Who decides over slogans many sides use? Example: ‘From the river’. It's shortsighted to brand as antisemitic a slogan that many sides use.
Censorship means extremists are given definition power over language.
Censors create an environment in which language is defined by extremists.
Censorship silences less the extremists but in effect the moderates.
Are censors hijacking language in order for politicians to instrumentalize the legislative arm of democracy?
Gessen writes that ‘From the river to the sea’ is a slogan that both sides use to refer to land they believe is historically theirs.
Branding this slogan as anti-Semitic is far too short-sighted.
It is for sure possible that some people carrying these posters believe that Jews should be banned from Palestine and that all the land should belong to Palestinians. And I think that's an anti-Semitic position. But face it: A country where both Jews and Palestinians live freely from the river to the sea. That is my dream, Gessen writes.
In some German states like Berlin, censors are automatically interpreting the ‘will be free’ as extremist. This is problematic because:
The word freedom should still be defined by the people who use it here as a support for a democracy and words here are not defined by Hamas but by the democratic voices.
Language is owned by everybody, not by censors & other extremists:
Hamas & settler-occupiers appropriate the language. You cannot protect the language from this appropriation by buying into their definitions and solidifying their definition power by suspecting everybody of extremism & silencing everybody's language.
There are laws against extremist language. There is thus no need for Minority Report style pre-crime censorship.
WHAT DEMOCRATIC VOICES MEAN WITH THEIR WORDS MUST NOT BE DECIDED BY POLICE.
WORDS USED BY VOICES IN GERMANY ARE NOT DEFINED BY HAMAS. Hamas does not control German voices.
Censorship helps the far right define language