August 2009 Archives

I'm finishing up my next book. The manuscript is due in to my publisher at the end of the month, which is less than two weeks away.

So I'm going to take a short break from blogging... unless there's something just crazy out there that needs a comment, like some new Jennifer Lynch eruption.

See you in September!

The National Post published this Op-Ed by me today about the Canadian Bar Association's creepy love affair with Omar Khadr, the Canadian terrorist being held in Barack Obama's Guantanamo Bay:

Why the Khadr fetish?

The Canadian Bar Association (CBA) has a crush on Omar Khadr. The left-leaning lawyers' club held its convention in Dublin last week, but even Ireland's charms couldn't get their minds off the accused terrorist, still detained in Barack Obama's prison at Guantanamo Bay.

The spark for the CBA's latest pronouncement on the matter was a decision of the Federal Court of Appeal, ordering the Canadian government to seek Khadr's repatriation (the government is considering an appeal). But the CBA doesn't need a reason to talk about their favourite cause. Khadr has been the subject of more CBA press releases than everyone else on the planet combined.

The CBA is obsessed. A search of its website yields 232 items about Khadr. What about other Canadians trapped overseas, such as Huseyn Celil, a Canadian citizen currently being held on trumped-up charges by China, or William Sampson, who was held and tortured in Saudi Arabia? They are non-persons to the CBA -- no press releases for them, and no mentions on its website.

At any one time, there are typically about 1,000 Canadians detained overseas, most of them for good reason. In Khadr's case, he is charged with murdering a U. S. soldier, Christopher Speer, in Afghanistan, where Khadr had gone as part of his jihad.

Article 4 of the Third Geneva Convention is pretty clear on the rights of people caught in Khadr's circumstances: If someone isn't part of a chain of command, doesn't wear a flag or emblem "recognizable at a distance," doesn't bear their weapons "openly" and doesn't follow the "laws and customs of war," they don't have rights as a prisoner of war. Khadr didn't do any of those things.

In the past, when Allied troops caught enemy combatants breaching those rules -- like some Germans did on D-Day-- they were shot on sight, or subject to expedited trials on the spot. Not Khadr; His life was saved by U. S. medics and he was flown to Guantanamo, where he has received food, shelter, a Koran and an imam -- and free lawyers. Sgt. Speer was flown home, too -- to a graveyard.

If the CBA had a general policy of demanding the return of Canadians caught in trouble overseas, its Khadr fetish wouldn't stand out so garishly. But the CBA doesn't do that. In fact, when it comes to the world's worst regimes, the CBA isn't just silent -- it participates in their PR rehabilitation.

Take Burma, a brutal country that just extended the illegal house arrest of democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner. The CBA recently sponsored a tourist junket to Burma, full of sightseeing and shopping. Suu Kyi has specifically called for a tourism boycott, saying in a 1999 interview "to suggest that there's anything new that tourists can teach the people of Burma about their own situation is not simply patronizing, it's also racist." But the CBA sent 60 vacationing lawyers to Burma on an itinerary that included some great bargains on lacquerware and rubies.

But the CBA's moral cover for Burma pales next to its collusion with the Chinese government. The CBA engages in legal exchanges with the All China Lawyers Association, a Communist Party front. If the CBA were meeting with legal dissidents, or were filing lawsuits or petitions on behalf of political prisoners, that would be one thing. But they're meeting with lawyers who work for the police state. It's an exchange alright -- the CBA vacationers get a great junket, and China and Burma get PR cover. They can point to the CBA's visits as proof of their liberalism. Oh, and you won't find the word Tiananmen on the CBA's website, either.

There is one more thing about Khadr. He was captured by the United States in 2002. But it wasn't until 2006 that the CBA began its noisy campaign to press the Canadian government for his release.

Was it a coincidence that the CBA didn't care about Khadr's repatriation until the Conservative government was elected?

Perhaps we should ask the keynote speaker at last year's CBA convention, Jean Chretien.

I caught a typo in the article, but I was too late to bring it to the attention of the Post. Just to double-check my facts, I searched for the word "Khadr" on the CBA's website one more time. In the four hours that had transpired since I submitted the above version, the CBA had made three additional mentions of Khadr, bringing the total to 235, not the 232 I had written.

By the time you read this blog post, it may well have grown some more, for the CBA is ardent in their love. You can check here.

 

Alright, one more column from the deep archives at Canadian Lawyer magazine. Here's my column from when the Conservatives cut off corporate welfare for lawyers, a program called the Court Challenge Program.

It was such a political winner -- I mean, seriously, if you were campaigning for election, is there any riding in this country, even in downtown Toronto, where you wouldn't love to be opposed by some angry trial lawyer, mad because his government cash was cut off?

I think it would be much the same if the Canadian Human Rights Commission were abolished. It's really the same as the Court Challenges Program, but ten times the budget, and the ability to act without the approval of real courts. If I were running for office, it would be a dream come true to be opposed by the likes of Jennifer Lynch and her brigade of Internet Nazis.

Here's the column:

Judges don’t like champerty, but lawyers sure do. Having a third party fund lawsuits to stir up strife clogs up courtrooms with troublemakers. Which naturally brings us to the subject of the Court Challenges Program (CCP), scrapped in September by the new Conservative government. 

It was Pierre Trudeau who first started funding litigators of fortune back in 1978, even before the advent of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as a way of pressuring provincial governments to expand bilingual services. Trudeau could only get so far democratically. How much easier — and cheaper — it was for him to let loose lawyers to convince a handful of ideological judges to do what democratically elected provincial legislators wouldn’t.   

Nearly 30 years later, the CCP hummed along at about $3 million a year, and in addition to funding language litigation, it focused on radical notions of equality rights. Three million dollars may not be much in the world of big-league corporate legal fees, but it fed an awful lot of activist lawyers who otherwise couldn’t get funding for their pet political projects. It’s unlikely that without funding from the CCP prisoners would have scraped together a legal kitty to win the right to vote, or the anti-spanking lobby would have financed their attempts to criminalize corporal punishment. Over the years, the CCP funded increasingly bizarre and counter-cultural projects that would have shocked even Trudeau himself.   

So of course the Canadian Bar Association is for the CCP. A month before the Tory decision to nix it, the CBA passed a resolution calling upon the government not only to continue funding, but to increase it, “in order to ensure its long-term financial stability.” The program’s financial stability, not the bar’s financial stability, just to be clear.   

Not surprisingly the CBA — too often a wing of the Liberal party — was ignored by the government. Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself was once the target of CCP funding. When Harper ran the conservative National Citizens Coalition, he challenged the federal government’s “gag law” that capped spending during elections by advocacy groups other than political parties. The CCP funded the left-of-centre lobby group Democracy Watch to intervene against Harper. Of course the government had plenty of its own lawyers in court that day, but the CCP’s slush fund allowed them to buy a few sock puppets, too.  

There was a special irony to the CCP giving government money to favoured interest groups like Democracy Watch to go to court to prohibit blacklisted interest groups like the National Citizens Coalition from spending their own money.

In recent years, the CCP adopted a new policy of secrecy: It no longer disclosed which litigants it funded in court. “Public” groups showed up in court, with lawyers paid for by the government, intervening on behalf of the government, and nobody was allowed to know that they were paid agents of the government. Add the charge of collusion to champerty.  

Harper himself was stung by the CCP. And the second most powerful man in Ottawa, Ian Brodie, actually wrote the book on the subject. It’s called Friends of the Court, in which he exposed the clique of leftist activists who run the CCP and purse out the money to their associates. When Brodie wrote that back in 2002, he was a harmless academic. Today, he’s Harper’s chief of staff.   

Harper and Brodie aren’t against public interest litigation. Harper himself was in court constantly with the National Citizens Coalition. But as Brodie wrote in a Fraser Institute paper, “Is federally funded interest group litigation an example of marginalized individuals banding together to fight oppressive government policies? Or is it a complex dance of federal social animators and their favoured activists battling other government actions in court?”   

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to wonder what the CBA would say about the CCP if it had been a tool of Conservative interest groups — funding challenges to Medicare’s monopoly, like Dr. Jacques Chaoulli’s groundbreaking case (funded all the way to the Supreme Court by Chaoulli and his own family). It’s not judicial activism that the CBA likes. It’s leftist judicial activism   

It’s smart politics for Harper to de-fund the CCP. By definition, groups that have to rely on government handouts lack public support. And lawyers whining about $3 million in lost fees are a politician’s dream opposition. Let public interest litigation flourish, but let it be true public interest litigation, not radical activists living out obscure ideological fantasies on the taxpayer’s dime.

I thought that the Canadian Lawyer website only had a few of my columns from the past three years up on their website. I'm wrong -- they have many more, but I couldn't find them because my name isn't on all of them.

Knowing this, I've been able to locate a bunch more of them, and though some are now a couple of years old, I think they're still interesting and some are even still current. Here's one about an interesting fight that dairy giant Danone got into with its Chinese joint venture partner, with the wonderful name Wahaha:

Danone isn’t used to getting roughed up. The French company is the world’s largest yogurt maker and owns Evian, the world’s best-selling mineral water, too. Then it got the bright idea to invest in China.

Danone teamed up with Chinese beverage manufacturer Wahaha Group Co. Ltd. Danone poured in money and Western technology; Wahaha supplied the Chinese credentials. The joint venture is now China’s largest beverage company.

So far, so great. But it all began to unravel earlier this year. Danone alleges that Zong Qinghou, the founder of Wahaha and chairman of the joint venture, had set up 20 of his own rogue companies producing the exact same products as the joint venture, using the joint venture’s suppliers and distributors — but keeping all the money for himself. It’s part of the reason why Zong is now the 23rd richest man in China, according to Forbes.

Breaches of contract and theft of intellectual property happen all the time — that’s what we have courts for. But what do you do in a country that has no independent courts?

At first, Danone offered to pay Zong to make his counterfeit brands part of their joint venture, offering more than $500 million. Zong scoffed, so Danone filed a lawsuit — in California. Danone might even win. But with its bottling plants and market in China, that’s a pyrrhic victory.

Zong quit as chairman of the joint venture. But he didn’t fly to Los Angeles to meet Danone’s case, or to Stockholm, where Danone had previously applied for arbitration. That’s what chumps who believe in the rule of law or sanctity of contracts would do.

Not Zong. He knows how it works in China. Here’s what it looks like when a $19-billion-a-year French company gets into a fight there.

First came a little muscle flexing by the Chinese government, a shareholder in Wahaha. A week after Danone filed its California suit, Chinese customs police seized a huge load of Evian water, claiming that it contained “bacteria.” Then came something even more amazing: the day Danone executives held a press conference in Shanghai to make their case, Wahaha employees held a protest outside, obstructing Danone’s staff. That’s quite something in a country with no freedom of assembly; Chinese police allowed this “spontaneous” protest to proceed for an hour.

But the coup de grace is yet to come. Zong filed for arbitration, too, with the Hangzhou Arbitration Commission, the kangaroo court in his hometown. Zong is arguing that, although he signed a contract with Danone giving them 51 per cent of the business and the right to the Wahaha name, that contract both “failed” and “expired” and never received government approval.

Chinese media have given much ink to Zong’s overheated rhetoric, railing against Danone’s “evil deeds,” quoting Mao Zedong and comparing his contract with Danone to unfair treaties foisted on China in the 19th century by Western imperial powers. Expecting an independent hearing from the Hangzhou Arbitration Commission is like expecting an honest report about Tiananmen Square from the People’s Daily newspaper. It
just isn’t going to happen.

Maybe Danone should have seen it coming. One of Wahaha’s signature brands is Future Cola, marketed in cans and bottles indistinguishable from Coca-Cola, with identical colours and styles. The concept of intellectual property hasn’t quite caught on in China yet.

China is now the world’s second-richest country, when measured in purchasing power. Its economic growth rate is near 10 per cent, and its stock markets have doubled already in 2007. But all of it is built on the same quicksand that is now swallowing up Danone. China has the outward appearance of a capitalist country, but it lacks the core elements of a free market — rule of law, sanctity of contract, property rights, and an independent, transparent judiciary arbitrating the whole thing.

And it’s getting worse. In 1985, Canadian Clive Ansley became the first foreign lawyer to open an office in Shanghai, practising law and teaching it at a university there. “Fifteen years ago, there was hope. We had judges who were largely untrained, but they tended to be honest and they tended to be allowed to go their own way for a period of time and to actually write the judgments in the cases they heard,” he says. Those days are gone; the Communist Party instructs judges on how to vote, rendering them little more than clerks.

Ansley quotes Cao Siyuan, the father of Chinese bankruptcy law, on the fate of foreign litigants: “It is absolutely impossible for a foreign party to win a case against a Chinese party in a Chinese court.” Judicial exchanges by Canadian judges are just exotic tourist junkets for the westerners, and a PR fig leaf for the Chinese government.

“It was very hard to work with people who do not understand the Chinese market and culture,” Zong said of his former business partners. Danone is starting to understand.

China is awesome to behold, especially its coastal megalopolises like Shanghai and Beijing. Shanghai is like a combination of Manhattan and Las Vegas, and when I was there two years ago, had 27,000 construction projects going on at the same time.

The Shanghai Daily, an English language business newspaper, reported that random samples of the structural steel being used for construction showed one third of it was substandard -- a terrifying thought when you're sitting atop a 70-storey tower. And that's just what the Communist Party censors permitted to be published.

