Free speech is our greatest weapon towards Jew hatred

After years of preventing numerous phantom types of racism, typically so exhausting to discern you’d want a six-week microaggression course to clock them, the West is as soon as once more confronted with the true deal. Since Hamas launched its pogrom in Israel on 7 October, butchering 1,400 harmless civilians, Jew hatred has poured out on to the streets of Western cities – day after day, night time after night time, weekend after weekend. Synagogues have been attacked. Jewish colleges have been vandalised. Jews have been assaulted. Younger, well-dressed Brits have lately been filmed ripping down posters of the kids kidnapped by Hamas, so affronted are they by the very existence of Jewish victims. Not since Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts has anti-Semitism been such an unabashed presence on Britain’s streets.

I dare say we’re not prepared for this. All these range workshops have left our elites woefully unprepared to face this risk – not least as a result of Jew hatred has, if something, been fuelled by the woke politics of our age, because it despicably treats Jews as ‘privileged’, ‘hyper-white’ and thus incapable of experiencing racism. What’s extra, even those that are genuinely involved, and determined to do one thing to defend British Jews towards this menace, are gripped by a generally held however deeply misplaced notion. Particularly, that the best way to defeat racism is thru censorship. That we’re only a few banned protests away from banishing anti-Semitism to the margins as soon as once more. It is a profound ethical and strategic error, which we actually should not make.

With one other ‘pro-Palestine’ protest descending on London this weekend, positive to be one other potent mixture of Islamists, Hamas apologists and morally bereft left-wingers, there are requires a crackdown. Following the sickening scenes of Hizb ut-Tahrir supporters chanting for ‘jihad’ at a smaller rally in London final Saturday, the Metropolitan Police have been criticised for a supposedly tender contact. Suella Braverman pulled Met chief Mark Rowley in for certainly one of her performative dressing-downs. In flip, Rowley has known as for brand spanking new hate-crime legal guidelines to crack down on ‘hateful extremism’. In the meantime, with good motive, bizarre persons are questioning why the British constabulary will flip up at your door mob-handed for those who retweet a spicy meme, however are apparently unwilling to do something about recognized extremists calling for holy warfare. The double requirements are obscene – but extra proof that the speech codes of our identitarian age soften away when confronted with the world’s oldest hatred.

However we can’t enable freedom of speech to change into a casualty within the struggle towards anti-Semitism. We have already got a plethora of restrictions on speech and protest, on every thing from ‘hate speech’ to disruptive demonstrations to ‘grossly offensive’ messages. Misgendering somebody on social media. Protesting towards the monarchy. Telling a police officer she resembles your lesbian grandmother. Brits have been handcuffed for all of those supposed ‘crimes’ and extra lately. And the cops’ warped priorities solely underline why we can’t hand the authorities the ability to resolve what’s and isn’t permissible to say. They typically come to moderately eccentric conclusions. Past direct incitement to violence, thuggish protest or harassment – which aren’t speech crimes in any respect, however moderately crimes that contain speech – even essentially the most hateful and excessive speech should be permitted. If for no different motive than it safeguards our personal freedom. We defend free speech for all, or for none in any respect.

Now, that doesn’t imply we must always simply settle for the bigotry and extremism that has emerged in our midst. Removed from it. Freedom of speech is our greatest weapon to fight Islamism and Jew hatred. It means we all know who these persons are – and what they assume. Certainly, censorship can’t defeat hateful ideologies, it simply pushes them out of sight and out of earshot – into closed rooms, encrypted boards and coded statements. In flip, it deprives us of the chance to oppose and discredit these hate-mongers by means of our personal argument and motion, by means of phrases and counter-demos. Censorship additionally makes martyrs out of those scumbags. That is why successive UK governments have been warned off banning Hizb ut-Tahrir, due to considerations it could increase the group’s recruitment whereas pushing it underground. You possibly can arrest a person, however you can’t arrest an thought.

As we mourn essentially the most lethal anti-Semitic atrocity for the reason that Holocaust, I concern we’re about to repeat one other grave historic mistake. Perversely, the rise of the Nazis has been become a cautionary story in regards to the excesses of freedom of speech and the need of censorship. Not solely does this ignore the Nazis’ personal brutal suppression of speech, it additionally ignores the truth that Weimar Germany had what we’d now name hate-speech legal guidelines. As Greg Lukianoff, president of the Basis for Particular person Rights and Expression, explains, many main Nazis, together with Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher, have been thrown into jail for anti-Semitic speech. In flip, they used this to current themselves as silenced truth-tellers. Posters have been produced of Hitler with tape over his mouth. This notion that hate-speech legal guidelines would have stopped the Nazis, though hate-speech legal guidelines didn’t cease the Nazis, and arguably really helped the Nazis, has been dubbed the ‘Weimar Fallacy’ by authorized scholar Eric Heinze, such is its cussed persistence in our political discourse.

Right here’s the factor. If we’re critical about defeating Jew hatred, censoring Jew haters is the worst factor we may do. Doing so not solely corrodes free speech for all, creating extra legal guidelines and precedents that might in the future be wielded towards us, all whereas making heroes out of hate-mongers, it additionally relieves us of the duty of defeating this extremism ourselves. Although that is the one method it will probably actually be defeated. Slightly than name for extra clampdowns, we have to roll up our sleeves and present by means of our personal phrases and actions – in particular person, in print, on-line and on the streets – what solidarity actually seems like.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Comply with him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_