May 2010 Archives

Pat Martin is the NDP MP for Winnipeg Centre. Last week he told reporters that members of the Catholic lay order, Opus Dei, "give me the creeps".

I'm sure that's true. Martin doesn't like Christians in general, even when they're doing social services in his own decrepit downtown, a downtown that has got more decrepit under his watch as MP. Martin would rather have urban decay than development, if the developers are Christian. Here's his own hometown paper calling him out as "irrational" for his anti-Christian outburst earlier this year.

But Martin went further this time. In response to news that fifteen or so MPs and staff had a meeting in the Parliamentary restaurant with the Canadian vicar of Opus Dei, Martin didn't just call conservative Catholics creepy, he expressed his objection that any MP would invite such people to soil the sacred precincts of Parliament Hill. Martin "certainly wouldn't attend anything associated with them," he said. Here's a video of Martin's comments:

As you can see from the rest of that segment, Martin wasn't the only one who expressed his distaste for Catholics -- so did Gilles Duceppe of the xenophobic Bloc Quebecois, the party that gave us Jacques Parizeau and his "money and the ethnic vote" gibe against the Jews. Plus ca change. 

Look, we know that Martin and Duceppe don't like Christians. No surprise there. But there is a new aggression to their comments. They don't just disagree with Christians. They don't just shun Christians themselves. They believe that Christians should be kept out of the public square altogether. That is, they are aggrieved that anyone would truck with them. And to effect a Christian-free government, these new McCarthyists of the left believe that Christians in public life have to be named, outed and denounced.

Here's Duceppe in Question Period:

Mr. Speaker, Ottawa's bishop stated yesterday that an sizeable pro-life caucus is working behind the scenes within the government. The Prime Minister, who controls everything, must know about this caucus. He must also know that Kara Johnson, who was president of the National Council of the Conservative Party, is a member of Opus Dei, and that Nicole Charbonneau Barron, who will again be a candidate for his party in Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, is also a member of Opus Dei, and that a conservative member invited his colleagues to dine with Opus Dei leaders.

 

Will the Prime Minister admit that his policy is influenced by the fundamentalist religious right?

 

Now look at that. Johnson and Barron are not cabinet ministers, or MPs, or Senators, or government employees or appointees. This isn't a question about the government. It's not an attempt to hold the government to account. It's an attempt to embarrass and harass a couple of party volunteers. Two members of Opus Dei have been found in a party of 100,000 members and as many donors. Scandal!

And here's a partial transcript of the scrum outside of Question Period (if anyone has a video, please let me know):

Question: Isn’t it a little McCarthyite though to stand up there and say these people are in this group, these people are in these groups?

 

Gilles Duceppe: No, I think this is basically McCarthyism certainly on the other side of the Chamber.  McCarthy was you can’t say something because you can’t prove that you don’t have a card of the Communist Party and prove that you don’t have. But the fact is and what I want to prove is that there’s the fundamentalist religious right is acting within that party and in a modern society religion and the state and politics should be separated.

 

Question: So do you think that people if there in a group like Opus Dei can’t be involved in politics?

 

Gilles Duceppe: I mean not as a group. Individually certainly but not as a group.

 

Question: But there is no – like (inaudible) apart.

 

Gilles Duceppe: They have – well, they have people in place. One was member of the national executive.  Another one is a candidate. One of their member, the vice-chairman of the House invited someone of Opus Dei yesterday. The Bishop of Ottawa said that there’s a pro-life caucus acting behind the curtains within that party. So a lot of things that prove that something’s going on.

 

So what do we have here?

1. The obvious: that anti-Christian bigotry remains an acceptable form of intolerance in Canadian politics.

2. This bigotry has infected the parties of the left.

3. The mainstream media, and indeed the rest of the political establishment, ignores this bigotry (and in many cases approves of it).

4. Like Marci McDonald's book on Christians, Duceppe's comments are ridiculous on the face of them: to ascribe government policy to two party volunteers without any government office. I doubt that either woman blacklisted by Duceppe have spoken to Harper in a year.

5. Like McDonald's book, Duceppe's comments are error-ridden: he says that a Conservative (MP Andrew Scheer) invited "his colleagues" to dine with Opus Dei "leaders". In fact, Scheer sent an e-mail to all of Parliament Hill -- including to Duceppe himself. And it wasn't Opus Dei leaders, but rather one man, Msgr. Fred Dolan.