To me, that perfectly encapsulates the difference between China's cities and Manhattan or Las Vegas. Part of China look modern and capitalist on the outside; but if you scratch beneath the surface, there is no cultural infrastructure that forms the hidden strengths of our system. Capitalism isn't just the ability to build a tower -- even the North Koreans can build tall things. But can they build foundations for them?

Foundations like the rule of law; property rights; sanctity of contract; government and corporate transparency; the ability to seek redress without fear of political repercussions. And what flows from all that is a culture of personal responsibility.

China has successfully achieved the outward appearance of America. I recommend sushi lunch at the top of the Jinmao Tower in Shanghai, if you want to feel like a top-hatted capitalist. But so much of that country is counterfeit -- from counterfeit structural steel, to the counterfeit western brands sold in official government tourist shops.

When I was in Beijing, the toothpaste poisoning scandal broke -- where made-in-China toothpaste was found to have been sweetened with antifreeze. It was fascinating to follow the arc of the story in the English language People's Daily, an official Communist paper.

(The entire newspaper was bizarre, still half-written in that stilted Maost style -- the "splittists in Taipei", etc. But even more strange was their choice of stories -- mainly denials of rumours and accusations that you had never heard in the first place. It was the most defensively written view of the world I'd ever seen -- and a pretty good guide as to what the ChiComs were politically worried about. It's as if they had a headline: "the rumours aren't true".)

But back to the antifreeze. The first phase of their crisis management was to outright deny the allegations -- no, there was no antifreeze in the toothpaste, the rumours aren't true.

The next phase was to come up with a cockamamie excuse that must have sounded good to someone: okay, sure, there's some antifreeze in there, but not too much, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved it!

That lasted for about a day. The final phase of the arc was the execution of some executive somewhere -- not trial, of course, for he might have protested his innocence, or more likely, implicated everyone else, right up to the government regulators. The execution -- really, a murder, let's admit -- was China's way of saying: you Westerner want accountability? You've got it! And not your pansy accountability. We killed a guy over the antifreeze. Are you not satisfied yet?

Yet that, too, is a counterfeit. In the West, we value the trial as much as we value the verdict. We believe in shining a light on misconduct, to learn from it, to improve from it, to follow the rot as far as is required to fix the problem. The end result -- a fine, an imprisonment, whatever -- is less important, actually, than telegraphing to everyone in society right and wrong.

In China, they are indeed telegraphing to society right and wrong: bluff it out; if you're caught, fib; if you're still caught, find a scapegoat and then declare the matter "over".

Come to think of it, Jennifer Lynch follows that same arc of non-accountability.

There are a lot of reasons to be hopeful about China -- for me, the fact that 20 million Chinese bloggers are still able to write on the Internet without disclosing their identities is a key reason for hope. (When I was there, it was bloggers who broke a scandalous story about slaves working at a brick factory, with the approval of local Communist bosses.) But there are plenty of reasons for pessimism, too.

The ability to put up a skyscraper is an impressive feat, and it is certainly the sign of some achievement -- something that, for example, Dubai is unable to do except by important hundreds of thousands of foreign skilled labourers. But unless those skyscrapers are built on the foundations of responsibility, they're wobbly in every sense, including physically.

One last observation. After a few weeks, we started to eat almost exclusively at Western restaurants. They're ubiquitous -- I think the most common face on Chinese streets is Col. Sanders. Seriously, other than on the currency and in some state museums, you can hardly find a portrait of Mao. At those Western restaurants, there was an imposed set of Western standards, rooted in personal responsibility. I was in a Haagen Dasz store (of couse) in Beijing and saw one young Chinese employee interviewing another young Chinese job applicant -- in English. The entire interview was about taking personal responsibility and exceeding standards, not faking them. It was the same in every Western store I attended. (At a Starbucks next to the Great Wall, they literally sent someone in to clean the bathroom after every time someone used it.)

Western values, transmitted through multi-national companies, will help save China. And so, of course, will Christianity, which counts 100 million adherents in that country, all of them doing so to their personal jeopardy.

Why Christianity? Because it is a religion that imposes a moral code on an individual. And it places something other than Chairman Mao or the state or the Communist idol of the day at the apex of obedience. And it tells every one of the billion point two Chinese that they are valuable, that they have worth -- the antidote to Mao's China, where 50 million of his countrymen were expendable and where he actually tried an experiment of replacing individuals' names with numbers.

 

Jennifer Lynch, the chief commissar of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, flew to Dublin, Ireland to give a speech to the Canadian Bar Association, which is holding its annual meeting there. I can't find her speech on the CHRC's website, so I'll go for now by Peter O'Neill's report for CanWest news.

I first saw O'Neill's report on the Internet yesterday morning; it went up on the websites of most CanWest newspapers, but it looks like only the Ottawa Citizen actually printed it in their paper edition.

The report is about two things; Lynch's speech, and the CBA's terrorist-coddling ways (which I addressed in a post yesterday). All I'd add to the Khadr matter is this factoid:

• Number of times terrorist Omar Khadr is mentioned on the CBA's website: 232.
• Number of times Chinese-Canadian political dissident Huseyn Celil is mentioned on the CBA's website: 0.
• Number of times Saudi-tortured prisoner William Sampson is mentioned on the CBA's website: 0. Et cetera.

Back to Lynch. The first question, of course, is how much did her Irish adventure cost Canadian taxpayers? I went to Expedia and to Air Canada's website, and found return airfare from Ottawa to Dublin for about $1,100 including taxes. Is there anyone out there who doubts Lynch will bill taxpayers in excess of $5,000 for her junket? I'm being modest: the last time Lynch flew to Ireland on our dime, she sent us the bill for a cool $9,000.

There's a difference, though. In her last five-star trip to Ireland, the purpose was purportedly the carrying out of her mandate as assigned to her by Parliament. It showed that her majesty has expensive taste, little regard for taxpayers during this recession, and hasn't been paying spending enough time back home in her Ottawa office cleaning up corruption. But she could at least plausibly make the case that going to Ireland -- and the many other exotic junkets she's been on -- had something to do with doing her job.

Not this time.

According to O'Neill's report, Lynch went to Dublin not to promote human rights. She went there to save her own job, to further her shrill campaign of hatred and contempt against her political critics -- especially bloggers like me.

Here's the story; let's go through it:

Earlier Saturday, Jennifer Lynch, head of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, urged Canada’s legal community to help her defend federal, provincial and territorial human rights commissions and tribunals which she said are under attack by conservative critics.

Lynch engages in name-calling: free speech advocates, and proponents of the rule of law, are apparently "conservative". Now, that's not name-calling where I come from, but at the ultra-liberal CBA, it's fighting words. At her Montreal rant against bloggers, Lynch used the phrase "far right", which she surely thought would invoke the spectre of anti-Semites. You know, notorious Jew-haters like Ezra Isaac Levant.

That Lynch regards "conservative" as an epithet should be instructive to the Prime Minister's Office. I think they missed Lynch's personal track record of anti-Alberta, anti-conservative bigotry when they appointed her. And perhaps some people in Dublin were roused by it. But, simply put, I think many of the CBA lawyers probably just chuckled. For, other than noisy me and noisy Mark Steyn, who are the bulk of the critics of out-of-control HRCs? Let's take a look at a few:

• Alan Borovoy, forty-year boss of the labour-left Canadian Civil Liberties Association;
• Egale, the powerful gay rights lobby;
• The Canadian Association of Journalists;
• PEN Canada, with its honourary patron, John Ralston Saul;
• Every liberal newspaper editorial board in Canada from the Montreal Gazette to the Toronto Star to Eye Weekly;
• Liberal MPs and Senators from Keith Martin to Jerry Grafstein;
• Janet Keeping of the Chumir Foundation for Ethics.

To name just a few off the top of my head.

Next, and I'm relying on O'Neill's wording, but I've heard Lynch say it many times: she never refers to "human rights" (let alone "civil rights"). She always talks about the importance of the "human rights system" or of the commissions and tribunals themselves. Not civil liberties; but bureaucrats.

The system is what's valuable to her. Of course it is. It's the system that pays her $300,000 a year, the system that sends her on junkets, that gives her a staff of 200, and that gives her 800 more well-paid allies in 13 other HRCs across the country. She's strong on defending the system -- she'll do anything to defend it from accountability or reform, even when her own staff are revealed to be members of neo-Nazi organizations. It's the system she cares about.

But I think that lawyers -- even lefty lawyers at the CBA -- actually care about real human rights. I think when they saw Lynch whine like a schoolboy about how tough it is to be in politics -- do you think it's easy to fly first class to Dublin!? -- they probably thought: how did a thin-skinned child ever become trusted to run a 200-person commission? And if she doesn't like the cut-and-thrust of debate, why doesn't she just shut up and do her job?

And those lawyers who thought a little more probably thought: HRCs? Aren't those the folks that have been in the news lately, trying to censor magazines and churches?

She told the CBA that opponents of rights bodies have successfully created a “chill” that makes it difficult for anyone to defend those bodies without also becoming a target.

A "chill". A "target". I know what those words mean. I was the target of three HRC complaints. To be targeted meant, in my case, to have fifteen government bureaucrats and lawyers bearing down on me for 900 days, to be forced to hire lawyers to defend myself, and to be falsely accused, in the name of the Queen, of being a racist. It meant being interrogated by government bureaucrats about my private political thoughts.

That's what being targeted means. And that punitive process was meant to chill anyone else who had big ideas about speaking freely in a way that "offended" the political correctness of Lynch and her fellow commissars: watch out, or they will come to get you, and even if you "win", you'll lose time and money. Just ask seventy-something Fr. Alphonse de Valk, the Toronto priest who was investigated by Lynch for two years, before she dumped him on the side of the road with a $20,000 legal bill, but not even an apology.

What Lynch really meant in Dublin and at her previous hate-filled rant in Montreal is that she doesn't believe she ought to be accountable. Mere scrutiny, for her, is chilling. Mere opposition and criticism is being targeted. But no-one has sued her; no-one has commanded her to appear to answer for her private political thoughts. At most, she was invited to answer questions by her bosses, at a Parliamentary committee, to merely answer questions about her staff's outrageous conduct -- but she refused to attend, and now attacks the MP who invited her, Russ Hiebert, as one of her 1,200 enemies on her official enemies list, compiled at taxpayers' expense.

The woman spends her days prosecuting people who have offensive opinions. It's not too surprising that she finds it offensive when people criticize her for it. She's not used to dissent. She's used to bullying people -- real bullying, with court orders and fines. She's not used to being told "no".

Lynch, saying some criticisms have been “troubling” and “at times scary,” also read out a graphic anonymous letter she received stating that she should be shot dead.

I'm sorry, I simply don't believe that.

This is a woman who has been caught in lie after lie after lie. In the National Post and Montreal Gazette, I dissected two of her most abominable lies -- lying about her employees' culpability in an Internet hacking case, and lying about her employees publishing bigoted comments on neo-Nazi websites.

The woman is a liar. And if she'll lie to protect her staff, don't you think she'd lie -- or at least stretch the truth -- to protect herself?

We know this: Lynch's staff -- at least seven of them -- lie in the regular course of their work. They go online, pretending to be neo-Nazis (I hope it's just pretending) in order to entrap other bigots. They lie as part of their jobs.

And they do more than lie: they call for truth to be destroyed. Lynch's unsolicited memo to Parliament in June actually demanded that truth be removed as a legal defence to criminal charges of hate propaganda (truth is already not a defence in Lynch's kangaroo court).

As Henry Kissinger said about the Palestinians: if someone is willing to kill you, they're probably willing to lie to you, too. If Lynch is willing to shred the Charter of Rights to get you; if she's willing to imprison you through a contempt of court application to get you; if she's willing to lie in public to get you; do you really think she'd hesitate to read out a fabricated letter at her pity party in Dublin?

Not that Lynch herself fabricated the letter. I don't think she's quite that hands-on. But that either one of her rogue staff wrote it, in one of their Nazi personas; and/or that Lynch is dramatizing and exaggerating a letter, to trump it up into a real criminal threat, instead of merely a rude insult sent in by one of the many people she's stepped on in her dark career.

But let me ask you a personal, practical question: if you received a genuine, credible death threat, what would you do? Would you go to the police? Or would you save it for a big splash at a CBA conference, to make your case that you're being picked on and that politics isn't fair? Methinks the lady doth protest too much. I don't know for sure the provenance of her "death threat". I do know that her staff routinely and methodically lie, including lying on the Internet about the CHRC. I do know that Lynch herself is a damned liar.

“I’m here to ask for your help,” Lynch told CBA members.

She urged them to write “letters to correct misinformation,” encourage other experts to participate in the debate and promote public education of the role of rights commissions and tribunals in the justice system.

Lynch wants other lawyers to debate for her. But she herself refuses to do so. She specifically refuses to engage me and my charges in debate on radio or TV. Remember this gong show, when she tried to have me kicked off of CTV?

Why does Lynch refuse to debate, and refuse to debate me in particular? She has accused me of spreading misinformation. Well, she's had five months since my book was released to pick it apart; I've been blogging about the CHRC pretty much every day for nineteen months. You'd think that, by now, she would be able to articulate what, exactly, I've got wrong. What fact is wrong? What allegation is untrue? Surely a smart QC like her, with a staff of 200 and a budget of $25-million could tear me to pieces, and publicize the tearing coast to coast, if I was wrong.

