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: