Before Complaining about “Hate Speech,” Remember That Terrorists, Like Other People, Can Lie

On August 23, a reporter for Ohio State University’s campus newspaper interviewed a fellow student named Abdul Razak Ali Artan, a soft-spoken Muslim who expressed his concerns over the media’s portrayal of his coreligionists and his fear that he might be attacked by bigots. Just over three months later, Artan—a devotee of Islamic State and al-Qaeda—went on a murderous attack, wounding ten students and a professor. The interviewer, Kevin Stankiewicz, recently wrote an article in the Washington Post reflecting on Artan’s presumed transformation from “thoughtful, engaged student” to terrorist. Noting that Stankiewicz doesn’t seem to have entertained the possibility that Artan was simply concealing his views, Sam Schulman connects this lack of imagination with current obsessions over “hate speech”: