A key step towards making dissident thought unlawful, and ensuring “Secure Tolerance,” is the effort to represent it, in its totality, as culturally illicit. As early as 2015, Brian Marcus, head of the ADL’s Internet Division, had been contacting Internet Service Providers (ISPs) with threats that allowing “hate” material on their service “would be bad for their business.”^[1] Backed with reports, policy proposals, and “recommendations” from their own alphabet soup of think tanks and solo Jewish intellectuals like Cohen-Almagor, the ADL and the European Jewish Congress began more widespread intensive lobbying of tech companies in late 2018. The acceleration of lobbying against Big Tech should be seen in the broader context of heightened activism for the implementation of “Secure Tolerance” more generally.

Go to Part 1.

2012–2015: The National Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance

Between 2012 and January 2015, Dinstein and three other experts on constitutional law, backed by Kantor’s ECTR developed a draft 12-page pan-European “tolerance law” for adoption by the European Union. The law was intended to “criminalize ‘group libel,’ such as negative stereotyping, target group-to-group intolerance, and ban neo-Nazi and other discriminatory organizations in Europe.” On January 27, the draft legislation debuted at the European Jewish Congress, then meeting in Prague, with Kantor presiding and throwing his “support behind the proposal, which would grant harsher punishments for hate crimes against Jews, Muslims, Roma, women, and LGBQT alike across the continent.”