The new censorship: by the People, for the People

When Haaretz lets Alan Dershowitz speak, you know it's about something even Haaretz can't safely ignore.

We live in an age in which censoring material that is deemed offensive by some is becoming widely accepted, especially among young people on the left.

There are, of course, major differences between using criminal means (violence, hacking, threats) and using arguably lawful means (speech codes, rescinding invitations) to achieve the censorship of offending material, but the results may be similar: self-censorship.

There is more where this came from: Hard leftists are as guilty of censorship as North Korea's dictator.

But essentially it boils down to a fairly simple situation: we, the grown-ups, are letting children - sometimes bright children, sometimes less, but still children that don't understand many basic things, including the meaning of freedom of speech - dictate to the rest of us what could be said, written, published, shown etc. and who could or couldn't do it.

I would agree that in the short term it is not the same as Pol Pot henchmen giving guns to ten years old kids, but what about the long term? If the future leaders, growing up in our universities, consider it normal to deny the freedom of speech to people they consider offensive, what kind of the world they are going to lead us into?