France’s momentary appearance on the world stage as a champion of free expression, after the execution of the beloved Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, made for a break in her relentless culture of repression of free speech, which she shares with most of Europe. Aside from a handful of exceptions—Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammad cartoons now being the most famous—official France and its media have for years done all that they could to prevent journalists, essayists, and fiction writers from questioning Islam and immigration policy, or drawing attention to the rising antisemitism and anti-Christian feeling that had driven so many French voters into the arms of the once-out-of-bounds National Front. Just the month before, Eric Zemmour, France’s most popular political commentator, had been fired by his major TV outlet and threatened with prosecution for inciting hatred. Targets for persecution ranged from the notorious to the recherché: Renaud Camus, an aesthete devoted to art, literature, his sensational diary, 20 volumes of it so far, and his eccentric political party of one, le Parti de l’Innocence. When he threw the featherweight of his party’s support to the National Front’s Marine Le Pen in the 2012 presidential contest, his longtime publisher told Camus he would no longer publish his books.
The very issue Charlie Hebdo was preparing to print when it came under murderous assault on January 7 was to be an attack for his supposed Islamophobia on the current hate figure of the French left, the highbrow novelist Michel Houellebecq, whose new novel Submission was published on that dark day. Just days before, a journalist for France24, a government-owned TV channel, fretted about the novel, which describes a France of 2022 that elects a Muslim president: “The book’s publication could not come at a more sensitive time as France is currently undergoing a fierce debate on Islam and national identity.” A former friend, Sylvain Bourmeau, whose interview with Houellebecq in the Paris Review was widely published across Europe, announced to the readers of his blog that Submission “is dangerous: contributing like so many things, large and small, and always ugly, to make life in France a little more unpleasant for anyone with an Arab name or black skin.” (Critics, by the way, have noted that Submission is by no means dystopic, and that its imagined Islamic French state is presented as an attractive, humane place.) The Paris Review interview is a reeducation course for the novelist in racism, Islamophobia, and the correct way to view France. Bourmeau suggests to Houellebecq that perhaps it were best that his novel had never been written: “Have you asked yourself what the effect might be of a novel based on such a hypothesis? . . . You don’t think it will help reinforce the image of France . . . in which Islam hangs overhead like the sword of Damocles, like the most frightening thing of all?”
When something goes terribly wrong in France, its media elite tend to blame it on someone who has said the wrong thing. After an at-first-unknown shooter attacked a Jewish day school in Toulouse in 2012, killing three children and a teacher-parent, Bernard-Henri Lévy knew whom to blame: the extreme right, as if the killer would inevitably turn out to be a neo-Nazi, instead of the jihadist he in fact was:
A skinhead National Front member may not have killed the Jewish children, but for the glory of France you must hold your tongue.
Yet despite all this fond protectiveness toward Islam and energy spent muzzling and denouncing anyone who dissents, the jihadists were not impressed. In a fervent letter sent round the Internet the day after the Charlie Hebdo murders, a French left activist pleaded with his comrades around the world not to condemn Charlie Hebdo for Islamophobia—after all, they support Hamas! But the policy of denunciation and prosecution to silence critics of immigration has failed. France’s Muslims are unconvinced that the state is on their side. Dutifully, major imams condemned the attacks of January 7, but schoolteachers told of Muslim students refusing to respect a “minute of silence” for the Charlie Hebdo victims, giggling and saying “awful things.” Meanwhile the French working classes are alienated, their traditions of religion and the family sneered at, and their complaints about crime and the desecration of their churches ignored. Worst of all, focusing on hate speech has blown up in the face of France’s Jewish community, who see the state act on their behalf only to the extent of rounding up the usual suspect—anti-semitic comedian Dieudonné—but refusing to confront Muslim immigrant youth who express their antisemitism with fists, clubs, and guns.
