How Hate Speech Rules Backfired

on Canadian Jews:

Benjamin Netanyahu and Daniel Pipes cannot equally freely, or fearlessly, speak at any progressive, multicultural, Canadian campus. No pro-Zionist can. But just about every self-serving anti-Zionist demagogue and Israel-demonizing progressive ideologue can. Hate is whatever those with the power to disrupt, destroy, and silence, say it is. And so, only the Jewish voice is a campus security concern. Hate censorship has been hijacked. A shelter against illegitimate promotion of hate has been turned into a sword against legitimate exercise of Jewish voice.

How could it be otherwise? Censorship is force not talk. It is not about demonstration of right, but an exercise in might. Might is a double edged sword. In the end, the sharper edge, as is the nature of might, belongs to the more belligerent, or the more popular, not the more tolerant or the more civil. The popular have sympathy. The belligerent have force. The tolerant, and civil, have only words. By legitimating hate censorship, Jews have robbed themselves of rights to their own words and armed those of their intolerant adversaries.