Britain’s contribution to the debate over free speech is to constantly remind Americans what it looks like when someone is actually punished for mere speech.
In the U.S., we’re currently locked in a debate over whether activists who trespassed and occupied a building after-hours and then assaulted a janitor and took two people hostage are being disciplined by Columbia University for their speech. Perhaps it is the legacy of the progressive Covid policy that disallowed all close gatherings except if the gathering in question was a protest for a righteous cause. Whatever the reason, Americans seem to genuinely believe that if you call your behavior a “protest” then you have a First Amendment right to smash the windows of a Jewish-owned shop.
Explaining to activists why this is wrong gets you nowhere, so perhaps it’s easier to understand if we use examples. Luckily for us (and unluckily for Brits), the UK routinely has such examples at hand.
In the Telegraph today, Brendan O’Neill writes of the latest trend in which the speech police (sometimes in the form of actual police) seek to cast out from the public square anyone who calls Hamas a terrorist organization.
O’Neill mentions two instructive cases. The first is that of Damon Joshua, who lost his job at a sewage company for calling Hamas “disgusting terrorists” in a group chat. Other employees complained and the post was taken down. But that wasn’t the end of it: Joshua was fired. “You would think that the least controversial thing you could say is that Hamas are bad people,” O’Neill writes. “It’s the law of the land, after all: Hamas is designated a terrorist organization in the UK.”
Indeed, it’s illegal in the UK to support Hamas. But to even things out, it is apparently strongly frowned upon to not support Hamas. Just maybe don’t say anything at all.
The second case is of Iranian-born Niyak Ghorbani, who has actually been arrested for holding a sign that says “Hamas is terrorist.” According to O’Neill, “The police said they wanted to ‘prevent a breach of the peace’. All they really prevented was a man from saying out loud what is written in our law.”
When Ghorbani holds the sign outside pro-Hamas marches in the UK, he is sometimes accosted and harassed. That’s not the same level of censorship as getting arrested for one’s views, but it’s a reminder of another way the problem of “chilling speech” can be more complicated than overt government suppression. That’s because overt government suppression of speech is easier to spot, and there is far less legal gray area.
In this way, pro-Hamas demonstrators in the U.S. have cleverly gamed the system. In physically preventing Jews from accessing public areas of campus and discriminating against visible Jews in campus organizations, and with the help of teachers who retaliate against Jewish and Israeli students, they ensure that speech on campus is thoroughly chilled and that free expression is limited.
Because this isn’t government suppression, it doesn’t trigger the ire (or even attention) of free-speech and free-expression activists and organizations, even when that climate of fear is enforced by employees of an institution that is dependent on government funds. But once the Hamasnik activists escalate to the point of lawbreaking, law enforcement gets involved—and that gets the attention of those free-speech groups, which come to the protesters’ defense. The very same people who have been systematically silencing Jews are now depicted as the Jews’ victims because they have mixed their own speech with violence. This inoculates them against the intervention of the authorities because speech is part of their repertoire.
In one sense, then, they should be thankful they are not in the UK, where they could not defend hostage-taking under the guise of “speech,” because speech itself is an arrestable offense. On the other hand, defenders of Hamas aren’t the ones being arrested at London protests anyway.
