Alan Dershowitz warns SCOTUS may favor security over free speech

Brutal attacks on innocent Jews by radicalized pro-Palestinian activists are becoming more common. Last weekend, Molotov cocktails were thrown at a Jewish group, causing several injuries, in Boulder, Colorado. In late May, two Israeli embassy staff members were shot and killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. In February, two Jewish men were shot as they exited separate synagogues.

The list goes on.

Famed attorney and legal scholar Alan Dershowitz is fearful that as the chaos grows, the Supreme Court might move in the direction of prioritizing security over free speech. On a recent episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” he said that this prediction is based on his “analysis of trends.”

“This is not a trend I approve of, but it’s a trend I see coming.”

Dershowitz points to emerging trends in defamation and incitement laws, suggesting the Brandenburg v. Ohio decision (1969), which protects speech unless it incites imminent lawless action, may be reconsidered due to recent violent incidents.

“‘Globalize the Intifada’ and ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea’ — those are calls for violence, and under the current Brandenburg case, they’re protected speech,” he says, noting that while these chants express abhorrent sentiments, “they should still be protected speech.”

His prediction, however, is that “when the next case comes up to the Supreme Court, this Supreme Court … may take a more security-oriented point of view and say, ‘Wait a minute, the incitement doesn’t have to be so direct; it could be a little bit more indirect’ and let the jury decide that issue.”

In his new book, “The Preventive State: The Challenge of Preventing Serious Harms While Preserving Essential Liberties,” Dershowitz explains “how free speech can sometimes cause violence but that it’s not proper to deny free speech in order to prevent violence,” arguing that there are “better ways” to curb it that don’t involve “constraining free speech.”

Dershowitz holds these beliefs despite possibly being in some danger himself. On the same day Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, the two Israeli embassy staffers, were shot outside the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C., Dershowitz was “getting an honorary degree at a college in Florida.”

“The security people from the college came up to me and said, ‘We’re terrified that there might be a copycat attempt to kill you because you’re a prominent spokesman for pro-Israel points of view,’ and so they created a whole security thing around me where they created an escape plan; they had policemen with machine guns and with bulletproof glass to protect me,” he tells Glenn.

“I think we’re going to see more copycat crimes. I think that Hamas wants to see violence in the United States. That’s their goal — to get more people to kill Jews, Christians, and others,” Dershowitz continues. “They’re probably going to succeed unless there are some preventive steps that are taken now.” However, any “preventive” measure “should not include diminutions of legitimate free speech under the Constitution.”

Glenn shares Dershowitz’s views. “I am really really concerned if there is another big event, like a 9/11, I fear Americans are just going to run to that kind of [censorship] stuff, and then we’re in a trap that I don’t think we get out of.”

To hear more of the conversation, watch the clip above.

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