Some of you might be thinking that I've been walking back my free speech absolutism in recent months, given my vocal support for Israel, and my vocal condemnation of the people who have been chanting, "Gas the Jews."
No.
Even though I'm probably echoing Douglas Murray completely in regard to the conflict, I have voiced my disagreement with him regarding the idea that support for terrorists acts, as were committed by Hamas, should be met with expulsion from Western nations.
Rather, my views on free speech have been bolstered.
As John Stuart Mill said in On Liberty, the danger of censorship is that truth becomes dogma. We simply know what we think that we know; but, we forget why we know it.
Even if we could form a ministry of truth that was perfect in only allowing truth to be spoken, and only silencing lies, we'd still have the problem of people not being challenged in regard to what they see as conventional wisdom.
The reason why Kosher dining halls are being shut down on college campuses across These United States under threats of violence I'd, in part, because college campuses have become hostile to free speech.
If the question were allowed to be asked, by a genuine skinhead, "Why was Hitler so bad?" I think a lot of the people shouting their anti-Jew bullshit on college campuses would take a moment to realize who they sound like.
The protests that took place provide a great case for free speech.
A huge portion of the marchers at the pro-Palestinian marches did not know that "from the river to the sea" is an active call for genocide.
This slogan shows that the core of the current Palestinian movement is not simply seeking freedom. The Hamas movement is a genocidal cult. Hamas is the oppressor and not the liberator.
If we censored the slogan, then people would not know this.
BTW, the press censored the Nazis prior to the holocaust. The censorship did not stop the movement. It let the movement grow in darkness until it was too large to contained.
So, most people outside Germany did not know about the genocidal nature of the ideology until the genocide was under way.
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