The French establishment’s ultimate target is the National Front’s Marine Le Pen (of whom Robert Ménard said in an interview with the website Boulevard Voltaire that the French intellectual left would “rather die under [President François] Hollande than live under Le Pen”). If the best efforts of the establishment have failed to persuade the French to fear Le Pen as a racist, antisemite, and hate criminal, they will also fail to persuade them that they have nothing to fear from the immigrant population that the political class made their neighbors, without the courtesy of having consulted them. At the same time, France’s Muslim citizens seem unimpressed by the authorities’ diligent efforts to smother dissenting voices. The terrorists of January 7 lived among the 16 percent of French citizens who admire the Islamic State; and the Muslim population by and large, like our president, did not join the mammoth national march against terrorism last weekend, despite the French government’s calculated decision to make the event Marine Le Pen-free.
The terrible martyrdom of January 7 comes after a years-long campaign against speaking out and speaking honestly that persuaded only the mouthpieces and censors. An energetic and beautifully expressed campaign of vilification and isolation of unsocial elements has failed. France’s momentary embrace of free expression as a pure good last weekend was unconvincing, but the idea has much to recommend it.
Let me propose an unprincipled defense of free speech. Let’s not consider whether placing limits on free speech is just or unjust, an act of mercy to minorities and the unprivileged or a betrayal of liberty that will destroy the French Republic and our own. Instead, let’s ask if it has worked.
Advocates of censorship in the United States argue that this country should be ashamed to be the only free nation that has not defined hate speech as a crime. We are also outside the honorable group of nations that have declared Holocaust denial a criminal act—in this shame we are joined by the United Kingdom. Europe’s unfree-speech regime has been in place for a generation or more. So it is actually possible to consider the question of how much good hate speech and Holocaust-denial bans have done for the societies that enjoy them, and how much harm the First Amendment’s power, so far, to prevent our having these laws has done to our nation and our citizens.
Nobody on the free speech side can comprehend how deeply and sincerely the hate-speech censors believe that banning hate speech will reduce the amount of hate in society, that controlling speech is the path to better, happier thoughts. This conviction is so deep-seated in its advocates that the question of its accuracy is rarely even considered.
Rather than measure the good that such laws may do, advocates of speech criminalization focus on the harm that hate speech and Holocaust denial do. That they have an interest in showing this is obvious, but much of the work on the harm of hate speech is thoughtful and persuasive. Yet so confident are they that silencing and punishing people for speaking in a hurtful way is necessary that they feel no need to present data to answer whether it is effective.
America, by standing apart from the Western world’s rush to impose criminal penalties on hate speech, has thus ended up serving as a voluntary control group in this great experiment. As Dr. Walter Reed did with yellow-fever-transmitting mosquitoes, we have exposed ourselves to hate speech and Holocaust denial without the protection of cops, judges, and jailers. Never mind that the question has not been asked: We can answer it simply by comparing the amount of hate speech and Holocaust denial in European countries with that in our own—and in the case of Holocaust denial, with that in the United Kingdom as well. Holocaust denial has the advantage of being a clearly defined thing, not subject to the rococo elaboration of varieties of hate on the part of the hate-speech condemnation profession.
Consider these data points on Holocaust denial, assembled from two widely examined surveys that compared U.S. and global attitudes toward Jews, one conducted for the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in 1992 in the United States and in France, Germany, and the U.K. in 1993 and 1994. The whole project was reexamined and presented in a useful pamphlet in 1995 by Tom W. Smith, the director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago.
We can compare these data with the results of last year’s massive survey of antisemitic attitudes worldwide conducted by the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL asked citizens of 101 countries their opinion about the Holocaust (along with other questions about Jews and Judaism) to establish an overall antisemitism score for each country. We are concerned here only with certain categories of Holocaust denial that can be measured from both the 1992-94 survey and the 2013-14 survey.
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Here are the results for the United States, the U.K., France, and Germany, measured soon after Holocaust denial was criminalized in Germany and France. (I have regularized the numbers to ADL’s 2014 practice of measuring Holocaust denial and acceptance as a percentage of those who are aware of the Holocaust. See Table 1.)
So at the outset of our test, it’s clear that the level of Holocaust denial is fairly similar, except in Germany, which also has what one might call a level of Holocaust denial reflected in the unusually high percentage of people who say they’ve never heard of it. The other countries reflect their respective distance from the event. France, an occupied country and a site on which Holocaust events took place, knows it best, Britain, across the channel, not nearly as well, and we bring up the rear.
