The Washington Post just keeps covering itself in glory. Richard Stengel is a former editor of Time Magazine and was the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs from 2013 to 2016. In this piece, he says the First Amendment is an “outlier” and calls for “hate speech” laws that would criminalize, among other things, the burning of Qur’ans. Stengel takes it as self-evident why the burning of the Qur’an should be banned, so we don’t know if it is because he is afraid Muslims will riot and kill innocent people as a result of the burning, and is pre-emptively surrendering to violent intimidation, or if he objects in principle to the burning of all holy books as disrespectful to the adherents of the religion in question, but he doesn’t mention anything about criminalizing the burning of the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita, etc., so it seems likely that the former is correct, and he is trying to codify cowardice into the American legal code.
Now, I don’t approve of the burning of any book, particularly the Qur’an. I believe that the Qur’an should be read carefully, and reread, and thoroughly understood. But the whole idea of the First Amendment was to safeguard against tyranny. Once one starts criminalizing one form of free expression, other forms may be criminalized as well. If the government can classify the burning of the Qur’an as “hate speech” and prohibit it accordingly, it adopt all Sharia blasphemy laws, and persecute non-Muslims accordingly. Or it can widen the definition of “hate speech” to include the articulation of criticism of the government itself, and there will no longer be a free society. The very concept of “hate speech” is subjective. Is study of how Islamic jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and oppression “hate speech”? Stengel would probably say it was. Others would say it is a necessary aspect of understanding those who would destroy us, in order to counter them effectively. If Stengel gets his way, and he very well might, he will criminalize what he dislikes, and likely prohibit honest analysis of the motivating ideology behind the jihad threat. What will be the effect of that? Patriots will be persecuted for trying to defend the country, and Islamic jihadists will have a free hand.
“Why America needs a hate speech law,” by Richard Stengel, Washington Post, October 29, 2019:
When I was a journalist, I loved Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s assertion that the Constitution and the First Amendment are not just about protecting “free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”
But as a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier. Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?
It’s a fair question. Yes, the First Amendment protects the “thought that we hate,” but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw….
John says
Such are the thoughts of the so-called press like most WAPO editors. They’ve never met a far left idea that they didn’t love; yeah, let’s scrap the first amendment and, at the same time also remove any first amendment protections for news publications so they’re on the same footing as the rest of America that they seem to hold in some level of distain, otherwise, why advocate removing that same protection of free speech they enjoy from the rest of us that don’t happen to carry press credentials.
Carolyne says
But isn’t it odd that he and media such as the Washington Post don’t seem to understand that they, too, would be censored by the government? IMO if someone owns a book, any book, and wishes to burn it that is his right, and none of my or the government”s business.
CogitoErgoSum says
My Koran is totally digital. I do not own a paper copy of it so they will need to control the internet and all forms of digital communication also. Their ultimate goal — to stop the free flow of ideas among the people. Those who once had control of the distribution of information to the masses are seeing their power slip away and they will do anything to keep hold of it.
Janice Mermikli says
A very good point.
Westman says
As a child, surrounded by patriotic adults who preserved my freedom im WW2, it never occured to me that we might have to literally fight for our freedoms WITHIN our own nation.
Men like Stengel are the neo-colonists, intending to enslave the “deplorables” who won’t buy into the new class system the arrogant elite propose for themselves. They thought they had full control until a mind-speaking President was elected. Now all they can think about is how to regain power instead of doing their actual responsibilities and are doing it with our money.
Kay says
+1
Jule Bacal says
Hate speech laws have to stop Qur’an/Hadits from being taught in all Mosques across our Nation. Its pure hatred and all SuperSupremacist. Like the nazigroups and KKKlan on steroids.
Sally Donaldson says
Let’s get this straight ,Mister Stengel worked for the Obama Kerry Clinton Fund from 2013 to 2016 ., the same years that These 3 Monsters gave Iran $150 Billion to destroy Israel
mortimer says
Anything that is worth saying will offend someone or someone will disagree with it.
Anything that is worth writing will offend someone or someone will disagree with it.
All revolutions have begun due to HATE for something.
What does Mr. Stengel ‘hate’? Should Mr. Stengel’s speech be banned?
Stengel uses the BANDWAGON ARGUMENT in this perverse manner:
I TRAVELLED THE WORLD AND SAW THE DICTORSHIPS DO NOT HAVE FREE SPEECH, THEREFORE AMERICA SHOULD REMOVE THE FIRST AMENDMENT.
