cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/26284554
By Syma Mohammed
Published date: 20 February 2025 21:44 GMTAlex Tyrrell, party leader of the Green Party of Quebec, who accompanied Engler to the police station on Thursday, spoke to the Middle East Eye about Engler’s arrest.
“I think it’s a shocking attack on free expression and democratic rights and criticism of Israel in Canada - a country that’s supposed to be a free, democratic society. We’re supposed to speak out about a genocide," Tyrrel told MEE.
Intolerance, in itself, is not a matter of perspective. It’s a clear criteria.
That doesn’t mean we can always clearly determine what speech is or is not intolerant. It often relies on gauging intent, which is difficult to do. The example you cited would be a judgement call for the courts; it very likely does not cross the line into intolerant speech, but if you could clearly demonstrate antisemitic intent on the part of the author, which would require other overtly antisemitic statements or actions, then you might be able to prove a case.
And this is nothing new. The law juggles questions of intent all the time. In cases of doubt, we err on the side of innocence. This is all very well trod territory. Why is it acceptable to assess the question of intent when judging between murder and manslaughter, but suddenly that becomes an unacceptable complication when we’re talking about what is or isn’t hate speech?
How is it a clear criteria? You haven’t defined what you mean by intolerance
From one of my previous comments in this exact conversation:
In other words, we don’t defend the right of Nazis to be Nazis because ultimately their goal is to strip rights and freedoms away from other people. Even if they’re not out in the streets lynching black people and Jews, they are actively working towards destroying the place our tolerant society holds for people who are different from them. Extending tolerance to their speech leads to less tolerance in society as a whole.
Conversely, we do not treat Pride parades as intolerant speech, no matter how offensive they are to Nazis, because their goal is not to reduce the tolerance of tolerant people. Nazis don’t get to be protected from other people’s intolerance of them - they don’t get to cry foul when someone says “Punch Nazis” - because their feelings of offence stem from their intolerance, and the intolerance others have towards them is a reaction to their intolerance.
In other words, if Nazis didn’t believe in a hateful ideology, no one would hate them. Whereas Nazis will hate black people no matter what black people do or don’t do.
You can’t define intolerance by defining tolerance as being intolerant of intolerance. You just made a loop
Tolerance is by its nature defined as the inverse of intolerance, and vice versa. That’s what the “in” at the start of “intolerance” means. They are each defined as the negation of the other.
A tolerant society is one that believes all people have a fundamental right to exist and live freely. It’s really that simple. Intolerance is therefore that belief that some people do not have a fundamental right to exist and live freely.