The next chart shows the state of play two decades later. Of course, in 1992, many of the generation who lived through World War II were still in the prime of life, while in 2014, almost all were elderly or dead. Each country’s population of adults included a generation none of whose parents were alive or old enough to have a reasonable experience of the war. Still, a surprising gap has opened between the countries that banned Holocaust denial and those that did not. (See Table 2, opposite.)
Twenty years of policing speech about the Holocaust has produced a perverse result. In the two countries in which Holocaust denial is freely available to anyone, the level of Holocaust denial and what might be termed Holocaust skepticism has changed very little. But despite the vigilance and police powers of the regulated-speech countries, the percentage of Holocaust deniers plus skeptics increased substantially, from 5 percent to 26 percent in France and from 8 percent to 11 percent in Germany. Yet in laissez-faire America, the percentage of those who remain ignorant of the Holocaust was cut nearly in half, from 19 to 11 percent, while in France ignorance of the Holocaust rose from 1 to 13 percent. Those who accept the historical truth in the United States and the U.K. grew from the ’70s to the ’80s in percentage terms; in Germany it remained the same; in France, it fell precipitously from 89 to 67 percent. (I should add, at the risk of being reported as an Islamophobe, that the ADL sample of French respondents in 2013 was only
2 percent Muslim.)
Tom W. Smith expressed surprise at the low level of actual Holocaust denial in 1992-94, and I feel the same way about Holocaust denial among Americans and Britons today. However contemptible Holocaust denial may be, it is, when people are permitted to discuss it, at a very low level. Smith points out that the vast majority of those who question the Holocaust’s scale and other details are unaware that there is an organized historical revision movement. They are not deniers-in-training, but merely ornery. The very rough data here, despite some problems with comparability, suggest that indignation, disgust, and contempt for Holocaust denial may be more effective than policemen.
What’s more, the sclerotic nature of legislation can’t keep up with human ingenuity when it comes to insulting and harming unpopular groups. Holocaust denial has certainly grown alongside literacy in the Arab world—where the idea that the Jews faked the Holocaust can scarcely be said to lower the popularity of the Jewish people. On the other hand, the West’s almost ritual focus on Holocaust denial as a uniquely horrific type of hate speech ignores the latest development in historical revisionism, one not only more insulting but more dangerous to the security of the Jewish people worldwide. The most up-to-date historical revisionists are happy to agree that Hitler systematically killed six million; but they assert that none of the six million victims were Jews. The “Jewish People” with an ancestral link to the holy land is an invented concept. Denying Jewish history, an ethnic and familial link to the ancient Hebrews, and a national identity is now fashionable among the European left, Jewish and gentile, as well as among the publicists of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. The prestige of this lie among the left of center political class in Europe has a far more damaging practical effect upon the Jews of the European diaspora and on Israel than Holocaust denial has ever had.
When Muslims and those who proclaim themselves their protectors say that they cannot be expected to put up with free speech, it is time for Jews to answer with action: Every Jewish community worldwide ought to petition its government that it wishes to forgo the utterly useless legal privileges that banning Holocaust denial gives us. As the supposed beneficiaries of the ban, we have the right to surrender it—and now it is our duty to do so. Tariq Ramadan, the Muslim Brotherhood scholar, is only one among dozens to suggest since January 7 that if Jews are spared Holocaust denial, it is hypocrisy to demand that Muslims accept cartoons mocking Muhammad. The sly insinuation of the argument is that the Charlie Hebdo murderers are no more than Holocaust-denial constables in a hurry.
The data on the effectiveness of hate-speech bans are even thinner, understandably so. Hate-speech experts show no interest in defining “hate” in a way that could be measured even in a single country. In theory, such a measure must analyze within each society the mutual hatreds not only of different races and religions but of denominations within religions, shades of skin color within races, and hatred of many other groupings: the young, the old, Yankees fans—the list is endless and would be impossible to analyze except, perhaps, in an elaborate annual survey of attitudes toward certain races, religions, and other groups.
