Hateful Speech Must Also Remain Free -- Including That Of An Anti-Semitic, Holocaust-Denying French Asshole
As the coddled kittens on college campuses are demanding trigger warnings for "The Great Gatsby" and Greek poetry, and as they are trying to shut down any speech that does not align with their beliefs, speech around the world is getting less and less free.
As I've written before, nobody needs the First Amendment to say, "Have a nice day!" It's the amendment for assholes, and it's a very good and healthy thing we have it.
The ideas in speech that is banned do not go away; they just go underground.
This is why I, as a person who grew up Jewish and got kind of kicked around for it by rotten kids, am all for the free speech of an anti-Semitic French asshole comedian, and I think it's absolutely disgusting that he's been sentenced to jail in Belgium.
Brendan O'Neill, at Spiked, thinks as I do:
It's the 21st century and Europe is meant to be an open, enlightened continent, and yet a man has just been sentenced to jail -- actual jail -- for something that he said. Will there be uproar? It's unlikely. For the man is Dieudonné M'bala M'bala, the French comedian, and what he says -- that Jews are scoundrels and the Holocaust is a fiction -- is deeply unpleasant. Yet if we're serious about freedom of speech, if we are truly committed to ensuring everyone has the liberty to think and say whatever they please, then the jailing of Dieudonné should outrage us as much as the attempts to shut down Charlie Hebdo or the jailing of a Saudi blogger for ridiculing religious belief. We should be saying 'Je Suis Dieudonné'.Due to the regimen of hate-speech laws in 21st-century Europe -- which police and punish everything from Holocaust denial to Christian denunciations of homosexuality -- Dieudonné has been having run-ins with the law for years. In 2009, a French court fined him €10,000 for inviting a Holocaust denier on stage during a gig. In March this year, a French court gave him a two-month suspended prison sentence for saying he sympathised with the attack on Charlie Hebdo and with the anti-Semite who murdered Jews at a Parisian supermarket a few days later. Now, this week, a Belgian court has given him an actual prison sentence: a court in Liège found him guilty of incitement to hatred for making anti-Semitic comments during a recent show and condemned him to two months in jail.
In all these cases, Dieudonné has been punished simply for thinking and saying certain things. This is thought-policing. It's a PC, spat-and-polished version of the Inquisition, which was likewise in the business of raining punishment upon those who said things the authorities considered wicked. To fine or imprison people for expressing their beliefs is always a scandal, regardless of whether we like or hate their beliefs. Dieudonné really believes the Holocaust is a myth, as much as a Christian fundamentalist believes that people who have gay sex will go to hell or American liberals believe Hillary Clinton will make a good president. He is wrong, massively, poisonously so; but then, so are those Christians about gays and those liberals about Hillary. If every person who says wrong, malicious or stupid things were carted off to jail, Europe's streets would be emptied overnight.
O'Neill's bottom line is exactly right:
All hate-speech laws should be scrapped. Dieudonné should be freed. And a continent whose governments argue against the imprisonment of bloggers in Saudi Arabia while jailing comedians at home needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror.
via @adamkissel
I agree with you. Because I believe in freedom of speech, and also because this is already causing backlash, with people blaming "the Jews" for his jailing and for these anti-speech laws.
Beth Cartwright at November 26, 2015 10:54 PM
Kudos, Beth. It's very easy to go the other way -- but very important not to.
Amy Alkon at November 26, 2015 11:19 PM
Eh, it's Belgium. I'm pretty sure they don't have a First Amendment. I find it hard to get worked up over this.
Reminds me of a joke. An American tourist is getting busted in Mexico, and demands his rights be read to him. Oh, senor, we know of your Miranda. But in this country, Miranda wears a funny hat and dances on tables.
I R A Darth Aggie at November 27, 2015 8:23 AM
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