An example of how incitement laws can be abused occurred in Sweden where Ake Green, a pastor belonging to the Pentecostal movement was sentenced , to a month in prison, under a law against incitement, after he was found guilty of having offended homosexuals in a sermon (wnd.com 7/8/04).  This is even though he ended his sermon with the statement:

"What these people who live under the slavery of sexual immorality need, is an abundance of grace. We cannot condemn these people. Jesus never belittled anyone. He offered them grace."

   Paul Belien, wrote an article in which he discussed what little protest their was of Ake's sentence. (The Darkest Corners of Our World?- Bush Can Start With Europe's Hate Crime Crackdown, VDARE.com 1/25/05)   He wrote:

The pastor's conviction prompted just one international political reaction. Vladimir Palko, the Interior Minister of Slovakia, Banning Patriotism, frontpagemagazine.com 4/25/2006)

   Internet sites with viewpoints that organizations object too are being blocked with the excuse that they are “hate speech” one example being the Penn State Bans Jewish Student's Anti-Terrorism Exhibit, 4/24/2006):

Pennsylvania State University has canceled an art exhibition about Arab terrorism and the destruction of Jewish historical and religious sites, claiming it does not "promote cultural diversity."

The ten-piece exhibit, by student Josh Stulman, was the result of years of preparation. It was called "Portraits of Terror" and focused on images of Palestinian terrorism, hate-propaganda cartoons printed in PA newspapers and photos of Jewish holy sites destroyed by Muslims.

Just three days before the exhibition was to take place, Stulman received an email from the School of Visual Arts saying that his exhibit on images of terrorism "did not promote cultural diversity" or "opportunities for democratic dialogue" and the display would be canceled, according to the PSU Collegian newspaper.

The accusation that the exhibit does not promote cultural diversity is a way of saying that people who see it might get hostile to Muslims.  The statement that it does not promote opportunities for democratic dialogue is absurd as such an exhibit would certainly promote dialogue.

Incitement laws threaten free speech in Canada.  According to (Banned in the. U.K., frontpagemag.com 10/26/05):

The British libel laws are so destructive that they affect writers and publications who never set foot in Britain and never published there. They are used effectively by Saudi billionaires who can afford the steep legal fees to silence successfully writers and publishers around the world who attempt to expose how the Saudis have funded and continue to fund the spread of Wahhabism, Islamist radicalism, and indoctrination that leads to global terrorism.

   Rachel Ehrenfeld couldn't even attend a meeting she organized in the U.K. on "How to Combat Terror Financing" because if she went she would have been in jeopardy because of British libel laws.  Sheikh Mahfouz sued her for her 2003 book "Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed — and How to Stop It." Rather than contesting the case in Britain, Ms. Ehrenfeld she went to an American court. In June, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously in her favor, finding that if an American writer is sued for libel in a foreign court, that person can appeal to an American court to request that a British decision not be enforceable here.  Cambridge University Press has agreed to destroy all unsold copies of a 2006 book by two American authors, "Alms for Jihad," following a libel action brought against it in England by Sheikh Mahfouz (New York Sun 8/2/07).  Phyllis Chesler wrote an article in frontpagemagazine (The Legal Jihad is Already Underway 8/14/07) about how people are being censored into silence.

   British libel laws have not been used to stop Hawza Ilmiyya, a Shi‘i institution in London from teaching that non-believers are filth.  In fact despite revelations about the school are not even going to stop the British taxpayer from help fund it (Do Conservatives Openly Threaten Sitting Judges? FrontpageMagazine April 15, 2005 wrote:

When they can’t win a debate (can they ever?), leftists deploy what the late novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand called "the argument from intimidation." Instead of trying to refute the other side, they label their opponents' position evil, attribute sinister motives to its adherents, and charge that its proponents are encouraging violence.

Thus, the Left stridently maintains that proponents of immigration reform are inciting violence against illegal aliens. Opponents of racial quotas are "creating a climate of contempt" where hate crimes are more common. Right-to-lifers are to blame for attacks on abortionists. The majority of the American people who are unwilling to allow a runaway judiciary to impose same-sex marriage on the nation were responsible for the death of Matthew Shepard and every other act of violence against gays (including those committed by other homosexuals).