Question for Stengel: WHY DO DICTATORSHIPS NEED CENSORSHIP?
gravenimage says
+1
Roderick MacUalraig says
+2
Janice Mermikli says
Very good point.
Jule Bacal says
But I do think it should not be allowed for the Qur’an/Hadiths to be taught in Mosques or private schools nor should naziminded, or KKKLan apartheid & genocide. Supremacists destroy freedom. Do we want freedom or not? Freedom does not mean ‘Anything goes’. Its just many people are not seeing who the destructors are & do not want to know or they may lose their Business$$.
gravenimage says
The only speech we should not allow are exhortations to violence–as so much Islamic teaching is.
Kay says
+1
mortimer says
Stenge doesn’t know he is implying …
IT ISN’T HATE SPEECH WHEN MUSLIMS DO IT or when the KORAN DOES IT.
He would have to ban over 60% of the Koran.
paul 316 says
So true! Great point mortimer … when I see a news feed with a few hundred rabid muslims and hear them screaming death to America !, death to Israel ! I’m not feelin’ the love.
mortimer says
to paul … that would be their hate you are feeling. It’s called ‘BARAA’ in Arabic. It means ‘cleansing’ (from the filth of the dirty, disbelieving kufaar). That is what Muslims are required to do to please Allah. A practicing Muslim should HATE the dirty kufaar and show hostility towards them.
mortimer says
Some countries have laws that ban criticizing politicians … that is the main purpose of the First Amendment … to be permitted to express a grievance.
The grievance the counterjihad has is that Islam contains a teaching of permanent warfare against non-Muslims until victory. This means if the non-Muslims cannot criticize Islam, then Muslims will have nothing to impede their eventual victory.
WildWelshWoman says
Does that mean he’d criminalize the burning of Bibles, too?
Yeah, thought not.
Angemon says
A journalist calling for restrictions on speech. I almost wish he got it just so I could hear him complain when eventually it bit him in the ass…
Whose fault is it that muslims react violently to any sort of criticism?…
Angemon says
Oh, and who gets to decide what is “hate speech that can cause violence by one group against another”?…
DHazard says
Among the general population of Muslims worldwide, burning the Quran is a serious offense equivalent in heinousness to raping a child. Oh wait, it’s worse than raping a child, or murdering your “too Western” daughter, or burning a Bible (corrupted anyway), or killing one of your slaves, or killing those damn __________. Muhammad’s vitriolic, petty hate was egalitarian in it’s targets. You can fill in the blank with almost any religion or Middle Eastern ethnicity except Muslim and Arab and then reverse search the Quran and Hadith to justify whatever you want to do to somebody else, even burning them alive.
somehistory says
“should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. ”
In his newfound world of ‘arab sophistication” he shows himself to be an idiot, a fool, and a friend to islam and its violence.
Suppose every other group that is now, or has ever been, the target of hate speech, and/or hateful actions, decided that the only way they could prevent such against themselves was to begin acting out their feelings the way moslims do.
Bombings….when the Bible is burned or maligned and Christians are threatened, killed, raped and their places of worship destroyed. Planes flying into buildings,,, when moslims throw homosexuals off buildings. Conflagrations in moslims’s barracks…when they preach hatred of the Jews and Christians. Knife attacks and mass stabbings on the street… when moslims pronounce their goals of destroying the U.S. and Israel.
This friend of moslims and their violence is advocating that no one can criticize islam or moslims….but because no one person can fairly define “hate speech” that would satisfy all people, all other people and groups are fair game for hate speech…and the actions that moslims provide to insulate themselves from anyone saying they hate islam…or that they hate moslims… for carrying out the rapings of children, and the terrorism that has murdered so many innocent people.
James Foard says
Richard Stengel is a great fan of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes was a eugenicist. Long before the Nazis began their program of forced sterilization of the “unfit” we have this little nugget from the pen of Holmes in his decision to forcibly sterilize Carrie Buck, who was later found to be mentally competent, but merely raised in poverty and poorly educated:
” It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes in the 1927 Buck vs. Bell decision upholding the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck, ‘feeble-minded.’ http://eugenics.us/eugenic-quote-of-the-day-compulsory-vaccination-and-compulsory-sterilization-justified-on-the-same-principle/288.htm
Wellington says
The First Amendment is an “outlier?” Wow. Just one more example of how the Left will gut true freedom in America if given the chance, just as Islam would.
Leftism and Islam. Perfect together (for now).
somehistory says
How many millions of people have scrimped and saved, borrowed from everyone they knew, dreamed, prayed, struggled and waited, to get the chance to come to the place where they could speak freely?
gravenimage says
Yes–I was horrified by this thug characterizing the protection of our freedom of speech–the very core of our democracy–as “an outlier”.
