Censorship is not the answer

Typical liberal thinking about censoring hate speech:

This focus on the Internet is significant. Just last week, the U. S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs released a report confirming that Internet Web sites remain the most important recruitment tool used by violent Islamist extremist groups to cultivate "the homegrown terrorist threat." While Section 13(1) is obviously incapable of ridding the Internet of such content, the Zundel case demonstrates that it can deal with the use of Canada as a base for such activities.

Except that Canada does not have a track record of going after Islamist speech. In fact, the free speech restrictions have hitherto been primarily used by the fellow travelers of the Islamists to shut down those who have the audacity to speak out against Islamism and the Muslim "moderates" who are often sympathetic to it on some level. It is much easier to go after a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier because they are fewer in number to begin with, and no self-proclaimed moderate in their right mind who has sympathies for their goals would admit as much. Hence, for it is easy to target Holocaust deniers with the Orwellian-named Human Rights Act because in general, to target them is to target an unsupported individual, whereas to target an Imam for preaching jihad is to target most of a congregation. We simply cannot have that because that would explode the myth that most Muslims are just as peace-loving by nature as the average religious person in Western society.

Freiman, the author of the linked article, does not seem to be a real student of history. The movements that unleashed actual genocide did not need mass media to gain the foundation that they used to rise up into politics. Rather, groups like the Nazis built their movements organically on the street. The only way to deal with that sort of hateful, totalitarian politics with censorship would be to create a truly repressive censorship regime which in all likelihood would only serve to provide an alluring mystique to its targets in the eyes of many.

Ironically, the Canadian Jewish Congress is a major supporter of laws whose primary effect has been to give their enemies a means to attack the Jews' natural allies on the conservative, Christian right. Then again, as history has shown, the relationship between Jews and state power has been akin to that between insects and bug zappers (ever drawn to it for protection, always hurt by it, never learning their lesson as a group).