That just hasn't happened, because I'm not wrong. The CHRC is a corrupt, abusive organization. That's why members of the Canadian bar -- not just members of the liberal CBA -- have pretty much just slowly backed away as Lynch has imploded over the past year. You can count on one hand the number of lawyers who have leaped to her defence. Well, one finger actually -- Pearl Eliadis. But she works for HRCs, so that's not really surprising. Even Janet Keeping, who says my language is too stout when I call Lynch a liar, condemns the CHRC for their censorship.

I think Canadian lawyers have actually been pretty attentive to the whole HRC debacle -- even a number of judges have mentioned the case to me, with great interest. And while, like Keeping, they might have some stylistic differences with me personally, they know this isn't a personal battle. It's a battle for civil liberties for all Canadians. Mark Steyn and I became accidental champions for it, because we were personally smeared by out-of-control HRCs.

That's where Lynch has made a gross miscalculation. She thinks that by personally demonizing me and Steyn -- that by keeping a 1,200 name, Richard Nixon-style enemies list, by denouncing her enemies as "far right" and by whining about how tough it is to hold a public office, she'll win this argument. But she doesn't realize what she looks like -- she's like the drunk at a party who doesn't realize that she's talking way, way, to loud and everybody is starting to get a little bit creeped out. Seriously: you've got the boss of the CHRC flying to Dublin to speak to the CBA -- and all she talks about is how tough a gig it is, because she's got political critics? Does she not know what she sounds like? I bet they were very quiet during her speech, but whispered about it a lot afterwards.

She said rights bodies have been under attack since 2007 after the Canadian Islamic Congress filed complaints over an essay published in Maclean’s magazine by conservative commentator Mark Steyn.

Note again: her interest is not in civil liberties. It's that her gang, her company, her system is "under attack". No concern for free speech. Plenty of whining about her, her, her.

But even that's not true. The Canadian Islamic Congress is a bunch of anti-Semites. Syed Soharwardy, the imam who complained against me, is an anti-Semite and an anti-Christian bigot, to boot. The fact that they filed complaints did not start this whole public debate. It's that the HRCs pursued those anti-Semitic, anti-liberal, anti-freedom complaints with a vengeance that started this debate.

Syed Soharwardy and Mohamed Elmasry are the Muslim equivalent of white trash. They're stupid, hateful bigots who have imported Saudi values to Canada. But it took the HRCs to deploy the governments of Alberta, B.C., Ontario and Canada to the service of their bigotry. That's what's appalling here. They gleefully violated the separation of mosque and state, and destroyed our Western, liberal values along the way.

The complaints filed to the Canadian, Ontario and B.C. rights commissions were all eventually dismissed, though criticisms by those commissions against Steyn’s published views about Islam prompted accusations that his right to free speech was being violated.

Steyn, fellow conservative commentator Ezra Levant, various other bloggers, and politicians such as B.C. Conservative MP Russ Hiebert and retired former Tory cabinet minister Monte Solberg have all expressed harsh criticisms of rights commissions and tribunals.

Many of the critics have argued that Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which prohibits the spreading of “hate messages” on the telephone and Internet, violates the right to free speech. Some have argued that hate crimes should be dealt with by police relying on the Criminal Code.

Lynch told the CBA that rights commissions are important components of the justice system, giving society’s “most vulnerable” minority groups access to a mechanism to deal with alleged rights violations.

Just a quick laugh on that last point. 12 out of the last 14 hate speech cases prosecuted in Canada were by the same complainant: a rich, white lawyer named Richard Warman, who is a member of no minority I can discern. He's a privileged bureaucrat, who actually worked for the CHRC itself when he started filing CHRC complaints (an abominable conflict of interest). He currently works for the Department of National Defence's own mini-HRC. And he continues to have his expenses paid by the CHRC, even though he no longer works there.

I'm not sure if he meets the test of "most vulnerable", so I'm not surprised that Lynch omitted that part from her call to action.

Critics are trying “to destroy our investigators’ and litigators’ reputations and credibility with untrue accusations,” Lynch said during her appeal for help from Canadian lawyers and academics.

Sandy Kozak is one of Lynch's investigators. She is a corrupt ex-cop, who was drummed out of the real police for illegal behaviour. You can read all about it here. It's not an untrue accusation. It's the truth. What's also the truth is that Kozak perfectly sums up the ethical issues at the CHRC: she's too corrupt for real police, but Lynch doesn't mind. I wonder what the CBA would think of that, if Lynch had disclosed the truth to them.

Dean Steacy is another one of Lynch's investigators. You can read about his racist actions here (scroll down).

It was Steacy's candid testimony in March of 2008 that really blew the lid off the anti-Semitic ring at the CHRC -- he was the one who named the seven HRC staff who have access to neo-Nazi memberships.

Stop for a moment here and put yourself in the shoes of one of the lawyers sitting there in Dublin, wondering who the hell this vindictive little woman is and what she's going on about. No; let's do better. Let's say you were in Dublin, and you actually believed every word that Lynch said. I mean, put aside her increasingly unhinged rhetoric, her boasting of her 1,200-person enemies lists, her ranting against the vast right-wing conspiracy of gay advocates and brown MPs and 60's civil libertarians. Let's say you actually bought was Lynch was selling, and you were so moved that you decided that, yes, you were going to answer her call and pitch in to the debate -- even if Lynch herself remains AWOL from any actual, you know, debating.

The first thing you'd do to rebut such lies and smears is to learn what they were, and what the truth was.

You'd do some digging.

You'd probably start with this whole neo-Nazi business, and the hacking thing, too.

You might look at Richard Warman's litigation-of-fortune.

You might even read some case law -- such as the recent ruling by the CHRTribunal about the "disturbing and disappointing" conduct of the CHRC.

If you dug deeply enough, you'd find the hundreds of anti-Semitic, anti-black and anti-gay comments written by CHRC staff. You'd find about troubling violations of the rule of law. You might even read Shakedown (thousands have) and say, "those are some pretty big accusations. Let me get to the bottom of it."

And then what?

I don't know how many people were in that room in Dublin. I didn't see Lynch on their official program, and the official conference blog didn't mention her. I'm guessing she had an early morning slot, and a few folks were a little bit late getting to the conference, between jet lag and some fresh Kilkenny.

If 200 people heard her, how many would be motivated to take up her cause, and become her truth squad? Ten?

And of those ten, do you really think that a single one of them, when conducting an independent, neutral survey of the facts, wouldn't be appalled by what he or she would find? Has Lynch even thought this through?

“For the moment the obligation to defend our existence monopolizes our energy.”

That is the most awesome line in Lynch's whole speech, and I'm glad O'Neill got it precisely enough to put it in quotes.

That's a firing offence in itself.

Here you have a woman tasked with the implementation of the entire Canadian Human Rights Act. She says that "hate speech" accounts for just 2% of her commission's activities. (I never believed it -- we know her hate squad is much larger than 4 people (which would be 2% of her total staff); seven of her hate squad are neo-Nazi members, and there's probably a half dozen who aren't. But she tells Parliament it's only 2% of her work.

But now she says her political campaign "monopolizes our energy".

She's consumed by it. Her personal vendetta against Steyn, me, and the 1,198 others on her enemies list has taken over her mind. Sorry: not just her mind and her energy, but "our energy". That's plural. She's talking about her tax-paid staff.

The purpose of the CHRC, according to Lynch herself, is now "monopolized" by the improper, abusive purpose of running Lynch's political campaign of hatred and contempt for her critics.

That's not what Parliament directed her to do.

That's not what taxpayers pay her to do.

That's not what the law requires her to do.

That's not what her public service ethics code (for there is no CHRC ethics code) demands that she do.

But it's what she's doing.

Jennifer Lynch has taken a $25-million organization and has deployed it to her own political vendetta. That's more money than the Tories or the Liberals spent in the last election. And she's using it for her own election campaign.

Paging Guy Giorno: you've got a rogue on your hands here.

She should have been fired for keeping neo-Nazis on staff.

She should have been fired for her vicious anti-Christian campaigns against clergy like Fr. de Valk.

She should have been fired for creating the public spectacle of lying to the country.

She should have been fired for refusing to attend Parliament, despite Russ Hiebert's request that she attend -- and then attacking Hiebert later, once Parliament had broken.

She wasn't. For some weird reason, this hateful, vengeful woman was allowed to continue -- and to create a massive, public sore for this government. Had she done all this in silence, it would be one thing. But she has done it flagrantly, publicly, and to the great detriment of the government.

Had Lynch been a cabinet minister -- and many cabinet ministers have smaller departments and budgets -- she would have been sacked for her insubordination, for corruption and for embarrassing the government.

Why is this hateful woman still cashing taxpayers cheques?

Why is this contemptuous woman flying around the world on her political campaign?

Fire. Them. All.

And then bring in the forensic auditors.

I'm not surprised to read that the Canadian Bar Association has called for the government of Canada to press for the return of terrorist Omar Khadr, currently rotting in Barack Obama's Guantanamo Bay. I've written about Khadr before. In short, he was charged with killing an American, in an American war, as an anti-American terrorist. Let him stand trial in America.

I acknowledge that there is another political view. But that's the thing: it's another political view. And foreign policy, especially relations with our largest ally, is a political thing, not the proper jurisdiction for a court to issue directives about. That's the real outrage here: that an aggressive, activists pair of judges want to play foreign minister, without any of the information and briefings necessary to do the job -- or the political accountability. Nice job if you can get it.

But back to the Canadian Bar Association, the left wing of the federal Liberal Party. If you skim through their self-righteous press releases, you'll see a pattern: they overwhelmingly condemn the United States for "human rights" violations, and are notably silent about such violations from villain states like China, Iran and Russia. (I acknowledge that, since Barack Obama became president, they have denounced Guantanamo Bay with less frequency and venom than when George Bush ran that same institution. Funny how that works.)

Anyways, the CBA was meeting in Dublin, Ireland (huh?) and, true to form, their keynote speaker was Mary Robinson, the bigot who oversaw the anti-Semitic hate-fest at Durban. That fits about right with the CBA's foreign policy: praise terrorists like Khadr and denounce the Jewish state. No surprise that Jennifer Lynch, the chief commissar of the Canadian Human Rights Commission was there. I wonder if she swapped tips with Robinson on anti-Semitism -- Lynch being the proud employer of seven members of neo-Nazi groups.

I'll talk more about Lynch's laughable comments later, but for now the point is the CBA's predictable demand that the Conservative government accede to the Federal Court of Appeal's "direction" to welcome back Khadr.

I can't find it on the Canadian Lawyer website itself, but I did find on "BurmaNet" this item I wrote a couple of years back about the CBA's execrable love-trip to Myanmar, the fascist dictatorship about which the CBA's moral conscience doesn't give a damn -- other than how to get the best deals on trinkets in the bazaars.

Read my column below, and tell me if, like me, you're not much interested in foreign policy and human rights advice from the kind of people who would go on junkets to Burma, without breathing a word about democracy:

March 5, Canadian Lawyer
The Burma boondoggle and human rights - Ezra Levant

There are two ways for Canadian lawyers to visit dictatorships like China and Burma. One is to meet with local dissidents and civil rights activists and learn about their repression and bring international legal and
political pressure on the regimes. The other is the way chosen by the Canadian and Ontario Bar Associations.

In March, the OBA sent a delegation to Burma, a country that brutally represses its own citizens and where civil rights do not exist. It is a regime that murders its political dissidents — or in the case of Aung San
Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize-winning democracy activist who is too well known to be murdered without international incident — holds them under indefinite house arrest.

Suu Kyi has asked that foreign tourists boycott Burma, so as not to lend economic or moral support to its regime. “To suggest that there’s anything new that tourists can teach the people of Burma about their own situation is not simply patronizing, it’s also racist,” she said in a 1999 interview.

Don’t tell that to the OBA. They’re sending a group of 60 Ontario lawyers and their spouses, eager to see Burma’s tourist attractions and shop in its markets. It’s a ghoulish tourism — rather like taking a
bargain-hunting trip to North Korea. To deodorize their grisly vacation, the OBA has set aside a few evenings for “legal meetings.” However, anyone other than government officials or their agents who dare to meet with
foreigners will be arrested by the Burmese government.

Don’t bother Morrisville, Ont., lawyer Doug Grenkie, the past president of
the OBA, with any of that. “There are lawyers practising there and people
who need our support,” he says. Of course, Grenkie doesn’t plan to
actually “support” anyone — he will be filing no lawsuits in Burma’s
kangaroo courts on behalf of Suu Kyi or other dissidents; he won’t be
delivering any petitions to government officials, and he won’t be taking
Burma’s plight to international human rights agencies at the United
Nations or elsewhere. No, according to the itinerary, his entourage will
buy some lovely Burmese lacquerware and rubies, and there’s even a
starlight cruise on the Ayeyarwaddy River. That’s the depth of the OBA’s
commitment to human rights: they’ll keep eating hors d’oeuvres until Suu
Kyi is free.

The OBA shouldn’t bear all the embarrassment, though their trip to Burma
is amongst the most crass. For years, the Canadian Bar Association has
engaged in farcical “exchanges” with their counterparts in China, too.
There is indeed an exchange that goes on, but it’s not Western lawyers
imparting our liberal legal traditions. In exchange for a luxurious
vacation for Canadian lawyers and their spouses, the CBA gives China moral
cover. That’s the exchange. Whenever groups like Amnesty International
highlight China’s appalling lack of human rights, Beijing can point to the
CBA’s eager apologists.