6. How terrifying is Msgr. Dolan? Who was attracted to his diabolical meeting? Well, Mario Silva, for one. Who's he? Oh, just a Liberal MP. A gay Liberal MP. That just proves how deep the Christian conspiracy is though, doesn't it -- it even has left-wing gay activists as part of their master plan!

But the real point is this: anti-Christian bigotry has metastasized from quiet prejudices into full-blown witch-hunts. McDonald's hateful book was a catalyst, but as Martin's comments earlier this year (and Duceppe's comments in the Toronto Star in 2008) show, the hatred was already out there.

(By the way, look at Duceppe's comments in that Star article. The atheist Marxist Duceppe is actually giving his political opinions about what Catholic rituals are "questionable" or not. Could you imagine him inspecting an Orthodox Jew or Sikh this way?)

Back to my list:

7. Do Duceppe and Martin meet the definition of "bigot"? I think so; here's the dictionary definition: "one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance". Yeah, the shoe fits.

8. Will Canada's self-appointed anti-hate squads pounce on Martin and Duceppe? The Canadian Human Rights Commission? Of course not: they're part of the anti-Christian persecution themselves, having prosecuted Fr. Alphonse de Valk, Rev. Stephen Boissoin, the Christian Heritage Party, etc. I'm surprised they haven't gone after Msgr. Dolan yet.

9. How about the Canadian Jewish Congress? Pause for laughter.

10. Look at Duceppe's bizarre answer about McCarthyism: "McCarthy was you can’t say something because you can’t prove that you don’t have a card of the Communist Party and prove that you don’t have."  We've all heard Duceppe enough to know that his English, while accented, is excellent. He is making the usual Marxist argument: censorship is only censorship if it's applied against the left. Witch-hunts against conservatives, by definition, aren't witch hunts.

11. But he saved the worst for last: he says that Opus Dei should not be allowed to participate in our democracy. He fudged it a bit; saying they ought not to participate "as a group". But that makes no sense: Opus Dei, as a group, is not involved in any political party. It is a lay organization -- it's not a group of priests. It's just a group of Catholics who have a particular belief. The very people he named in Parliament were participating as individuals -- it's ridiculous to claim they were Opus Dei candidates, for example. But they were precisely the ones Duceppe was damning.

12. One more point about the media. Duceppe's attack was either inspired by or coordinated with Le Devoir's Helene Buzzetti, who has written several breathless reports about Opus Dei in recent days. You need a subscription to read the full text, but here are some of her gems (my translation, helped by Google): Opus Dei "arouses suspicions"; it is "controversial"; it engages in "secrecy"; and my favourite: "it urges its members to pursue graduates studies and then mingle with the elite". (How suspicious! Sounds like the Jews, really!) Don't you love it when journalists put their own editorial opinions in as facts, merely by stating them without attribution? They "arouse suspicions", you know!

This same Helene Buzzetti, I might point out, is the same reporter who actually asked Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon if he thought any "member of B'nai Brith" (good code word!) should be barred from being appointed to the NGO called Rights and Democracy, because R&D dealt with Israel. It's no surprise that someone who doesn't like Jews much wouldn't like conservative Catholics much. And it's no surprise that, since Buzzetti's question about blackballing Jews passed without comment that her hyperventilation about Opus Dei passes, not without comment, but with encouragement.

David Warren's piece in the Ottawa Citizen is, as usual, essential reading. Let me end by quoting him at length:

How do you feel about people being blacklisted because they're Catholic? How do you feel about MPs calling different religions "creepy"? How about a leader of a party declaring certain private religious rituals "questionable"? How about the condemnation of even inviting such people to lunch?

If your answer is anything different than it would be if Marci McDonald and Pat Martin and Gilles Duceppe were counting Jews or Sikhs or Muslims, then shame on you.

So I guess that means shame on the bulk of the MSM which welcomed McDonald's book, and has stayed silent in the face of the Duceppe/Martin comments (credit to the CBC's Evan Solomon for being the sole voice, other than Deborah Gyapong's, to object.)

I'm going to try to shorten and organize this rambling post and work it into a proper Op-Ed. Feel free to leave any advice in the comments section.

President Felipe Calderon of filthy Mexico has come to Canada to lecture us on the environment.