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Nevertheless, it is interesting to take a look at the United States, in 2013-14, unprotected by hate-speech laws, and compare it with its rival nations where hate speech is a crime. I include, this time, Canada, which is demographically like us, but enjoys the protection of hate-speech legislation. I begin with the ADL’s “Antisemitism Index” for each country, and then that for each country’s two largest belief groups—Christians and atheist/nonreligious. In the United States, U.K., and Germany, the level of anti-semitism expressed by the whole country is compared with that of its dominant religious groups. When there is a delta, as the statisticians would say, it is interesting because it represents a situation where the dominant groups are meaner or nicer than the country as a whole. Christian/secular Canadians, for example, are less antisemitic than the country as a whole, which in turn is a third more antisemitic than the United States and the U.K. The presence of non-Christian, nonatheist groups in France, on the other hand, lowers not raises its antisemitism index. More important, I think, are the total haters-of-other-religions figures in the last two columns (my own contribution to hate-speech science). The United States is tied for second-most hate-free country with Canada. France and Germany have a substantially higher level of dislike for Jews/Buddhists/Hindus that is about equal. Germany’s high level of distaste for Muslims makes it the most hate-filled country in our sample—19 percent total hating, compared with only 11 percent for the North Americans and half that for the U.K. When comparing attitudes to other religious groups, America is no more hate-filled than Canada, which is beset with speech codes, and is substantially less hate-filled than speech-patrolled France and Germany. (See Table 3.)
Again, this comparison is highly artificial. It is America’s comparative ranking that is important to my argument, which clearly shows that a country without hate-speech laws—even a country with a reputation for being unkind and racist like ours—is in fact to be classed with the most tolerant, but well-thought-policed countries.
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Let us grant to Jeremy Waldron (The Harm in Hate Speech) and his colleagues all their arguments about the specific injuries that hate speech can cause. How would they respond to the evidence that restrictions on speech don’t reduce hate? They may think that hate-speech police methods are still in their infancy, and that some Bill Bratton/Rudy Giuliani-style speech-monitoring and surveillance experts can produce a dramatic drop in hate crime, perhaps after a mental hygiene stop-and-frisk program has been instituted.
But to them, we can respond with an absolute: Few crimes consisting purely of hateful speech directed at someone as a member of a disadvantaged group can be nearly as injurious as the harm caused by hurtful remarks directed at us as individuals by people who know us well. Compared with the injury done me by remarks made by my mother, father, grandparents, teachers, friends, enemies, spouses, children—verbal injuries, humiliations, rebukes that are unfair and, even worse, accurate, to say nothing of ineradicable remorse for the injuries my own words have done to others—instances of antisemitism, anti-Americanism, and beratings for being white are faint indeed. I hope I’m not alone in being rather proud of having been made to suffer for my race. But only the onset of Alzheimer’s can free me from the verbal darts lodged in me: You’re clumsy; you’re selfish; you take without giving; I can’t trust you; you’re too inarticulate to be a good teacher; you’re wasting your life. If there were a law that could protect us from pain caused by parents, teachers, Little League teammates, 1960s greasers, drivers in the next car—I think anyone would take that over a law that guaranteed protection from bigots and ill-regarders of one’s religion’s points of theology.
In 2013, the Nation published an article by hate crime researchers which makes, I think uniquely, the admission that criminalizing hate crime does not reduce hate crime—in this case against the LGBT community on which they are experts.
Europeans may think that we Americans walk around armed with guns but unarmed against hate speech. In fact, limits on free speech have in effect been privatized in this country. Voluntary organizations have risen up to enforce what speech is acceptable, not because they have legal powers, and not because they are wise or just, but because they project the moral authority and rhetorical power to draw the line between what is permissible and impermissible, polite and impolite. The precise location of such lines is merely convention. That is a good thing. Unlike laws, voluntary organizations can change or be superseded. The Legion of Decency had the moral authority to draw the line between what is obscene and what isn’t as long as the public was with it and entrusted its judgment to it. When the public mood changed and serious artists became interested in what happens to the human body after the wedding ceremony and after the meal, the legion became a figure of fun. Marx was wrong: Only private organizations can wither away—never the state, which may be replaced with something worse.
