Odds and ends

• The Glenn Beck show on CNN went well. Ms. Underestimated links to a video clip of it here. I'll keep you posted on when Mark Steyn and I are rescheduled for Bill O'Reilly's show, and if a tentative invitation to CTV's The Verdict firms up.

• Great new columns by Calgary's Barry Cooper and Vancouver's Terry O'Neill.

• Somehow, Iowahawk managed to get a copy of the notes taken by Shirlene McGovern, the "human rights officer" who interrogated me. Check it out here.

• My lawyer has received two upset calls from the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The first, from Shirlene McGovern herself, complained about the publicity she is receiving. I'm surprised at her reaction -- you'd think someone who regularly interrogates citizens about their private political views would be comfortable with the concept of public scrutiny. Imagine if she actually had to expose her private thoughts, not just her public actions as a government officer.

• A few days later, another commission officer called my lawyer, complaining about this blog. I told my lawyer to invite them to write a letter to the editor to me. I haven't received it yet, so I presume they're just going to file another human rights complaint against me.

• My YouTube videos have crested 400,000 views. A week ago, I installed a statistics program to track the number of visits to this site. It won't surprise you that employees at the human rights commission have been very frequent visitors. At first, as a taxpayer, I was upset that Officer McGovern was surfing the net during business hours, looking for her name. But I realized that every minute she was Googling herself -- ego-surfing, it's called -- was a minute she wasn't interrogating some other poor shmoe. 

• Officer McGovern isn't the only one upset. The left-wing Canadian Jewish Congress, the special-interest lobby group most responsible for criminalizing speech in Canada, is obviously feeling some political heat because of what they have wrought. Their figurehead co-presidents, Rabbi Reuven Bulka and Sylvain Abitbol, wrote a muddled column called "Some human rights complaints are frivolous". That's actually less mealy-mouthed than it sounds, given that the commissions have a 100% conviction rate for thought crime hearings. But what is the standard for acquittal that the CJC proposes?

"Human rights commissions must constantly recalibrate where the balance lies between free expression and its abridgement, but the determination of where to place the fulcrum must always be based on the statutory standard that such expression is “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.”

and

"the appropriate application of statutory criteria is our best defence against those who would eliminate the law to protect their interests, and against those who would use the law to promote a narrow political agenda."

In other words, the concept of a "pre-crime" is still fine by them. No-one has to be exposed to hatred or contempt for someone to be found guilty. It just has to be "likely" that could happen. And hatred or contempt -- emotional feelings -- are enough. The CJC doesn't even think that a discriminatory act is necessary for a conviction. They support the notion of thought crimes.

If the human rights commissions apply the standards in this fuzzy-headed op-ed, Mark Steyn and I will still be convicted.

What an embarrassment the CJC has become. Essentially they are pleading for Steyn and I as special cases. Is it because I'm a Jew and Steyn sounds like he might be, too? Is it because we're being sued by Muslim fanatics? Or is it because the CJC is taking some political heat for their support of these illiberal, anti-intellectual commissions, and the CJC's alliance with Richard Warman, the serial human rights complainant and foul-mouthed, anti-Black, misogynist bigot?

The CJC's op-ed will be seen as nothing but more proof for anti-Semites and neo-Nazis who claim -- with historical and statistical validity -- that the hate speech provisions are a tool used mainly by secular, leftist Jews to punish their anti-Semitic critics. But now that those same precedents are being used against Jews and philo-Semites by Islamic fascists, the CJC wants to change the rules.

I know these two men. I attended Bulka's synagogue when I lived in Ottawa, and I served on a board with Abitbol. They're reasonable enough fellows who always seemed to me to be open to debate and disagreement. But they're not the ones running the CJC; they're the political window dressing. The engine behind the CJC's censorship campaign is Bernie Farber, the CJC's full-time executive director.

I first met Farber in the 1990s when I was a student. I remember him opening a speech in Calgary with the phrase, "those of us in the business of fighting hate know that..." It was the most honest thing I've ever heard him say: "fighting hate" was Farber's business. And if fighting hate is your business, you need to have hate to fight. Bernie knows how to develop his market. Agents provocateurs like Warman help drum up that business when it doesn't occur naturally.

I've always laughed at the fact that Mohamed Elmasry, the anti-Semite suing Mark Steyn, and Syed Soharwardy, the misogynist radical suing me, each claimed to represent all Muslims. Elmasry calls his organization the "Canadian Islamic Congress" and Soharwardy calls his the "Islamic Supreme Council". Neither represents more than a handful of Muslims -- and in Soharwardy's case, even that is in question.

Does the impressively named Canadian Jewish Congress really represent Canadian Jews today?

Three generations ago, the CJC's purpose was to help assimilate Jewish immigrants to Canada, and to help recruit Jews to join the Canadian army during the Second World War. I'd call that "conservative". A quick read of their website today shows that they're basically the Liberal Party at prayer -- feting Justin Trudeau when they're not calling for the construction of government housing projects. At least they dropped their environmental and Aboriginal policies, which kept them busy ten year ago.

Offensive and anti-Semitic free speech didn't kill the Jews during the Holocaust. Murderous men did, and they only did when real rights and freedoms were destroyed -- the right to property; the right to life; the right to equality before the law; mobility rights; freedom of religion; freedom of association. Violent acts killed the Jews, not "feelings" of "contempt". How revolting that the official Jews now propose limiting real rights and freedoms in the vain hope that will stop people from feeling "hatred" for them. I'm no anti-Semite, but if I'm anything to go by, the CJC, and the other supporters of these unconstitutional laws are the ones engendering feelings of contempt.