Perhaps Iran's president will be next in line, to teach us something about the treatment of women, and China's president will come to give us tips on a free press.

Mexico City isn't famous for much, but it is famous for its filthy air. That's a picture of it above; here's a story or two about it.

Pollution isn't Mexico's only problem, of course. Massive corruption is another problem; brutal gang wars are another. Et cetera.

And then there's the drip, drip, drip murder of Canadian tourists down there.

Hey, do you have some free time? Why not read Amnesty International's 100 press releases about Mexican human rights violations. Oh, did I say 100 press releases? I meant that the table of contents for all of their press releases about Mexican human rights violations is 100 pages. The page count of the press releases themselves is closer to 1,000.

So back to our news story: Felipe Calderon, who presides over this corrupt, dirty, crime-ridden country has come to lecture Canada on the environment. On the Kyoto Protocol, to be precise. He wants it enforced.

Well, of course he does. Because, if you read Annex B of the Kyoto Protocol (the last page) you will see that Mexico is exempt from reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. Just like OPEC is exempt, and China, India, Brazil and most of the world's other polluters.

Not that Mexico has reduced its emissions voluntarily, either. According to this United Nations chart, Mexico has actually increased its greenhouse gas emissions by more than 60 megatons a year since 1990, the baseline year for Kyoto calculations. It hasn't cut a damn thing.

Here's a chart of our respective countries, for the last six years of comparable data. We're pretty much unchanged; it's the Mexicans who are increasing their emissions.

So what is Calderon getting at?

His country is as dirty as ever, when measuring real pollution.

When measuring carbon dioxide -- which is not pollution, but let's ignore that for now -- he's increasing at a rapid clip.

So why does he want Kyoto implemented?

Well, for the same reason that China does: because Kyoto has a built-in fudge factor for the developed countries listed in that Annex B that I mentioned above. If developed countries can't meet their Kyoto targets (and none can), Kyoto comes with a built-in loophole: those countries can either buy carbon "credits" from countries like Mexico, or can get credit by spending foreign aid money in countries like Mexico, on make-work green projects.

Calderon doesn't actually give a damn about the environment -- you can see that just by looking at his home town. What Calderon cares about very, very much, is getting countries like Canada to give him free money.

You know what? I don't think Mexico needs free money. In fact, I think more free money will make Mexico an even worse place. And I don't think Canadians are interested in cutting a cheque to the presidente of a country that increasingly resembles a banana republic -- and has a penchant for killing our tourists.

P.S. Oh, speaking of Mexico and the environment? I have one word for you: Ixtoc.

I'm surprised by the attention that Russ Hiebert, the MP for South Surrey-White Rock-Cloverdale, has received for his expenses.

As far as I know, Hiebert is not one of the 29 MPs who have cost taxpayers millions in lawsuits (though, if he is, that too would not be particularly remarkable -- any company, private or public, is liable for the actions of their employees done in the course of their employment).

No, the attention on Hiebert is because he has followed the Parliamentary travel guidelines that allow MPs to bring their spouses and young children with them to Ottawa then the House sits.

Here's CTV's story on the subject, and here are 200 others mentioning him on Google News.

So Hiebert hasn't stolen any money, Adscam-style. He hasn't broken any rules. He hasn't engaged in reckless behaviour on the taxpayers' dime. And he hasn't dreamed up some wasteful new program, spending billions of our tax dollars. But he has been the subject of enormous criticism because he flies his family out to Ottawa with him.

He hasn't violated any Parliamentary rules. Just some unwritten media rules.

So let's write down those rules for all to see.

Rule 1: MPs who live in Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal are better than MPs who live in B.C. (or, even worse, the B.C. interior or Vancouver Island) because it costs less for them to travel to Ottawa. So Liberals are better than Conservatives -- what a surprise!

Rule 2: MPs who don't have families, or who don't want to spend time with their families, or who are divorced from their families after spending long stretches of time away from them, are better than MPs who bring their families to Ottawa.

Rule 3: If you are a B.C. Conservative MP with a family, you are more odious than a drunk-driving hipster Liberal MP from Montreal and will get more media criticism.

Look, I'm all for cutting the budget, and I think Parliament's half a billion dollar annual expense could surely use a trim. I'd cut far deeper than that -- like Tom Flanagan, I'm embarrassed by the government's "green fund" and other expenditures they feel are required to survive politically in an era of minority Parliaments.

