In
Europe, Hate Speech Laws are Often Used
to Suppress and Punish Left-Wing
Viewpoints
By
Glenn Greenwald
August 31, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Terrorist attacks, and the emotions
they spawn, almost always prompt calls
for fundamental legal rights to be
curtailed in the name of preventing
future attacks. The formula by now is
routine: The victims of the horrific
violence are held up as proof that there
must be restrictions on advocating
whatever ideology motivated the killer
to act.
In 2006,
after a series of attacks carried out by
Muslims, Republican Newt Gingrich
called for
“a serious debate about the First
Amendment” so that “those who would
fight outside the rules of law, those
who would use weapons of mass
destruction, and those who would target
civilians are, in fact, subject to a
totally different set of rules.”
Of Islamic
radicals, the former U.S. speaker of the
House argued that they do not believe in
the Constitution or free speech, and the
U.S. should thus “use every technology
we can find to break up their capacity
to use the Internet, to break up their
capacity to use free speech, and to go
after people who want to kill us to stop
them from recruiting people.” In
an essay
defending his remarks, Gingrich argued
that “free speech should not be an
acceptable cover for people who are
planning to kill other people who have
inalienable rights of their own,” adding
that “the fact is not all speech is
permitted under the Constitution.”
The white
nationalist violence at Charlottesville
has led to similar arguments. While
polling data
and
anecdotal evidence
have long shown an erosion in the belief
in free speech among younger Americans,
including those who identify as liberals
or leftists, Charlottesville has
prompted a full-scale debate about the
merits of preserving the right to
express “hate speech,” however that
might be defined.
An
excellent Guardian article on
Monday by Julia Carrie Wong examines the
implications of the growing
liberal/left desire for “hate speech” to
be restricted — either by the
state wielding the power of “hate
speech” laws or by private tech
executives prohibiting the use of their
platforms to disseminate what they
regard as “hateful ideas.” As Wong
correctly notes, “Many Americans increasingly
favor European-style
limitations on hate speech.” Numerous
op-eds
and
blogposts
have been published recently explicitly
calling for such restrictions. As a
result, it is well worth examining how
those “European-style limitations”
operate in practice, and against whom
they are applied.
Many Americans who long
for Europe’s hate speech restrictions
assume that those laws are used to
outlaw and punish expression of the
bigoted ideas they most hate: racism,
homophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny.
Often, such laws are used that way.
There are numerous cases in western
Europe and Canada of far-right
extremists being arrested, fined, or
even jailed for publicly spouting that
type of overt bigotry.
But hate speech restrictions are used in
those countries to suppress, outlaw, and
punish more than far-right bigotry.
Those laws have frequently been used to
constrain and sanction a wide range of
political views that many
left-wing censorship advocates would
never dream could be deemed “hateful,”
and even against opinions which many of
them likely share.
France is
probably the most extreme case of hate
speech laws being abused in this manner.
In 2015, France’s highest court
upheld the criminal conviction
of 12 pro-Palestinian activists for
violating restrictions against hate
speech. Their crime? Wearing T-shirts
that advocated a boycott of Israel —
“Long live Palestine, boycott Israel,”
the shirts read — which, the
court ruled, violated French law that
“prescribes imprisonment or a fine of up
to $50,000 for parties that ‘provoke
discrimination, hatred or violence
toward a person or group of people on
grounds of their origin, their belonging
or their not belonging to an ethnic
group, a nation, a race or a certain
religion.'”
As we
reported at the time, France’s
use of hate speech laws to outlaw
activism against Israeli policy — on the
grounds that it constitutes
“anti-Semitism” and hatred against
people for their national origin — is
part of a worldwide trend. In May of
last year, Canada’s then-conservative
government
threatened to use the
nation’s rigorous hate speech laws to
prosecute Israel boycott advocates on
the ground
that such activism is “the new face of
anti-Semitism.” As Haaretz
reported
about the French prosecutions:
“Pro-Israel activists in neighboring
Belgium are pushing for a similar law to
Lellouche, hoping it might also put a
dent in BDS activities in that country.”
Other French activists have been
convicted of “inciting racial hatred”
for applying boycott stickers to
vegetables imported from Israel.
There can
be little question that if the power to
ban “hate speech” were vested in the
hands of U.S. officials or courts, the
same thing would happen. It is a
virtually unquestioned bipartisan
consensus that advocating a boycott of
Israel constitutes hatred and
anti-Semitism. In her 2016 AIPAC speech,
Hillary Clinton
cited the boycott movement
as evidence that “anti-Semitism is on
the rise across the world.” A group of
bipartisan U.S. legislators are
currently sponsoring legislation to make
it illegal for businesses to participate
in any international boycott of Israel,
a bill that
the American Civil Liberties Union says
can be used to criminalize advocacy of
boycotts.
