No one can deny that freedom of speech is one of the most basic rights in democracies both in the United States and abroad. Unlimited freedom of speech however, is an unrealistic expectation for many reasons. The most pressing one being a violent reaction to hate speech. We must be able to seek a balance between freedom of expression and censorship of religious and racial hatred. Hate speech is a type of speech that incites other people to hate a certain group in society defined by common characteristics usually either race, gender, religion.
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It usually also incites to commit violence and discrimination based on hatred. This is the type of speech that I think has the most basis for restriction because of it’s tendency to incite violence because of its outrageous and usually untrue claims about a group of people as a whole. By allowing unlimited free speech we run the risk of creating harm for individuals as was the case in the Keane piece we read for today. Keane details an event in 2006 where a Danish newspaper published blatantly offensive cartoons depicting the muslim prophet Muhammed with a bomb shown as a turban.
A year later a far leaning liberal party in Denmark ran on the platform of another cartoon of Muhammed on the body of a dog with the slogan “Freedom of Speech is Danish, censorship is not. ” The cartoon was not necessary other than to incite some sort of emotional reaction that could very well lead to a violent retaliation which it did in 2008. An attack on the Danish embassy in Pakistan was strongly associated with the cartoon crises. The attack killed six people. The party platform’s cartoon narrowly escaped Denmark’s laws on restricting free speech.
Denmark’s “racism clause protects persons, or groups of persons, against defamation, whereas the blasphemy clause protects those religious sensibilities of believers that are connected to dogmas or rituals deemed central to their religion, but not religious sensibilities in general. ” I would argue that although this cartoon did not insult any specific dogmas or rituals of muslims, it should have been prevented because of the inevitability in which it would lead to violence which outweighed the necessity of that cartoon to a campaign.
Among the effects of hate speech is the encouragement of racist and sexist beliefs that can grow to become acceptable thoughts and beliefs in certain communities. It is impractical to assume that just because a belief is blatantly wrong and hate mongering as its only intention that certain groups of society will not take these claims seriously. The President of Iran himself in 2005 denied the entire event and death of 6 million Jews during the holocaust. As a citizen of Iran you would be prone to listen to your president and accept his assertions as facts if it was not illegal to promote these lines of thinking.
This reasoning was the justification for 13 countries in Europe, including France, to ban the denial of the Holocaust. No amount of social awareness education could completely eradicate this line of thinking from existence without legal boundaries as well. That all being said, any limit on the freedom of speech should be very specific and narrow. It should be carefully designed to promote equality and protect against discrimination. Whomever proposes the limit should prove that no other measures short of limiting rights can provide the same result, as was the case for holocaust denial.
It is inaccurate to assume that people, when given full access to freedom of speech, will police themselves and will always be cautious and considerate to other groups of people. This has never been the case throughout history. Freedom of speech should not be absolute and can be limited when it endangers other human rights (like the right to life). It’s a thin line between hateful words and hateful actions. Impressionable and often uneducated people can be led to violent crimes by hate speech.
The example of the protests against the Muhammed cartoons in Denmark is telling of this fact. Many protesters were encouraged by some Muslim leaders to commit acts of violence. It is senseless death over hateful words that can easily be avoided and a good way to do that is through legislation. When there is no real value or truth in stereotyped depictions of a group of people, it is justified for a government to step in and create consequences for hate speech which can lead to real life crimes of violence.
