Legal Constraints on the New Anti-Semitism
Thomas S. Kuttner · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2001
H olocaust denial is often termed ‘the new anti-Semitism’, but it takes only a cursory glance to see that it reeks of the old. The same tiresome litany — the Jew as fiend, the Jew as conspirator, the Jew as a canker, exploitative, amoral, depraved and always foreign — in short, all that led Hannah Arendt to identify anti-Semitism as ‘an outrage to common sense’ 2 is to be found there. Any society in which this outrage is perpetrated must respond forcefully, at least to hold it in check if not to blot it out. But how? Some have advocated expansion of the common law torts of libel and defamation — a project judges have not embraced, nor generally legislatures on the civil side. Rather, in the common law world, the instrument to which the state has traditionally turned to curb asocial behaviour that threatens public order is the criminal law. This is the case in Canada whose Criminal Code 3 contains three offences that deal directly or indirectly with what is compendiously termed ‘hate propaganda’: advocating genocide; 4 public incitement of hatred likely to lead to a breach of the peace; 5 wilful promotion of hatred other than in private conversation; 6 and until recently a fourth, spreading false news. 7 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.