12 No. 57 JUSTICE According to the deniers, the Holocaust is the product of partisan Jewish interests, serving Jewish greed and hunger for power. Some Jews disguised themselves as survivors, carved numbers on their arms and spread atrocious false stories about gas chambers and extermination machinery. It was not Germany that acted in a criminal way. Instead, the greatest criminals are the Jews. The Jews are so evil that they invented this horrific story to gain support around the world and to extort money from Germany. For their extortion and fabrication, for creating the greatest conspiracy of all times, they deserve punishment, possibly even death. Jews are demonic and crooked people who deserve to die for making up this unbelievable tragedy. In effect, the ultimate purpose of Holocaust denial is to legitimize another Holocaust against Jews. Accordingly, Holocaust denial can be seen as the last stage of the Holocaust and it is the inception of a second stage of a vile bigotry that undermines Jewish existence in the world. Those who deny the Holocaust are antisemitic. It is demeaning to deny the Holocaust, for it is to deny history, reality, and suffering. Holocaust denial might create a climate of xenophobia that is detrimental to democracy. It generates hate through the rewriting of history in a vicious way that portrays Jews as the anti-Christ, as destructive forces that work against civilization. Furthermore, hateful messages desensitize members of the public on very important issues while silencing others. Hate speech builds a sense of possible acceptability of hate and resentment of the other that might be more costly than the cost of curtailing speech. And hate speech, in its various forms, is harmful not only because it offends but because it potentially silences the members of target groups and interferes with their right to equal respect and treatment. Hateful remarks might reduce the target group members to speechlessness or shock them into silence. The notion of silencing and inequality suggests great injury, emotional upset, fear and insecurity that target group members might experience. Hate might undermine the individual’s self-esteem and standing in the community.14 Drawing the Line Deciphering what constitutes hate is not always simple. In my book, Confronting the Internet's Dark Side: Moral and Social Responsibility on the Free Highway,15 I argue that on the one hand, statements that assert “Jews are money hungry,” “gays are immoral,” “Israel is an apartheid state” and calls to boycott Israel16 are all unpleasant, yet legitimate speech. On the other hand, calls that provoke violence against target groups fall under the definition of incitement; here the context is harmful speech that is directly linked to harmful action. By “hate speech” I refer to malicious speech that is aimed at victimizing and dehumanizing the targets, who are often (but not always) vulnerable minorities. Hate speech is fuzzier than incitement and concretely more damaging than advocacy, which is speech designed to promote ideas. Hate speech creates a virulent atmosphere of “double victimization”: the speakers are under attack/misunderstood/ marginalized/delegitimized by powerful forces (governments, conspiratorial organizations), and the answer to their problem is to victimize the target group. Their victimization is the speakers’ salvation. In 1996, the United States accounted for 66% of the world’s Internet users, while in 2015 the American market was reduced to 9.3 percent.17 Still, the American influence on the Internet is very significant. As the United States is taking the most liberal view in the world on the scope of freedom of expression, hate speech is shielded under the First Amendment. There is no basic disagreement that hate speech is vile and offensive. Most people believe it is. Still, it is a price that Americans are willing to pay to preserve and protect free speech. Generally speaking, hate is derived from one form or another of racism, which has facilitated and caused untold amounts of human suffering. It is an evil that has acquired catastrophic proportions in all parts of the world. Notorious examples include Europe under Nazism, and since then Yugoslavia, Cambodia, South Africa and 14. See Gordon W. Allport, THE NATURE OF PREJUDICE (1954); Richard Moon, THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTION OF FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION, at 127 (2000); Phyllis B. Gerstenfeld, Diana R. Grant and Chau-Pu Chiang, Hate Online: A Content Analysis of Extremist Internet Sites, 3(1) ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL ISSUES AND PUBLIC POLICY 29-44 (2003); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, UNDERSTANDING WORDS THAT WOUND (2004); Raphael Cohen-Almagor, Harm Principle, Offense Principle, and Hate Speech, in Raphael Cohen-Almagor, SPEECH, MEDIA, AND ETHICS: THE LIMITS OF FREE EXPRESSION, at 3-23 (2005); Jessie Daniels, CYBER RACISM: WHITE SUPREMACY ONLINE AND THE NEW ATTACK ON CIVIL RIGHTS (2009); Abraham H. Foxman and Christopher Wolf, VIRAL HATE (2013). 15. Raphael Cohen-Almagor, CONFRONTING THE INTERNET'S DARK SIDE: MORALAND SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY ON THE FREE HIGHWAY (2015). 16. Boycott Israeli Apartheid page, available at www.facebook. com/kaiser.hafeez1?fref=ts (last visited Oct. 19, 2015). 17. World Internet Users and 2015 Population Stats, http:// www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
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