Ireland toys with criminalizing speech: Last week, in Dublin, three young schoolchildren were stabbed by an Algerian-born man. This set off waves of protests, rioting, and looting, mostly attributed to the anti-immigrant far-right by the press (the accuracy of which some Irish political observers dispute).
Unfortunately, "the riots have caused the government to go into warp drive to pass their proposed hate-speech laws," writes National Review's Michael Brendan Dougherty. "Ireland already has laws on the books to stop criminal harassment and laws to stop the incitement of riots. But the proposed hate-speech laws go much, much further, to the point of criminalizing speech that a person has neither uttered nor published. A person could be arrested under these new laws for merely possessing speech, perhaps on his phone, that a judge deems offensive."
