May his memory be a democratic blessing

May his memory be a democratic blessing

By Gil Troy
Canadian Jewish News
March 19, 2006

Headlines like “British Historian David Irving jailed for denying the Holocaust” make me cringe. Irving uses historians’ tools to give lies a seemingly authoritative veneer. But does such despicable conduct deserve three years in an Austrian jail? At a time when enlightened democrats should be defending newspapers’ rights to publish Danish cartoons, even if some Muslims find them offensive, imprisoning anyone for a thought crime is foolish. Ideas – be they noble or noxious – cannot be jailed.

For three weeks this winter, while Muslims rioted against cartoons and Irving was being sentenced, a gang of mostly Muslim kidnappers in France tortured to death a 23-year-old cellphone salesman. During some ransom calls, relatives heard Ilan Halimi scream as his torturers read verses from the Qur’an and burned him. Skittish French police, press and politicians first characterized the crime as financial, not anti-Semitic, even though the kidnappers assumed Halimi’s modest relatives could meet their demands because “Jews are rich.” One kidnapper later admitted: “We put our cigarettes out on him because he was a Jew.”

The Austrian authorities’ heavy hand and the French authorities’ initial neglect highlight the difficulties in fighting poisonous ideas. In our age of big government, hate crime legislation seems a natural response. It clarifies society’s moral stance, gives leaders political cover, and seeks to scare bigots. But criminalizing thought violates one of free societies’ central building blocks. It is self-defeating to sacrifice our faith in liberty to fight those who violate that faith.

Yes, enlightened secular democracies require leaps of faith. We choose to believe that the people can pick better leaders than insiders could. We choose to believe that the chaos of maximizing freedoms promotes more individual happiness and fairness than more orderly, centralized, decision making and standard-setting by elites. And we choose to believe that the free marketplace of ideas can best distinguish workable, noble ideals from outmoded reprehensible prejudices.

Hate crime laws are lazy, undermining that sifting process. Does anyone need the Austrian government – which has denied its own people’s complicity in Nazi crimes – to teach that denying the murder of six million people is illogical and immoral? And while the French establishment’s resistance to recognize Halimi’s kidnapping as a hate crime frustrated his family and offends those committed to combating this evil by exposing it honestly, French hate crime legislation was no more effective in inhibiting the barbarians than were French laws prohibiting kidnapping.

Law is best at regulating deeds not thoughts, punishing actions not motives. Civil society must tackle more abstract challenges of fostering openness, acceptance, civility and equality. The response to Halimi’s murder should be humanistic, not legalistic, and democratic, not autocratic. We need mass outrage, educational initiatives, social sanctions, enlightened debates, sweeping denunciations, not thicker law books.

Muslim clerics, French leaders, local celebrities, state educators, and parents should use their smarts and moral power to root out this rot from French society – and other corners of the world – as part of a broader assault on intolerance. European leaders should connect the dots and shun Hamas representatives until that organization repudiates its anti-Semitic, anti-Western, terrorist-romanticizing ideology. Only bold steps will change attitudes toward Jews and other targeted groups, especially in France where the New York Times reported that one Christian charity distributes free pork meals to serve “their” poor people, not Jews or Muslims.

Last month, hundreds of thousands of people in Paris, along with others in smaller rallies in Marseille and elsewhere, showed that they could meet this challenge peacefully, without rioting. Muslim, Jewish, and Christian clerics marched together. “ILAN TORTURED, FRANCE WOUNDED,” one banner declared, while protesters cried, “Vive la France” and “la Justice,” thus transforming the fight against anti-Semitism from a Jewish issue into a more universal French and human issue.

The protesters chose to believe that their voices, passion, and idealism could change hearts and minds. The marchers joined a proud, historic democratic parade, trusting vision, not violence, and liberty, not law, to help us all, individually and together, create the kind of world where a David Irving would be shamed and shunned, not jailed, into silence, and an Ilan Halimi could have lived the long, happy life he deserved.

May Halimi’s memory be a blessing and spur all of us to embrace the kinds of democratic ideals his murderers should have learned at home, in school, in the mosque and on the street.

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and the author, most recently, of Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today, which is being re-released this spring in a revised and expanded third edition.

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