The danger of carefully drafted anti-hate-speech laws is their legalism. When good lawyers draw a clear and reasonable line beyond which one cannot go, everything short of that line is not only legal, but protected speech. For example, Germany’s laws against Nazi symbols, Holocaust denial, and antisemitism are notoriously tough. But what has happened in at least two occasions I know of in the last few years is this: The gold standard for antisemitism is to deny the Holocaust. In the instance of Ken Jebsen, a disc jockey at Radio Fritz (Potsdam/Berlin) fired in 2011, and in a courtroom in Munich, drawing such a clear line has worked to protect some pretty ordinary antisemites. The disc jockey claimed, correctly, that never once had he denied or praised the Holocaust—so he couldn’t possibly be an antisemite. And in Munich, a man sued a journalist for libel for calling him an antisemite, and the judge’s initial decision was that antisemitism could only be proven by denying or advocating the Holocaust of 1940-45. So the victim’s shield becomes the tool of hate.
And for Charlie Hebdo? The executioners were sending a message to two audiences, neither of them the cartoonists whom so many Muslim and liberal Western commentators accused of committing blasphemy and hurting the feelings of Muslims. One was to the government of France, which had, as Christopher Caldwell remarked in these pages last week, a great deal of prestige invested in the protection of Charlie Hebdo, whose premises had been destroyed by firebombing in 2011. That the West believes to some degree in free speech was probably of no interest to the jihadists, whose demands for the West involve much more than forcing us to compromise a principle we pretend to cherish. They were demonstrating the powerlessness of France to protect people in whom they had a special interest, and their own greater power.
The other important message was to the Muslim population in non-Muslim countries, where so many had come originally to live a Muslim but relatively liberal life, free of the imam and the religious police. It was they who were being warned not to tolerate Enlightenment values, not to acknowledge the interventions of French Jewish or left-wing organizations on matters touching Muslim honor, and not to hope for a future in which they will be free of Islamist rule, wherever they live.
Tariq Ramadan made the reference plain by omission in his Guardian column immediately after the attack. “We condemn what happened in France. We condemn the violent extremism that is targeting westerners. But it is not only westerners. We are reacting emotionally because 12 people were killed in Paris, but there are hundreds being killed day in, day out in Syria and Iraq, and still we send more bombs. We have to look at the big picture. Lives matter, but it is important to be clear that the lives of Muslims in Muslim majority countries have as much value as our own lives in the west.”
Ramadan wants the war against ISIS to stop because attacking Muslims who are slaughtering Muslims in Muslim majority countries is not the business of the West. He is silent on the fact that al Qaeda men attacked Charlie Hebdo, because that is understood—indeed, he justifies it by saying that the 12 murders are equivalent to the magazine’s choice, a few years ago, to fire an antisemitic employee. He carefully says nothing about the value of Muslim lives in Christendom, such as the policeman, Ahmed Merabet, and copy editor, Mustapha Ourrad, who died in the attack—for they are contingent. By omission, he informs them that they may not appeal to protection as French citizens to the French state: They, at least, will be, by mutual and silent agreement, submitted to Islamism. In their very different way, the Islamists who tried to extinguish Charlie Hebdo and murder Jews this month took care to kill a Muslim in the service of the liberal French state—as did the Islamist who killed the Jewish children in Toulouse in 2012 (his other victims included three French paratroopers, Muslims of North African origin).
Limiting free speech, for noble or ignoble reasons, is an experiment that has been tried and failed. Jailing antisemites and dissenting journalists has failed to protect even the lives of European Jews, much less reduce antisemitism. The one Western leader who refused to join the march in Paris for free expression is the one most concerned with protecting Muslims from insult, and also the one who has most assiduously pursued a foreign policy that surrenders Muslim populations to the most sectarian and violent rulers available. What will happen to liberal Muslims under a legal regime that reserves special privileges for Islam’s tyrants is not difficult to imagine.
Sam Schulman is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
