Suddenly I'm curious to know whether the Weimar Republic did anything to curb the torrent of anti-Jewish propaganda coming out of the Nazi party.

Weimar Germany had its hands full keeping up with the Nazis' wholly extralegal tactics. I would be shocked to learn that the government of the time made any effort to stamp out their propaganda.

If not, they would be hard-pressed to justify the claim that the Nazis would have risen even faster had they tried.

(As an unrelated sidenote, it's worth noting that the Nazis' rise to power was anything but fast. It took 15 years and even after Hitler's election there was still active opposition both at the popular level and within the legal system which they had to eliminate step by step.)

As it pertains to hate speech laws and the discussion here, the Nazi example is an interesting one. It seems to me that if propaganda alone was responsible for the rise to power of National Socialism and the devastation that followed, we ought to see neo-Nazis springing up everywhere that such propaganda is available — universities, public libraries, any time someone watches The Blues Brothers, and so on.

And yet, that's not how it works out. The Nazis, like all such groups, were about more than their words. They also had to kill off their rivals, terrorize the populace, assassinate their own dissidents, burn the legislature to the ground, and stage a coup before they could realize their agenda.

So maybe it's more what hate groups do, rather than what they say, that we need to worry about. That's why in the US at least hate crimes are acts, not speech.

Tell me why I shouldn't regard this underground movement against this particular bill to be a hysteria ...

I have no idea, having not had any contact with the movement in question. As I suggested in my earlier comment on the subject, it's entirely possible that it's all just fluff legislation intended to score points and give people work, like the TSA.

... So far, what people have written seems to have little or nothing to do with the bill, which quite literally sets up academic facilities to learn about how to prevent a type of terrorism...

I'm sorry if I accidentally typed the words "I believe in an insane screaming conspiracy with no merit" when I thought I was saying something else. You know how it is — the keys are right next to each other.

Yes, I did say "going after" with respect to American Muslims. No, a bill doesn't have to say "we are going after Muslims" for that to be what they mean. Because, yes, collecting information, tracking organizations, and indoctrinating law enforcement is a form of "going after."

And that would be fine! Except that (and this is what I meant to type) there's no reason for it that I can see. We've had "homegrown" terrorists for a very long time in this country — I think McVeigh still has the highest casualty-per-lunatic ratio of anyone in the history of American domestic terrorism. Does anyone really think that this new apparatus is going to be used to go after white, Christian reactionaries who own a lot of fertilizer?

When Europeans talk about this stuff they always, always mean unintegrated Muslim populations and the madrasas where they're taught fundamentalist Islam. Personally, I think Europe brought that problem on itself, but that aside, from a practical point of view, do we have the same issue here? I don't see it.

There is something that seriously does bother me about the presumption that we need new ways to study Islamic terrorism after they got us once in 2001.

They "got us" after years of repeated, unsuccessful attempts (reported dutifully over the years in the likes of the New York Times, though I guess one has to have been a national security fanatic to notice or remember) that were thwarted every time by good intelligence work and close interagency cooperation.

So a bill that tells us that we now need new tools to make sure that "another nine eleven" doesn't happen is actually a lie wrapped in a solution's clothing. We didn't lack tools in 2001 — we just were (deliberately, apparently) not using them.

If you ask me, if we're going to be studying anything it should be that.