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 on Weekly Standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/great-free-speech-experiment_823845.html?page=1