Tel-Chai Nation

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry makes the argument in Bloomberg why France's approach with speech laws is an utter failure:

French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced last week his government’s plan to “fight racism” to much fanfare. The cause is a worthy one (who can be against fighting racism?), but sadly the plan is a disaster.

The government wants to make it much easier to ban any online content deemed to be racist or to be “promoting hatred.” One might ask why the urgency when, according to the official figures, hate crimes are down 16 percent from last year. French President Emmanuel Macron clearly feels it's an issue that resonates with voters.

The problem with the flash bans on hateful speech is obvious: collateral damage to speech that should be protected in democracies, including of course speech that is hugely distasteful to many. It's exactly for this reason that the new rules go too far.

France has historically been one of the most restrictive nations when it comes to speech, after Germany. While Germany’s specific neuroses regarding its Nazi past make its extremely restrictive hate speech laws understandable, France has really never had a free speech tradition in the Anglo-American mold.

And that's surely been the problem for a long time. Worse, nobody you'd think was a realist ever tried to get the laws changed in the books to make them clearer, and establish that incitement to violence should be what's forbidden, not criticism of ideology.

Furthermore, as became clear this week when the murder of Mirielle Knoll occurred, hate crimes aren't down by a longshot. Read the rest of the article for more.

Labels: dhimmitude, France, islam, jihad, Moonbattery, political corruption, terrorism