But does anyone think that Canada's fiscal situation is going to be saved by making Parliament Hill even less family-friendly, to save a few hundred thousand dollars a year? If anything, I would imagine the parent of a young family would be more budget-conscious in general than an empty-nester. But that's not even the point.

This story would not have been written if Hiebert were a mom instead of a dad -- oh, unless that mom was a Conservative, who would then be accused of being a poor mother. But that's not the big point here either.

And this isn't about my sympathy for a Tory.

This is about my understanding of the enormous efforts that western, northern and rural MPs of every partisan stripe take just to get to Ottawa. For some MPs, the idea of going home on weekends is simply a logistical impossibility.

If, God forbid, Parliament Hill were ever moved to a place like Calgary or St. John's or Nunavut, family travel allowances wouldn't be the subject of breathless attempts at scandalmongering by bored journalists. Family travel allowances would be a holy sacrament from which Toronto and Montreal MPs would righteously wring out every last penny, and woe to any journalist (why do you hate the children so?) who dared criticize it.

Here's my interview clip with John Stossel on his First Amendment special. I was also on a panel with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and then I took a couple of questions at the end of the show, too -- if I can find those clips I'll post them.

I was invited to New York today to tape a special show on Fox Business News with John Stossel. The show airs tonight at 8 p.m. ET.

I had the honour of sitting right next to Ayaan Hirsi Ali for part of the show -- what a courageous hero she is. I would have been happy to just be there in the audience -- I have never seen such a clear, persuasive articulation of free speech on any TV show, ever. Stossel is an amazing messenger for liberty, and I was so thrilled to see the resources and audience he has at Fox. It was also a great pleasure simply to meet other folks in the green room, including Bill Maurer of the Institute for Justice.

Here's a promo clip for tonight's show:

I can't believe I actually forked over $32 for Marci McDonald's book, The Armageddon Factor.

I'm not mad because I disagreed with her bigoted screed -- I knew that I would, based on her excerpt in the Toronto Star, and her comments about the book on TV.

I'm mad that I wasted $32 because the book is so full of errors, it's shocking that Random House let it out the door without major re-writes.

There are literally dozens of factual errors in it -- that I know about. There are surely more. You just can't rely on a word this woman says -- except that she truly, deeply hates Christian conservatives.

Here's an Op-Ed I wrote in today's National Post on the subject:

A Comedy of Errors

In her book The Armageddon Factor, Marci McDonald has a lot of nasty things to say about Christians in Canada. She calls them "retrograde and exclusionary," "militant," "radical," practitioners of "apartheid" who have a "dark and dangerous vision." And then she takes a run at Jews and Sikhs, too.

It's surprising that Random House agreed to publish such a screed, but it's a free country, and McDonald is entitled to her own opinions, no matter how bigoted.

But she's not entitled to her own facts.

I am directly familiar with only a few of the subjects in McDonald's book, yet I was able to spot dozens of errors immediately. I'm sure there are many more; I've spoken with a number of people McDonald wrote about extensively, who tell me that McDonald didn't bother to actually interview them, and neither did any fact-checker from Random House.

Some of McDonald's errors are just plain weird.

For example, on page 39, she says that Jason Kenney "served as Stockwell Day's chief of staff." I presume she makes that point to show just how dominant the Christian influence in Day's office is. But as anyone on Parliament Hill knows, Kenney has never been Day's chief of staff --Kenney has been his own MP since 1997, years before Day even came to Ottawa. Day's chief of staff is a Montreal Jew named Neil Drabkin. Day's manager for his leadership campaign was a hard-living, pro-choice Red Tory named Rod Love. Unfortunately, the true facts don't fit McDonald's narrative of a Christian conspiracy.

McDonald makes other amateur errors like this. For example, on page 395, she writes that Rob Anders is an MP from Edmonton. Actually, he's the MP from Calgary West. It's not an important error, but it does highlight the problem with McDonald -- who spent her career in Washington, D.C. -- trying to write about Canadian politics. She just doesn't know her subject that well.

Being out of the loop means that McDonald misses things. On pages 39 and 368, for example, she claims that Kenney's ethnic outreach efforts were "revealed" in a "leaked strategy paper" published by The Globe and Mail in October, 2007. That might be how McDonald found out about it; but the rest of us learned about Kenney's role in ethnic outreach a year and a half earlier, when Prime

Minister Stephen Harper appointed Kenney his Parliamentary Secretary for Multiculturalism.

It is useful for McDonald to cast Kenney's role in ethnic outreach as a secret that had to be revealed, because that supports her thesis that Christians such as Kenney have a hidden agenda. But anyone who follows Kenney knows his courtship of ethnic communities--most of whom are not Christian -- is hardly a subject that he likes to keep to himself.

On page 39, McDonald calls Kenney a "charismatic Catholic," a reference to a denomination that mixes Catholicism with elements of evangelical style. That's news to Kenney. McDonald seems to have just plain made it up.

So, too, is the claim on page 65 that Ontario politician Frank Klees was a Baptist minister. He wasn't -- not that McDonald bothered to check with him before writing it.

Many of McDonald's errors seem to point in the same direction -- to make Christians look more scheming or powerful than they are.

On pages 69-70, for example, she claims that the Canada Family Action Coalition "scrambled" to put out a political report card "pinpointing acceptable social-conservative candidates without taking a partisan stand that would jeopardize their charitable tax status." Sounds like those scheming Christians were trying to bend the tax laws--except that CFAC is not a charity and is not bound by laws against partisanship.

McDonald talks about things that never happened, like on page 164 where she claims a Christian activist named Faytene Kryskow visited Stockwell Day's home in B.C., or on page 119, where she claimed Terry O'Neill wrote a column without disclosing his role in a pro-life group (in fact, he did disclose it -- as his letter on today's National Post letters page attests). And on and on.

Is McDonald's case really so weak that she has to rely on this many factual errors to make it? Why didn't she interview many of the key people she wrote about? Why didn't Random House fact-check her clangers? Did none of her editors really know that Jason Kenney is an MP, not a political staffer?

Can I please get my $32 back?

Iran is building a nuclear bomb.

Hezbollah is rearming with long-range missiles from North Korea.

The United Nations is as brutally anti-Israel as ever with the largest bloc now being the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

Boycott and divestment campaigns are on a tear in Europe, and the British advertising standards council has barred Israel from using images of the Western Wall in tourism ads. Canada's postal union has condemned a stamp celebrating Canada-Israel relations.

Labour unions and left wing churches regularly pass anti-Israel motions. University faculties refuse to meet their Israeli colleagues.

In North America, even in Canada, some university campuses are no-go zones for kids with yarmulkes.

But the Canadian Jewish Congress is in their situation room fighting back against... the Toronto police decision to list "shiksas" as a "victim group". That's muscling in on Bernie "Burny" Farber's turf, and he won't stand for it! Only Bernie can play the victim card! Time to fight!

Clear everying less important off Burny's desk! This is the top priority!

The CJC sounds like I do when I'm trying to do anything to avoid doing real work -- you know, sort the fridge alphabetically, iron some blue jeans, write on my blog, etc. It's why I've deleted freecell from my computer.

Seriously, is there any reason -- other than Burny's high self regard, and even higher salary -- that the CJC isn't just put out of its misery?

Let the Canada-Israel Committee fight the Israel battles.

Let the local Jewish communities councils and synagogues deal with their local matters.

Let the Jewish charities do their work.

Let the campus clubs help the kids.

But the bizarre CJC and its strange priorities -- demonizing Canada's greatest Zionist, Mark Steyn; making fools of themselves (and us all) over shiksas; their fetish for government censorship -- are just embarrassing.

And a waste of precious community resources.

They've had a good run. But they've outlived any possible usefulness.

Shut 'em down.

So the Obama administration is having serious discussions with China about human rights.

Sounds great.

Except that the human rights violation Obama's negotiators brought up in their talks, "early and often", was the new Arizona bill against illegal immigration.

Did you know that Jason Kenney was Stockwell Day's chief of staff?

I didn't know that until I read it in Marci McDonald's laughably error-ridden book. And neither did Kenney or Day.

Oh -- by the way: Day's leadership campaign boss was actually a hard-living secular fellow by the name of Rod Love. And Day's chief of staff is a Jew named Neil Drabkin.

But it makes the book more fun when it's Kenney, right?

Kenney isn't the only one who received a promotion in McDonald's work of fiction.

Did you know that Frank Klees was a Baptist minister?

No? Neither did Klees!

If I were him, and had been falsely called a Baptist minister in a book, I promise you I would not stop lording it over all my friends, insisting that they call me The Reverend Ezra.

'Cause Marci said so!

'Cause it's proof of the conspiracy!

'Cause she's got to sell some books!

'Cause Random House didn't bother fact-checking her!

Can anyone say Stephen Glass?

I was on CTV's Question Period today with Marci McDonald, the author of a new, anti-Christian book. It's basically a Richard Nixon-style enemies list of Christians in politics, filled out with plenty of conspiracy theories and plain old bigotry.

You can see it here.

I called McDonald a bigot again today, and her rebuttal was to tell me that she has some Jewish friends.

Seriously.

What a fossil from the 1960s.

The only thing missing was her saying something like "I admire some of you people", or some other clanger like that.

I'm really embarrassed for her.

I note, however, that she has changed her spin in the past week.

When she first debuted, she was bashing the "Christian right". Then a few people pointed out that half of the malefeasors she lists actually aren't Christian at all. So she has broadened her attack to the "religious" right.

In the U.S., that term is a synonym for the Christian right. But McDonald is explicit: she's attacking Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and Jews, too.

In other words, anyone who isn't a secular liberal post-Christian like her.

She's a Christian hater -- that's a given.

But she has essentially come out denouncing multiculturalism as part of this hostile takeover of Canada.

Sort of weird, coming from a liberal. But you just know that she's lived a pretty white life. I bet those Jewish "friends" she has are a lawyer or a banker; I bet any black "friends" she has (in fairness, she claimed none), are probably servants.

It's not surprising to find people who have hard feelings about others, especially people different from them. What is suprising is that McDonald managed to get a reputable publisher to put her hateful screed out under their name. It's more suitable for the Internet, right alongside JewWatch and other such sites -- and is about as accurate.

She is more polished than JewWatch, but not by much. She reminds me of the well heeled objectors to John F. Kennedy's presidency, who noted his Catholicism and politely inquired as to whether he would be loyal to America -- or loyal to the Pope in Rome. Like McDonald, they claimed they weren't bigots -- heavens, no! -- they were just asking questions and making lists of nefarious Catholics.

McDonald was just in her twenties back then, but had she written this book in 1960 instead of 2010, she surely would have denounced Kennedy and his brother Robert as a threat to American values because of their faith.

I'm so glad that McDonald's generation of journalist -- bigoted, sloppy, error-prone, smug -- is going the way of the dinosaur.

She is author of several landmark books, including the one called Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis and another called The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam.

She's coming to Canada, courtesy of the International Free Press Society -- the same group that brought Ann Coulter.

Bat Ye'or is speaking in London on June 2, Toronto on June 3 and Ottawa on June 7.

You can learn more details, including how to register, by clicking here.

Marci McDonald's semi-literate book claims that the Christian Right controls Canada under Stephen Harper.

Right. That explains why Henry Morgentaler received the Order of Canada.

But McDonald does do something fun: she makes an enemies list, Richard Nixon-style.

But seriously: if you're going to make a conspiracy theory, how on Earth do you exclude the Jews?

They're disproportionately represented in Ottawa.

But that's creepy -- and smacks of racism.

Much safer to beat up Christians, and make up blacklists naming them, right?

That was my point I tried to make on Friday, on CBC's Power and Politics. A show where all three of the panelists were Jewish, by the way.

You can see the video clip here (fast forward to 1 hour, 14 minutes into the show). If I can find this on YouTube, I'll post that instead. 

I see that the CBC is going to investigate itself to determine whether it has a left-wing bias.

My favourite line in the news story is this:

CBC refused to comment on the study’s methodology...

So you've got the CBC investigating the CBC about the CBC's own fairness. But the CBC won't or can't demonstrate that the bias investigation isn't biased.

So maybe we need a bias study of the bias study.

This all sounds about as reliable as shipping lettuce by rabbit.

I wonder if the CBC's crack team would accept that sort of self-investigation by, oh, say, a politician or a business leader who had been caught acting unethically.

Maybe reliable, neutral CBC personalities like David Suzuki and Judy Rebick will lead the investigation into the CBC's balance.

But I actually have a little story to tell about this myself.

