Home » Despite BDS, hate speech laws have no place in a free society

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Despite BDS, hate speech laws have no place in a free society — 5 Comments

  1. Following your link neo, as to the evolution of that doctrine led me to this:

    “The paraphrasing [“Shouting fire in a crowded theater”] does not generally include the word “falsely”, i.e., “falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater”, which was the original wording used in Holmes’s opinion and highlights that speech which is dangerous and false is not protected, as opposed to speech which is truthful but also dangerous.”

    This distinction applies to ‘hate speech’ laws such as Canada’s. If telling the truth as to a mortal societal threat is hate speech because regardless of its truthfulness, it incites hate toward a group, then truth is made silent and that can and sooner or later will be fatally suicidal, as Europe is in the process of demonstrating.

    The standard of “Shouting fire in a crowded theater” was later superseded by the current standard of “Imminent lawless action”:

    “Imminent lawless action” is a standard currently used that was established by the United States Supreme Court in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), for defining the limits of freedom of speech.

    Brandenburg clarified what constituted a “clear and present danger”, the standard established by Schenck v. United States (1919), and overruled Whitney v. California (1927), which had held that speech that merely advocated violence could be made illegal.

    Under the imminent lawless action test, speech is not protected by the First Amendment if the speaker intends to incite a violation of the law that is both imminent and likely.

    While the precise meaning of “imminent” may be ambiguous in some cases, the court provided later clarification in Hess v. Indiana (1973).

    In this case, the court found that Hess’s words did not fall outside the limits of protected speech, in part, because his speech “amounted to nothing more than advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future time,”[1] and therefore did not meet the imminence requirement.”

    To my knowledge only the Left is pushing in America for ‘hate speech’ laws. Their purpose is coercion and censorship. And that makes them Americans-in-name-only.

    [all emphasis mine]

  2. Geoffrey Britain:

    Agree that the standard does not apply to the BDS movement that seeks to boycott Israeli products. And agreed that it is the left pushing hate-speech laws. In the case of the BDS movement, if Canada applied it to them, they would be hoist by their own petard. But as I explained, I still would not support such laws.

  3. Years ago, Jared Taylor wrote a book called, iirc, “Paved with Good Intentions”. He’s been called a racist, possibly with real cause, possibly because he spoke the truth, which is more likely.
    One of his points is that, to the extent society tries to put a lid on the knowledge of what is happening, the problem gets worse. You cannot, for example, keep people from knowing about the knockout game no matter what you do.
    But when society, and, worse, the government is seen as colluding in efforts to keep you ignorant and punishing you when they find you’re not, the social pressure builds and builds and builds and then we have a real problem.
    If the feds are trying to keep you from knowing something it must be really, really bad. And if the issue of hate speech becomes legitimate, or just a bit more legitimate, it will be the feds, as in Canada.

  4. “More and more and more as time goes on, I think that a large part of American exceptionalism is its attitude towards free speech and therefore its commitment to liberty, which is beginning to seem unique in all the world but is increasingly threatened.”

    I agree. Most Americans would hardly believe what is going on in much of Europe.

    In France there are two particularly tricky categories of non-protected speech: one goes under a very broad label of “apology of crimes” and the other one is speech that is “racist”. Recently there was a much publicized case of a young woman previously associated with Front National, Anne-Sophie Leclé¨re, who shared an offensive comparison on Facebook (an image where there was an ape next to a photo of a black justice minister). She shared already existing material, wrote something akin to “ain’t it funny how similar they are?”, and ultimately ended up sentenced at 9 months of prison ferme and a ridiculously highly amend… after having been sued NOT by the minister herself, but by an anti-racist group from French Guiana.

    France is a European country that has been historically the closest to the American sensibilities in matters of anti-censhorship tradition, protection of the dissenting intellectuals, church/state separation, anti-royalty sentiments etc. If the freedom of expression is undergoing radical abridgements in France, it is quite indicative of what is probably going on in the rest of Europe. But, the most interesting aspect of this is that many of these abridgments are not “new” as a legal basis enabling censorhip has been solidifying over the last century and half.

    In Italy lately there has been much agitation over the proposal of law called “legge Scalfarotto” aimed to combat homophobia and discrimination based on sexual orientation, but includes such dubious phrasing as “promoting the ideas of superiority” which, according to some interpretations, would essentially amount to criminalizing SAYING, for example, that the traditional marriage is “better” (whether on moral, religious, anthropological grounds) than the homosexual “marriage”, or SAYING that it is “better” to reconcile with the reality of the biological sex you were born into than seek a “reassignement” surgery and similar.

    To my knowledge, BSD initiatives have not been specifically attacked so far (holocaust revisioniosts have been though), but in much of Europe there seems to exist already a legal ground to penalize whatever is the current form of socially unwelcome speech without it appearing a “new” thing.

    The US interpretation of free speech, as threatened as it is, remains the widest and the freest one around.

  5. The real hate speech is speech that seeks to elevate islam and other totalitarian ideologies above the grandeur of Western Civilization. Yet, I fully support their right to speak their vile ideas.

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