While I can not take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party”-Senator Joseph McCarthy

Where have you been on the Internet lately?  What petitions have you signed on the Internet?  What Facebook Groups or Twitter lists name you?  The days of the Red Scare and McCarthyism are here again in the form of the endless and timeless bounds of the Internet and the mainstream media’s ability to Google your name.   In the 50’s, the organizations you belonged to and the people with whom you associated could get you labeled “a Red.” In the 21^st Century, you can get tagged for associating with the wrong people or from the web sites you visit, or the Facebook groups you join.  The new McCarthyism is upon us.

When I think about every petition I have signed via the internet,  or every blog I have commented upon, I sometimes worry that somewhere in the dark corner of the Internet, an opinion lurks in internet infamy  that will someday come back to haunt me.  I only have to Google my own name to get hundreds of pages of references to Brian Cuban. Will signing a PETA petition label me a left wing radical? Fortunately, I have no plans to run for elected office, so only so much damage can be done.  If I did have such plans, the mainstream media would have a gold mine of all the mentions of my name, or of my family name, on the Web.  I’m sure that there is something out there to label me a socialist, a Hamas sympathizer, or someone who is soft on terrorism because I have written on Islamophobia. I don’t even consider myself to be on the left whatever that means.  I even voted for John McCain in the 2008 presidential election.

The concept behind McCarthyism was around long before Fox’s Glenn Beck labeled the 2010 head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House, Cass Sunstein “the most dangerous man in America” but it has been taken to a new level by cable media and internet pundits to be heard above the screaming.

With regard to Senator McCarthy and his infamous Wheeling, West Virginia “I have a list” speech, we know now no such list existed. The piece of paper Senator McCarthy held in his hand had nothing to do with spies or Communists. He might as well have held up a restaurant menu. Was that piece of paper all he held in his hand?  He held so much more in intangibles that won the day to justify fear of our neighbor. He held the trust of an elected official. He played the specter of “I know something you don’t know,” which is a statement that even when simply implied but left unstated, captivates the human desire to know.  His outrageous statements had the sheen of credibility because no one in his position would say such a thing unless it was true.  In other words, coming from a demagogue like McCarthy, his statements had the credibility of the unbelievable. The desire to want to believe those we are supposed to trust overwhelms the logical senses, and we say “there must be something to it”

How many times have we listened to a claim and said “That has to be true, no one would say it if it wasn’t.”  Such a reaction is not confined to the days of the Red Scare simply because it is a natural and normal human response.  How many readers believed Glenn Beck when he said he had evidence that President Barrack Obama was “ building “concentration camps”?  Beck claimed  he had conducted “research on” the so-called concentration camps being built by the Obama White House as part of a conspiracy to establish totalitarian rule in America. He claimed that he could not “debunk them.” He stated, “If you have any fear that we might be heading toward a totalitarian state, look out.  There is something happening in our country and it ain’t good.”

How different is the above from simply stating, “I have here in my hand a list of 200 Muslims I suspect of engaging in terrorism.”  What sort of reaction would that trigger today?  Would anyone in the mainstream media be so irresponsible as Senator McCarthy to make such a statement if no such list existed or the list had not been value checked?  Make the comparison. Beck holds a trusted position as a news commentator.  When Fox News pundit Glenn Beck makes an outrageous claim, we think that outrageous claim must have some truth to it, or why else would someone trusted make it?  How does this differentiate Beck’s tactics from the tactics of Joseph McCarthy?  Like the fraud of McCarthy’s list, it turned out that Beck completely lacked evidence or common sense to support his claims.  That did not stop his allegations from being picked up by bloggers and tweeters spreading the news with an air of conspiracy credibility until Beck was forced to retract as the ridiculous nature of the statement became clear.

When Beck called Sunstein the most dangerous man in the world, he went on to further employ “McCarthyesque” tactics and also sounding eerily like hate radio priest Charles Coughlin when he implored viewers who were ‘watching the capitol” to tune into his program because he had done his homework and they had not, further alleging that Sunstein represented history that we did not want to repeat.  Another instance of a symbolic red baiting claim that Beck “had a list” and information that only Beck was privy to so he should be trusted to the exclusion of those without the information.  Beck went even further with Sunstein by incorporating Nazi Germany imagery when he compared Sunstein’s office to the Reichstag and referring to his beliefs “awfully Nazi.”

The final quote from McCarthy’s speech has become a microcosm of the battles fought in the media and fought between left and right wing loyalties in the 21^st Century:

“Today we are engaged in an all out battle between Communistic atheism and Christianity.  The modern champions of Communism have selected this as the time, and ladies and gentlemen the chips are down, they truly are”

Today, Joseph McCarthy would have simply tweeted his allegations.  Lives are easily ruined and conspiracies are born in 140 characters or less.

In 1978, a Jewish lawyer named David Goldberger defended the rights of American Nazis to march through the streets of Skokie, Ill.  Skokie was and is home to thousands of Holocaust survivors.

A Jew defending Nazis?  Why?  Not only did he and the ACLU defend the Nazis, he won.  The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the right of the National Socialist Party of America to march . The Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal, validating the developing national policy that even the most unpopular of speech in the most unpopular of circumstances merited First Amendment protection.

What Professor Goldberg knew and defended is what many in this country do not realize, which is that the United States of America stands alone in its unbridled protection of free speech which includes the most unpopular and the vilest hate speech.  You would be hard pressed to find any other country that does not criminalize hate speech in some form, including countries we would consider “free” by our standards.

