In the face of such enormities, the political correctness debate has rather muddied the waters, diluting the wider implications of what hate can produce. For the most dangerous threat behind hate speech is surely that it can go beyond its immediate targets and create a culture of hate, a culture which makes it acceptable, respectable even, to hate on a far wider scale. Such a culture of hate is not easy to define, and does not necessarily have one trajectory, but its evolution is evident in the circumstances surrounding some events in recent history. Only one leading rabbi, Yoel Nun, spoke out loudly against the killing. He was denounced by some of the other sages, even had his life threatened, and was forced to resort to an escort of bodyguards to protect himself.
Words can turn into bullets, hate speech can kill and maim, just as censorship can.
One has only to run through newspapers in former Yugoslavia to find examples of hate speech as propaganda. In l987, the Serbian newspapers published a photograph taken by a Belgrade reporter in Prekale, Kosovo, a Serbian province with a majority Albanian population. A gun hung from her shoulder. She needed the weapon, the papers revealed, to protect her and her children from Albanian terrorists, who were torturing and killing Serbs and raping their wives and daughters. The photograph attracted a lot of publicity, and shocked the whole of Serbia.