After the 2006 election, I was invited by the CBC's chairman to attend their board of directors' retreat in New Brunswick, to give advice on what to make of the new Conservative government.

I took the task seriously, canvassing several cabinet ministers and even the Prime Minister's Office before my visit. It won't surprise you to know that my report was not well received by the president of the CBC at the time, Robert Rabinovitch (I'm not kidding, he physically fell out of his chair). But it might surprise you to learn that a number of board members were very sympathetic to my assessment. (It was clear to me from Rabinovitch's interactions with the board, though, that they were not a true board of directors with actual authority. Rather, they seemed more like a politically correct, demographically correct focus group, and that Rabinovitch was humouring them, not being directed by them). There has since been a complete turnover in directors, and I do not know if they are still treated as window-dressing. But they were then.

I'm not going to disclose my advice to the CBC, but I do feel at liberty to disclose one of the messages that I was asked to convey to the CBC by a cabinet minister.

In the wake of the 2006 federal election, the CBC had been accused of anti-Conservative bias and then, like now, the CBC launched an investigation into itself.

The CBC promised to give this study to the cabinet minister when it was complete. But they didn't. The cabinet minister had asked for it, but it was not sent (nor made public), even months after the election. That minister asked me to request it again.

When I put the minister's request for that study to Rabinovitch, he was clearly uncomfortable, and at least one director pressed him on the subject. (That may have been when he fell out of his chair, I can't recall.)

I do not know if the CBC ever gave that study to the cabinet minister; I did a cursory search of the CBC's own website today and didn't find it published (please correct me if I'm wrong).

What can we learn from this?

Well, a few things.

1. The CBC holds itself to a lower standard than it holds the subjects of its reporting. It would never accept the laughable bias of a politician investigating himself, or an oil company investigating itself. Example: while the CBC is bleating for complete disclosure of unredacted, uncensored national security documents from Afghanistan, they censor comments on their own website critical of their Liberal pollster, Frank Graves.

2. The CBC has a long history of bias -- and they have become expert at explaining it away, shooing away criticism and digging in defiantly. They live by the maxim: never admit anything, never apologize. They have a bunker mentality on the subject of bias, as was evidenced during the Frank Graves fiasco. They are as partisan as any political party, and in fact act like a political party during election campaigns.

3. One of the CBC's favourite tactics when called on their bias is to announce their own review to pre-empt an independent review. They did this in 2006 and they're doing it again now. I'd be surprised if they haven't done it before, too.

4. Once the media interest in their bias dies down, they bury their internal report -- if they ever even conducted it in the first place.

5. You'd think that the CBC's own investigation of itself in 2006 would have been a whitewash, and thus something they would have published, or at least given to the cabinet minister in question. The fact that they had refused to release it suggests that things might have been so bad, even the CBC's own hand-picked investigator couldn't cover it up. Either that, or it was such a complete whitewash it had no credibility. There really isn't a good explanation for not handing it over, is there?

6. The CBC, unlike other media, operates with impunity when it comes to bias. Other media across the world are dying off like dinosaurs. The nominal reason for that is lack of ad revenues, but ad revenues follow eyeballs -- just ask Rupert Murdoch, owner of the biggest newspaper in America (The Wall Street Journal) and the biggest cable news channel in America (Fox News). He doesn't get a billion dollars a year from the government -- but he doesn't need to, since he can attract readers and viewers on his own.

Not the CBC: they can continue to be a hard-left group of activists, participating in a culture war against the West, the North, conservatives, rural Canadians, Christians, etc., etc., and be immune from the desertion of viewers that would be the market's punishment if a private broadcaster conducted itself in the same way.

I really wouldn't care if the CBC was biased, if I wasn't forced to pay for it. The National Post has its biases to the Jewish right, and the Toronto Star has its biases to the anti-Christian left. The more the merrier. But no-one is forced to support either of those newspapers if they don't want to.

If only the same could be said about the billion-dollar Liberal campaign machine called the CBC.

The Liberal smear-job against the men and women serving in our Canadian Forces has been led by two former NDP premiers, Ujjal Dosanjh and Bob Rae, both of whom now sit in Michael Ignatieff's shadow cabinet.

One presumes that Ignatieff has delegated this matter to his NDP wing because he himself is not the ideal spokesman to accuse our soldiers of torture, having written a whole book defending torture, called The Lesser Evil.

