Terrorist attacks, and the emotions they spawn, almost always prompt calls for fundamental legal rights to be curtailed in the name of preventing future attacks. The formula by now is routine: The victims of the horrific violence are held up as proof that there must be restrictions on advocating whatever ideology motivated the killer to act. In 2006, after a series of attacks carried out by Muslims, Republican Newt Gingrich called for “a serious debate about the First Amendment” so that “those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who would target civilians are, in fact, subject to a totally different set of rules.”

Of Islamic radicals, the former U.S. speaker of the House argued that they do not believe in the Constitution or free speech, and the U.S. should thus “use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people.” In an essay defending his remarks, Gingrich argued that “free speech should not be an acceptable cover for people who are planning to kill other people who have inalienable rights of their own,” adding that “the fact is not all speech is permitted under the Constitution.” The white nationalist violence at Charlottesville has led to similar arguments. While polling data and anecdotal evidence have long shown an erosion in the belief in free speech among younger Americans, including those who identify as liberals or leftists, Charlottesville has prompted a full-scale debate about the merits of preserving the right to express “hate speech,” however that might be defined. An excellent Guardian article on Monday by Julia Carrie Wong examines the implications of the growing liberal/left desire for “hate speech” to be restricted — either by the state wielding the power of “hate speech” laws or by private tech executives prohibiting the use of their platforms to disseminate what they regard as “hateful ideas.” As Wong correctly notes, “Many Americans increasingly favor European-style limitations on hate speech.” Numerous op-eds and blogposts have been published recently explicitly calling for such restrictions. As a result, it is well worth examining how those “European-style limitations” operate in practice, and against whom they are applied. Many Americans who long for Europe’s hate speech restrictions assume that those laws are used to outlaw and punish expression of the bigoted ideas they most hate: racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny. Often, such laws are used that way. There are numerous cases in western Europe and Canada of far-right extremists being arrested, fined, or even jailed for publicly spouting that type of overt bigotry. But hate speech restrictions are used in those countries to suppress, outlaw, and punish more than far-right bigotry. Those laws have frequently been used to constrain and sanction a wide range of political views that many left-wing censorship advocates would never dream could be deemed “hateful,” and even against opinions which many of them likely share. France is probably the most extreme case of hate speech laws being abused in this manner. In 2015, France’s highest court upheld the criminal conviction of 12 pro-Palestinian activists for violating restrictions against hate speech. Their crime? Wearing T-shirts that advocated a boycott of Israel — “Long live Palestine, boycott Israel,” the shirts read — which, the court ruled, violated French law that “prescribes imprisonment or a fine of up to $50,000 for parties that ‘provoke discrimination, hatred or violence toward a person or group of people on grounds of their origin, their belonging or their not belonging to an ethnic group, a nation, a race or a certain religion.'”

In the UK, “hate speech” has come to include anyone expressing virulent criticism of UK soldiers fighting in war. In 2012, a British Muslim teenager, Azhar Ahmed, was arrested for committing a “racially aggravated public order offence.” His crime? After British soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, he cited on his Facebook page the countless innocent Afghans killed by British soldiers and wrote: “All soldiers should DIE & go to HELL! THE LOWLIFE F*****N SCUM! gotta problem go cry at your soldiers grave & wish him hell because that where he is going.” The police spokesperson justifying the teenager’s arrest said: “He didn’t make his point very well, and that is why he has landed himself in bother.” So those of you craving European-style hate speech laws want to empower the police — and then judges — to decide when a point is sufficiently ill-made and offensive to justify arrest. Ahmed escaped a jail term, and was ultimately given “merely” a fine and community service, but only “because he quickly took down his unpleasant posting and tried to apologise to those he offended.”

Writing about the Ahmed case in The Independent, journalist Jerome Taylor documented how “hate speech” laws in the UK have rapidly expanded to include any opinions deemed upsetting: “In recent years we have increasingly begun to criminalise the offensive, a precedent that should be deeply worrying for anyone who cares about the importance of free speech.” In The Guardian, Richard Seymour went further and said that “Ahmed is the latest victim of a concerted effort to redefine racism as ‘anything that could conceivably offend white people.'” This is how hate speech laws are used in virtually every country in which they exist: not only to punish the types of right-wing bigotry that many advocates believe will be suppressed, but also a wide range of views that many on the left believe should be permissible, if not outright accepted. Of course that’s true: Ultimately, what constitutes “hate speech” will be decided by majorities, which means that it is minority views that are vulnerable to suppression. In 2010, a militant atheist was given a six-month suspended sentence for leaving anti-Christian and anti-Islam fliers in a religious room of the Liverpool airport; according to the BBC, “jurors found him guilty of causing religiously aggravated intentional harassment.” In Singapore, “hate speech” laws are routinely used to punish human rights activists who criticize Christianity, or Muslims who have defended or promoted sermons from imams deemed too critical of other religions. Cases in Turkey are common where citizens have been prosecuted under hate speech laws for criticizing government officials or the military. Radical imams are prosecuted in Europe if they are too strident in their support for sharia law or their defense of violence against western aggression. A leftist activist in France was convicted and fined for insulting former French President Nicolas Sarkozy by holding a sign that said “get lost, jerk”; ironically, those were the exact words Sarkozy himself uttered when a citizen refused to shake his hand at a public fair (the European Court of Human Rights ultimately overturned the Frenchman’s conviction). In 2013, as Salon’s Nico Lang reported, “judges fined Laure Pora, the former head of the Paris chapter of ACT UP, 2,300 euros for using the term [“homophobe”] during a 2013 demonstration against the pro-life group Lejeune Foundation and La Manif Pour Tous.” A 2015 report from Freedom House documented that “internet freedom around the world has declined for the fifth consecutive year, with more governments censoring information of public interest.” Specifically, “state authorities have also jailed more users for their online writings.” The report documented that free speech protections are declining in roughly half the countries they surveyed. “The most significant declines occurred in Libya, Ukraine, and France,” where “standing declined primarily due to problematic policies adopted in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack, such as restrictions on content that could be seen as ‘apology for terrorism,’ prosecutions of users, and significantly increased surveillance.” Earlier this week, the German government ordered an influential left-wing website shut down on the ground that it “stirred up” unrest at the G-20 summit in Hamburg and was used to incite violence. Calling the site the “most influential online platform for vicious left-wing extremists in Germany,” officials said “the website had referred to police officers as ‘pigs’ and ‘murderers,’ and had featured instructions for creating Molotov cocktails.” Though the site was ordered to shut down under laws banning illegal associations rather than “hate speech” laws, the principle is the same, part of a general German trend in which “the authorities have taken action against hate speech and incitements to violence.”