Update: stuffing a Jew's mouth with money isn't anti-Semitic

I'm not sure why Susan Cole isn't on a human rights commission yet. She fits the demographic profile perfectly: an angry white woman in her fifties or sixties. Seriously: Barbara Hall, Jennifer Lynch, Lori Andreachuk, Shirlene McGovern. They even look the same. They even dress the same. How did Cole miss the recruitment drive?

I say this for two reasons. First, she's just about the only "journalist" in Canada who supports the censorship powers of human rights commissions. The phrase "Uncle Tom" journalist is far too gentle for such a hypocrite; I've read Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Uncle Tom comes across as one of the gentlest, kindest men there is, someone who bears his burden with grace -- and is chided only for his passivity, not for being a traitor to his own kind. Susan Cole doesn't quietly bear the burdens of censorship -- she rejoices in censorship, demands it for her political opponents and excuses it.

She makes Uncle Tom look like Harriet Tubman.

The only reason I'm mentioning her twice in one week is because it's rather quite entertaining to watch her self-destruct on this issue.

As I pointed out the other day, her incomprehensible condemnation of my book (well, not really of my book -- it was really more a vomit of insults against me personally) was received with a massive denunciation by her own magazine's readers. Seriously, skim the decimation her readers lay upon her. But just skim it -- it's too painful to read them all.

Cole, naturally, wasn't troubled by charges of being illogical, or fascist, or just plain stupid. But the charge that her far-left-wing, anti-Israel magazine might have a whiff of anti-Semitism about it (say it ain't so!) is the one thing that caused her to reply. In particular, her decision to use this image:

depicting me, elicited a barrage of criticism.

It's not too subtle: I'm a money-hungry Jew (who hates poor Muslims). Not too many other ways to read a picture of, well, a Jew eating money. He must be hungry, right? Money-hungry.

That was the only criticism that seemed to upset Cole, because it exposed her as, to paraphrase section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, someone who published something on the Internet "likely to expose me to hatred or contempt".

Uh-oh. Susan Cole is a hatemonger! I'd better blow my hate crime whistle!

So Cole has come up with an alibi. No, that's not me being a money-hungry Jew. That's me eating my legal fees, she now says.

Uh, yeah. Good one. After a week, that's the best explanation she could come up with -- oh, after calling anyone who was insulted the real anti-Semites? Hilarious; lame; typical; gorgeous to watch. It reminded me of when Warren Kinsella was caught on tape (uh, by himself) claiming that Chinese restaurants in Canada serve cat meat to unwitting customers. There's something poetic about watching lefties, who accuse their political enemies of racism at the drop of a hat, squirm when their own racism is revealed.

Look: Susan Cole is a nobody, even in her own industry. The reason I highlight this is to show the true character of those who support Canada's human rights commissions. They're the bigoted ones. They're the un-Canadian ones.

And I say it not just in mockery -- for I believe that part of denormalization is to laugh at HRCs, rather than to fear them. I say it as a sombre observation that in our society there are plenty of people who would fit in quite well in a totalitarian regime.

Don't think for a moment that human beings in Canada or the U.S. are somehow genetically superior than human beings in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia were. There are those amongst us who would run to join in any such tyranny, who would lovingly volunteer to rat out their friends and neighbours, in the tradition of Pavel Mrozov. Our culture is more moral than those were, of course, but human beings are flawed, and there are those, like Cole, who would be attracted to an authoritarian regime for various reasons. Richard Warman practises a bizarre form of voyeurism and vigilantism when he goes online, for hundreds of hours, in neo-Nazi drag, to entrap fellow citizens; Kinsella boasts that Lenin is one of his heroes; Cole says that there should be laws against telling certain jokes -- laws like Stalin had.

I guess what I'm saying is: freedom constantly decays, and there are those who would hasten its decay for they would prefer an authoritarian society, with them on the side of authority.

Susan Cole is a laughable crank in Canada in 2009, whose ideas get no traction. But had she been born in Germany or Russia 100 years ago, she would be terrifying in the extreme.