Westman says
Of course the First Amendment is an “outlier” compared to Europe. Why is Stengel too ignorant to realize that we fought a revolution and immigrants left a stultified Europe to have that right of free expression?
Stengel has the “globalization” sickness. Why is a division forming in America? Why is there an attempt to unseat a President who speaks freely? Because too many Americans want to be like free-stuff Europe; a Europe now in a slow-beginning economic downturn that will become evident when the UK is out of the EU. It used to be said that, “When the US caught a cold the world caught pneumonia”. Now the EU is of sufficient size, it will get its own colds and pneumonia.
somehistory says
What he wants is that:
No one can say that islam is hate.
No one can say that moslims preach terrorism.
No one can say that moslims preach death to others, esp Jews and Christians.
No one can say that their book is full of commands to murder.
No one can say their book advocates slavery and rape.
No one can say that their book instructs them to lie and lie and lie again in furtherance of islam.
In fact, he wants it to be that no one can say anything about islam or moslims or their filthy book that they don’t want to hear…not even that they have murdered someone the speaker knew or loved or witnessed being murdered.
Because if someone says anything…even any Truth about islam or moslims or their filthy book… it makes moslims angry and violent…and that, to this fool, is a reason to not say anything they don’t like.
But, he did not say they have to stop saying the things they say and reading those things in their filthy book.
rubiconcrest says
If you know how the press often works I believe this man is receiving money to write this trash. Another example, which is not the first, is an article in the Stanford Magazine entitled ‘Scoring Points … Liverpool fans become less anti-Muslim with Mohamed Salah on their team’ is another example. We are led to believe our knowledge of Islam would change if there were more Muslim soccer players like Salah or that our freedom of the press is antiquated and we should adopt the sharia version. This is the Muslim brotherhood in action. If any book deserves to burn the Koran is it. Many Muslims agree and are too afraid to say it as well.
gravenimage says
Why would you assume that he doesn’t believe this savage nonsense and is just writing this for money? Grimly, many idiots would like to dismantle our freedom of speech.
D J says
In London on 7/7 4 muslims tried to kill and many others because of that book.
How did I react? I read the book and tried to understand it.
As Robert has said many times: Don’t burn it. Read it.
It is the best tool we have in our battle against Islam.
Charles the Hammer says
You don’t have to read much of it to realize it’s all nonsense and lies. The cult of Islam lacks any sense of spirituality, grace or mercy; it is, more than anything, a dark, foreboding collection of the worst totalitarian impulses of mankind, masked as a religion. It is truly evil.
Niemoller says
He opens with “the most sophisticated Arab diplomats” as his source of expert rationale on what constitutes free speech, lol?!? He this guy nuts or a comedian?
Does he plan to burn all the sacreligious entertainment from the 70s onward? Monty Python? Animal House? The Exorcist? Or is he good with being a supreme hypocrite?
I think he must have a large check from the Saudis recently deposited in his account for writing this pathetic editorial.
Lydia Church says
“hateful speech that can cause violence”…
Okay, now there’s a term that is as open ended as can be.
‘Hateful speech’ can be anything, and any of it ‘can cause violence’.
This is just a recipe for censorship of the 1st amendment, nothing less.
And what a coincidence that the item in question being protected here is….
(drumroll)…. the koran!
Tom Cheria says
While we are tweaking first amendment free speech – high time to tweak freedom of religion and BAN RESPECTING OF A SLAVE OWNER AS GREATEST PROPHET.
If HATE SPEECH needs to be banned then HATE RELIGIONS need to be banned as well.
Kepha says
Stengel is the public face of all State Department officials who succumb to the disease of clientitis–coming to see things through the other guy’s eyes. He somehow forgot to speak for an America that has a First Amendment; and any official who says the First Amendment is an “outlier” should lose his position of public trust.
Now, for a counterclaim: Shall we re-criminalize blasphemy against the name of Jesus Christ? In Ruggles v. NY (1811), disciples of our own John Jay on the New York State Supreme Court upheld the imprisonment of a man on such charges.
Dan says
“I believe that the Qur’an should be read carefully, and reread, and thoroughly understood.”
This clown’s probably too dimwitted to understand that’s EXACTLY what Thomas Jefferson said.
So that we KNOW why Muslims do what they do, and WHY they are not compatible with a Christian based society.
And which Founding Father said our form of government only works in a “Moral Society.”
