B'nai Brith says without censorship laws there would be "anarchy"
When I was in Winnipeg three weeks ago, I had a brief book signing at the local McNally Robinson store. While I was chatting with patrons and signing books, I managed to simultaneously do an interview with the local Jewish newspaper, called The Jewish Post and News. They actually put the story right on their front page, and it continued onto page 3. You can read the whole story here, in .pdf.
I'm pleased that Shakedown has received so much interest from Jewish media and that I've been invited to speak to so many Jewish groups. It's a sign of confirmation of my thesis that the "Official Jews" who are for censorship do not speak for the mass of Canadian Jewry. I find that very encouraging.
The JP&N story was pretty sympathetic. Regular readers of this blog will have heard me make most of the points in it before. But what's new is that David Matas, legal counsel for the B'nai Brith, tries to defend human rights commissions. It makes for entertaining reading -- especially since the B'nai Brith itself has been subject to a five-year-long witch hunt by the Manitoba Human Rights Commission. My favourite detail about that fiasco is that B'nai Brith hasn't even been informed as to the identity of the complainant! Seriously, in what court in the world -- outside of totalitarian regimes like North Korea -- are cases brought by parties who remain secret? Actually, that's not fair to North Korea. They have secret trials there, to be sure, and they're sham trials, of course. But everyone knows who the prosecution is: it's the state. In Manitoba, the government has been hijacked by some secret party that the B'nai Brith doesn't even know. It's so absurd it would be funny, if it weren't so punitive.
And yet the B'nai Brith defends HRCs. I'm almost tempted to say they deserve everything they get, but I know that's not true. I believe that even murderers deserve a fair trial -- so surely politically correct lobby groups do, too.
Matas seems to agree that there ought to be some procedural changes made -- he points to outrageous delays in HRC cases, and to the fact that harassing complaints that abuse the system are not punished with costs being awarded against them. I agree with those criticisms, but even if the processes of HRCs were perfectly fair, I still wouldn't want them to have the power to censor political thought.
For me, it's not just the process that's abusive. It's the substance of the law -- the censorship of ideas.
Matas, who is a clever man, knows he has a difficult case to make, and he doesn't do a particularly good job of it. He says that the hijacking of HRCs by radical Muslims, such as Syed Soharwardy, could be stopped if the HRCs were merely "educated" about the risks of radical Islam. That's so naive it's cute. The HRCs are perfectly aware of the nature of radical Islam. They're happily doing the bidding of that illiberal fascism in the war against our western liberties. Matas actually thinks the HRCs don't know what they're doing. Well, tell that to Islamic fascist Arman Chak, happily working in the bosom of Alberta's HRC. I'm sure he'll turn right around after a little re-education session by Matas.
What would probably happen if Matas tried to re-educate Chak, is that Chak would try to re-educate Matas. And since Chak has the power of the law behind him, Chak would win. That's the problem with giving the state the power to censor -- and to re-educate. You can't always be sure you're going to be the one holding the stick, as opposed to getting beaten with the stick. The B'nai Brith and other Official Jews are so used to having Canada's HRCs do their bidding, they can't conceive of being its victims -- even as B'nai Brith has been victimized for five years, they still think that's an anomaly, rather than the natural, irresistable future of these censorship boards.
But my favourite line from Matas is his response to my call for the abolition of censorship laws altogether. Again, I'm opposed to both the process and the substance of such laws. Here's Matas's weird reply:
“This [Levant’s argument] is an argument which can be used about any law. Israel is falsely accused of genocide. So there should be no law against genocide and so on. The defence against abuse of the laws is to stop the abuse, not repeal the laws."
Look at what Matas is trying -- very clumsily -- to do. He's comparing laws against speech to laws against mass murder. That's one logical flaw -- equating political offensiveness with real crimes. And he's wrapped it in another logical flaw: saying that the only reason I want to repeal such laws is because they're being abusively applied. But, of course, I'm against censorship because I'm against censorship -- not just because the censors are such abusive clowns.
This is the final line of defence I've seen for the handful of people who actually do try to defend HRCs: they always deliberately blur thought crimes with real crimes. Pearl Eliadis is a specialist at this -- she always tries to use words that imply real violence -- "assault", "drive-by", etc. -- when talking about merely offensive words. It's a tell -- a sign that the HRCs' defenders know they're defending the indefensible, so they're going to try to pretend they're against real crimes, not word crimes.
Let me end with my all-time favourite fear-mongering response. If we repeal the censorship provisions of Canada's HRCs (and the criminal code provisions against "hate propaganda"):
That sort of reaction is a prescription for anarchy. It is in everyone’s interest that we have a society living under the rule of law rather than living in a lawless society.
Anarchy! Ladies and gentlemen, the only thing standing between Canada's peace, order and good government, and riots in the street, a war of all against all, are these HRCs and their censorship laws! Canadians are so malevolent, so violent and lawless in their hearts, that were it not for people like Jennifer Lynch, we'd be at each others' throats!
I'm not interested in living in a lawless society. I rather like our laws, or most of them. I like the Criminal Code, though we could do without the hate propaganda sections -- and, given the infrequency with which those provisions are actually used, it seems like the police can do without those, too, without us lapsing into "anarchy".
But look again at what Matas has done: he has said that to repeal censorship laws is to make us lawless. No: it would simply remove the laws from our thoughts and our words, and keep the police focused on violent deeds.
I rather like the idea of living in a country with intellectual anarchy. And, given the fact that you are reading this on the Internet, I get the feeling that you do, too. The Internet is about as lawless a frontier as it gets, when it comes to ideas and information. You will read offensive things on the Internet. But you're a grown-up. So you can handle it.
I'd like to live in a country where I'm safe from real harm. But when it comes to ideas, thoughts, emotions and other harmless deeds -- yeah, anarchy sounds a lot better to me than living under the yoke of Canada's HRCs, including the one that has had Matas on the run for half a decade for B'nai Brith's word crimes.
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