CZECHIA: Pluralism under pressure: How hate speech silences believers
Speech at the HRWF conference “Faiths under Fire at the Age of Rising Hate Speech” in Prague on 13 November 2025
By Hans Noot, Associate director of Human Rights Without Frontiers
HRWF (14.11.2025) – When we speak of hate speech, we think of words that wound or dehumanise. In recent years such words have multiplied — typed in comment sections, shouted in streets, and amplified by public figures who should know better. They have driven synagogues to install security doors, forced churches to hire guards, and made Muslim women remove their headscarves to feel safe. Across Europe, believers now live with the steady awareness that their symbols, their sacred places, and sometimes their bodies may become targets. Faith communities truly are under fire.
We see this clearly in Europe’s media. After the terrorist attacks in France in 2015 and again in 2020, several mainstream outlets labelled Muslim neighbourhoods as “breeding grounds” for extremism. The line between individual guilt and collective identity blurred, and research later showed that such reporting helped fuel a rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes. What looked like information became a form of accusation. Media language, even when not openly violent, can function as hate speech when it casts a whole religious community as suspect.
Much of today’s climate comes from a sincere desire to protect vulnerable groups. After centuries of religious persecution, safeguarding minorities from humiliation is essential. But compassion without resilience breeds fragility. In our zeal to prevent harm, we risk confusing disagreement with hatred. A believer expressing a traditional moral view may be quickly labelled intolerant; a secular critic who questions religion may be accused of bigotry. Faith communities find themselves navigating hostility from outside and suspicion from within the very culture that claims to protect them.
The effects reach every corner of public life. Debates about religion are cancelled before they begin. Teachers hesitate to discuss faith in the classroom. Editors avoid publishing pieces on religious ethics. Ordinary believers — Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs — learn to keep their convictions quiet, worried that any sentence might cross an invisible line. This does not produce harmony; it produces anxiety. Pluralism was never meant to spare us discomfort but to teach us how to live with it.
For minority religions, the pressure is even heavier. Their communities suffer vandalised mosques, desecrated cemeteries, arson attacks on gurdwaras, and conspiracy theories that paint believers as threats to national security. In the Czech Republic, authorities recently reported a sharp rise in antisemitic hate-speech incidents — about 40 percent in a single year — underscoring how quickly hostile words can surround an entire faith community. Yet these same communities also face scrutiny when expressing their own traditions — whether a rabbi speaks about circumcision, an imam discusses gender ethics, or a Christian minister cites scripture. When speaking about faith becomes dangerous, faith retreats from public life, and our societies lose the moral diversity that pluralism is meant to protect.
Social media intensifies this trend. Outrage has become a daily ritual in which a new offender is condemned so the crowd can feel righteous. We no longer burn heretics; we cancel them. We do not stone sinners; we shame them into silence. The structure of exclusion remains, even if its vocabulary has changed — and religious believers are often among its primary targets.
Europe’s struggle with rising hate speech is therefore not only legal; it is about the kind of society we choose to be. If we confuse protection with purification, we risk creating a new form of intolerance that dictates which beliefs, scriptures, or moral traditions may be spoken aloud.
To remain a home for genuine religious pluralism, Europe must distinguish between speech that denies another’s humanity and speech that simply expresses conviction. Freedom of expression and freedom of religion are not rivals but twin pillars of democracy, and when one is weakened, both collapse.
The antidote to hate speech is not silence but strength: the strength to speak, to listen, and to protect the dignity of every faith under fire.