In 1995, William Jefferson Clinton (never one to shy away from an absurdity) suggested that the Oklahoma City bombing was in part the product of conservative talk show hosts complaining about high taxes and excessive regulation -- thereby promoting disdain for Washington.

   The large increase in Islamic populations in Europe has resulted in an attack on free speech in many countries in addition to Sweden.  One example of this is the suspension of Robert Kilroy-Silk a well known TV presenter (Israel National News 1/11/04).  An article of his appeared in the Sunday Express on 1/4/2004.  titled, "We Owe Arabs Nothing."  The article stated,

Apart from oil - which was discovered, is produced and is paid for by the west - what do they contribute? Can you think of anything? Anything really useful? Anything really valuable? Something we really need, could not do without? No, nor can I. What do they think we feel about them? That we adore them for the way they murdered more than 3,000 civilians on September 11 and then danced in the hot, dusty streets to celebrate the murders? That we admire them for being suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors?"

   Pan-Arab media outlets, the Muslim Council of Britain, and other Muslim groups reacted with outrage to Kilroy-Silk's article, and BBC hurried to take Kilroy-Silk's morning TV talk show off the air pending an investigation of his comments. 

   It has even been reported that Kilroy-Silk is facing a police investigation over the issue.  The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) has referred the article to the police to consider whether it might constitute an offense under the Public Order Act.  CRE Chairman Trevor Phillips said, "Given the extreme and violent terms in which Mr. Kilroy-Silk has expressed himself, there is a danger that this might incite some individuals to act against someone who they think is an Arab."

   Azzam al-Tamimi, of the Muslim Council of Britain, even said, "There are suspicions that Kilroy's article is part of an intensive campaign that started with the statements made by Ariel Sharon, the prime minister of the Zionist entity, in which he accused Muslims in the West of being behind growing anti-Semitism."

   It should be noted, of course, that it was the European Union that recently prepared a report on anti-Semitism indicating that Moslem and pro-Palestinian elements are involved in most of the incidents. See "A Survivor of Palestinian Tyranny, frontpagemag.com 10/13/04 ).  Ilana Mercer in an article titled "example of suppression of free speech in England Colin Rose 53 years old, prison officer with 21 years' of impeccable service was fired for making a joke on (11/15/03) about Osama Bin Laden because it could antagonize the large number of Muslims in the British prison and because it was considered racist to express hostility to Bin Laden.

    The Student Union of the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London passed a motion saying that peace requires the elimination of Zionism and racial discrimination in all its forms, and condemning any form of Zionism on campus.  This motion was used for a long time to prevent the creation of an Israel Society, even though Israeli and other students wanted one, on the grounds that it would by definition be a racist society and racism is not permitted on campus. Gavin Gross in an interview with Frontpage Magazine (wnd.com 12/18/04).  There sentence was overturned by a different judge but the financial and emotional cost was very high and they still have to pay off $150,000 in legal fees.  The laws that were used against them have led to many absurd situations in Australia.

    Fear silences those who speak out against Islam.  In one pathetic example of cowardice Scholastic Australia pulled the plug on a children’s thriller called the Army of the Pure after booksellers and librarians said they would not stock the book because the "baddie" was a Muslim terrorist.   According to The Australian 11/25/2006,

This decision is at odds with the recent publication of Richard Flanagan's bestselling The Unknown Terrorist and Andrew McGahan's Underground in which terrorists are portrayed as victims driven to extreme acts by the failings of the West.

The Unknown Terrorist is dedicated to David Hicks and describes Jesus Christ as "history's first ... suicide bomber".

In McGahan's Underground, Muslims are executed en masse or herded into ghettos in an Australia rendered unrecognisable by the war on terror.

Scholastic's general manager, publishing, Andrew Berkhut, said the company had canvassed "a broad range of booksellers and library suppliers", who expressed concern that the book featured a Muslim terrorist.

"They all said they would not stock it," he said, "and the reality is if the gatekeepers won't support it, it can't be published."

