Two terrorists who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group gunned down 16 Australian Jews on Sunday. They and 40 others who were wounded were targeted as they memorialized the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah at Sydney’s Bondi Beach.
The correct responses to this attack should be clear. We should emphasize the historic, sadly enduring immorality and absurdity of antisemitism. We should bolster security for Jewish places of worship, education, and events. We should ensure that counterterrorism operations are resourced robustly. A crackdown on free speech is, however, ill-judged.
Both Australia and the United Kingdom are doing just that. Australia will introduce new laws to ban speech, including “serious vilification” of racial or religious groups. U.K. police forces are also now making arrests for those who shout “globalize the intifada” at protests.
We should be grateful that neither of these actions would be constitutional in the United States. First Amendment protections mean that shouting “globalize the intifada” would only be illegal were the speaker proven to have intended to provoke imminent unlawful action. As in the Supreme Court case of National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, which upheld the right of Nazis to march through a Jewish majority neighborhood, vilification of races is similarly protected speech in the U.S. There are no hate speech exceptions to the First Amendment.
Most Americans rightly despise antisemitism and racism. Still, the First Amendment ensures we retain robust rights of individual free speech and public debate, even where said speech is deeply offensive to many. This is a sacrosanct principle of the American experiment, and it sets us apart from much of the world, including Europe. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts explained why this matters in the case of Snyder v Phelps. He noted that “Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and … inflict great pain. … We cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a nation we have chosen a different course — to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”
This places America in the starkest contrast with the Salafi jihadist ideology to which the Islamic State group is beholden. Salafist jihadists believe that only pure words, thoughts, and deeds, as defined by select preachers and select interpretations of the Koran, deserve protection of law. They believe that impure words, thoughts, and deeds require coercive restraint to protect God’s will on Earth. They then use their supreme sense of moral virtue to excuse foul atrocities such as the attack last weekend and the countless other atrocities the Islamic State group has committed over the past 10 years.
America’s unparalleled freedom thus provides the Islamic State group with a cause for defining hatred.
Consider one of the group’s ideological forefathers, Sayyid Qutb, who traveled across America between 1948 and 1950 and didn’t exactly like the U.S. Indeed, he wrote an inadvertently hilarious screed on everything he hated about America. Which is to say, just about everything, even jazz. Qutb lamented that “the American’s enjoyment of jazz does not fully begin until he couples it with singing like crude screaming. And the louder the noise of the voices and instruments, until it rings in the ears to an unbearable degree, the greater the appreciation of the listeners.”
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Jazz is to be adored, of course, and antisemitism is to be abhorred. But you do not build a healthy society by making broadly subjective, increasing restrictions on what can be said. The attempt to do so by Australia and many European countries has only worsened the social divisions in those countries while doing little to protect those at risk from terrorism. Ultimately, that’s because banning speakers from saying terrible things does not stop them from thinking or acting on those beliefs. Venting in public is preferable to the martyr complex and descent into deeper extremism that comes with the inability to vent in public.
And more than that, denying the individual the freedom to speak their mind is just morally wrong.