In the Name of Free Speech, It’s Time to Repeal the Ban on Holocaust Denial

Even as the massacre at Charlie Hebdo led to enthusiastic expressions of European support for free speech, there has been little discussion of Europe’s draconian (by American standards) limitations on “hate speech” in general and Holocaust denial in particular. And yet, according to Sam Schulman, not only has the effort to prevent “journalists, essayists, and fiction writers from questioning Islam and immigration policy” done nothing to deter or deflect jihadist fury, but proscribing Holocaust denial has failed to curb anti-Semitism, including the murderous kind.

On the latter front, writes Schulman, the evidence is clear. “Twenty years of policing speech about the Holocaust have produced a perverse result”:

In the two countries [the U.S. and UK] 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 [France and Germany], 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.

From his inspection of the data, Schulman concludes that “limiting free speech, for noble or ignoble reasons, is an experiment that has been tried and failed.”

Read more at Weekly Standard

More about: Anti-Semitism, Charlie Hebdo, Freedom of Speech, History and Ideas, Holocaust denial, Radical Islam

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF