Urbana City Council Unlikely to Censor anti-Semitic speech on UPTV

If you think that anti-semitism is on the fringe of our society, you aren't looking much. Maybe in terms of well educated people it is. But well educated people know not to listen to Brumleve's trash diatribes. The concern is the people it will influence: people ignorant on Jewish culture, religion, traditions.  With freedom of speech he is entitled to voice his own opinions, but he isn't entitled to his own facts. You think they would hesitate to remove someone spewing racial hate at black people from the programming? I'm fairly certain that black-centered racism is a one way ticket off the air no matter what kind of programming it is, public or otherwise.

It's easy for people to sit around and defen his freedom of speech. Especially if it only impacts you in a principled manner. Think about the holocaust survivors in your community. How does it affect them? How about young children in schools, jewish children who's peers could see this. Parents have enough to censor with programming unsuitable for kids from networks like mtv. Shouldn't they be able to find comfort in the fact that their community programming promotes the kind of quality they can rest easy knowing their kids watch?

They say freedom of speech ends when it promotes violence, but who knows what kind of information it will take to invoke a hate crime from someone exposed to this propoganda?

The last time this country stood by while someone exercised their hateful "freedom of speech" regarding the jews in this manner, things escalated. Perhaps you've forgotten but it was called the Holocaust. And six million jews died.

The Hillel does  not go more than 18 months without being defamed, vandalized or graffited. I find that to be evidence of latent anti semitism. Perhaps that's what you call friendly relations? Also, mass public demand of a Holocaust is not the singular mark of latent anti-semitism. You don't have to demand to burn all the homosexuals to prove latent homophobia.

And regardless, this isn't defended by freedom of speech. If you will turn your attention to the following (source http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment01/) :

"Group Libel, Hate Speech .--In Beauharnais v. Illinois, 104  relying on dicta in past cases, 105  the Court upheld a state group libel law which made it unlawful to defame a race or class of people. The defendant had been convicted under this statute after he had distributed a leaflet, a part of which was in the form of a petition to his city government, taking a hard-line white supremacy position and calling for action to keep African Americans out of white neighborhoods. Justice Frankfurter for the Court sustained the statute along the following reasoning. Libel of an individual, he established, was a common-law crime and was now made criminal by statute in every State in the Union. These laws raise no constitutional difficulty because libel is within that class of speech which is not protected by the First Amendment. If an utterance directed at an individual may be the object of criminal sanctions, no good reason appears to deny a State the power to punish the same utterances when they are directed at a defined group, ''unless we can say that this is a willful and purposeless restriction unrelated to the peace and well-being of the State.'' 106  The Justice then reviewed the history of racial strife in Illinois to conclude that the legislature could reasonably fear substantial evils from unrestrained racial utterances. Neither did the Constitution require the State to accept a defense of truth, inasmuch as historically a defendant had to show not only truth but publication with good motives and for justifiable ends. 107  ''Libelous utterances not being within the area of constitutionally protected speech, it is unnecessary . . . to consider the issues behind the phrase 'clear and present danger.''' 108Beauharnais has little continuing vitality as precedent. Its holding, premised in part on the categorical exclusion of defamatory statements from First Amendment protection, has been substantially undercut by subsequent developments, not the least of which are the Court's subjection of defamation law to First Amendment challenge and its ringing endorsement of ''uninhibited, robust, and wide-open'' debate on public issues in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. 109 In R. A. V. v. City of St. Paul, the Court, in an opinion by Justice Scalia, explained and qualified the categorical exclusions for defamation, obscenity, and fighting words. These categories of speech are not ''entirely invisible to the Constitution,'' but instead ''can, consistently with the First Amendment, be regulated because of their constitutionally proscribable content.'' 110 Content discrimination unrelated to that ''distinctively proscribable content'' runs afoul of the First Amendment. Therefore, the city's bias-motivated crime ordinance, interpreted as banning the use of fighting words known to offend on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, or gender, but not on such other possible bases as political affiliation, union membership, or homosexuality, was invalidated for its content discrimination.".... So, basically only because of a technicality is there not a precedent that would eliminate these messages today.I hope that clears up some of your questions. Perhaps  you haven't lived as a Jewish minority in a small town, so you haven't encountered anti semitism, but please don't be so naive as to pretend that we as a culture have eliminated it. 

While I cannot present you with a full list of suggestions for city council, I think it certainly speaks for itself that there have been similar issues brought to court and it has been confirmed that defamatory speech is not protected. Additionally,  my argument is not so much regarding exact regulation, but one of frustration that city council was so hasty to dismiss this issue as protected by free speech, without considering the ramifications. Though it may be a slippery slope to put up red tape censoring a show, in some cases it is the duty of council to realize that there is enough at stake that it may be time for such action. It may be the more difficult thing to do, but it would certainly be the right one. It's always a lot easier to argue on principles without considering the real effects on people and why sometimes there is a difference between what is legal and what is ethical. Urbana is a great community and should strive to go a bit beyond just upholding basic law, but making it a friendly and welcoming place for all of its citizens.

Perhaps it would also serve my purpose to explain that I am a political refugee of a country (Russia) where I've already seen the kind of effects hateful messages can have for Jewish people. It certainly was not easy leaving Russia in the early 90's to come to America. We went to the American embassy with a picture that said it all. A building where several jewish families lived, graffitied with a huge Star of David. The embassy saw this and it likely helped grant us permission to enter the United States. So in 1993 a representative of this country took a stand for my family and said that we should not have to live in a country that treats us with such hate.  Allowing this man to go on is not a step forward for free speech, it is a step back for our ethical and sociopolitical climate.

As far as a regulation...we can start with the fact that taxpayers' money should not go to support a public access channel that accepts submissions with defamatory speech. The jewish citizens of our community that pay taxes shouldn't have to watch that money fund something so ignorant and hateful.