Is freedom of speech worth dying for?

On January 16, 1969, Jan Palach, a 23-year-old Czech student set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square, Prague in protest against Soviet Occupation. While he was rushed to hospital he kept repeating, “Please tell everyone why I did it. Please tell everyone.” It was reported that a letter was found with him stating that he disagreed with the propaganda and censorship. He and a group of students had just two demands or more suicides would follow:

1. Abolish censorship immediately
2. Ban the spreading of “Zprávy” (Soviet “news”)

On January 19 he died after suffering third degree burns to more than 85% of his body. His suicide was followed by that of an 18-year-old student called Jan Zajíc who died for the same cause.

What they did was incredibly brave and their demands, to my mind, were not at all unreasonable. Freedom of speech and expression are so fundamental to life that some people are willing to die for it. But what is most powerful about their actions is the contrast to modern day suicide bombers whose very modus operandi is to kill as many civilians as possible. Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc did not commit violence against any other person.

On October 7, 2023, a group of Islamic Jihadists brutally slaughtered and raped over 1,000 people, most of them civilians and many of them young people at a music festival in Israel. The terrorist group, Hamas, claimed responsibility for the attack and much of the evidence for the event comes from cameras worn on the bodies of the terrorists. 

Women were stripped, raped, and shot in the genitals, some stabbed repeatedly in the genitals, toddlers set on fire, there were beheadings, mutilations, and torture. Babies were taken hostage. Parents were murdered in front of their children. The half-naked bodies of women were later paraded around the streets of Gaza while locals cheered euphorically and spat on them. 

I was alive for the September 11 terror attacks of 2001. I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news and also how I felt at the time. It was not glee or cheer or joy. No one in our countries at that time celebrated. No one claimed or argued this was justification for anything. We were all united in absolute condemnation.

On October 7, 2023, while the terror attacks were happening, people all over the world cheered. People in our countries – in the UK, in Australia and in the US – cheered for Hamas. Before Israel did anything in response, people were cheering for the terrorists. They cheered the slaughter of babies, men and women. They cheered the brutal rape of women. They cheered the abduction of hostages, some as young as 9 months. This is when I first understood antisemitism. I did not really know what it was before.

We’ve all watched as over the past 7 months people in our countries have systematically torn down photos of Israeli hostages abducted by Hamas. As one online commenter said, you wouldn’t see anyone removing posters of lost dogs in London or Paris and if even one person did we would wonder what had happened in our society, “We would ask why were were producing people so pathological?“

Now that Israel has and is responding to the atrocities the criticism and the protests against the country have grown. I don’t doubt that some of the criticism is warranted and I’m not arguing that criticism of Israel is antisemitism (it’s not) nor am I going to argue in favour of civilian deaths in war. Civilian casualties are always tragic. In a free country we can criticise our leaders as much as we like without fear of persecution. Israel is a democracy with regular elections, where freedom of speech and expression are valued, where there is a free press, where women and gays have equal rights, where 20% of the population is Arabic (including Arabic Muslim, Christians, and Druze) and they have all the same rights as everyone else. 

Compare this to the Gaza Strip which has not had any elections since 2007 when Hamas was voted in and their first action as administrators was to murder the opposition. There is no freedom of expression or freedom of speech in Gaza. Palestinians are unlawfully detained and tortured for defaming Palestinian authorities.  Women and girls do not have equal rights and 59% are victims of domestic violence. There was a case last year of two girls who escaped an abusive father only to be returned to him by Palestinian security services. They have not been heard from since. There are no gay rights in Gaza and coming out as gay means persecution and in some cases execution.

Why then do people uncritically accept everything Hamas say while simultaneously treating everything Israel says with scepticism? Be sceptical, sure, but at the very least be equally sceptical of both sides. If Hamas say Israel bombed a school and Israel say it was no longer a school and instead being used by terrorists, why would anyone uncritically believe Hamas? We can’t know for sure because the conflicting sides tell two different stories but if I had to choose between what the authorities in an oppressive regime say versus what those in a democracy with a free press and freedom of speech say I’d lean towards the latter.

The rights given to the people of Israel through a free and democratic society but denied by Hamas to the people of Gaza are what Jan Palach and his friends were fighting for. We should never underestimate these freedoms we enjoy which is why I look with horror at the many young people in our society today who celebrate the oppressive terrorist regime Hamas. I felt similarly when I saw all those young men and women from around the world rush to join Isis in Syria not that long ago. Unlike Jan Palach, they don’t understand the value of freedom of expression and freedom of speech.