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.