Well “morals” are based on your cultural beliefs and we have enough trouble dealing people who have our cultural beliefs, but refuse to abide by their morals.
How can we expect members of a religion that says our cultural beliefs are not only stupid, but actually IMMORAL?
Dan says
Oh and if the Qur’an can’t be burned or defaced, then NO religious texts can be.
gravenimage says
Obama State Department official Richard Stengel calls in Washington Post for criminalizing burning the Qur’an
………………
Repulsive call for the crushing of freedom of speech.
somehistory says
The idiot meant for this word “outlier” to be an insult, something so different that it was in no way a good thing.
However, the meaning “a person or thing differing from all other members of a particular group” is applicable to the First Amendment to the Constitution.
No other country has the “guarantee” that all persons are to be treated equally, and no other nation has a Constitution like the U.S. has.
The “Freedom of Speech” that moslims disparage and this fool is trying to insult by his language, is special, in that no other nation has the same guarantee against the Government sending the police or military against its citizens for making complaints, suggestions, making speeches, etc. that some members of the government don’t like or with which they disagree.
He didn’t mean it to be a compliment. But if one looks at it with the definition in mind…and considers other words to say “different”…then it is not the insult he meant it to be.
One can just imagine being in another nation…with all that islam is doing to stop the Truth from getting out…and see that we have something to really appreciate in being this “outlier” when it come to speech and freedom.
Norger says
So you can burn an American flag, “Piss Christ” (a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine) is not only projected by the First Amendment, it wins an award in a competition sponsored by National Endowment for Arts, a US government agency. A painting of the Virgin Mary in elephant dung, with weird sexual imagery is 100% A OK.
Newsflash to Richard Stengel: Burning a a Koran is clearly protected speech under the First Amendment. If you think otherwise, please offer an intellectually honest distinction between burning a Koran and any of the examples listed above. And BTW, only reason why anyone, including you, gives a rat’s a** about someone burning a Koran is because Muslims react violently when their religious sensibilities are offended. You are willing to surrender the First Amendment to Islam. My vote is NFW.
joe forns says
I will burn any and all books that call for the murder of my children and the rape an murder of my wife . Along with any books that say its okay to have sex with animals and dead people . I will also burn any books that teach marrying little girls and being a pedophile is okay . I will also burn any books that tell you to wage endless war on every one who isn’t of your religion or that teaches its okay to kill or enslave people who aren’t practicing your religion . Well how about that the koran just so happens to do all of that . Yet this guy doesn’t say shit about burning bibles or protecting our wives and children from what the book he wants to protect teaches its readers . Maybe we need to buy him a one way ticket to a muslim country of his choice . Where he will most certainly die a horrible death , so he can get first hand knowledge of what he seeks to shove down our throats
s says
oh and I thought he might have wanted to criminalize burning the American Flag.. oh how silly of me…
petervburrows says
Of course the Koran should be burned, one page at a time, in public. For example, read aloud verse 4;34 and ask if there is anybody there who approves of wife beating. When nobody does, ask if that horrid page shouldn’t be burned and then do so. On to the next verse of hatred, and there are so many!
Roger says
There needs to be an all hands-on-deck examination of his total context and what’s he been doing in his life to be attacking our first Amendment. He is just a manifestation of the Communist-Islamic Supremacist ideology and there will be more to sway the minds of Leftist public opinion and voters. We should study Pakistan, Khan, the OIC, the UN, etc to know that these elites want one world government with one unifying religion, Islam, so they can maintain there power and wealth. Do these children and grandchildren of the elites actually produce anything except people who want to live off the rest of us.
tgusa says
“Free speech is what digs the grave for despotism, while suppression of free speech is the trademark of dictatorship. That is why the first priority for all totalitarian regimes was to impose restrictions on freedom of speech.” Alexander Podrabinek
“but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another”
And yet,across the board, from issue to issue, that is the democrat party platform in a nutshell.
Roger says
When two side are polarized, both sides can argue to suppress the speech of the other. Each side will use the power and leverage they possess, to get their way. However, ideologically someone has to start the violent approach and in our current times, the Left supports violence denying Constitutional rights of the conservatives. The Marxist-Islam takeover our public schools and universities bodes for their success over time. If we fail to maintain free speech, we will be submitting to the powers that be. The discussion of free speech must take priority, because all rational discourse requires it. Look at Europe and the few free voices left.
UNCLE VLADDI says
Re: ” it adopt all Sharia blasphemy laws, and persecute non-Muslims accordingly.”
Is English not your native language, Robert?