The CBA sends lawyers to “teach” Chinese lawyers, for example, about how
we run criminal defence trials in Canada. Nice, but China isn’t governed
by Canadian law; its conviction rate is over 95 per cent, appeals are
extremely rare, and the death penalty is ubiquitous. Of course, many of
these “crimes” are not what we would consider crimes — the crime of
political dissidence remains law in China, and even following illegal
faiths, from Falun Gong to non-sanctioned Christianity, is punishable by
imprisonment or death, including a forced human organ harvesting program
that would make Josef Mengele proud.

What is the point of “teaching” Chinese lawyers about constitutional
freedoms, procedural fairness and the rule of law when China’s legal
system has none of those traits and when it is just another arm of the
Communist Party? There is a word for such a sham that the Russian
Communists invented: the Potemkin Village. At least that was built by the
Communists themselves as a propaganda ploy. It’s a Chinese innovation to
get Western liberals to pay for a propaganda exercise to cover up China’s
appalling — and worsening — human rights record.

It is strange that the CBA and OBA are a party to fascist regimes like
China and Burma. In Canada, the bar associations are on the cutting edge
of human rights and civil rights, relentlessly badgering Canada’s
government on everything from gay marriage to racial quotas to outlawing
spanking. Canada may be one of the freest countries in the world, but
that’s never enough for the CBA. China — the world’s greatest executioner
— is the toast of the CBA. Perhaps all the Canadian government has to do
to defang the CBA is take some lawyers and their spouses on an exotic
shopping vacation.

Ed Stelmach is far and away the worst premier in Alberta's 104-year history. I don't even think his own partisans would deny that. They'd simply point out that even the worst premier in Alberta's history can still beat the Liberal Party in the polls, and they're right. That's hardly a feat. I wonder if that winning streak will continue in the face of the awkwardly-named Wild Rose Alliance, undergoing a renewal right now.

I predict Stelmach will be known in history as the undertaker of the Alberta PCs. He is already known as the underminer of the province's oil and gas industry, a remarkable feat. He has changed the province's oil royalty regime five times in three years; is it any wonder that a survey of nearly 600 oil and gas executives, Alberta is now ranked as the least favourable province in which to invest? Perhaps that's a reason why the province is headed for a $7-billion deficit, an amazing achievement given that oil is hovering in the $70/bbl range. By contrast, Ralph Klein balanced the budget on $20/bbl oil.

Here an article I recently found on the Internet that I wrote two years ago, before Stelmach pulled a Hugo Chavez on the oil patch, and before the province swung from massive surpluses to massive deficits. Even then it was obvious that Stelmach and his numb caucus were economically illiterate, with a touch of populist bullying thrown in for good measure. I wrote this in Canadian Lawyer two years ago:

During the 1990s, Alberta was the policy laboratory for the rest of the country, testing out ideas like balanced budgets and tax cuts adopted in other provinces. But today, Alberta’s government has lost its leadership role.

It is a follower now, toying with importing socialist ideas that were once anathema in Canada’s most entrepreneurial province.

The price of housing is on the minds of lots of Albertans, as a flood of job seekers pour in from other provinces, driving up the price of the average home by 13 per cent over the past year, and much more than that in Edmonton and Calgary. But the free market has responded as it should; nearly 50,000 homes were built in the province last year, more than in Quebec, a province with more than double the population. Alberta’s construction permits routinely exceed a billion dollars a month, most of it residential, a number exceeded only by Ontario.

That’s Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” theory at work. No central authority instructed workers from high unemployment areas to migrate to Alberta’s booming oil patch; and no one directed Canada’s developers to build more homes where needed. Both of these opportunistic trends happen to be a natural check on themselves in the long run: higher housing prices attract investment that will eventually lead to lower housing prices. In the meantime, those higher housing prices offset the economic benefits to job seekers moving to Alberta from more affordable provinces, naturally cooling off Alberta’s migration.

But Alberta’s allegedly Conservative government isn’t leaving it alone. The government recently struck a committee to look into the housing “crisis” — if 50,000 new homes a year can be called a crisis. Among its recommendations was a plan to limit annual rent increases to inflation plus two per cent — rent control.

In the end, that recommendation wasn’t adopted by the government — to the dismpay of many MLAs. “The free market is not working very well right now,” explained Neil Brown, a Calgary Tory MLA. But tens of thousands of Canadians think otherwise. They’re not choosing Saskatchewan, a province with nearly as much oil and gas, more wheat, more potash, and more uranium. Alberta’s wealth is not because of its natural resources but precisely because its free market is working so well.

It’s not the construction industry that dodged the rent-control bullet: it’s any newcomer to Alberta hoping that more apartments will be built. In disastrous rent control experiments from Toronto to New York, apartment-seekers are always the first casualty because no-one wants to become a landlord and those who already own apartments have no reason to do more than bare minimum maintenance. Rent control is usually an early domino in urban decay; when the private sector abandons rental apartments, the government moves in, building housing projects that become magnets for crime.

Economics deal with the eternal question of scarcity: man’s desires exceed the amount of resources available. His reach exceeds his grasp. In the free market, scarce apartments are allocated based on who wants them the most — roughly measured by who is willing to pay the most for them. Rent control rations scarce apartments another way: whoever got there first gets to keep them, even if newcomers would pay more. It doesn’t just transfer wealth from landlords to renters; it transfers wealth from people who don’t have apartments to people who already do.

Alberta is still riding out its economic “miracle.” But it actually isn’t a miracle at all; Alberta’s success is the predictable outcome of a low-tax, low-regulation, entrepreneurial economy. Its government should remember that most of its newcomers came to get away from job-killing government regulations, not to have those regulations follow them.

It's a little bit sad to read that now; Alberta's economy has tipped into a recession, there is a glut of unsold condos and homes on the market and prices have fallen back by several years. Saskatchewan, by contrast, is booming -- rolling in surpluses, tax cuts and debt pay-downs. The difference is that they've elected their best premier in history, the Sask Party's Brad Wall. It's hard for an Alberta chauvinist like me to watch, for the first time in 75 years, a net migration from Alberta to Saskatchewan, both of money and people. But I don't begrude those fleeing Alberta, and I certainly don't begrudge Saskatchewan and Wall for earning their trust, where Ed Stelmach has earned their contempt.

Yale University Press has announced that it will censor the Danish cartoons of Mohammed from their forthcoming book about the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. In other words, they will destroy the core intellectual integrity of the book, in a pre-emptive submission to sharia law.

Here's the response by the American Association of University Professors:

"We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands.” That is effectively the new policy position at Yale University Press, which has eliminated all visual depictions of the Prophet Muhammad from Jytte Klausen’s new book The Cartoons That Shook the World. Yale made the unusual decision not only to suppress the twelve 2005 Danish cartoons that sparked organized protests in many countries but also historical depictions of Muhammed like a 19th-century print by Gustave Doré. They are not responding to protests against the book; they and a number of their consultants are anticipating them and making or recommending concessions beforehand.

In an action that parallels prior restraint on speech, Yale also refused to give the author access to consultants’ reports unless she agreed in writing not to discuss their contents. Such reports typically have their authors’ names removed, but a prohibition against discussing their content is, to say the least, both unusual and objectionable.

Publishers often refuse to print color illustrations to save money or limit the number of black and white illustrations to reduce the length of a book, but Yale Press has not raised any financial issues here. The issues are:  1) an author’s academic freedom; 2) the reputation of the press and the university; 3) the impact of these twin decisions on other university presses and publication venues; 4) the potential to encourage broader censorship of speech by faculty members or other authors. What is to stop publishers from suppressing an author’s words if it appears they may offend religious fundamentalists or groups threatening violence? We deplore this decision and its potential consequences.

Cary Nelson, AAUP President

That's a good start.

A number of American publications reprinted the cartoons. Going from memory (which is always risky), the Weekly Standard did, the Rocky Mountain News did, the Philadelphia Inquirer did, the Atlantic Monthly did, and a half-dozen other large media. That's not a lot, and it was a scandal that the New York Times didn't -- or for that matter, my favourite U.S. magazine, National Review. But my point is, enough U.S. media did run them to show that Yale's concern about violence is completely misplaced. None of the American media that reprinted them were subject to violence. And even if they had: since when does Yale silence the truth at the demand of threateners?

Yale is protected by campus police, "real" police, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Defence. More to the point, Yale is not located in Syria or Iran, where those two countries' secret police whipped up staged anti-Danish riots as public distractions from their own political problems. (As we have seen in both of those countries, spontaneous political rallies are crushed by the secret police; the cartoon riots were orchestrated by those governments.)

I've said it before, and this is depressing proof of it: the fatwa against those cartoons, issued on the streets of Damascus and Teheran, did more damage to our North American culture of liberty than did 9/11 itself.

9/11 killed thousands of people and cost countless dollars. But other than those who were killed that day and their families, and those in our volunteer armed forces, 9/11 really didn't change our lives other than perhaps the frustrating kabuki we go through at airport security. What's different in our daily lives?

The Danish cartoon riots, though, had an enormous effect. They planted seeds of fear in the minds of thousands of editors, publishers, producers, journalists, professors, politicians and other "public intellectuals" -- the dealers in ideas, the opinion leaders. They have chilled the intellectual climate of the West. They have made us disarm ourselves -- or at least gag ourselves, which is a step towards intellectual disarmament. To cause Yale, with the beautiful motto "truth and light", to censor the truth that was going to shine a light on a dark subject, is a staggering blow to the heart of the American academy. Imagine Yale's reaction had such a publication ban been issued by an American court or legislature: they would have shrieked censorship and invoked the First Amendment, and with good cause. But a publication ban issued by fatwa from the ayatollahs of Iran and their colony in Syria? It was obeyed with the zeal of a convert by the appeasers at Yale.

It is not fear of violence; and if it is, it is not acceptable. It is fear of being politically incorrect. It's fear of being unfashionable. It is self-abnegation; self-destruction; voluntary, pro-active cultural suicide; it is a willing embrace of sharia before sharia is even forced. It is the renunciation of the western, liberal, enlightment values that created Yale, and an embrace of Islamic fascism and its intellectual closed-mindedness.

Enough for now. Let me close with my own essay of explanation for the decision of the Western Standard magazine to publish the cartoons in 2006, a decision that has led to many wonderful things, including to the current debate about freedom of speech in Canada. At the end of the essay are some of the 7,000 letters to the editor we received in the two weeks that followed. Here it is:

Editor Kevin Libin and I agreed: it was just one of those times when a fortnightly magazine wouldn't be able to move quickly enough. By the time the Western Standard would roll off the presses, every other daily newspaper and weekly magazine in the country would have already printed the Danish cartoons that were the subject of riots around the Muslim world. If we were going to publish them after Maclean's, the National Post and the Sun chain did, we'd have to take a different, more reflective approach--not to put the cartoons on the cover as a bold statement of freedom, as the others surely would. We would analyze how the media responded to the implied threats of violence from radical Muslims, we would look at how agents provocateurs used the cartoons to whip up riots in Iran, Pakistan and Syria to serve their own political ends, and we would reveal how the Muslim world itself has depicted Mohammed throughout the ages.

That was the plan, anyways. Of course, Maclean's, the Post and the Sun didn't publish the cartoons. As we came closer to our production deadline, it dawned on us that no large-circulation publication and no TV station in the country had done so, and none would. We'd be the first.

We didn't know what would happen; there had been a minor scuffle at a university in Halifax when a professor posted the cartoons on his office door--several belligerent students invaded his office and berated him. A larger protest followed, as did one in Toronto, apropos of nothing, in front of the Danish consulate. We decided to call the Calgary Police Service's Middle East community relations unit, just to give them the heads-up about what was coming. We hired some extra security for our office, too, out of an abundance of caution.

The magazine was still at the printer when word somehow leaked out that we were publishing the cartoons. The Friday before we rolled off the press, the Calgary Herald and Calgary Sun both called to confirm it, and it was front-page news in Calgary on Saturday. By noon that day, radio and TV stations had picked up the story and were running with it nationally, following me on a visit to Saskatoon just to get the details. By the time Monday morning rolled around--before a single newsstand or subscriber had received the magazine--it was front-page news across the country, and was being given Michael Jackson-style coverage on TV and radio. That day, CTV alone interviewed me three separate times. Before the week was out, the news of our publication was the subject of more than 100 news stories, including on Al Jazeera and China's Xinhua.

Why was it such a big story? I don't mean the cartoons themselves--we know why they're news. But why was the fact that we published them considered news? The cartoons were the central artifact in the largest news story of the month. How could any self-respecting "news" outlet--other than radio stations that are forced to paint pictures with words--not display them? It wasn't for us to answer why we published them, it was for the rest of the media to answer why they did not.

In fact, a large number of journalists privately complimented us for doing what their own publishers had not allowed them to do, and some wrote supportive columns. I received kudos from many interviewers during commercial breaks, and unsolicited e-mail notes and phone calls. There was a pent-up frustration amongst the press corps that they had not been permitted to fully plumb the issues behind the cartoons and the riots, and our decision to publish gave them an opportunity to do so, using us as a surrogate.

A smaller but more vociferous group of reporters took the opposite approach, either in criticizing our bona fide news decision to publish them (such as gratuitously mentioning the fact that Libin and I are Jewish), or in magnifying the reaction to our publication, such as when two of our newsstand distributors, Chapters/Indigo and McNally Robinson, decided not to stock that one issue (they're both selling this latest edition). The eagerness among some of the press to report negative business ramifications bordered on the obsessive; it was as if they were hunting for some after-the-fact justification that their own decisions to censor themselves were valid. It was bad enough that we broke their censorship cartel and provided our lucky readers with the news they wanted. It embarrassed the self-righteous wing of the press corps that a plucky little magazine in Calgary showed more dedication to the craft of journalism than the grandees at CBC headquarters. But for us to do so without any severe suffering--as I write this, not a single protester has visited our offices, not a single bomb threat has been made--is an additional rebuke to their own timidity.