   While cowards in the non-Islamic world silence free speech, heroes in the Muslim world speak out.  Abdelkareem Suleiman had the courage criticize Muslims on his web log while living in Egypt.  While blogging about Muslim attacks on Christians that took place in Alexandria in October 2005, Suleiman wrote:

 "The Muslims have taken the mask off to show their true hateful face, and they have shown the world that they are at the top of their brutality, inhumanity, and thievery.”

He also had the courage to write that:

"Some may think that the actions of the Muslims does not represent Islam and has no relationship with the teachings of Islam that was brought by Mohammed fourteen centuries ago, but the truth is that their action is not different from the Islamic teachings in its original form."

And

"professors and sheikhs at Al-Azhar (university) who stand against anyone who thinks freely" would "end up in the dustbin of history".

   Abdelkareem Suleiman was sentenced to Jail.  His web log is www.sandmonkey.org.  A petition seeking his freedom is online for those who wish to sign it.

Why not attack free speech when we know that the speech is wrong?  John Stuart Mill wrote an answer to that question in chapter 2 of "On Liberty" an excerpt of which I quote below:

....The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error...We have now recognized the necessity to the mental well-being of mankind (on which all their other well-being depends) of freedom of opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion, on four distinct grounds; which we will now briefly recapitulate.

First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.

Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.

Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds.

And not only this, but fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but encumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.

    Suppression of free speech allows a government to oppress a people without them even knowing they are oppressed.  Instead they will blame whoever their government wants them to blame and will fight whoever their government wants them to fight.  For example Iraq blamed Kuwait for it's economic troubles.  Iraq with all it's oil could have been a paradise if it hadn't been exploited by the ruling government of Saddam Hussein.  His suppression of free speech enabled him to manipulate Iraqis into invading Kuwait.

    What if a speaker comes who himself silences free speech.  That was the case when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to speak at Columbia on September 24, 2007.  A former hostage of Iran, Barry Rosen, wrote in the New York Post that:

Ahmadinejad is a reprehensible leader who violates free speech in his own country and cracks down on those Iranians who attempt to open up his repressive regime.  He uses speech to spread age-old anti-Semitic stereotypes in the Middle East, denying the existence of Israel, and denies that the Holocaust ever happened…  It's only when Ahmadinejad permits his own people to march and speak freely, that I believe Columbia President Lee Bollinger would be justified in giving the Iranian president an open forum.

    Columbia invited Ahmadinejad but  retracted a speaking invitation to the president of the Minuteman Project, a citizens' group that seeks to secure America's borders from illegal immigrants.  Columbia also bans ROTC from its campus.  This is selective use of the right of free speech.

   Cheol-Hwan Kang spent 10 years in a North Korean prison camp, where he and his family were sent when he was 9. He defected to South Korea in 1992. He wrote (Beyond Nuclear Blackmail, The Washington Post 7/13/03):

Without warning, appeal or reason, any North Korean can be sent to a slave labor camp for such "crimes" as reading a foreign newspaper, listening to a foreign broadcast, complaining about the food situation or refusing an arbitrary request from an official. Some 200,000 North Koreans are held in these camps, in horrifying conditions of torture, harsh labor, hunger and summary execution. In the past three decades, several hundred thousand North Koreans have died in the camps...  What the North Korean government fears most is that its people will awake from their isolation and ignorance. That is why it imprisons those who listen to foreign broadcasts.

   North Korea tests their chemical weapons on such prisoners.   North Korea has become a nuclear threat to its neighbors.   Free speech could potentially undermine the North Korean regime and end that threat.

    Muslims attempt to silence their critics with charges of racism and incitement.  Miss Fallaci wrote a book that is critical of Islam called the Rage and the Pride.  At a speech before the American Enterprise Institute (10/23/02?) she said that critics have attempted to ban the book or have her arrested in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy. The 72-year-old author described these efforts as "intellectual terrorism."  In her prime, Miss Fallaci was famed as a belligerent journalist and argumentative interviewer, who had unprecedented access to the world's most reclusive and wary leaders.  A partisan in the Italian resistance in World War II and a lifelong leftist, she once became so disgusted while interviewing Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that she ripped off her head scarf and threw it in his face.  The act of defiance was considered an unpardonable sin in the ayatollah's Iran.     A lawsuit brought by the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between People, a Muslim human rights group, is demanding that the book be banned in France.  In a ruling that may affect her case, a French court acquitted best-selling French author Michel Houellebecq of charges of racial insult and inciting racial hatred for calling Islam the "dumbest religion."  

