Marine Le Pen of France’s extreme right National Front proposes to ban all religious symbols from the public sphere. She says this will help combat Islamic terrorism.
Collateral damage is the religious symbols of non-extremist Muslims, Jews, Christians. So no more kippot — although according to recent reports out of France, many Jews there avoid wearing a kippah out of fear for their safety.
Indeed, France is in trouble.
Ironically, Le Pen’s approach mirrors that of Europe’s left in combatting the extreme right: outright bans. In most Western European countries, Nazi-related symbols, speech and organization are illegal.
The European approach, one could surmise, is to ban what society deems unacceptable.
The American approach is different. Hate speech laws are tied to behavior influenced by such speech. This more nuanced approach is more difficult to manage, especially in the age of social media. An ADL task force reported a spike in harassment of Jewish journalists, typically delivered via Twitter (IJN, Oct. 21). This harassment is taking the form of classical anti-Semitism, using Nazi symbols and history, such as gas chambers, to threaten these Jewish journalists (story, page 8).
For those who might argue that this is one of the distasteful consequences of free speech and must be accepted, we would respond: These tweets include actual threats, as unlikely as they are to be acted upon. As such, they move from mere speech to incitement.
Fierce protectors of the Bill of Rights might argue that banning such speech from social media is akin to the European limits on free speech. We would remind them: the First Amendment’s protection of speech limits the government’s powers. It does not limit private companies.
Twitter has responded by deactivating a significant percentage of these accounts, which is good. It must, however, be careful not to start deleting any and all accounts of people tweeting unpopular opinions, even ones that contain hateful words.
Each deletion must be assessed individually as to whether the account holder’s tweets veer into incitement or outright physical threats. Otherwise — despite Twitter being within its rights to delete accounts at will — we do endanger freedom of speech.
Copyright © 2016 by the Intermountain Jewish News
