Further to this post, Charlie Gere (Director of the Institute for Cultural Research at Lancaster University) today claims that 'there is no such thing as free speech'. I'll give him one thing: he's bold enough to identify his own view by an accurate designation. Others prefer to say the same sort of thing by dressing it up as 'free speech yes, but badaboop, badabeep, badabadaba'. Good on Charlie for telling it like it is; there's no free speech, you can only say what's permitted, what's tolerated, within your society and your culture. This does get to the bottom of things. For if speech is not protected whatever might be thought of it within your community, your society, your culture - and democratic as they may be - then you are only free to speak and think within limits laid down for you by others... which is not free speech. That's why Gere's view of the issue is a rotten one. You do better to stick with J.S. Mill: interference that prevents harm to others, and that's it.
Gere seems not to be aware, incidentally, that until relatively recently anti-Semitic tropes and stereotypes within English-language fiction were not altogether rare. I wonder if he thinks that Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth should be taken off the market and purged from public libraries.