Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘hate crimes’

The police have arrested five suspects in conjunction with the firebombing at UTT that destroyed the elementary school’s library last month:

“Four males aged between 18 and 20 and one female in her 30s were all apprehended at 6:15 this morning,” Montreal police spokesman Ian Lafrenière said Friday.

[ . . . ]

Lafreniere did not give the nationalities of those arrested, saying there was some information police did not want to reveal so as not to jeopardize the investigation into other possible suspects.

Or perhaps that they’re too politically-correct to provide that information. It’s sure to come out shortly, though – they can’t withhold the information forever.

This is truly sick and disgusting. Someone set fire to the library of U.T.T. St-Laurent, one of the major Jewish elementary schools here in Montreal and the feeder school of my (attached) high school. Not incidentally, it, along with my high school, was also the target of antisemitic vandalism last May. But the sheer hate required to set fire to a library of an elementary school is mind-boggling. Thank G-d there were no children there at the time, and nobody got hurt:

United Talmud Torah School in St. Laurent was the target of an anti-Semitic attack Monday morning as the building was set on fire.

No one was hurt in the blaze that occurred at about 2:30 a.m. The extent of the damage is not known at this time, but it seems to have been limited to the school’s library. The school is located on de l’Eglise St.

Investigators found letters at the scene that were described as anti-Jewish hate messages. They also found signs of accelerants indicating the fire was deliberately set.

I’m truly horrified. I remember we used to have practice drills in grade school and high school, both for standard fires and for “security incidents”. It seemed normal that we had closed-circuit cameras in high school… we saw them as a tool to apprehend students skipping class, not antisemites with agendas. We truly, naively believed that the stories they taught us in Jewish history classes about hatred against Jews were just that – chapters in history books. It never occurred to us that our school was anything but safe.

I feel bad for the students who will have to face the fact that someone set fire to their school. No elementary school child should have that illusion of safety shattered.

Update: RDI has more, including the reaction of Jean Charest:

“De tels gestes sont intolérables, écrit M. Charest, incendier une école est déjà un acte vil, mais quand cela est fait au nom du racime ou de l’intolérance, chaque Québécois doit se lever et le dénoncer afin que cela ne se reproduise plus.”

Strong words from the Premier’s office. But unfortunately, this kind of hate has already recurred far too many times. And I fear it won’t be the last.

This hits way too close to home.

A comment just below questioned my stance on freedom of speech. I started to reply to it, but realized this is a core issue on this blog and I should address my thoughts to all readers. Some of you will agree and some won’t, but for what it’s worth, here’s how I view this very complex and touchy issue.

Freedom of speech is a precious and inalienable right. David H is correct in saying: “Allowing one group of people to decide that the words of another group are so dangerous that they must be silenced is a dangerous precedent.” I have repeatedly stated that freedom of speech need apply to all, and not only to those we agree with. If I, for example, say that Kevin Spacey is a good actor, and an angry mob of people disagrees with me and decides to riot to prevent me from speaking those words, then they are denying my right to free speech.

But freedom of speech does not imply freedom from the consequences of that speech. And that is where laws about incitement of hatred come into play.

The angry mob that chose to silence the speech of Benjamin Netanyahu was denying the right to freedom of speech by deciding ahead of time that based on who Mr. Netanyahu is – namely, the right-wing, former Prime Minister of a country that they hate – he shouldn’t have the right to address a crowd. That was wrong for many obvious reasons. Having read the text of the speech that Netanyahu planned to give on September 9th of last year, it is clear that – though it contains a political opinion that is unpopular amongst the Left at Concordia, it is far removed from any sort of hate speech. If Netanyahu were to have been permitted to speak, however, and if he did in fact incite hatred, then he would have been subject to the consequences of this under the law, just like anyone else.

I think a great deal of misconception comes from the word “censorship”. The C-word is taken as a given evil, and people scurry away from it screaming. But, to quote the old cliché, freedom of speech doesn’t give you the right to yell “fire” in a crowded movie theatre. Not permitting the yelling of “fire” isn’t censorship; it’s protection of public safety. Similarly, it doesn’t give you the right to approach a contract killer and ask that he murder your wife. That may be speech, but it’s also contracting murder which is – rightly – extremely illegal.

So, of course it is obvious that there are limits to speech. Those are clear-cut cases, but what about cases that aren’t so clear-cut? For example, what about somebody publishing a website denying the Holocaust? This is where societies differ – in the U.S. it’s legal, in Canada it’s not. There are arguments on both sides of the issue here. Some would argue that denying this freedom is ultimately more dangerous, because if the situation were to be reversed and the tyranny became the majority, they could conceivably deny the freedom to you. The true test of freedom of speech, they would argue, is whether we can bear to watch a Ku Klux Klan march, or a neo-Nazi rally, without succumbing to our natural desire to shut these racist assholes up.

I think they make a good point. And that they’re wrong.

Freedoms are not absolute. They end at the point where they interfere with the rights of their fellow human beings. Incitement of hatred has real consequences for the groups against which it is directed. And a society must draw the line somewhere in order to function civilly.

Hate speech is not without cost or consequence. To assume that speech is always peaceful is like saying that contracting a killing is a peaceful, protected act. Certain groups have learned very quickly that if you repeat a lie often enough, people come to believe it as truth. And if you spew hate loudly enough and often enough, you recruit others to your cause, and ultimately create what Ursula Owen calls a “culture of hate“:

In the face of such enormities, the political correctness debate has rather muddied the waters, diluting the wider implications of what hate can produce. For the most dangerous threat behind hate speech is surely that it can go beyond its immediate targets and create a culture of hate, a culture which makes it acceptable, respectable even, to hate on a far wider scale. Such a culture of hate is not easy to define, and does not necessarily have one trajectory, but its evolution is evident in the circumstances surrounding some events in recent history.

[ . . . ]

Words can turn into bullets, hate speech can kill and maim, just as censorship can. So, as dedicated opponents of censorship and proponents of free speech, we are forced to ask: is there a moment where the quantitative consequences of hate speech change qualitatively the arguments about how we must deal with it. And is there no distinction to be made between the words of those whose hate speech is a matter of conviction, however ignorant, deluded or prejudiced, and hate speech as propaganda, the calculated and systematic use of lies to sow fear, hate and violence in a population at large?

Owen has been one of the world’s most staunch supporters of freedom of speech. But even she concedes that the area of hate speech is tricky, and that there are no clear-cut answers.

Speech is a weapon as well as a right. There ought to be a wide range of what is considered acceptable speech. We shouldn’t censor speech simply because we disagree with it or find it distasteful. But when it crosses the line into outright incitement of hatred, then it stops being a healthy part of society and becomes a cancer.

If the majority becomes the tyranny, then hate speech laws may be used against the good minority. But we must prevent the majority from becoming the tyranny in the first place, or else we’ll have a lot more to worry about than laws on freedom of speech. We’ll have lost our humanity.