Hard Cases Make Bad Laws

The case of censorship often rides on scenarios in which the less-than academically-inclined profane the public sphere with vile untruths.

The truth is censorship serves only the government that wants to eliminate dissent.

Using Holocaust denial as a withering counter-point to the defense of all free speech is a cowardly, weaselly, intellectually backward tactic used by people who don't know or care that such a tactic is futile, anyway:

The point here is that antisemitism may be ineradicable. It’s difficult to situate it as a sociopathic feature of so many cultures without trespassing from the language of the secular. It’s hard to describe the Holocaust in any lexicon that does not contain words like “evil.”

This doesn’t mean you give up. It means you work harder in the identification and quarantining of antisemitism’s many vile iterations. One of the smaller line items in the budget calls for $2.5 million for the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto. Public education will probably do more good than the law proposing an amendment to Section 319 of the Criminal Code, and all the laws in the world. It’s hard work, but it’s the one thing that might start with the Jews, but burdens us all equally.

 

No human ill is completely eradicable.

It is why we need yearly events to remind us of our great failings and redemption.    

What we don't need is a secular government whose goal was never to grasp a perennial evil in the first place but to use it as a foot-in-the-door for larger interests.

It is not for a government to repair, anyway. 

Where are the parents, educators and even the Jeremiahs who point at the decidedly vindictive and expose them for the charlatans that they are?

Do we need to be protected from these charlatans or should we expose them? 

Are we that infantile that we need coddling instead of admitting that we can't or won't confront what is in front of us?

Why should a Holocaust-denier be elevated to the status of a folk hero because none dared lay the groundwork for his marginlaisation in the first place? How hard would it have been to avoid these calls for blanket censorship simply by calling this clown out for the liar that he is?

But then we wouldn't have the hard case or bad law.