Publishing the cartoons did not create a frenzy among our subscribers or our advertisers. We actually sold several hundred new subscriptions, and hundreds more single-issue sales out of our office. It did not "inflame" the Muslim community. Our office was business as usual. The only people who went into a frenzy over it were the rest of the media, publicly examining their own neurosis about having failed in their duty to put reporting above political correctness.

It is by now trite to rebut the principal excuses made by the "mainstream media," but let us do so again. I can think of five.

First, some editors said that the cartoons do not meet their editorial standards. They are "juvenile" said The New York Times (insert your own joke here about that never having been a problem for the press before). But we did not publish the cartoons as an editorial message from us; we neither agree nor disagree with the cartoons. We published them as a fact, as a piece of evidence, to illustrate what was being "blamed" for riots overseas. If juvenile cartoons could really cause embassies to be burnt to the ground, that is news that's fit to print.

The second objection, made to me by Harry Forestall of the CBC, was that anyone who wanted to see the cartoons could find them on the Internet (though, not on the CBC's website, of course). That's partly true (they were online, but a challenge for some people to find), but that's hardly the proper motto for something claiming to be a news organization. If the best argument the CBC can muster, with its billion-dollar-a-year tax subsidy, is that some little blogger is already meeting Canada's demand for news, then what's the point of having the CBC? Forestall's point answers itself. The mainstream media is now about cultivating an official groupthink; those wishing contrary points of view or who want to judge spicy subjects for themselves must look elsewhere.

The third objection, made to me in a debate with Scott Anderson, VP editorial for all the CanWest newspapers, is that the media self-censored to avoid giving offence to religion. But that's not credible. Not a day goes by without something offensive to Christians being published. The most shocking example, of course, was the photograph entitled Piss Christ," wherein "artist" Andres Serrano photographed a crucifix immersed in a vial of his own urine, an image published in every magazine and newspaper in North America, and the source of much huffing and puffing from editors about freedom of speech. That's just the biggest example; from Hollywood's Last Temptation of Christ, to South Park's treatment of Jesus, Christianity--and every other religion--has had to learn to deal with a free press through peaceful protest, such as writing letters to the editor.

I debated Anderson, and he admitted that "under different circumstances we may have published some of these cartoons to illustrate the story . . . but the reaction is so vitriolic and so angry . . . there is some deep offence here that I don't see in the cartoons, but others obviously do." So, Anderson acknowledged that the cartoons are fairly mild and that if he was truly following his own news judgment, he would have run them. But the response was just "so angry" that he caved in. I appreciated the honesty.

The Globe and Mail 's Edward Greenspon came up with a twist on Anderson's explanation, saying that the cartoons were "unnecessarily provocative," so he chose to censor them. Like CanWest, he chose to outsource his own editorial judgment to those who could show--or feign--the angriest offence. It is horrendous that major newspapers allow any angry heckler to veto them; it is embarrassing that editors would parrot the language of the censors by implying that the publication of the cartoons was done to provoke, as opposed to report the news. Greenspon's argument, too, concedes that it wasn't an editorial judgment, but a political or public relations judgment--the fear of "provoking"--that denied his readers their news.

The final and most delicious excuse offered by the media was that they did not publish cartoons out of "respect" for Islam. But the mainstream media is overwhelmingly liberal, especially on the key Muslim issue of sexuality. Strictly interpreted, Islam is against homosexuality, abortion and women's rights--the touchstones for the liberal media, as they prove each federal election. Since when did the gay-friendly Globe "respect" sharia law, which condemns gays to death? Since when did the pro-choice, pro-feminist Toronto Star "respect" sharia, which strictly limits women's rights? No, that is not respect. That is fear.

Perhaps it was that same incoherent fear that expressed itself through the mouths of the new Conservative defence and foreign affairs ministers. Gordon O'Connor announced that our publication would endanger our troops in Afghanistan; Peter MacKay said that freedom of speech must be limited to what is "responsible" and "appropriate," and that his department would now "promote a better understanding of Islam internationally." Our troops--including our many subscribers in the Canadian Forces--know that cartoons don't kill people. Terrorists kill people. And the reason we have armed forces is to protect our freedoms. In response to his ministers' gaffes, Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued his own statement, correcting the record and giving his unlimited endorsement to freedom of speech. These excuses seemed pretty flimsy to us, and to the majority of the thousands of people who e-mailed and phoned us from around the world. And, according to a February poll conducted by COMPAS, a public opinion research company, fully 70 per cent of Canada's working journalists disagreed with their own editors' decision to censor the cartoons--they supported our position.

The story has more or less played itself out. There are some loose ends, such as a complaint filed against us by some Calgary Muslim leaders, both to the police and to the human rights commission. Of course, this is a more civilized approach than the barbaric rioting overseas, and let us give credit to Canada's Muslims where it is due. But that authoritarian instinct--to run to the police and the courts to enforce a Muslim religious edict, or even to settle a score or an argument--is deeply troubling.

As a lawyer, I see those complaints as nuisance suits, designed to waste our time and money, and as a further warning to other media that to defy the imams is not cost free. But the larger problem is that the official leaders of Canada's Muslim community have not yet been inculcated in the concept of a truly diverse society, where differences of opinions are resolved without resort to the state, and where the rest of us do not have to submit to Muslim edicts. The biggest and most pleasant surprise in my week was the number of Muslim and Arab subscribers who signed up in solidarity with us. They told us they came to Canada to get away from sharia law, and they don't want that law following them here. Perhaps our new minister of citizenship and immigration, Monte Solberg, will beef up the civics classes for new immigrants. Under the Liberal government, new immigrants were handed a little Canadian flag and told to vote Liberal. Perhaps it's time we taught the supremacy of Canada's Constitution, and that in this country we all submit to Queen Elizabeth's laws.

The ruckus is over and we all survived. Hopefully, that in itself will encourage other media to live up to the industry's supposed ideals in the future. For decades, journalists have claimed to follow a higher standard than other commercial industries, and have often looked contemptuously on other businesses. We see now that it was all a sham; when a real threat came to freedom of expression--not a benign church lady protesting Piss Christ, or a harmless customs officer trying to block some pornography, but the risk of true violence--Canada's official keepers of freedom of speech hid under their desks. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association was silent; PEN Canada and Amnesty International actually told journalists to restrict what they say. So much for them. We should never grant them the moral high ground again. And Canadians who trusted those cowardly guardians with their liberal values--feminism, gay rights, abortion, secularism, true diversity, things that are at risk under sharia law--should do some contemplation. It's an odd thing when a western magazine, widely perceived as conservative, is the chief bulwark against a theocratic muzzle on Canada's Toronto-based liberal media.

I've never been prouder of our magazine, and everyone associated with it. Not a single member of our staff and not one of our owners disagreed with our decision to publish. And all this right on our second anniversary of publication. I can promise you many more years of independent, honest reporting that tells it like it is.

We received more than 7,000 letters in response to our decision to run the Danish cartoons--some supporting us, some condemning us. Thanks to all who took the time to write. Though we can't run all the letters, here's what some of you had to say:

Why publish the cartoons when you see the chaos that these publications are creating around the world? Must we bring the violence to Canada? Are you out of your minds? What in heaven's name is wrong with you people? Do you want to be "right" or do you want to be happy?

J. Bilodeau
- - -

This is a short message of support, from a Canadian living in London, England, for your editorial decision to publish the controversial cartoons. The decision of many Canadian and British periodicals not to publish the cartoons undoubtedly has been based on genuine fear for the lives and safety of those associated with the publications. I suppose that such fear may be a good defence for their decision; after all, there is no rule that they must be brave. However, for these publications to deny that they are fearful, for them to offer up a spurious or misleading justification for the decision not to publish, and for them to vilify those who do publish, does not help to preserve a free and democratic society.

Marke Raines
- - -

I'm going to purchase a subscription. Why? Your magazine's take on politics and my views are not on the same page--not by a long shot. But I do believe in free speech, and freedom of the press. Nobody tells me what to read; I'm a free man and this is a free society. This magazine is showing courage in the face of great loss, and I respect that.

Darren Parks
- - -

It is regrettable that you have decided to publish the infamous cartoons. You basically want to insult over one billion Muslims. Do you print nude men and women on the front page of your publication just to show the freedom of press?

Habib Khan
- - -

I felt tremendous relief when I read that you have published the cartoons. As a liberal feminist, I am crushed that the CBC has not published those cartoons, and I am glad that someone is standing up for basic principles of free speech. Usually I am against nearly everything the Western Standard stands for, but in this case I am grateful to you for defending me and my country against bullies and thugs.

Melissa Svendsen
- - -

I don't think anyone who has glimpsed the Western Standard would be surprised at what your "rag" publishes. We are aware that most of the writers are Jewish, no doubt the magazine is owned by Jews, therefore we know the motivation. The Jewish-owned media in Canada hides behind laws that protect Jews while stirring up hatred against others. It will be interesting to see what happens when the tables turn, like it did once before, in pre-war Germany.

Judy Lane
- - -

Thank you all for your bravery. My dad, who fought five years in the Second World War, would be proud. He hated pussies, as you can imagine.

Robert Zurrer
- - -

You've done the right thing. Your purpose is to inform, and accomplishing that mission takes courage. I applaud yours.

Keith A. Verble, MSgt, USAF
- - -

These mild little pictures that you published could not have caused the uproar we see. Please put your money where your mouth is and show us the real thing. If these were really it, then we are dealing with Grade A paranoia.

Alexander Paton
- - -

I have recently read of the persecution that your paper has suffered as a result of your decision to publish the Mohammed cartoons. Given the worldwide intimidation that has been perpetrated against any press daring to exercise their freedoms thus, your decision to do so was not only courageous, but a fine example to the craven press, who have allowed their agendas to be set by intimidation, violence and the threat thereof. I believe that your action was justified, in these circumstances or any others. Freedom does not exist where it cannot be exercised.

Jason Briscoe
- - -

So now the lives of our troops are in jeopardy because you, the editor, are an a--hole? Kudos to the retailers who declined to sell your rag. But have you learned nothing? You're still offering to sell it? Your parents did a very, very bad job in raising you. You are a disgrace to this country!

Lisanne Tussault
- - -

Though the Muslims riot worldwide and the media spins it to make it look like the rioters are foaming at the mouth, if these cartoons had been depicting Hitler with the Star of David in his eyes having tea with Benjamin Netanyahu, I fear the consequences would have been much more severe. We would likely see legal action, loud Jewish outcry and a few deportations to European countries that have stricter penalties for picking on Jews. So, now that the same laws your people enacted as a shield from scrutiny are being used against your Western Standard by Muslims, free speech has all of a sudden become something worth fighting for?

Sisko Brill
- - -

I spent over two years in Saudi Arabia and left just before 9/11. I often watched the religious police beat and herd people into the mosques with sticks at prayer time. I saw the devout Muslims treat Indian, Pakistani and Indonesian Muslims as slaves, beat and mistreat them. I know that the only reason newspapers are not printing the cartoons is fear. We should print a cartoon every day on the front page until they understand that they cannot, and we will not, allow them to take away our freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of or from religion.

Bob Savage
- - -

What is it with you people? First you kill Jesus and now you're attacking the Prophet Mohammed? No wonder Hitler felt so threatened seeing himself as a new-world saviour.

M. Stevens
- - -

I am the very proud mother of a son who chose to serve in the Canadian military. A young man, who wants to make a positive change in the world. To assist in restoring peace to the Middle East, so those people can live a life of less deprivation and hostility. You are simply sabotaging all the good the Canadian army is doing in Afghanistan, and you should be made an example of, as what not to be. You should be sadly ashamed of yourself, as should your mother.

Diane Ricard
- - -

The world's TV screens and newspapers have been filled with images of rioting Muslims and embassies ablaze, as well as stories of at least 12 people who have been killed in this carnage. What is missing is any sense of context. Seeing these cartoons, which are largely innocuous, makes this Islamic orgy of destruction even harder to believe.

The Western Standard has every human right to publish those cartoons, or anything else it deems worthy of information and conversation. Readers, consumers, advertisers, policy-makers and citizens in Canada, the U.S. and every freedom-loving nation in the world should stand with them, rather than with the self-appointed censors who are trying to shut them down, and with their weak-kneed, summertime friends who are sprinting into the tall grass now that things have gotten hot.

Deroy Murdock
- - -

We as Christians have nativity scenes vandalized at Christmas, but an Islamic cartoon is forbidden? Discouraged by Prime Minister Harper of all people? We really need a reality check in this country. Freedom of speech is a Canadian right, administered and controlled by Canadians, not Islamic fundamentalists or wimpy prime ministers.

Harry L. Jack
- - -

Why do you feel a need to do this at this time? Why not when they were first published? Of course, it wouldn't have been profitable back then. It would have simply been an insulting gesture to the Muslim community. But now you stand to profit from this, as we can already see it all over the news. Your name is everywhere. Now, that'll pay. I guess you're just doing "your job," and you'll probably hit the delete button after reading this letter, but I wish to remind you, at this time, that whichever religion you might be related to, God will remember your decision to have thrown fuel on the fire.

Francois Dumais
- - -

At last, a magazine that tells it like it is! Thank you for the courage to stand up for freedom of speech. Why would anyone try to stifle the very freedoms that they came to Canada to enjoy?

