In the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, it is a crime to pray, silently, within one hundred meters of an abortion clinic. It remains a crime even if that abortion clinic is closed. If one were spotted engaging in an act of silent, non vocalised prayer, ninety nine meters away from an abortion clinic, at four o’clock in the morning when nobody else was there, one would be committing a crime.
By contrast, if one stands on one of the main stages at the Glastonbury music festival and leads tens of thousands of people in a chant saying “Death, Death, to the IDF” (which in fairness rhymes quite nicely), then one is not committing a crime.
Silent prayer? Banned. Open expression of support for literal murder? Tolerated.
It should be noted that “Death to the IDF” is not, by any measure of the English language, actual incitement to violence. To incite something, you need to use a verb: “Kill” the IDF would be an instruction.
“Death to” the IDF is more an expression of a desire for something to happen, but for it to happen independently of your own actions. Anyway, nobody with a brain thinks that the crowd of bong-addled drips at Glastonbury would have much of a chance on the front lines against the Israeli Defence Forces.
The chant was in the same family of performative nonsense as Kneecap’s “up Hamas, up Hezbollah” line. It is an expression of sympathy with jihadist murderers. It is not an expression of desire to join the jihadist murderers and obtain the services of 72 virgins in the aftermath of the inevitable martyrdom happily supplied by the IDF to those who do.
Whatever about incitement, though, there is little doubt that the chant “death to the IDF” is certainly and indisputably hate speech.
There can be fewer more clear expressions of hate than to literally wish death upon somebody. “I wish for you to die” is not simply an expression of personal opposition or strong dislike, otherwise this column would regularly express a desire for the death of people who park their cars across two spaces at the shopping centre.
No: It is hate, spoken. And therefore, it is hate speech.
But of course, here is where we encounter the basic problem, summed up in what I like to call McGuirk’s iron law of Hate Speech: Left-wing people are incapable of hate, in their own minds, so such laws cannot and never shall apply to them.
This is the entire principle on which the hate speech regime is constructed: It is not actually designed to prosecute the speaking of hate. It is designed to regulate the political marketplace of ideas by designating some political views as hateful, and others as simply views expressed with a particularly passionate intensity. In fact, if you are on the left, it’s not hate at all: Saying “death to the IDF” is actually an expression of love for the Palestinians. Left-wing people, especially when they gather in large crowds, believe themselves and are therefor believed to be incapable of hate. That is an iron law of our dominant political religion: The angrier a left-wing person is, the deeper their love must be. The angrier a right-wing person is, the deeper their hate must be. That is the unspoken governing principle of all public discussion of free speech, hate speech, and incitement to violence.
The case of Lucy Connolly, imprisoned British childminder, is instructive. In a moment of ill-advised political anger, Connolly tweeted to her few thousand followers that she did not care if accommodation centres housing migrants were burned to the ground. “Set fire to the hotels for all I care”, she tweeted. For this crime – which the British courts decided was both hate speech and incitement to violence, she is in the midst of a 31-month prison sentence. She could not be imagined to have expressed her anger at migrants out of love for white British natives.
And of course, her language mirrors that of the “death to the IDF” chanters almost perfectly, absent that she arguably used a verb (set fire to) rather than a more passive voice (death to). But are we really to believe that she would have avoided a prison sentence had she just said “death to the asylum seekers” instead? Does anyone on planet earth think that if she had said those words, she would have gotten a lesser sentence?
No, the point here is not the words she used, but who she directed them at. Calling for the theoretical death of brown-skinned migrants is a crime. Calling for the theoretical death of foreign Jews is not. Perhaps the UK authorities will prove me wrong by prosecuting and imprisoning the Glastonbury rapper (who had a much larger audience than Connolly did). And perhaps one day it will snow in hell.
The double standard on speech is not the only double standard that applies to the political left. People who live in Ireland will recall, for example, that during the Covid lockdowns, mass public gatherings were entirely forbidden, and that there was media panic over anti-lockdown protests both on public order grounds and the idea that these reckless people were undermining our collective efforts to stop the spread, and so on. Yet when thousands of angry young left wingers took to the streets of Dublin to protest the death in the United States of George Floyd, and to remind Irish people that black lives matter, there were no arrests or prosecutions and nary a word of media reproach.
To live in the era of liberal governance and to understand it, one must first know that ancient quote, oft attributed to Cicero: “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law”.
What happened at Glastonbury over the weekend is a glaring example of that principle in action. Hate speech laws do not apply to left-wing hate. They never have, and they never will, for they are not intended to. That is why Kneecap are getting a rap on the knuckles, Bob Vylan is getting a slew of sad head-shaking expressions of disappointment, and Lucy Connolly rots in a British jail.
The pretence that we live in a fair and equal society is important. But it is, nevertheless, a pretence.
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