Ideas can't be banned

Editorial

Censorship, like so much in life, has unintended consequences. We witnessed such an occasion last week when the federal government withheld pro-Israel material from crossing the border into Canada.

Jewish organizations, including Canadian Jewish Congress, have been at the forefront over the years of trying to block anti-Semitic messages and messengers from entering this country. Inevitably, that sort of vigilance is likely to snap back in unintended ways. Most of the Jewish organizations that have lobbied for censorship are also great supporters of Israel. So it is ironic that they were bested (temporarily, at least) at their own game.

The material in question was a series of Zionist essays on their way from the United States to the University of Toronto, to be distributed at a conference of Ayn Rand fans. Apparently, the material was viewed as provocative by some federal bureaucrat.

The Canada Customs and Revenue Agency made a fairly quick decision, allowing the material through after about a day. (Bureaucrats apparently read faster than they used to. A documentary film about Little Sister's bookstore, reported earlier this year in the Bulletin, indicated it sometimes took customs investigators months or years to make a decision on whether some material was pornographic under Canadian regulations.)

But the tempest provided a couple of unintended lessons, as well, and should be welcomed for doing so.

Minority groups may believe that censorship can help protect them. This seems to be the case with Canadian Jewish agencies that protest material and speakers that propagate discrimination. But censorship is not a tame animal and if it protects minorities with one hand, it should hardly be surprising to find it slaps us down with the other.

More practically, though, technology makes the concept of preventing the free-flow of ideas laughable. One can imagine that, in the time it took bureaucrats to scour pro-Israel literature for potential hate messages, the same material was being e-mailed freely into this country, printed, photocopied and distributed to anyone with an interest in the subject.

The point is this: we can discuss, argue and lobby the government on the subject of hate literature and censorship. But technology has made the whole debate moot. Anyone can receive any published information they seek, almost instantaneously. The proper response to hate has never been to sweep it under the carpet, but rather to confront and refute it. Intellectually honest people always knew that ideas could not be banned. The advent of e-mail and the Internet makes that an irrefutable reality. We no longer have the power to ban bad ideas. We must be prepared to face them.

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