Leona Stordeur
- - -

I support the decision of the Western Standard to publish the cartoons about Mohammed. Making fun of religion is something Canadians have done for a long time and we should not change. We recognize the dangers of organized religion, while valuing our own private spiritual pursuits. Maybe there should have been cartoons of all the major religions, showing the faults and hypocrisy of them all.

Donald McPherson
- - -

Until recently, as a Canadian living and working in Indonesia, I had nothing to really worry about. The fanatics are nowhere near as plentiful as the western media would have people believe, and those that do exist tend to restrict their threats to people from countries who have caused them harm or offended them in some way. Canada's near-spotless international reputation has protected us here for a long time. Until now. On behalf of all Canadians living in Muslim countries, I'd like to thank you for pretending to stand up for a free press with no regard for our safety.

C.M.Patton
- - -

You're doing the right thing but will be subjected to the usual opprobrium from multiculturalists and secularists--but you have a lot of support out here in the great Canadian hinterland. Tell Peter MacKay he will never be prime minister if he caves in to extremists. Why do these guys always turn into wimps once they are in power? I am not impressed. Who the hell do Stephen Harper and his cronies think we voted for? Not self-flagellating wimps.

I'm 54 years old and I may be alive when the barbarians rush in to take over my country, but at least I can remember better days when we thought our society and values were worth defending. Keep the lights burning out there in Alberta! You're the only light we have left.
Harvey Chartrand

I admire your courage to report the news as it should be reported no matter what religion, culture or high-powered spouses are offended. The news should be reported as it happens without an editor's spin just to gain attention, and if people are offended, that's too bad.

Sheetal Chadha
- - -

Although depicting God or a prophet is in itself blasphemous, according to Islam, this isn't the main concern here. It was how the prophet was depicted as a terrorist. It's very ironic how North Americans are investigating Islam after unfortunate events like these and are making this religion the fastest growing on the continent.

Anwar Syed Ahmed
- - -

Finally, a voice speaks out against threats and intimidation. Christians and Jews have been satirized for ages in print and in cartoons, yet they do not threaten, terrorize and kill those who offend. Instead, they politely, yet at times heatedly, complain. It is about high time that Muslims the world over show the world that theirs is a religion of peace, rather than a religion based on threats, intimidation and terrorism.

Darrell Reid
- - -

Huzzah for having the balls to publish those tepid little drawings, alone among Canadian publications. They may be cartoons, but they have nothing on the cartoons that pass for mainstream Canadian media.

Arnie Keller
- - -

I have today purchased a subscription to your magazine. It's good to see that someone in the media in this country recognizes the danger in knuckling under to the mob. It is discouraging to see how quickly the rest of the print media is prepared to compromise the concept of free speech. Everyone I have spoken to about this issue agrees with your position. You have more support than you may think.

Gordon Wilson
- - -

I support you and your magazine. I have recently returned from a tour in Afghanistan where my platoon suffered eight casualties, five of whom remain suffering to varying degrees. All Muslims I know here and abroad are very good people. Some are the best I know. The ignorance and intolerance of a few Islamic leaders are provoking the reaction to the cartoons. Simple drawings have provided extremists a fire to fan. I have first-hand experience of their so-called "Holy War" and it is about the same old things--power and money.

Mike Gauley
- - -

You are an embarrassment to Albertans, Canadians and indeed, all socially conscious people the world over! I sincerely hope you are sued for causing hate and possibly violent acts by offended citizens. If you worked in any government office in this province or country and produced such offensive pictures you would be investigated to their fullest and dismissed, which is what should happen!

Janice Blunden
- - -

Sanity and courage at last from someone in the Canadian media. Publishing those cartoons is about free speech and protecting our culture and values. Yes, it may offend; yes, it might be against Muslims' religion, but it's not against mine. They made an issue of it; they chose to try to force their values on us. Had they just shrugged the shoulders, the whole issue would have disappeared.

Kelly McDonnell
- - -

As a committed social democrat, I probably disagree with many of your editorial positions, but I strongly commend your decision to publish the cartoons. Your rationale is dead on: without access to the images, no one can form a reasoned judgment about the entire controversy; a democratic society depends absolutely on access to all significant information about the world we live in. Self-censorship in a case like this is a capitulation to the irrational demands of a medieval culture. Good luck to us if we take even one step down that road.

Charles Marxer
- - -

Thank you to the Western Standard from someone who escaped from an Islamic hellhole to live in a free country. The rest of the Canadian media has been so cowardly it is shameful.

Rauha Khalid
- - -

You should can your Jew publisher. In my opinion, he is a complete a--hole and he should be arrested, charged with the hate crime he has committed and deported to Israel.

Mike Armstrong
- - -

Most papers don't print the "Muslim cartoons" because of fear, being scared of the most unreasonable "bullies." Something else came to mind. Practically all the Jews that were sent to Nazi concentration camps in occupied Holland were picked up not by Nazis but by a police force which was almost 100 per cent anti-Nazi. Again: fear! I was there when it happened. And this is how the bullies get their way.

Evert Hamminga
- - -

McNally Robinson Booksellers is refusing to stock the latest edition of the Western Standard out of fear of offending Muslims. However, the company's online site sells both Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I guess the double standard only applies if you are offending groups of individuals that will not respond with unjustifiable violence.

Andrew Tanentzap
- - -

Until you published these cartoons, I was proud to be living in one of the few countries that truly understood the concept of free speech. Free speech is a right we must all protect, but it also bears with it a heavy responsibility. As my husband often says, "Just because something isn't wrong, doesn't make it right."

Dee MacLeod
- - -

This is a complicated issue that the mainstream media want to avoid and I think your gumption may result in serious discussions about free speech. It may cause some in the media to openly criticize those that use fear as a weapon against free speech. As a result of these discussions, the left-wing media may, in future, even show some respect for the tenets of all religions.

Undoubtedly, you'll be vilified as a hatemonger or some such nonsense. Hang in there. There's a silent majority that wish you well. I certainly do.

Gary Hudson
- - -

The cartoons are news and need to be reported. It is definitely not an attack on anyone's religion. This would never have come to the attention of the world but for the hysterical reaction of some Muslim fanatics. If any religion cannot accept any criticism, then it must indeed be fragile and terribly insecure.

R. I. MacKenzie
- - -

I served in the Canadian Forces for many years and participated in "peacekeeping" missions. Ostensibly, my work and the work of my fellow soldiers, sailors and airmen/women was to promote human rights and, most importantly, freedom and political issues aside, we did the best we could. I applaud you for exercising your right to be free from coercion, duress and manipulation of the press. You can be sure my local retailer will be taken to task for his decision not to carry your magazine. Good for you and for us for having you. I may not always agree with your opinions and editorial policies but I am proud of your courage and integrity.

Dan Deveau

...because it's Garry Breitkreuz country. He's probably the most principled MP in the House of Commons when it comes to property rights.

I mention this because my letter to the editor about Jennifer Lynch, politeness and political accountability ran in Yorkton's paper today.

The B'nai Brith is diligently disproving a stereotype about Jews. Unfortunately, it's the stereotype that we're smart. 

Exhibit A: 
Here's their press release from last week about a nuisance human rights commission complaint, filed by an anti-Israel group. On its own, the press release would be sensible -- it points out that HRC complaints are often bald-faced attempts to legally bully political targets, a tool increasingly used by the unholy alliance of foreign jihadis and their domestic leftist allies. 

B'nai Brith calls the complaint "frivolous": 

...“It is obvious that this maneuver to involve the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario is part of a new strategy being employed by those who wish to create a ‘legal chill.’ 


...“We have recently seen other cases here in Canada which exemplify this new strategy of intimidation through ‘legal chill’: there was an attempt to muzzle Maclean’s magazine, the Western Standard and Ezra Levant were dragged through tribunal hearings, and B’nai Brith Canada, for a period of five years, had to defend itself against a frivolous charge lodged with the Manitoba Human Rights Commission. In all of these cases, the charges were either withdrawn or the defendants won, but only after an enormous cost in terms of dollars and human resources. 

“Serious reform is necessary to ensure the viability of our Human Rights Tribunals and Commissions. Canadians who believe in standing up for human rights should really be concerned that these types of frivolous complaints keep wasting valuable resources that could otherwise be spent fighting genuine human rights violations.”

On its own, there's a lot to agree with there. 

But there's one small problem: the B'nai Brith only calls HRC censorship complaints "frivolous" when they're not the ones using them. 





Exhibit B: 
Last spring, B'nai Brith dispatched its Ottawa lobbyist, lawyer Michael Mostyn, to help prosecute Marc Lemire in the censorship complaint brought against him by serial complainant and Stormfrontbigot Richard Warman. B'nai Brith was -- and still is, to this very day -- an intervener against Lemire, along with other Official Jews who prefer to censor rather than debate their political opponents. Here's a copy of the transcript from that hearing; you can see that in addition to the B'nai Brith, the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center were also intervening against freedom of speech. 

You can read Mostyn's comments, starting at page 317 on the .pdf, page 5951 on the transcript's numbering system. His comments were brief, so I'll reproduce them in full here: 

Quote:

MR. MOSTEN: Okay, thank you very  22 much. It's Michael Mosten speaking for B'Nai Brith  23 and, as promised, I'll be very, very brief.  24 Mr. Steacy, you had previously spoken  25 about the complaint driven process and you had said  1 that there are various ways that you intake complaints  2 such as by telephone, other means.  3 So, if I can perhaps phrase it as,  4 small "c" complaints being an informal complaint,  5 something that might be received over a telephone  6 versus a big "C" complaint which would be something  7 going through a formal and approved process, do you  8 consider all of those complaint driven as you were  9 speaking previously?  10 MR. STEACY: Yes, I do.  11 MR. MOSTEN: Okay. Would you agree  12 that it's a common investigative technique to engage in  13 online conversations?  14 MR. STEACY: Yes, it is.  15 MR. MOSTEN: Is it an important and  16 essential investigative tool for you in your role in  17 the Commission to engage in online conversations?  18 MR. STEACY: It was.  19 MR. MOSTEN: Is it fair to say that  20 complaints come in various forms, there are multiple  21 postings on websites, there's all kinds of material  22 online and that these websites and message boards are  23 not blank slates before you would have in the past  24 taken a look at them?  25 MR. STEACY: I would agree with that.  1 MR. MOSTEN: And I put it to you, Mr.  2 Steacy, that to allege that any of these previous  3 Commission cases that there are any fabrication  4 involved with that is ludicrous.  5 Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, those  6 are my questions.

(Sorry for not cleaning up the formatting.) 



There are a few things to say right off the bat. 

First, Mostyn clearly didn't have a clue what he was doing there. He's B'nai Brith's lobbyist on Parliament Hill, and actually a former Conservative candidate. He's not a life-long censor like Bernie<ahref=http://ezralevant.com/2008/06/jews-and-censorship.html> "Burny" Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress. His questions were uninformed and foolish, and I think he knew it, which is why he kept them mercifully brief. That's no excuse, of course. But it adds a degree of pitifulness to his appearance. 

Second, Mostyn was cross-examining Dean Steacy, and he asked a short series of questions, the foolishness of which I'll address in a moment. But what's far more important is what Mostyn did not ask Steacy. 

Second, Mostyn was cross-examining Dean Steacy, and he asked a short series of questions, the foolishness of which I'll address in a moment. But what's far more important is what Mostyn did not ask Steacy. 

Steacy is the censorship investigator at the Canadian Human Rights Commission who testifed, under oath, in this very case, that "freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value”. You can read that for yourself right here, at transcript page 4793. 


This was uninteresting to Mostyn and it obviously did not trouble him enough to motivate him to ask about this stunning renunciation of our Charter of Rights, Bill of Rights and other inheritances of freedom. 

But perhaps freedom of speech is outside Mostyn's mission statement. Surely anti-Semitism isn't, though. 

The day that Mostyn was at the hearing, Steacy testified that he (and six other CHRC staff) had memberships in neo-Nazi organizations like Stormfront and Vanguard. Those CHRC staff weren't just passive observers, like anyone can be merely by surfing on over to those sites. They actually signed up as members, and sometimes -- like Steacy himself did -- engage in bigoted conversations. In Steacy's case, he actually wrote to a B.C. white supremacist group, congratulating them on their racism, encouraging them to continue, and offering to help. Mostyn, representing the B'nai Brith which claims to give a damn about anti-Semitism, was silent about that. 


Well, that's not quite true, is it? Mostyn wasn't silent about it. He positively praised it. He called Steacy's online bigotry "an important and essential investigative tool". It wasn't really even a question, but more of a statement -- aimed not to cross-examine Steacy, but aimed at the tribunal chairman, to tell him that B'nai Brith, speaking on behalf of Canada's Jews, approved of Steacy's bigotry. His shocking testimony should be tolerated, ignored, even supported. The B'nai Brith had officially declared that Steacy's piggish behaviour was kosher. 

So a government bureaucracy tasked with eliminating hate was instead promoting it. So bureaucrats who were supposed to be tamping down bigotry were instead engaged in it. And the B'nai Brith thought this was just fine. A press release condemning it? Are you kidding? The B'nai Brith gave it their seal of approval, their hechsher. 


The whole case of Warman v. Lemire is tainted with anti-Semitism. Warman himself has been denounced by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal for his anti-Semitic comments online, including his comment that Jews in the government are "scum". Classy. You can see the tribunal's condemnation of Warman here. You won't see it on the B'nai Brith's or CJC's websites, though. They don't give a damn about Warman's vicious anti-Semitic comments. They were intervening in support of him -- and still are today, five months after the tribunal denounced Warman. 





