Jonathan Kay on hate speech laws

Jonathan Kay has another great Op-Ed on "hate speech" laws, and the obsolete, self-defeating logic of victimhood promoted by the Canadian Jewish Congress. Importantly, he shows the strong Jewish tradition in allowing free speech, even "hateful" free speech -- citing the great U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, the first Jew to sit on that court.

(Brandeis was not the first Jew to be nominated to the court -- that was Judah Benjamin who, on the eve of the Civil War, declined the nomination, preferring to sit as a Senator, an interesting statement on the relative importance of those branches of government 150 years ago. The fact that Benjamin would go on to serve in the cabinet of the Confederacy also helps to explain his decision.)

Kay laments the decline of Jewish intellectual vigor to the point where ethnic grievance mongers -- really, the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons of the Jewish world -- seek to define us as perpetual victims, rather than one of the most successful groups in Canada.

Here are my favourite three paragraphs:

...As the recent human-rights cases against MacLean's and the Western Standard show, there will always be complainants and commissars willing to expand the definition of prohibited speech to encompass legitimate discourse. Ironically, the censorship regime that well-meaning Jewish intellectuals helped put in place to fight anti-Semitism a generation ago is now being applied to prosecute the pundits blowing the whistle on the one truly genuine threat that Jews are facing worldwide: militant Islam. Thin-skinned types may find Levant and Mark Steyn over the top. But then, lots of people said the same thing about Near. Whether the threat is shariah or shakedowns, the marketplace of ideas needs its fearless mavericks. Just ask Samuel Shapiro. Better yet, ask Irshad Manji, Salim Mansur, Ujjal Dosanjh, Tarek Fatah, or any of the other identity-politics dissidents who've been labeled "malicious, scandalous and defamatory" by members of their own communities.

As far as Canadian Jews are concerned, there is another less obvious cost to putting the community's moral authority behind institutionalized censorship: It cements a collective self-identity based around victimhood. The message is: "We are so vulnerable, so incapable of arguing down the brain-dead lunatics who attack us with words, that we need state censors to act as our shield."

Though criminal prosecutions against anti-Semites are actually quite rare, the few that arise encourage the conceit of a community besieged by murderous hatred. This conceit, though useful in creating a shared sense of community solidarity, has served to distract Canadian Jews from the happy fact that anti-Semitism is completely extinct in our society's respectable mainstream. Canada is probably as close to a post-anti-Semitic society as has ever existed in any nation in Western history --including modern-day Israel. But you wouldn't know it from the lachrymose doom-speak emanating from the acronymed Jewish activist establishment.