“Really we’re pretty much like North Korea at this point,” said Saad.
Gad Saad is Jewish and emigrated from Lebanon due to religious persecution, yet he supports the freedom of speech of Holocaust deniers.
That’s how committed he is to an open dialogue, something he says is being lost in the western world.
Saad is scheduled to speak Monday evening at the University of Regina on “forces that impede the free and rational exchange of ideas.”
“I support the right of grotesque, diabolical people saying that the Holocaust and anything that I might have experienced is a hoax. Why? Because that’s what freedom of speech is. It’s the right for people to be idiots, to be wrong,” said Saad, a marketing professor at Montreal’s Concordia University and the Canada Research Chair in evolutionary behavioural sciences and Darwinian consumption.
There are only two exceptions to “absolute” freedom of speech, said Saad.
The first is using words to directly incite violence against other people.
The second is defaming or libelling someone.
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