Pro-Israel
students often
claim
that advocating a boycott of Israel is
tantamount to campus “bullying” and
anti-Semitism. Campus censorship
principles in the U.S.
are most often applied
against
pro-Palestinian groups.
Does anyone
doubt that high on the list of “hate
speech” for many U.S. officials, judges,
and functionaries would be groups, such
as Black Lives Matter and antifa,
far-left groups that fight against white
supremacists? Some GOP-controlled state
legislatures
are already arguing
that BLM should be officially classified
as a “hate group.” Beyond what many
officials say is the group’s hatred for
police officers, they also “point to its
platform that accuses Israel of carrying
out genocide against the Palestinians.”
In the UK,
“hate speech” has come to include anyone
expressing virulent criticism of UK
soldiers fighting in war. In 2012, a
British Muslim teenager, Azhar Ahmed,
was arrested for committing
a “racially aggravated public order
offence.” His crime? After British
soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, he
cited on his Facebook page the countless
innocent Afghans killed by British
soldiers and wrote: “All soldiers should
DIE & go to HELL! THE LOWLIFE F*****N
SCUM! gotta problem go cry at your
soldiers grave & wish him hell because
that where he is going.”
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The police
spokesperson justifying the
teenager’s arrest said: “He didn’t make
his point very well, and that is why he
has landed himself in bother.” So those
of you craving European-style hate
speech laws want to empower the
police — and then judges — to
decide when a point is sufficiently
ill-made and offensive to justify
arrest. Ahmed escaped a jail term, and
was ultimately given “merely” a fine and
community service,
but only
“because he quickly took down his
unpleasant posting and tried to
apologise to those he offended.”
Writing
about the Ahmed case in The Independent,
journalist Jerome Taylor
documented how
“hate speech” laws in the UK
have rapidly expanded to include any
opinions deemed upsetting: “In recent
years we have increasingly begun to
criminalise the offensive, a precedent
that should be deeply worrying for
anyone who cares about the importance of
free speech.” In The Guardian, Richard
Seymour
went further
and said that “Ahmed is the latest
victim of a concerted effort to redefine
racism as ‘anything that could
conceivably offend white people.'”
This is how hate speech laws are used in
virtually every country in which they
exist: not only to punish the types of
right-wing bigotry that many advocates
believe will be suppressed, but also a
wide range of views that many on the
left believe should be permissible,
if not outright accepted. Of course
that’s true: Ultimately, what
constitutes “hate speech” will be
decided by majorities, which means that
it is minority views that are vulnerable
to suppression.
In 2010,
a militant atheist was given a six-month
suspended sentence for leaving
anti-Christian and anti-Islam fliers in
a religious room of the Liverpool
airport;
according to the BBC,
“jurors found him guilty of causing
religiously aggravated intentional
harassment.” In Singapore, “hate speech”
laws are
routinely used
to punish human rights activists who
criticize Christianity, or Muslims who
have defended or promoted sermons from
imams deemed too critical of other
religions. Cases in Turkey
are common
where citizens have been prosecuted
under hate speech laws for criticizing
government officials or the military.
Radical imams
are prosecuted
in Europe if they are too strident in
their support for sharia law or their
defense of violence against western
aggression.
A leftist
activist in France was
convicted and fined
for insulting former French President
Nicolas Sarkozy by holding a sign that
said “get lost, jerk”; ironically, those
were the exact words Sarkozy himself
uttered when a citizen refused to shake
his hand at a public fair (the European
Court of Human Rights ultimately
overturned the Frenchman’s conviction).
In 2013, as Salon’s Nico Lang
reported,
“judges fined Laure Pora, the former
head of the Paris chapter of ACT UP,
2,300 euros for using the term
[“homophobe”] during a 2013
demonstration against the pro-life group
Lejeune Foundation and La Manif Pour
Tous.”
A 2015
report from Freedom House
documented
that “internet freedom around the world
has declined for the fifth consecutive
year, with more governments censoring
information of public interest.”
Specifically, “state authorities have
also jailed more users for their online
writings.” The report documented that
free speech protections are declining in
roughly half the countries they
surveyed. “The most significant declines
occurred in Libya, Ukraine, and France,”
where “standing declined primarily due
to problematic policies adopted in the
aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist
attack, such as restrictions on content
that could be seen as ‘apology for
terrorism,’ prosecutions of users, and
significantly increased surveillance.”