    Robert Redeker, was a French public high school teacher who wrote in the newspaper Le Figaro in September 2006 that (French Critic of Islam Flees Threats, The New York Times, 9/29/2006 ):

 Muhammad was "a merciless warlord, a looter, a mass-murderer of Jews and a polygamist." He also called the Koran "a book of incredible violence."   Redeker also compared Islam unfavorably with Christianity and Judaism and criticized the hostile reaction to a recent speech by Pope Benedict XVI that seemed to link Islam and violence.  Redeker wrote:

 "Jesus is a master of love; Muhammad is a master of hatred.  Whereas Judaism and Christianity are religions whose rites forsake violence and remove its legitimacy, Islam is a religion that, in its very sacred text, as much as in some of its everyday rites, exalts violence and hatred. Hatred and violence dwell in the very book that educates any Muslim, the Koran."

Immediately afterward, Redeker began to receive death threats by telephone, e-mail and in the Internet forum. The forum published photos of him, what it said was his home address, directions to his home and his cellphone number.

He said that his wife and their children had also been threatened with death. Asked to describe the sort of threats he had received, Redeker said: "You will never feel secure on this earth. One billion, 300,000 Muslims are ready to kill you." Among the threats was one by a contributor to Al Hesbah, an Internet forum that is said to be a conduit for messages from Al Qaeda and other jihad organizations.

"It is impossible that this day pass without the lions of France punishing him," the Hesbollah contributor wrote. The contributor called on Muslims in France to follow the lead of Muhammad Bouyeri, who murdered the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh after he made a film denouncing the plight of abused Muslim women.

"May God send some lion to cut his head," the contributor said of Redeker, who was described as a "pig."

    Robert Spencer wrote frontpage magazine that, the fine was not £30,000, as Mr. Pipes wrote, but more than £87,000 and, with interest, has since more than doubled, to over $180,000. She wrote:

More importantly, I neither paid a fine nor apologized, and do not intend to do either.
 
I did not even acknowledge the British court or its jurisdiction, since I wrote and published the book in the U.S.
 
I commend Mr. Pipes for choosing bin Mahfouz’ lawsuit against me as an example, since bin Mahfouz has sued more than 30 other writers and publishers, including many U.S. citizens and publications, all of whom apologized and paid fines…
 
Finally, in his conciseness, Mr. Pipes neglected to mention that I have sued bin Mahfouz in U.S. Federal Court to protect my First Amendment rights. Winning this case could discourage further Islamists lawsuits against the press.

 Islamists clearly hope, as Douglas Farah notes, that lawsuits will cause researchers and analysts to "get tired of the cost and the hassle and simply shut up.

Ahmed Mansour was expelled from Egypt's Al-Azhar university because of his moderate beliefs about Islam.  He came to the United States and one day visited a local mosque.  Martin Solomon wrote about what happened next.

In late 2003, after visiting the local Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ahmed Mansour and his wife emerged in what can only be described as a state of shock. Mansour’s wife had attended a religious lesson and Mansour himself browsed the literature on display. According to the affidavit of Dennis Hale (PDF), Episcopal Lay Minister, Boston College Professor and founder of Citizens for Peace and Tolerance, Mansour informed him that “both the religious lesson and the Arabic newsletters inside the mosque were full of hateful references against the West and Jews.” In particular, he noted that the mosque was touting a fund-raising endorsement for their new mosque project featuring infamous Wahabbi cleric and pitch-man for the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheik Yousef Al-Qaradawi.

Shocked to see that the poison he thought he had left behind, the poison he thought was an ocean away but was following him to America, Mansour spoke out about what he had seen.

As thanks for stepping forward, Mansour has found himself a defendant in a wide-ranging defamation lawsuit, a lawsuit that has involved television and print media outlets, activist organizations, and individuals — anyone, it seemed, who had dared speak or repeat anything less than complimentary about the Islamic Society of Boston.