This overt racism is then given a gloss with a professed “respect” for “culture.” (As though culture were the standard and humanity a “construct,” instead of the other way around.)

Egyptian culture, this argument goes, is the culture of beasts. It is a “culture” of rape and murder and other violences. “Our” culture (that of human rights, free speech, respect for women) is not appropriate for them. We must “respect” them by allowing them to act as their culture dictates. (Who are we to say their bestial ways are inferior to our advanced ones?)

It is a marvelous combination of outright racism with faux-respectful culture-worship.

Well, guess what? I’ve checked with the people involved - Arabs, black Africans, “that kind of people.” Turns out, they do not believe that free speech and respect for the worth of the human soul is a “Western cultural invention.” They believe they are human fucking rights. And they believe they are good enough to merit them.

So, would those of you engaged in this kind of hateful sophism do us all a favor? When you wish to express your racism, would you go ahead and grow a pair and spit it right out, so that even the soft of brain can recognize you? Or, if you lack the self-possession to do that, would you mind terribly just staying the hell out of the way?

The whole idea of the CPB, or perhaps its ideal, is one of a society of open discourse, uncompromised by governmental interference. In other words, our goal is a free marketplace of ideas. In fact, when it comes to that marketplace, we are laissez-faire in the extreme. If an idea doesn’t float, it doesn’t deserve to. And, just as in a democracy a citizen is obligated to do his or her duty by voting, in a marketplace of ideas, the same obligation ensues.

So that’s why the validation of Holocaust deniers, and any other racist idiots, by universities and alleged “free speech” groups in countries where they are not silenced by the government is outright bullshit. This has recently come up in the town where I live, the university town of Eugene, Oregon, where a Holocaust denier has been invited to speak at the local university by an organization that calls itself a “free speech” group.

The government, at least in the U.S., is not in the business of jailing, or otherwise silencing, Holocaust deniers. But useful idiots like the Pacifica Forum nevertheless trot out a self-justifying appeal to free speech that is half-witted at best and cynical at worst. For a government to interfere and shut people up, even nitwits, is intolerable. Equally intolerable is making the advocation of cretins palatable by sprinkling free speech rhetoric on it.

In other words, any one, in any society in which the government is not silencing these opinions, is a voter. You are either voting for anti-Semitism and other forms of racism or you are voting against it. Whenever you hear people defending their glorification of evil, whether out of ignorance or cleverness, with free speech, well, it’s time to go to the polls. Check free speech or faux speech.