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May 21, 2010
Censorship can backfire
Any party condemnations need to be speech friendly.
STEFAN BRAUN
A movement is gathering steam in Canada to pass all-party resolutions condemning Israel Apartheid Week on Canadian university campuses as illegitimate hate speech. The federal NDP and its provincial counterpart in Manitoba, recently nixed the move, but the Ontario legislature came onboard. So, what can possibly be wrong with legislatures condemning hate in a democracy? In Canada, plenty. The problem here is with the legal context. It raises the spectre of political “speech capture” and partisan official censorship. Worse, it risks a democratically deleterious, and self-defeating, future-silencing dynamic.
If this were the United States, where the Supreme Court has rejected hate censorship laws as violating First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, such resolutions would not be the problem they are. There, everyone is taught, your right to peaceably speak as you think and to think as you peaceably speak, on all the issues of the day, does not mean that what you say is right. No one is above criticism or condemnation. On the contrary, disagreeing, even denouncing, is the very essence – a civic duty – of the right to freely speak.
In Canada, however, our highest court has declared hate-speech law, civil and criminal, valid. We are taught that to censor, not answer hate, is our constitutional right and our civic duty. When our governments condemn speech as illegitimate, a chilling spectre of legal censorship is sent shivering down the spine of the body politic. When they do so on behalf of one group against another, on such politically charged topics as the Middle East conflict, the spectre of partisan “speech capture” unavoidably follows. Is the state sending a green light to university administrators or law enforcement to watch, muzzle or charge disfavored speakers?
Putting the power of the state behind such resolutions is short-sighted. It risks long-term Jewish interests for short-term gain, which can come back to haunt the community. For one, lending credence to conspiracy theories that Western governments are in the silencing pockets of “the powerful [Jewish] lobby” is hardly the best way to assert historical truths and win over skeptics to the cause against hate. Bald extremism, most Canadians can readily recognize and renounce. Insidious innuendo, they may not. Why turn an advantage into a liability with suggestions of censorship?
Such resolutions risk turning future legislatures into partisan speech-chilling political tools with which rival groups can more effectively club their deep-seated disagreements, and each other, into submission. If the Jews can do it, why can’t their opponents? The prospect that some time in the future an enlightened “progressive” legislature of a multicultural society, like Canada, may pass an all-party resolution condemning public expressions of Zionism as hateful racism, may seem far-fetched to some today. But, then, the idea of Israel Apartheid Week at our multicultural progressive institutions of higher learning, would, not that long ago, have been far-fetched, too.
The Middle East conflict is not Ernst Zundel. Victims and victimizers today are more publicly ambiguous. The golden age of unchallenged Jewish muting of antisemitism is ending – replaced by a multicultural age of minority intolerance. Future legislatures, making only Jewish-friendly all-party condemnatory choices, cannot be counted on. A chilling precedent risks being set.
If these resolutions are not to boomerang back to haunt future Jewish freedom to freely, fully and fearlessly speak truth to power, changes need to be made. At the very least, such resolutions must make perfectly clear that the purpose of condemnation is neither to question the right of anti-Zionists to peaceably make their case, nor to bestow on campus or other authorities a green light to harass or prosecute them for making it, but rather to renounce the vile and vilifying content of their message. A further explicit statement, condemning any and all campus failures to accord the same mutual respect and freedom from intimidation to the free, full and fearless exercise of the Jewish voice on campus, should also be added. Condemnatory all-party resolutions need be expressly speech friendly. Countering intimidation on Canadian campuses effectively is, singularly, a Jewish free-speech issue. Why serve the cause of the intimidators by turning it into a Zionist censorship one?
Dispelling public perceptions of official Jewish hijacking of public discourse is a precondition to credible and fearless future exercise of the Jewish voice to answer hate. Unqualified resolutions, suggestive in any way of a wink-and-a-nod to law enforcement or campus authorities to mute the “politically disfavored” voice, serve neither the Jewish cause against hate, nor Canadian democracy, well. Ironically, progressive campus authorities have never needed much nudging to defend favored “progressive” voices of vilification as freedom of speech. Nor to compromise, or even hush, disfavored Jewish voices defending against them, as divisive. A chilling air of “lose-lose” wafts strong through the nostrils of Jewish campus human rights. But, then, such are the hidden dilemmas, and political ironies, of bold exercise of Jewish freedom of speech to answer vilification in a political culture of even bolder legal censorship of hate.
Dr. Stefan Braun is the author, among other works, of Second Class Citizens: Jews, Freedom of Speech and Intolerance on Canadian University Campuses and Democracy Off Balance: Freedom of Expression and Hate Propaganda Law in Canada.
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