The defendants claimed that the death was a hoax and that the French dude knew it.

Then there’s this other guy who has an entire website devoted to the alleged shooting with scrupulous skepticism about the video footage on the one hand, and the insistence that this alleged hoax is of world historical importance.

Sounds like a tempest in a teapot to me. It’s a certainty that many Palestinian civilians have been killed since 2000, most of them, of course, by accident, like the 19 that were killed after a radar malfunction. At the same time, it’s a certainty that the Israelis and Palestinians have to work out a modus vivendi, because neither people is going anywhere. Enough, already.

It does seem to me that the individuals who implied or accused this guy of deliberate hoaxing (if that’s the story) were wrong to do so, according to non-US law (of course in the US, according to Sullivan, you can say basically anything about a public person.)

However, being wrong in attempting to impeach someone else’s credibility because you don’t like their viewpoint should NOT in my view translate into fines and prison sentences.

Free speech has to be absolute, all the way. ALL THE TIME. And the remedy can only be good speech driving out bad. Any other alternative puts a clique or an elite in charge of determining values, and, ultimately, dictating values. Those are the marks of a closed society. No thank you.