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.”

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].