How a particular country views hate speech depends on its history and social norms that are each distinct and unique.  The United States is no exception.   Each country also defines hate speech according to its own values. What might get you a slap on the wrist in one country may result in stiff prison sentences in another.  On that note it has been interesting to follow what has been going on in Kenya.  They have been engaged in massive crackdown under their hate speech laws.  Many there view  hate speech as an affront to all social norms and values.  The view was stated succinctly in an article entitled: “Purveyors Of Hate Speech Are Kenya’s Enemies”

“So, why is it so hard for some media houses to spot the phenomenon, recognise(sic) it for the malignancy and threat to civilised(sic) society that it is, isolate it and only report or comment on it in the most circumspect manner, the way profanities are rendered in print in polite society?”

It goes on to state:

“Hate speech is the precursor of hate action and the herald of attempts at, or actual, genocide”.

How do these opinions and philosophies translate to the almost absolute freedom we have in the United States to spew hatred including racial epitaphs and general intolerance of those we do not agree with, pray with or look like.  Not very well.  We can try to regulate violent actions but we simply can not universalize a moral compass where speech is concerned.  It is an impossibility where the ability to engage in unpopular speech is so tightly interwoven into the inception and growth of the United States as a nation.  It is not that we have not sporadically tried to do so.   The Supreme Court has not always been sympathetic to free speech.

What is unfortunate is that the freedoms we enjoy today to belly up to extremes has resulted in a lack of meaning to the rhetoric. Hate speech with meaning is not always hate speech. It is the backbone of government accountability.  In the 21st Century however ,hate speech as a term of battle has been thrown around so freely that we simply shrug it off as pundit putridity.  Words like Sedition, Insurrection, Treason and Terrorism have become watered down to the extent that they no longer emotionally register.  They have become nothing more than terms of art expected and shrugged off.  What we are left with is a lot of doggies barking about nothing in-particular, trying to see who can bark the loudest.  The cure is not to muzzle the dogs.  It is to teach our children not to feed the animals. That is where the freedom for the thought that we hate is unleashed.  That is where  battle against hate speech begins.

What is hate speech?

Is it when the Drudge Report headlines with “Obama Goes Street”?  A headline that some thought played on racial stereotypes?  Maybe it’s when former White House correspondent and Hearst News reporter Helen Thomas recommends that the Jews “get the hell out of Palestine”.  She took  it a step further by recommending that the Jews go back to Germany or even Poland where over 3 million Jews were  murdered in the Holocaust.  Many Jews thought this was hate speech. Many others thought it was benign honesty.  What about denial of the Holocaust in itself?  As a Jew, I consider it a form of anti-Semitic hate speech.  Most Jews would agree with me.  There are those, however, who consider it legitimate educational debate.  Taking it a step further, many  Jews consider the debate hate speech in itself.   All are certainly 1st Amendment protected rhetoric.  In the United States, we enjoy the 1st Amendment freedom to engage in both benign and extreme rhetoric like no other country in the world.  This freedom provides the perfect “Incubator” for hate speech to spread without restraint in all forms of media.

While cable pundits mesmerize Baby Boomers and Generation X,  Facebook Groups, YouTube videos, digital hate games and Twitter accounts dominate the recreational time of our youth. They are also the primary tools of spreading hatred and recruiting “haters” in the 21^st Century, providing a medium that has become an “Internet Hate Incubator.”  Exploiting these new mediums of expression and information distribution, and further incubating them by legitimatizing hate speech by main-stream media on both the left and right.

The tentacles of extreme expression reach in many other directions.  In 2010, a proposed Muslim Center to be built within the shadow of Ground Zero generated a firestorm of controversy.  I supported it and still do.  Many however, view it as an expression of  hatred towards Americans and the United States as a whole.   A slap in the face to the victims of 9/11.  Strong evidence, that almost a decade later, hate still runs deep for an entire ethnic group as a result of the actions of a few.  Blogs and cable news rhetoric fuel this hatred.  Bringing like minded people together to incubate it to a boiling that will surely, once again erupt into violence against innocents.

The rise of hate speech in cable news media and hatred spreading virally on the Internet has progressed in lock-step with the Internet’s advance as a medium of expression and news distribution, taking advantage of each advance to spread their message of hatred more quickly, efficiently and with reach never before imagined.  The days of American History X-style playground rants and leaflet handouts have left for all time, replaced by  cable media and web sites able to reach beyond the playground into homes, bedrooms and the mind.

Hate speech has now gone well beyond standard applications of rhetoric.  Growing up as a Jew, I have become all too familiar with the words, “Kike,” “Heeb” and the like.  Other racial and ethnic slurs such as “Nigger, Spic, Towel-head” to name a few are the “standardized” weapons of hate speech many experience daily and we all read about.  The rules of the game are, however, changing. If someone calls a person of Muslim descent a “Radical Muslim” or Terrorist, is that hate speech?  In the 21st Century and beyond, the Media and Internet Hate Incubator has made it much more subjective.  Much like the standards of obscenity spelled out in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), when Justice Potter Stewart added:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

Like pornography, the definition of hate speech within a person’s values and  life experiences is subjective. In 2010, a worldwide uproar occurred over a day on Facebook dedicated to drawing the prophet Muhammad.   The Facebook user posted a group entitled: “Draw Muhammad Day”.  The group encouraged other Facebook users to draw a picture of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.  The Islamic faith prohibits depicting the prophet.  In response to this “day” on Facebook, the countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh temporarily blocked country access to the social networking site. There were protests around the world. A social media saturation of protest and counter-protest. I do not find it offensive to draw or see a drawing of the Prophet Muhammad.  Unless you are Muslim, you probably do not either.  An example of of subjective hate speech.

What is Cable news media and  social networking sites to do with this subjective hate speech that may offend a portion of its user base?   An even larger portion of its user base may consider the same content as within the bounds of free speech and resist its removal. Defining hate on a global scale is no easy task and not everyone will be happy regardless of the direction taken.