Exhibit C: 
In last fall's federal election, the B'nai Brith issued this embarrassing election guide. Look at the very first cluster of recommendations: the B'nai Brith actually demands that the "Criminal Code should be amended to include Holocaust denial as a hate crime." 

To date, the concept of "hate crimes" has been bad enough -- grafting a political offence onto existing criminal offences. So someone who hits you is guilty of assault and battery; someone who hits you because you're gay or Jewish or black is guilty of assault and battery and "hate". It treats victims differently based on their "identity", and it starts to criminalize emotions -- for that is what "hate" is. 

But look at what the B'nai Brith is doing. They don't just want to graft "hate" onto existing crimes. They want hate itself to be a crime. Worse, actually: mere "denial" of a historical fact. One doesn't have to be a "hater" to question or deny the fact of the Holocaust. But B'nai Brith wants the mere disbelief (or even a public musing of disbelief) of that fact to be a crime. 

Is there any other fact -- scientific, historic or otherwise -- so sacrosanct that we would ever consider criminalizing disbelief in it? Would "denying" the Armenian genocide be a crime? Stalin's mass starvation of the Ukraine? Mao's murder of 50 million of his own countrymen? Would the denial of those historical facts be a "crime", too? How about other facts -- like that the world is round? Or how about theories that aren't quite facts, but that political correctness demands we treat like facts, such as man-made global warming? 

Seriously: have you ever heard of anything more anti-intellectual, anti-liberal, indeed anti-Jewish than to demand the criminalization of dissent, even stupid dissent? How embarrassing that this is being done in the name of Jews. 

Just a few lines down, B'nai Brith demands that "symbols used to advance a racist agenda" be "banned". What does banned mean? That there now ought to be pictures that are crimes to depict?

I watched Tom Cruise's movie Valkyrie the other day. It is chock full of swastika flags and other Nazi symbols. Should that movie be banned? How about Schindler's List? How about documentaries or textbooks about the Second World War? In the U.K., some politically correct officials have ruled that St. George's cross is a racist symbol. Hell, forget the St. George's part -- some argue that any cross itself is racist. What fools would demand the "banning" of symbols? The answer: fools who are so self-absorbed, so solipsistic, so unimaginative, so cloistered, so supremacist that they can't see five minutes ahead: that the very first "symbol" to be demanded "banned" for "advancing" a "racist agenda" would be the Star of David, that radical Palestinian activists would cite as the symbol of anti-Arab hate. 




Exhibit D: 
The Mona Lisa of stupidity is the B'nai Brith's first recommendation for "reform" of Canada's human rights commissions. It's from that same election document. Let me reproduce it here: 

Quote:

Reform of the human rights commission system is urgently required, including educating commission staff as to the threat the ideologies of Islamism and political Islam pose to human rights in Canada.

Got it? 
The Jews' enemies shouldn't be allowed to use HRCs. So "political Islam" should be officially deemed a "threat", and HRC staff should explicitly be barred from accepting complaints by political Muslims. But political Jews -- Zionists; philo-Semites; Official Jews -- should be allowed to continue to prosecute their enemies in the HRC system. Just like Michael Mostyn and the B'nai Brith are doing right now in the Lemire case, a case that is still before the tribunal. 





Exhibit E: 
The five-year, secret HRC complaint against B'nai Brith itself. This is the ne plus ultra in hypocrisy. The B'nai Brith was abused for five long years by an anonymous Muslim antagonist, and their sole response is that Muslims shouldn't be allowed to be so abusive -- only Jews should be. They don't object to abusive nuisance suits. They just object when other people get to do it. 

The B'nai Brith is not as obsessed with censorship as the Canadian Jewish Congress. That would be impossible: the new CJC president, Mark Freiman, is actually a former section 13 censorship prosecutor for the CHRC. But the B'nai Brith is a pretty close second. 

You'd think B'nai Brith would abandon its incoherent, illiberal policy on HRCs out of self-interest -- to appeal to the countless Canadian Jews who are turned off by the CJC's soft fascism, and to demonstrate intellectual coherence with the rest of the B'nai Brith's more conservative policies. Michael Mostyn's embarrassing behaviour at the Lemire hearing -- whether that was on his own volition, or on Frank Dimant's instruction -- shows the B'nai Brith has a lot to learn about the Jewish values of freedom and democratic debate. And the B'nai Brith's press release last week condemning "frivolous" HRC complaints by others, while the B'nai Brith continues their frivolous intervention in the ongoing Warman v. Lemire case, is just pure hypocrisy. 

Here's an interesting segment that aired on the Christian TV show 100 Huntley Street. In addition to my own case, it also highlights Fr. Alphonse de Valk of Catholic Insight magazine, who was bullied for years by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, before they finally dumped him on the side of the road with a $20,000 legal bill. (The most grotesque detail of his case was that his investigator was Sandy Kozak, an unethical ex-cop drummed out of a police force for corruption. You can read my scoop on Kozak's unethical past here. Incredibly the CHRC put that corrupt ex-cop on the case of investigating the grandfatherly Fr. de Valk. Jennifer Lynch should be fired for that in itself.)

I thought the final few minutes, that showed a Christian, pro-life lawyer talking about his own use of a human rights commission, was depressing. By using the same system that is being systematically used by the state as a wrecking ball against Christians, that lawyer is legitimizing the system, and imbuing it with moral authority that it does not have nor deserve. Based on the facts in the TV clip, he clearly had other remedies -- such as suing in a real court, under contract law.

My final observation would be the folly of Barbara Hall, the chief commissar of Ontario's HRC. She says there is no hierarchy of rights, and thus she feels free to subordinate freedom of speech to other counterfeit "rights", like the right not to be offended.

But of course, that's not accurate. We do have a hierarchy of rights. It says so in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Some rights are so important, they are given the name "fundamental freedoms" and are given their own, special section in the Charter, to set them apart from the rest. That includes freedom of speech, for example.

The bizarre psychobabble by Hall and her federal counterpart, Jennifer Lynch, about a "matrix" of rights, is pure, made-up gobbledegook, an attempt to justify their illegal censorship.

Here's the clip:

 

The Edmonton Journal ran a letter by me today in rebuttal to Janet Keeping's article about politeness. Here's my letter:

Re: "Freedom of expression isn't a licence to offend" by Janet Keeping, Ideas, July 29:

For 900 days, Canada's human rights commissions (HRCs) falsely accused me of racism, merely because I published a news story about the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. Fifteen Alberta government bureaucrats and lawyers prosecuted me, all on the taxpayers' dime. In the end, I was acquitted -- but left with $100,000 in legal fees.

Janet Keeping, president of the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership, thinks I'm the rude one, though, because I didn't go quietly. She thinks I insulted Canada's HRCs by describing them with words like "odious" and "execrable." She says that those and some of my other choice words are "unethical." Apparently the government's false accusation that I'm a racist -- for which they have yet to apologize --was ethically fine.

Keeping criticizes me for calling a particular HRC official a "damned liar." If I had called someone a liar who was not, in fact, lying, then it would just be name-calling. But, as I painstakingly documented in the National Post and Montreal Gazette last month, the person in question said a number of important things that were demonstrably false. For example, according to sworn testimony before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal on March 28, 2008, several investigators with the federal HRC have acquired memberships in neo-Nazi organizations like Stormfront. The official denied that. Calling her a liar isn't an insult, it's a demand for accountability.

I am a victim of Canada's out of control HRCs. It's strange to me that Keeping, who is normally a thoughtful person on matters of free speech, would blame me as the victim for not quietly accepting the government's abuse.

Ezra Levant, Calgary

It don't think it was as effective a reply as my letter that the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix ran, that the Journal didn't accept. For some reason, they just didn't want me to use the name "Jennifer Lynch" in my reply. I guess they're worried about an HRC complaint. Here's what ran in the S-P:

In Personal attacks have no place in ethical debate (SP, July 30), Janet Keeping writes that I was unethical to call Jennifer Lynch, the head of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, a "damned liar."

But Keeping left out something important: I have, in fact, caught Lynch in a damnable lie. On July 11, she told the National Post that her staff members have never published hateful comments on neo-Nazi websites. But that's not true, as Lynch knows.

At a March 25, 2008, hearing and elsewhere, her staff confessed under oath to making countless hateful remarks, including calling Jews "scum," gays a "cancer" on society and for white police to discriminate against blacks and be loyal to "their race."

Dean Steacy, who works for Lynch, even testified that he and six other CHRC employees have memberships in neo-Nazi organizations like Stormfront. Just to be clear here: These are people who are supposed to be fighting against Nazis.

It might be unethical to call her a damned liar if she hadn't lied. It might be unethical to call her "execrable" if she were lying about a trifle, instead of covering up a systemic corruption of human rights.

Keeping also writes that it was unethical of me to note that, when I bumped into Lynch on Parliament Hill, she looked haggard. If I had seven Nazi members working for me, and had been investigated by the RCMP, the Privacy Commissioner and Parliament all in the last year, I'd look pretty haggard, too.

For me, exposing bigotry within our government is a higher ethical calling than staying silent so I don't hurt some politician's feelings.

Ezra Levant

Calgary

The Journal did run another letter alongside mine, so maybe that evens things out:

I am with Ezra Levant on the issue of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. They have him in the crosshairs and he will not be getting out any time soon.

Anyone who has the least interest in the right of free speech in Canada should be up in arms about the shameful way the this organization conducts it business. The CHRC is famous for hearing complaints which would never see the light of day through the normal justice system. The most galling thing about the whole process is that the complainant has their legal fess paid for by the Canadian taxpayer while the defendant must pay out of pocket for his defence.

James McNab, Edmonton

 I really don't think think this is a debate about politeness. I mean, I'm happy to have that debate, too, but it's not as important. Is it polite to call someone a liar? Probably not; but if they are a politician, like Jennifer Lynch is, and they really are lying, as I've meticulously documented, and the lies are important lies, then I think that politeness must take second place behind public accountability. I think it would be unethical to elevate mere politeness for politeness's sake ahead of responsible government. Those who think that one can expose the lies -- and corruption and abuse and neo-Nazi activities(!) -- of a 200-person, $25-million/year government agency without marshalling the full force of the English language are either naive and inexperienced, or -- as Jennifer Lynch is doing -- simply trying to change the subject from the Canadian Human Rights Commission's bad behaviour.

When Canada's censorship laws are finally repealed, and the abusive, corrupt staff at the CHRC and other HRCs are disciplined for their outrageous (and, in some cases, illegal) behaviour, we can then have a debate as to whether or not it is fair game to call their chief politician and spin doctor "haggard". Until we have shut down the real and pressing menace to our civil liberties, I'm not too interested about whether or not I'm using the wrong fork for my salad, or other exquisite courtesies.

P.S. I see that Peter Worthington's great column on the CHRC's Nazi shenanigans has made it into the pages of the Whitehorse Star. What do they think of the self-censorship of overpoliteness at the Star? I think their motto gives us a hint: illegitimus non carborundum.

 

Peter Worthington is an awesome man. I had the pleasure of spending a few days in his company a couple of years ago in Chicago, during Conrad Black's trial. As you might expect from such an effective journalist, he's also a great storyteller, and each morning before the court room opened, he held court in the waiting area, as all of the other journalists listened to his stories ranging from the early days of the Toronto Sun to his international scoops (he was once the only journalist on site to cover the outbreak of a minor war).

I like to read his columns to see how writing is done by a pro. So imagine my delight when he wrote about the Canadian Human Rights Commission's cover-ups, keying off of my column in the National Post that exposed their staff's memberships in neo-Nazi groups like Stormfront.

I'm a little late in mentioning it, but here it is. Some excerpts:

In a column in the National Post Ezra Levant, who has been battling Alberta human rights zealots, identified seven individuals who work for the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) who also joined neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic, or white hate groups.

It's not that these individuals are Nazi sympathizers or racists who've infiltrated the hallowed halls of human rights activists. They aren't. What they are, are provocateurs, using the Internet to join suspect hate groups in order to collect evidence against them.

In other words, it's a form of entrapment.

Intelligence agents joining (penetrating) a group to assess possible treason or subversion, is vastly different from enticing, provoking or encouraging a racist reaction by pretending to be more extreme than the extremists -- which is what CHRC provocateurs do.

...CHRC investigators likely see themselves as crusaders, exposing suspect or dangerous organizations and gathering evidence to protect society. Hardly.

Canadian democracy is not threatened by white supremacists or anti-Semites.

Democratic countries generally show repugnance toward extremism.

One gets the feeling the CRHC sets up targets to knock down, thereby justifying its existence. For more details on CRHC mischief, try going to the blog ezralevant.com, or other sites giving details about provocateurs pretending to be racists in hopes of catching racists. Try RichardWarman.com or Google Dean Steacy, and see for yourself.

Short of disbanding the CRHC, Section 13 of the Human Rights Act must be scotched. It "empowers the Commission to deal with complaints regarding the communication of hate messages by telephone or on the Internet ... any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination."

That's pretty broad, especially when the Criminal Code already allows for legal action in many cases where human rights vigilantes seem intent on waging vendettas.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper should rein in the human rights bureaucracy that too often offends the very essence of due process and democracy.

