"There is a huge difference between an insult and a threat, and ... it isn’t actually that hard to tell one from the other."

This isn't food for thought. It's a five-course meal.

Two Views on Speech, by Adam Gopnik (New Yorker)

... The absolutist American view, let’s stipulate at once, still has much to be said for it. It says that once the state gets into the business of distinguishing acceptable dissent from unacceptable dissent then what we have is no longer dissent. Instead, we have state-sponsored and defined dissent, like that of the tiny “dissident” parties that were allowed to persist, once upon a time, in Eastern Europe, pendant to the chief Communist one. As John Stuart Mill said, in what is still the greatest defense of freedom of speech ever written, the free contest of ideas, even bad ones, is necessary to discover the truth of things. Or, to borrow a turn of phrase from the N.R.A.: it takes a good man with a pencil to stop a bad man with a pen.

But the view that governs the opposite position, in Canada and Europe alike, is not irrational or truly hostile to liberty. The laws and rules vary, but all have a simple distinction at their core, which is that criticizing an ideology, including a religious ideology, however vociferously, is different from inducing hatred of a people or persons. In plain English, hate-speech laws are based on the simple truth that there is a huge difference between an insult and a threat, and that it isn’t actually that hard to tell one from the other.