their own words and actions. Let the antisemitic poison come to the surface rather than try to force it underground. Bring them out of their dark corners into the open where, as the old saying goes, sunlight can be the best disinfectant. They we will know where we all stand.
One side-effect of the despicable reaction to the Hamas massacres has been to make clear where the new divide is in our politics and culture. Drawing such clear lines in the battlefield is a precondition for winning the war.
The alternative, to try to suppress views we find repugnant, is no solution at all. Banning something is not the same thing as defeating it. The Islamists and their cheerleaders will still be there, beneath the surface, nursing a festering sense of martyrdom, waiting to strike again.
Does anybody seriously imagine that France has made the problem of Islamic extremism disappear by banning anti-Israel protests? The French state has spent decades trying to suppress the rising tide of Islamism, only for it to burst through the surface in the Charlie Hebdo massacre of 2015 and the other terrible atrocities that followed in Paris and elsewhere. (The murderers of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and journalists, incidentally, were not only the soldiers of an old eastern religion; some of us also saw them as the armed wing of a modern Western movement to cancel those whose views are branded offensive.)
Now is the time, not to demand that the state censor the peddlers of hate, but to take them on by speaking up loudly for the Israelis and for our Western civilisation. In some circumstances we might even take a lead from the video of (non-Jewish) New Yorkers who, seeing an anti-Israeli activist tearing down ‘Kidnapped’ posters featuring Israelis held hostage by Hamas, strongly advised him to desist. Judging by our experience in London, if instead they had called the police, the cops might even have helped him rip them down.
Don’t Ask the State to Ban Hate
Photo by Kena Betancur / AFP
The spectacle of angry Islamists and their useful idiots on the Islamo-Left spouting anti-Israeli, antisemitic and anti-Western hate on our streets has shocked many Europeans. There are loud demands for other governments to follow the lead of France, where the authorities banned pro-Palestinian protests after the Hamas massacres of Israeli civilians on October 7th.
Over here in London, the Metropolitan Police have come under fire for refusing to ban the big march demanding ‘Ceasefire Now’ (aka ‘Immediate Israeli Surrender’), planned for Armistice Day, Saturday November 11th. There is no doubt that the Met is a cowardly, institutionally-woke body, whose double standards mean it will arrest ‘gender-critical’ feminists for daring to suggest that a woman cannot have a penis, yet indulge Islamist hate-mongers because ‘jihad’ can supposedly have a peaceful meaning. On this occasion, however, it appears that, on balance, London police have made the right advance decision—albeit for all the wrong reasons.
It might be good to imagine that we could simply ask the authorities to wave a public order law or a policeman’s riot baton and make all the hatred and political poison go away. But in reality, there are both principled and practical reasons why we should not immediately turn to state censorship as a solution, even when faced with stomach-churning public celebrations of Jew-hatred.
In principle, we should defend the bedrock democratic liberty of freedom of speech. And in practice, we should allow the antisemitic Islamists and the West-hating Left to speak out and show their true colours, so that we can see and hear where everybody stands and where the battlelines are drawn.
In short, free speech is not our problem. Forcefully wielded, it remains our best weapon in the existential political war we are engaged in today.
To start with the principle. Alongside Israel’s life-and-death war in the Middle East, we in the West are waging a political and culture war against those who despise Western democracy so much that they will side with genocidal Islamists. Like the Israelis, this is a battle we cannot afford to lose.
If we are to stand up for our democratic civilisation, however, we need to defend its precious liberties. The most important of those is freedom of speech, the lifeblood on which democracy and all other liberties and depend. It is an indivisible freedom that we defend for all or for none at all.
Once you forget that principle and try to draw a new line limiting free speech, the question is always: who decides? Should we really entrust the knee-taking, rainbow-flag waving, woke-colonised Metropolitan Police or the European courts with even more power to control what we can legitimately say, see, or think? That is a dangerous ploy which, history suggests, is sure to backfire. The cancel culture warriors, who are temporarily posing as champions of free speech for anti-Israeli activists, would truly love nothing better than to see yet more restrictions on anything that can be deemed ‘hate speech.’
