Philly buses ordered to accept ads featuring Hitler & 1941 Palestinian leader

[Jim Lane]

110. That argument is called "heckler's veto" and it's generally been rejected.

If the incitement to violence is immediate and comes about because people agree with the speaker, then the speech can be limited, to preserve public order. If there's an angry mob gathering outside the house of a professor who's written pro-Palestinian articles, and Pam Geller is up on a soapbox screaming about Arabs and Hitler and whatnot, and one can reasonably see that her diatribe might cause people to attack the house and injure the professor or others in the house, then she's probably outside the protection of the First Amendment.

Suppose, however, that she sets up her soapbox in a public park. There's nobody nearby being directly vilified. Nevertheless, many of the people who walk by and hear her are outraged by her bigotry. Among the people who stop to listen, there's a growing mood to target her -- to rush her, push her off the soapbox, forcibly silence her, injure or even kill her. If you accept that as a sufficient basis for suppressing her speech, then you're saying that people who disagree with a speaker (including a bus ad) can silence it just by credibly threatening violent retaliation.

I'm assuming your comment means that you're addressing a situation like the second one -- people who are upset by the ad target the bus and possibly its passengers. If, instead, you mean that people seeing the ad might be persuaded by it and might attack innocent Arabs, the answer is that any possible incitement is just not direct and immediate enough. When DUers denounce police for killing an unarmed black, it's conceivable that our posts, by lessening respect for the police, could increase the chance of anti-police violence. That possible causal link, however, is too tenuous to support suppression of the speech.