In his recent book, entitled Trigger Warning, Mick Hume makes an impassioned case for protecting freedom of speech. However, writes Oliver Wiseman, the book is poorly executed and contains some muddled thinking of its own:

When it comes to the question of what to do about Holocaust denial . . . Hume forgets to turn his contrarian autopilot off. Defenders of free speech are right to oppose the bans on Holocaust denial that are in place in many EU countries. Censorship cannot kill a bad idea. Hume, however, must take things further: Holocaust denial should not only be legal, it should be free from taboo as well. . . .

[H]e asks the reader to be as outraged as he is that “those who question the history of the Holocaust are treated as the secular equivalent of heretics today, pariahs to be cast out of civilized society.” Is that such a bad thing? It is hardly a free-speech travesty that David Irving, Britain’s most notorious Holocaust denier, is persona non grata at respectable universities. . . .

To ask, as Hume does, for a fair hearing for all ideas, even after they have been exposed as lies motivated by hatred, is to stretch moral relativism past its elastic limit. Freedom of speech is such a vital liberty because it allows us to sort good ideas from bad ones, not because there is no such thing as good and bad.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.