Earlier
this week, the German government
ordered an influential left-wing website
shut down
on the ground that it “stirred up”
unrest at the G-20 summit in Hamburg and
was used to incite violence. Calling the
site the “most influential online
platform for vicious left-wing
extremists in Germany,” officials said
“the website had referred to police
officers as ‘pigs’ and ‘murderers,’ and
had featured instructions for creating
Molotov cocktails.” Though the site was
ordered to shut down under laws banning
illegal associations rather than “hate
speech” laws, the principle is the same,
part of a general German trend in which
“the authorities have taken action
against hate speech and incitements to
violence.”
The
shutting of this left-wing site is part
of a long tradition in Germany where any
ideas deemed threatening to the
prevailing order can be banned. In the
1950s, a European court
upheld the order
of the German government to dissolve and
bar the Communist Party, and to seize
all its assets, on the grounds that it
opposed the principles on which the
German government was based.
Even if
“hate speech” laws were magically
applied by authorities exactly as
advocates would wish — whereby only the
ideas one hates would be suppressed and
punished while the ideas one loves would
be allowed to flourish — there would
still be very good reasons to oppose
such laws. I wrote at length about those
reasons several years ago
at The Guardian
and
again last week,
and ACLU Legal Director David Cole wrote
this week
in the New York Review of Books about
why the ACLU defends all speech, even
the most hateful kind.
In
particular, the assumption that
censorship will weaken hateful groups
and make them go away is completely
backward. Nothing strengthens hate
groups more than censoring them, as it
turns them into free speech martyrs,
feeds their sense of grievance, and
forces them to seek out more destructive
means of activism.
When I represented the free speech
rights of such groups as a lawyer, they
loved nothing more than when
censorship attempts were directed at
them, because they knew that nothing
would more effectively strengthen their
cause. Conversely, as the aftermath of
Charlottesville has proved, nothing
exposes the evil of such groups, and
thus weakens them, like letting them
show their true nature.
Ironically, those advocating that
neo-Nazis and other hateful groups be
forcibly censored are doing more to
empower them than almost anything else
could. As Cole wrote: “When white
supremacists called a rally the
following week in Boston, they mustered
only a handful of supporters. They were
vastly outnumbered by tens of thousands
of counter-protesters who peacefully
marched through the streets to condemn
white supremacy, racism, and hate.
Boston proved yet again that the most
powerful response to speech that we hate
is not suppression but more speech.”
But the more important point is that the
ideal application of censorship
that advocates envision isn’t how such
laws are applied. And it never will be.
If you empower state authorities to
decide which ideas are permitted and
which are not — to assess which ideas
contain enough “hatred” to justify
banning — it is not likely but inevitable
that those laws will ultimately be used
to outlaw the ideas you like. As Cole
put it, “It is virtually impossible to
articulate a standard for suppression of
speech that would not afford government
officials dangerously broad discretion
and invite discrimination against
particular viewpoints.”
As The
Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf
recently explained,
there is a grave irony at the heart of
these newfound liberal desires for “hate
speech” censorship laws: The people who
would implement and interpret them are
those in power, people like Donald
Trump, Jeff Sessions, GOP governors and
legislators, and their litany of
right-wing judges. It takes little
imagination to see how such laws would
be applied, and against whom. Indeed,
the U.S. history of allowing such
restrictions is that they have been used
against exactly the groups
that censorship advocates think they are
protecting. As Cole wrote:
Our history illustrates that unless
very narrowly constrained, the power
to restrict the advocacy of violence
is an invitation to punish political
dissent. A. Mitchell Palmer, J.
Edgar Hoover, and Joseph McCarthy
all used the advocacy of violence as
a justification to punish people who
associated with Communists,
socialists, or civil rights groups.
Indeed, the
ACLU was
borne out of an attempt
by former President Woodrow Wilson to
criminalize dissent from his policy of
involving the U.S. in World War I. It
then spent decades fighting censorship
efforts aimed at communists, socialists,
civil rights groups, and LGBT activists.
When you empower society to outlaw ideas
it hates most, that is who is
most vulnerable. Civil liberties
lawyers were successful in defending
those groups only by upholding the
principle that state censorship of
political viewpoints is always
impermissible.
But to see what the actual rather than
the hoped-for effects of hate speech
laws are, no speculation is necessary,
nor does one need to dig through U.S.
history in the 20th century. Just look
at how such laws in Europe are now being
applied, and against whom. Who could
possibly look at that and view it as
desirable?
This article was first published by
The Intercept
-
Top photo: As part of the national
week organized by the group “Just and
Sustainable Peace between Israelis and
Palestinians.” More than 150 people
gathered in Lyon, on the banks of Rhones,
to show their solidarity with the
Palestinian people, for the defense of
freedoms, the right to boycott Israeli
products, the end of the occupation, and
the requirement of sanctions, as long as
Israel is violating international law.
