We don’t remember the near-misses. Everyone can tell you where they were when they heard that the Twin Towers had been attacked in 2001. Britons can also recall the 2005 London Tube attacks, in which 57 people died. But almost no one remembers Sept. 15, 2017 when, through the merest chance, another bomb attack on the London Underground resulted in only minor injuries.
Time divides into branches, and we, inhabiting the branch where the bomb did not tear devastatingly through a rush-hour Tube compartment, quickly move on to other things. But it is worth pondering for a moment the other version. The bomber, Ahmed Hassan, had packed five pounds of shrapnel – knives, screwdrivers, bolts – around his explosives in a bucket. The train was heaving with people. We could easily have seen a worse massacre than in 2005, perhaps surpassing even the 67 Brits who died on 9/11 – still the single worst loss of life suffered by British nationals in any terrorist attack.
In that parallel universe, last week’s trial of Hassan would have been an altogether bigger deal. There would have been a traumatic, but ultimately cathartic, national debate about how he had been allowed into the country in the first place. Hassan entered the United Kingdom illegally via Calais, France, then applied for asylum. He admitted to having been trained by the Islamic State, though he claimed it had been against his will. After being settled with a foster family (he told immigration officials he was 16, and thus underage) he continued to display an unhealthy interest in jihadi music and videos. Sure, no one foresaw that he’d attempt mass murder. No one ever does in these cases. That’s precisely why we need to look more closely at people seeking to remain in a country they entered illicitly.
Britain’s Home Office can deny entry to anyone deemed deleterious to the public weal. It occasionally exercises this power. A couple of weeks ago, for example, it barred an anti-Muslim Canadian blogger named Lauren Southern. At around the same time, it also excluded a fringe nationalist from Austria called Martin Sellner.
Southern and Sellner have opinions that place them outside the mainstream. I doubt I’d enjoy their company much. But their opinions are just that: opinions. There is no suggestion that either of them would fill a bucket with explosives and sharp objects and set it off on the underground. How have we reached the point where people can be denied entry into a liberal democracy because their views are objectionable, but where illegal immigrants displaying symptoms of radicalization are allowed to remain?
The law used to be clear. You had free speech up to, but not beyond, the point of incitement. The difference was well understood. “There are too many Archenlanders in Narnia” is an opinion. “Let’s throw these Archies into Winding Arrow River” is incitement.
Now, in almost every Western country, that distinction has broken down. Last week, to pluck an almost random example, a Scotsman named Mark Meechan was found guilty of hate crime after teaching his girlfriend’s pug to raise its paw in a Hitler salute whenever he said “Sieg Heil” or “Gas the Jews” and posting the footage on YouTube. As jokes go, this one was spectacularly unfunny, tasteless, and obnoxious. Almost anyone watching the clip will have thought worse of its author. But will they be likelier to bomb a synagogue for having seen it? Hardly.
Continental Europe has always had laws restricting free speech. But the English-speaking democracies liked to tell themselves that they were free countries – something that made them better than the totalitarian regimes that challenged them down the decades. One of the things that made our system better than our rivals’, or so we thought, was that we couldn’t be arrested for saying the wrong thing.
Not anymore. In Australia and Canada, as in Britain, people are now prosecuted for, in effect, expressing hurtful opinions. Only the U.S., secure behind the First Amendment, remains an open society – for now.
It used to be argued that immigration would erode free speech in the West, because newcomers would vote for blasphemy laws and the like. That hasn’t happened. Instead, the restrictions on free speech have come overwhelmingly from white liberals, using the settlers’ imagined hurt feelings as an excuse.
The next Ahmed Hassan might get lucky. There might then be a crackdown on the security of our borders. We might even get serious about deporting undesirables. But I’m afraid the damage to free expression will already have been done.
