cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/26284554
By Syma Mohammed
Published date: 20 February 2025 21:44 GMTAlex Tyrrell, party leader of the Green Party of Quebec, who accompanied Engler to the police station on Thursday, spoke to the Middle East Eye about Engler’s arrest.
“I think it’s a shocking attack on free expression and democratic rights and criticism of Israel in Canada - a country that’s supposed to be a free, democratic society. We’re supposed to speak out about a genocide," Tyrrel told MEE.
The right wing assholes whining about free speech don’t actually want free speech. You can see that in the campaigns to remove books from school libraries all across the country. All across the world the right are demonstrating time and again how little they actually support free speech.
What they want is the freedom to spew hate speech, which is the only kind of speech that a tolerant and free society should not tolerate. All other forms of speech they will gladly and eagerly suppress unless it agrees with them.
Right wing assholes don’t want free speech, but I do.
That includes extremist views, since the government should not in any way be in business of determining what those are
It’s not a question of “extremist”. What is or isn’t “extreme” is largely a matter of how far an idea strays from the norm. Some extreme ideas are very good, some extreme ideas are terrible.
The question, rather, is of purpose, not character. Intolerant speech - that is, speech whose purpose is to limit the rights of specific groups of people to exist - is the only kind of speech that we must be prepared to limit, because without limits on intolerant speech, the intolerant will ultimately abuse their freedoms to strip away freedoms from others.
This draws a hard line. It clearly defines and delineates what is and is not acceptable. It is a simple and clear rule that any tolerant society must abide by if it is to continue to be a tolerant society.
For the proof of this, you only need to look at what is happening in the US right now.
To you, speaking out against Israel is fine, but to some people it might be antisemitic. Whether or not it is against the rights of someone is actually personal opinion, not for the government to decide
But we’re not required to evaluate the facts of the case based on what “some people” think. We can objectively examine the content of people’s speech and ask whether it’s intent is to advocate against the basic rights of a group of people or not. Criticising Isreal does not meet that test, despite what the ADL might claim.
Yes, there are grey areas. Yes, there are hard calls that have to be made. But saying “This is hard” and then throwing up your hands and resorting to free speech absolutism because you can’t handle the difficult work of building a society is just childish.