I never thought I would be defending a radical Muslim of anything, but then I read this Telegraph article today about how Canada charged radical Muslim Salman Hossain with “promoting genocide,” as well as “promoting hatred” against the Jewish people of Canada and the United States. Hossain is the first person in Canada to be charged with such a crime.

The calls for violence he made and continues to make are, of course, abhorrent, but I have to defend his right to say them. That’s because I firmly support freedom of speech, even of the most vile kind, and Hossain’s arguments certainly fit the bill.

You may think, “How can you do that? This is not speech; this is incitement!” However, that’s not the way I’ve read it. They comments are his opinions. He is saying that a genocide ought to be committed against Jews, that someone should commit a genocide. He is not revealing any operation in the planning stages. That may change depending on what the intelligence community picks up, and it may be more than likely that will turn out to be the case, but if that happens, then charge him with that. Anything less is pinning him with a thought crime.

Now, I realize that Canada is not the United States, and that they don’t have a first amendment like we do, though Canada does have something similar. According to the Telegraph, Canada’s “Charter of Rights and Freedoms” protects freedom of speech and association.  However, it actually goes further than that and specifically mentions “thought” as a protected right. Not even the Bill of Rights does that (though in practice, speech and thought are treated the same, and you really cannot have speech without thought). Both charters are not absolute, there are laws and court cases defining specific types of speech that are not protected. And that will be where the U.S. and Canada differ, as Canada believes that “hate speech” and calls for violence should not be protected.

The problem is that both are rather vague categories. What type of “hate” should be protected and what shouldn’t? Should hate speech against Jews go unprotected while hate speech against gays is protected? On the violence end, should you be allowed to say that you want one person to die (“I think he should die”), while saying you want a whole ethnic group to be killed is deemed illegal? It’s easy to see how this idea of protecting some classes of people but not others can get messy, and can be treated with political motivations. The answer to this in the U.S. has generally been to protect all forms of hateful speech, regardless of the class it’s against, though there are campaigns by liberals to change that, particularly on university campuses. But mostly, hate speech is protected.

That’s how it should be, and I think Canada should realize that they have set a very bad precedent. Unfortunately, the government’s rationale for banning this hate speech, via OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino, doesn’t hold up:

“But we must not stand idly by when these rights are used as a shield to promote hatred against any community.”

With all due respect to Mr. Fantino, no “community” should expect to be protected from hatred. There is certainly a dark side to freedom of speech, but if you begin restricting that speech, it becomes all too easy to begin telling people how they must think about those communities. Before you know it, you no longer have freedom of thought. You have to take the bad with the good. No ethnic group or other community should expect to never be offended. That doesn’t mean that we must humor the hate speakers, and we definitely don’t have to praise their speech. Far from it. We should call them out for it, criticize them for such views, and hound them for it. And in this case, we definitely should. But that is much different than a government banning such speech because they feel a need to stop the “promotion of hatred.”

It is easy, particularly with calls in the Middle East for the destruction of Israel, to feel that such thoughts must be outlawed in the West, in order to protect certain communities.  But really, criminalizing such views ends up protecting nobody, and only leads to government looking for more ways it can restrict speech. Canada has begun down that path with the charges against Hossain. It has a chance to reverse this thought crime legislation before the precedent become entrenched in future, more restrictive law.