So, does defending free speech have to mean tolerating expressions of extremism and hatred? Contrary to today’s liberal-left orthodoxy, free speech must include the freedom to hate and the right to be offensive. Hatred, after all, is a human emotion we all feel one way or another; not sure about you, but I hate the genocidal death cult of Hamas. So long as we are dealing with thoughts and words, not violent deeds, the state has no more business telling us who we can or can’t hate than dictating who we should love.
As for policing ‘extremist’ speech, in the end we surely must accept that it is only those words and ideas deemed extreme or offensive that need defending from censorship. The mainstream and the mundane can look after themselves.
Whether we like it or not (and we won’t), that means allowing free speech even for our enemies, such as those who try to defend the pogrom in Israel as a Palestinian war of liberation. Of course, we have no interest in defending the right of malicious morons to spout antisemitic filth. But we do have an interest in upholding the other side of free speech—our right to hear them and judge for ourselves, without having our ears and eyes protectively covered by a nanny state.
Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation in Europe, so that it is a crime to belong to Hamas or actively solicit others to join or support it. UK home secretary Suella Braverman has now asked chief constables to widen the scope for police action against protestors on the grounds of harassment or incitement. She suggests that in current circumstances, chanting the genocide-implying slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ or even waving a Palestinian flag might be considered a ‘racially-aggravated public order offence.’
As Braverman says, “context is crucial” in matters of free speech. Screaming anti-Semitic abuse in a Jewish family’s face is not the same thing as chanting a slogan outside an Israeli or U.S. embassy. But we need to keep the definition of harassment or incitement as narrow as possible, and hold the line between words and deeds, between waving flags and physical violence, between offensive chants and criminal offences.
When should words be criminalised as incitement to violence? Here, at least, Europe might swallow some pride and learn from America. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution enshrines the right to freedom of speech and of the press in American law. As interpreted by the Supreme Court for more than 50 years, the First Amendment deems that expressing hateful or inflammatory views is not enough to break the law. Instead, a speaker’s rights are protected unless his words were deliberately intended towards “inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and were also “likely to produce such action.”
Before anybody says that the pro-Hamas protestors are a different case, we might recall that the U.S. law emerged from a 1969 case where the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader for spouting racist bile about black people and Jews at a rally full of armed Klansmen. Only if anti-Israeli protestors exceed that high bar for incitement to violent disorder should the law get involved.
So much for the principle. The practical reasons for not the banning anti-Israeli lobby seem equally pressing today. Let us allow these apologists for mass murder to expose themselves with their own words and actions. Let the antisemitic poison come to the surface rather than try to force it underground. Bring them out of their dark corners into the open where, as the old saying goes, sunlight can be the best disinfectant. They we will know where we all stand.
One side-effect of the despicable reaction to the Hamas massacres has been to make clear where the new divide is in our politics and culture. Drawing such clear lines in the battlefield is a precondition for winning the war.
The alternative, to try to suppress views we find repugnant, is no solution at all. Banning something is not the same thing as defeating it. The Islamists and their cheerleaders will still be there, beneath the surface, nursing a festering sense of martyrdom, waiting to strike again.
Does anybody seriously imagine that France has made the problem of Islamic extremism disappear by banning anti-Israel protests? The French state has spent decades trying to suppress the rising tide of Islamism, only for it to burst through the surface in the Charlie Hebdo massacre of 2015 and the other terrible atrocities that followed in Paris and elsewhere. (The murderers of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and journalists, incidentally, were not only the soldiers of an old eastern religion; some of us also saw them as the armed wing of a modern Western movement to cancel those whose views are branded offensive.)
Now is the time, not to demand that the state censor the peddlers of hate, but to take them on by speaking up loudly for the Israelis and for our Western civilisation. In some circumstances we might even take a lead from the video of (non-Jewish) New Yorkers who, seeing an anti-Israeli activist tearing down ‘Kidnapped’ posters featuring Israelis held hostage by Hamas, strongly advised him to desist. Judging by our experience in London, if instead they had called the police, the cops might even have helped him rip them down.
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