Hm not good. In my country (Germany), the individuals who said it could be and should be persecuted under our law that prohibits incitement of hateful violence. I assume it was some kind of religious leader and those shouldn’t get a free pass. The followers who listened and may silently support the message, could not be persecuted and also shouldn’t be. Some of them should probably be watched, if they show signs of acting out on their ideas.
If you allow I’ll take this small minority within the larger frame of “muslims” (they are so different in their beliefs, that it is hard to press them into one group really, even for someone anti-religious like myself), who have this batsh*t crazy idea in their head that they should and could force their understanding of some old fairy tales onto mankind, as an example. As far as I know there are again several subdivions, like wahabites and others, but they’re more or less equally stupid. Here we can pretty much see the difference between thought and speech, and how they interact.
Without speech or written word by some leader, it is highly unlikely that most of the harm they’d done would have occured. The individuals acting out the gruesome attacks have in any cases known to me always been linked to specific preachers, all of whom have been said to call for exactly the kind of things you’ve mentioned happened in Canada. Aforementioned heinous acts don’t happen out of the blue. The individuals may or may not have had specific experiences in their life that led them into thinking about it. This seems even still somewhat normal, as assumed or real injustice against you, can regularly trigger thougts of violent reply to make it undone. Now most people either forget about it or find that this doesn’t solve the issue, but if they meet someone, say a preacher, who continously encourages their hatred, fuels it, fills it with ideas of how heroic it would be to cowardly murder people and so on, they get closer and closer to acting it out.
That’s why, for me, it seems necessary to show a hard edge against those who incite hate. In the specific case it would have meant to arrest and prosecute the imams.
A side effect of being strict about this basic framework which provides safety and a functioning society, could also be less distrust and tensions between several “groups” of people. The inciters of hate are usually the small minority, but they try to force the majorities into their logic. Specifically for the religious fundamentalists I’ve mentioned, it has been said to be part of the strategy to incite racism against muslims so that for instance more muslims join their heinous cause, after experiencing grave injustices by non-muslims based on their religion alone. And then everyone who uses such incidents as a “proof” for how “bad” muslims are, just support the agenda of the fundamentalists.
Hatespeech fulfills a fundamental role for all of those who want to bring our societies to their knees. Be it racists, religious fundamentalists or others: not the act of thinking irrationally, but writing / saying it out loud leads to an escalation.
So yeah, stupidity is infinite and that’s okay. We are always going to be stupid and limited. But inciting hatred and violence is not born out of being less intellectually capable, it comes from being too weak and to cowardly to be better than that.