He's not mincing any words, and he's just a flabbergasted as I am about the CHRC's bad behaviour, and how this government tolerates the enabler-in-chief, Jennifer Lynch. He's clearly done his research, too, referring to Dean Steacy, the CHRC investigator who declared under oath that he gives freedom of speech "no value", as it's an "American concept". Worthington also mentions the website www.RichardWarman.com, which contains a wealth of primary documents about Warman's campaign of "maximum disruption". That's tough stuff!

I'm late in mentioning Worthington's column, but let me point this out: in addition to running in the major Sun newspapers across Canada, that powerful article has appeared in the Northern News, the Peterborough Examiner, the Pembroke Daily Observer, the Sault Star, the St. Catharines Standard, Northumberland Today, the Barrie Examiner, the Cornwall Standard-Freeholder, the Belleville Intelligencer, the Kingston Whig-Standard, the Brantford Expositor, the Owen Sound Sun-Times, the Brockville Recorder and Times and the delightfully named North Bay Nugget.

That's a lot of people in a lot of places reading about Jennifer Lynch's cover-up about the Nazi memberships of CHRC staff.

I'm guessing that Peter has earned himself a special place in Lynch's 1,200-page enemies list.

But I'm guessing that, over the course of his career, he's stared down much tougher bullies than her.

Michael Coren is one of Canada's most supportive voices when it comes to repealing the censorship powers of Canada's human rights commissions. He had me on for two full-hour shows to promote my book, which is incredible, given the reach of his audience. And he's also interviewed great free speechniks like Mark Steyn.

SDA Matt has a lot of great clips of those shows, here.

And now Michael has a new book out himself, called "As I See It". I've just ordered one myself and I'd encourage you to do the same. You can order it directly from Amazon.ca, here.

 

I have to say I was surprised by Janet Keeping's latest Op-Ed in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix and in a few other newspapers. Keeping is the boss of the Sheldon Chumir Ethics Foundation, and she has been one of Alberta's leading advocates to repeal the "hate speech" provision of that province's human rights act -- the provision under which I was charged.

Keeping has been an excellent ally, in part due to her impeccable liberal credentials. She was even kind enough to invite me to speak at a conference last year in Halifax, on censorship and the media. We had a chance to chat a bit that day, and she impressed me deeply, especially when she said she always visits the museum in which the Magna Carta is displayed in London, England. I bet you Jennifer Lynch, the chief commissar of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, hasn't even read that document, and if she did, she'd regard it as some bigoted "dead white man's law".

The precise title of that Halifax conference was actually about the media's "right to offend". I don't think that I or any of the other presenters actually got around to dealing with "should" the media be obnoxious -- we were all talking about the media's right to be obnoxious -- that is, the immorality of the government being the arbiter of obnoxiousness. I think we were all focused on the present peril -- censorship -- so we didn't have a debate on rudeness and its remedies, a debate which is a luxury in a time of censorship.

As I have argued before, obnoxiousness (or offensiveness, to use a term preferred by HRCs) is something that the free market deals with almost instantly. First off, the marketplace of ideas is far less politically correct than government bureaucrats -- and certainly less so than the media. When the Western Standard published the Danish cartoons of Mohammed back in February of 2006, the media went into Michael Jackson mode. Our readers? Not so much. They loved it. Going from memory, we had over 1,200 new subscriptions, and only a few dozen cancellations, all of which happened before people actually received the magazine. In other words, those objectors thought the cartoons were so outrageous and so pornographic before they even read it -- that's what the media frenzy led them to believe -- so they quit the magazine pre-emptively.

People are interested in controversy. That's part of what makes news newsy. They're interested in the weather and tasty recipes too, of course. But they want to know about the clash of ideas. A degree of offensiveness -- that is, ideas that offend other ideas, other dogmas -- is one definition of news, and certainly it's the definition of politics. It's also the definition of "progressive" ideas -- ideas that naturally replace, challenge or offend the status quo. Liberal ideas like equality for minorities were naturally obnoxious, rude and offensive to the status quo -- that was the point, they wanted to change things.

The free market of ideas approved of our publication of the cartoons, overwhelmingly. And, if it didn't, we would have paid a quick and just price: the loss of subscribers and advertisers, perhaps the quitting of staff, and, as a result, my termination as publisher at the hands of our shareholders and directors. All of which would have happened without the intervention of the state (and a lot quicker than the 900-day proseuction by the Alberta HRC).

But back to Janet Keeping's article. She briefly mentions the HRC debate, but then says this:

...It's not ethically OK to be obnoxious.

...Rule No. 1: It is nearly always wrong to personally attack those who hold opinions different from yours. When done deliberately, attacking your opponents instead of their views is dishonest because it purports to be about one thing -- the public policy in question -- but is actually about something else, the destruction of your opponents' credibility or integrity. It can also be self-defeating. When seen for what it is -- basically, character assassination -- it can undermine whatever validity there is in your policy position.

Regardless, the strategy is often employed, most notoriously at present, by Ezra Levant, lawyer, writer and blogger on human rights commission issues, in his campaign against Jennifer Lynch, Chief Commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Here is a small sampling of the things Levant has written recently about her: "Jennifer Lynch is a damned liar" and "an execrable woman," he has said. "What an odious woman. When she accosted me ... I didn't recognize her ... She is much more haggard and old than her ancient publicity picture."

This kind of personal attack, while not illegal unless false and thus defamatory (which some of this stuff might be), violates the ethics of debate because it targets a person, not the policy under scrutiny -- whether the Canadian Human Rights Commission should have the power to regulate speech. And while Levant's comments, taken cumulatively, may be intimidating, they have literally nothing to do with the law reform issue at hand.

...And it is no answer to claim that some human rights commission officials carry out their duties in an oppressive, even harassing, manner. If true, this should be remedied, but not through reverse bullying: Just as our mothers told us, two wrongs really don't make a right.

I was surprised by this letter. Here is a brief response I had in the Star-Phoenix today:

In Personal attacks have no place in ethical debate (SP, July 30), Janet Keeping writes that I was unethical to call Jennifer Lynch, the head of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, a "damned liar."

But Keeping left out something important: I have, in fact, caught Lynch in a damnable lie. On July 11, she told the National Post that her staff members have never published hateful comments on neo-Nazi websites. But that's not true, as Lynch knows.

At a March 25, 2008, hearing and elsewhere, her staff confessed under oath to making countless hateful remarks, including calling Jews "scum," gays a "cancer" on society and for white police to discriminate against blacks and be loyal to "their race."

Dean Steacy, who works for Lynch, even testified that he and six other CHRC employees have memberships in neo-Nazi organizations like Stormfront. Just to be clear here: These are people who are supposed to be fighting against Nazis.

It might be unethical to call her a damned liar if she hadn't lied. It might be unethical to call her "execrable" if she were lying about a trifle, instead of covering up a systemic corruption of human rights.

Keeping also writes that it was unethical of me to note that, when I bumped into Lynch on Parliament Hill, she looked haggard. If I had seven Nazi members working for me, and had been investigated by the RCMP, the Privacy Commissioner and Parliament all in the last year, I'd look pretty haggard, too.

For me, exposing bigotry within our government is a higher ethical calling than staying silent so I don't hurt some politician's feelings.

Ezra Levant

Calgary

The first thing that surprised me about Keeping's letter was its false moral equivalence. She equates me using critical words on my blog to the corrupt and abusive prosecutions engaged in, in violation of our Constitutional rights and the rule of law, by Jennifer Lynch.

No; actually she doesn't even equate them, for if she equated them, she'd give equal criticism to Lynch's abuses. She criticizes only my words, and actually calls them bullying and intimidating -- but remains silent on Lynch's false prosecutions, entrapment, and the neo-Nazi memberships of seven of Lynch's employees.

My noisy objections as a victim are more offensive to Keeping than Lynch's violations of civil liberties, using the machinery of the state.

That's just weird and it's not very liberal. I think sometimes people are tempted to take a shot at me -- to blame the victim -- because I don't really fit the profile of what the left thinks a victim should look like or act like. I haven't decided to roll over and take a beating. I'm fighting back -- speaking truth to power, as a lefty would say. Keeping doesn't like the fact that I used obscure words like "odious" and "execrable", I guess.

It's also weird to say that critical words are "intimidating". Huh? I know what intimidating means. It sounds like this: "if you keep publishing those cartoons, I'm going to prosecute you" or "I have a staff of 200 bureaucrats who will hunt you down using unethical behaviour, will prosecute you, and even if you win, you'll be financially destroyed".

That's what intimidation sounds like. Mere disagreement and criticism isn't intimidating, at least to people who have graduated from grade school.

But there's a much bigger point here. Jennifer Lynch is a politician. She's a very visible public personality, who has voluntarily decided to enter the public fray even moreso than her position would normally entail. She has engaged pollsters like EKOS and spin doctors like Hill and Knowlton to help craft her public campaign. She has created public spectacles, like her backfiring retainer of Prof. Richard Moon, and her latest unsolicited memo to Parliament. She has courted controversy, and done a media tour. She is not a private person; and she is not merely a bureaucrat. She is a crusading censor, who actually demands that Canada remove truth as a legal defence to the criminal prosecution of hate speech.

But yet, when someone merely criticizes her, she whines "intimidation" and "bullying".

Yeah, right.

But it's worse still. Keeping particularly doesn't like my use of the phrase "damned liar" to describe Lynch. Now, I agree, if I was merely using "damned liar" as an insult without any basis, it would be questionable, though the damage would be chiefly to my own credibility. But I called Lynch a damned liar after painstaking, meticulous research, including reading many pages of Canadian Human Rights Tribunal transcripts (including a transcript, for example, that the CHRC tried to suppress, and then tried to redact). Oh, and the CHRC tried to close that hearing to the media, too.

I called Jennifer Lynch a damned liar because she is a damned liar: she publicly denied that the CHRC staff join neo-Nazi groups and publish hundreds of bigoted comments online. But they do, and they admit to it. Only Lynch is still lying, to cover it up.

(She has also told other lies, including that the police have exonerated her staff's hacking of a private citizen's Internet account. They haven't -- they call the case "unsolved", though the CHRC are their only suspects.)

I called Lynch a damned liar because she is a damned liar. And she's lying about her outrageous conduct, done in the name of the government and the Queen.

Keeping is silent about those details -- fair enough, she hasn't bothered to educate herself about the foul deeds of the CHRC. But that's almost worse: if Keeping doesn't know the facts about the CHRC's Nazi conduct and Lynch's cover-up of them, why does she call my labeling of Lynch a liar to be unethical?

Is it really unethical to call out a politician who is lying? Is Keeping's lust for politeness so predominant that she believes we should subordinate other values like political accountability?

Really? Does Keeping think no-one should call Stephen Harper a liar? Or Ed Stelmach? Or George W. Bush? Or Richard M. Nixon? Is that unethical, too? If not, then why should Lynch get a pass?

I don't think Keeping is serious. What I think happened is what I know Lynch is doing to anyone who will listen to her. She's done trying to argue this thing on the facts -- she knows she's losing, she's been found out, using her own CHRC documents. She's done trying to argue this thing on principle -- she knows censorship is un-Canadian, and she comes across as a North Korean or Soviet buffoon.

Those aren't working for Lynch. So she's whining like a schoolboy.

Could you imagine a great woman leader like Margaret Thatcher, or Golda Meir, or Indira Gandhi, whining that the boys were being too mean to her -- because they called her a "liar"? I mean, seriously: is this woman ready for prime time, or should she go back to being Joe Clark's aide?

What an embarrassment to feminists: when the going gets tough, Lynch calls up the media -- and even her critics -- and just whines about how hard it is to cut it in the big time.

To my surprise, Keeping bought it. Out of sympathy for Lynch -- a tired, old, haggard socialist who just can't cut it in the big leagues -- Keeping replaced logic and principle with pity.

Weird.

Oh, by the way: Lynch does look haggard. I was shocked when I saw her on Parliament Hill. I knew what her PR photo looked like, and the woman who presented to me was not the same as in that photo. Either she was using a very old photo or she has aged a hell of a lot in the two years.

Now, for anyone else in public life, or anyone who has ever run in a campaign, their personal appearance, including their energy level, confidence, grace under pressure, etc. -- is highly newsworthy and relevant. If a "leader" can't hack it, and starts to fall apart under stress, maybe she ought to stay out of the big leagues. If a leader won't take responsibility for her own staff, and engages in cover-ups, and then just abject begging for mercy, does that person truly have a place in a position that requires a strong personal constitution, a strong sense of right and wrong, and a strong sense of accountability to the public?

As I wrote in the Star-Phoenix, Keeping asks me to put politeness ahead of holding Lynch to public account.

No thanks.

Lynch didn't create all the problems at the CHRC. But when she discovered them, her reflex wasn't to root it out and fix things, but to cover it up. Her reflex in the face of public criticism hasn't been self-reflection and self-assessment, but lashing out and creating her 1,200-item enemies list. And her reflex in the face of losing the argument is to, well, do the grown-up equivalent of crying: saying it's just not fair to have to answer "bullies" who "intimidate" her by calling her a liar, even when she is a damned liar.

The damned liar should be fired -- and Keeping does Lynch, all professional women, and civil liberties, no favours by lowering the ethical bar on Lynch out of pity.

It's Jennifer Lynch who is deeply unethical, who presides over a coven of Internet Nazis and Internet hackers, and who is a human rights destroyer who doesn't even believe free speech is a Canadian concept. For Janet Keeping to make excuses for Lynch is out of character for Keeping, who knows and loves civil liberties, and should know better than enabling Canada's chief infringer of those liberties.