An angry woman named Pearl Eliadis

We've talked about Pearl Eliadis before. She's a member of the human rights jet-set -- a former director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, a woman who has seen the world on our dime, fighting against what she calls hatemongererers. Here's my introduction to Eliadis.

As I mentioned recently, she gave a rant at the luxurious HRC get-away the other weekend at beautiful Niagara-on-the Lake.

A friend has sent me a copy of her PowerPoint presentation, which you can view here.

It's the kind of thing that human rights grantrepreneurs love to do -- give a self-serving PowerPoint presentation to other human rights workers, in a five-star hotel, on the government's tab. I'd like to know how many thousands of dollars Eliadis got paid for that, on top of a lovely weekend by the lake, but I'll likely never find out.

Let me draw your attention to a few things in Eliadis's presentation that offer us a window into the mindset of the HRC industry.

Look at her description of the media response to recent HRCs' attacks on freedom of speech. She calls it "hysteria."

My first thought, of course, was to file a human rights complaint against her. Hysteria is rooted in the Greek word for uterus, and it was considered a women's malady. In other words, Eliadis is engaging in both sexism and able-ism. But I digress. I know what Eliadis means. Media hysteria simply means things she disagrees with. Just like "hate speech", means political ideas she disagrees with, and "discrimination" means Canadians' day to day choices she disagrees with. It's a lot easier to denounce someone as mentally ill (hysteria) or criminal (illegally discriminating) than to argue with them. That's a trick that Bernie "Burny" Farber knows.

But look at what she claims is hysterical: the use of the phrases "thought police", "convictions" and even "prosecutions".

But what else is the order from Alberta's HRC, telling Rev. Stephen Boissoin that he must renounce his religious views, if not the work of thought police?

And what do you call the issuance of such an order, along with thousands of dollars in punitive fines, if not a "conviction"?

And, to take my own case as an example, what is an 850-day, 15-person investigation by the government, if not a "prosecution"?

Is that really evidence of "media hysteria"? Or is Eliadis's name-calling simply her way of avoiding a difficult debate?

On her next page, Eliadis says that this subject has gone from "an interesting debate" to a "storm of controversy". I guess the difference, for her, is that what she called an interesting debate was when no-one was challenging her. Now that her arguments are being demolished by the blogosphere and mainstream media alike, it's mere controversy. Whatever gets you through the night, I guess.

On page 9 of her presentation, Eliadis tries to make the case for strict regulation of speech, claiming that it's "the most powerful human act". I suppose in an intellectual sense it is. But I'd say that murder is a more powerful human act. My point being, speech itself never killed anyone. The Jews of the Holocaust weren't killed by name-calling; the were killed when they were killed by violence. Their "right" not to be hated wasn't a real right. Their right to property, mobility, freedom of association, self-defence and ultimately to life were taken away. Speech couldn't touch them, other than their feelings, until Germany undid the real human rights protecting Jews.

Eliadis calls speech a "powerful weapon". But that is only true metaphorically, just like TV's "Crossfire" is not really a cross-fire, and a media "scrum" is not really a scrum, etc. Eliadis is being deliberately tricky; she is using a metaphor for violence, a metaphor for a true crime, to try to criminalize mere speech. It's a common trick, and you see it often with the mis-use of phrases like "gay bashing", which are used interchangeably to mean mere criticism, and actually physical "bashing". It's a deliberate attempt to blur the lines between words and violence. On page 11, she does this again, claiming that speech "poisoned" the environment. Again, poisoning someone is a real crime, which is why those words are stretched and misused to cover mere rudeness.

On page 13, Eliadis hints at her real agenda: hijacking and commandeering Canada's media, and subjecting them to HRC meddling. She wants "poisonous" -- hell, why not just say "murderous" while you're at it! -- speech in the mainstream media to lose its "immunity" from Eliadis and her group of would-be editors. She loved Rick Salutin's comment that "money controls the media", a Marxist complaint that seems touchingly quaint, in the era of the Internet. Neither Eliadis nor Salutin spring to mind when I think of the word "modern", so they probably don't know much about how the Inter-Webs work, but money is no substitute for good ideas, as the New York Times's shareholders are discovering.

As happens quite often, Eliadis reaches for foreign legal traditions when she wants to supplant our own legal traditions of liberty. Readers will recall that Ian Fine did so in his debate against me on CPAC -- he complained that we're out of synch with the United Nations -- run by such moral exemplars are China and Iran. So, too, Eliadis excuses her soft fascism by appealling to an obsolete, unCanadian foreign treaty, on page 14, claiming that we need to impose "special responsibilities and duties" on our media. Needless to say, those special duties will be in fulfilling Eliadis's world view.

Perhaps the most telling page in Eliadis's PowerPoint is on page 16. She is obviously referring to Mark Steyn, when she talks about Muslim demographics and "controversy entrepreneurs". That's quite a comment coming from a grantrepreneur like herself. Just a reminder: Steyn didn't file the complaints against himself that cause the "controvery"; the Canadian Islamic Congress did, and three human rights commissions humoured them. As a leftist might say, Eliadis is blaming the victim.

(I think the world needs "controversy entrepreneurs". To me, that means someone who helps the public work through controversial issues of the day. That includes scholars, the media, politicians, think tanks -- anyone who deals with spicy matters. The human rights commissions would shut down any meaningful disagreement over controversial matters. If that's the choice, I'm on the side of people who actually plumb disagreements, not paper them over.

But do HRCs actually paper over controversies? These days, HRC positively advertise for controversy -- whether it's Barbara Hall's call to have racial complaints "spike", or Alberta's 60,000 brochures teaching new immigrants how to bitch about life to HRCs. I think the real controversy "entrepreneurs", in the bad sense of the word, were in the hotel with Eliadis.)

But look at what she says then: it's largely irrelevant that Steyn's facts are true. If Steyn uses those true facts to "vilify" someone -- say, radical Muslim terrrorists -- he's still guilty of a human rights crime. Truth is not a defence. Eliadis compares Steyn to Rwandan radio stations exhorting murder. That's an execrable comparison -- Steyn has not been accused of inciting murder; again Eliadis blurs mere speech and violence. But, again, it wasn't a Rwandan radio station that killed people. It was soldiers with machetes.

Let me conclude as Eliadis does, with the quote she wanted to leave her fellow HRC activists with:

"there is no real freedom of speech if the media do not provide an outlet for other viewpoints more nearly equal to the outlet they reserve for their own."

Again, it's a Marxist comment; and it's hopelessly outdated in the era of the Internet. But it shows the lean and hungry eye with which the HRCs look at Canada's media.

I'm glad that every journalist in the country (except Bernie "Burny" Farber's friend, Haroon Siddiqui) gets it: they're coming for Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn today, and for the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star tomorrow.

UPDATE: A commenter or two points out that Eliadis engaged in outright fibbery in one of her PowerPoint slides. She claimed that, as part of the "media hysteria", the Ontario Human Rights Commission's guilty-verdict-without-a-trial was called a "drive-by shooting". Uh, no it wasn't. It was called a "drive-by verdict" (by Mark Steyn himself), which is actually funny, and true.

But that fact isn't quite useful enough for Eliadis, as she tries to portray her critics as violent, is it? So she amends the truth; changes the facts; and then presents it to her echo chamber of fellow human rights jet-setters. What a liar.

Fire. Them. All.