Our Freedom of Expression Is Killing Us

[Jim Lane]

225. I doubt that that section would apply to the anti-Muslim film.

I am a lawyer, but I haven't researched this point and don't practice in this area. I'll offer you a semi-educated guess: Incitement under this statute probably means that the speaker urged people who agreed with him or her to take violent action, and they did. It probably does not mean that people who disagreed with the speaker took violent action, and that the speaker could therefore be punished. That would be the "heckler's veto". It has sometimes been used as a justification for shutting down speech -- stopping a speaker from speaking because he's getting the crowd so angry at him that violence might result -- but I think even that much is a bad idea. Criminally prosecuting the speaker because the crowd got angry at him is outlandish. It's like saying that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., if he had recovered from his gunshot wounds, could have been prosecuted for inciting James Earl Ray to violence.

I'll admit my bias here, as an agnostic. I should be free to say unkind things about superstitions, even if some superstitious people get upset and even if a few of them get violently upset. (I don't normally refer to Islam, Christianity, and the like as "superstitions" but I'm being deliberately offensive here to make my point.)