So he hands it off to the far left, including former Communist Dosanjh. Here's a few clips from the past few months of Dosanjh taking the Taliban's side of the argument against Canadian troops:

Well, who showed up at Parliament yesterday but Bill Graham, a former Liberal colleague of Ujjal Dosanjh. They sat in cabinet together while Canada's policy towards Afghan detainees was being drafted. Because, remember, it was the Liberal cabinet that sent our troops to Afghanistan in the first place. (Graham was the Liberal Defence and Foreign Minister, and then interim leader.)

It was a decision approved of by then-cabinet minister Dosanjh. And so was the protocol by which Canadian Forces handed over Taliban prisoners to the Afghan government.

What a shame for Dosanjh that Graham just happened to come to Parliament and answer questions about the subject.

Did Dosanjh really think that Graham would now denounce the mission in Afghanistan, and join in Dosanjh's cheap politicization of the war? Did he really think that Graham would disown the prisoner transfer system that the Liberals themselves wrote (that was later improved upon by the Conservatives)?

DId Dosanjh think that Graham would pretend to forget his own role in creating the rules -- as Dosanjh has forgotten his?

Not bloody likely. Watch this great exchange. Graham is too polite to say it bluntly, but his message is clear: Dosanjh doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.

I see from several of my favourite blogs a news story reporting that the Toronto Police now list "Nazis" as a potential victim group of "hate crimes".

And why not? Nazis can be hated, too. In fact, they are widely hated, and they should be. So it's not surprising that they are sometimes victims of crime.

But that's the problem with the phrase "hate crime". Hate itself is not a crime. And a crime is criminal whether or not it is motivated by hate.

Merging the two into a legal phrase is a trick, designed to blur the distinction. It is an attempt to criminalize the feeling of hate.

This corrosive legal idea was introduced into Canada in the 1960s and 1970s. Canada's Official Jews were the political midwives of the "hate speech" provisions in both the Criminal Code and various human rights laws.

As I've written before, these laws were obviously not enacted in response to any real criminal threat. Just twenty years after the Second World War, one out of five men on the street in Canada was a war veteran who had personally helped dispatch the Axis. The idea that our stable, liberal democracy might have erupted in pogroms or even revolution at the behest of a few eccentric racists is laughable.

No, the hate speech laws weren't in response to a legal need. They were in response to a political and psychological need. The Canadian Jewish Congress wanted to show the bruised Jewish community that they were alert and vigilant ethnic bosses -- perhaps to make up for their shameful political silence during the Holocaust itself.

And, for many of the individual Jews who agitated for these laws, it is clear to me, after reading hundreds of pages of archival material, that hate speech laws were a form of therapy. Jews, who were beaten literally and metaphorically during the Holocaust, could now do a little beating of their own. Call it a prototype for the movie Inglourious Basterds, a Jewish revenge fantasy.

That's what Canada's hate speech laws were built for: so Nazi-obsessed Official Jews could act out a muscular, state-sanctioned vengeance for the Holocaust, a Holocaust where the Jews had been physically and politically weak. It was a do-over, to be played out here in Canada, safely.

Now the Official Jews could purge their guilty feelings of impotence on hapless eccentrics like Ernst Zundel who, with his German accent and irridentist views, was a perfect voodoo doll for the Jews to stick with little legal pins.

Seriously: could you find a more mottled crew of misfits than those who have been prosecuted under our hate laws over the years? I wish I could recall the name of the Official Jew who I once heard gush that when he visited Zundel in jail, he smelled of his own urine. I saw such a beatific satisfaction in his eyes, I wish I could have shown him a videotape of himself, rejoicing in the degradation of a political enemy. How un-Jewish.

But forgive the lengthy tangent. Let's talk about Canada's hate laws, and their extension now to Canadian Nazis. Bernie "Burny" Farber, the High Priest of Official Jewry, Grand Poohbah of the Canadian Jewish Congress, said:

“How does Nazi fit into that,” questioned Bernie Farber, of the Canadian Jewish Congress, when the category was pointed out by the Town Crier.

“A Nazi can never be a victim but only a victimizer,” he said.

First: is it really surprising to Burny that another group has weaseled its way into the political class called "victim"?

Seriously, did Burny and the CJC architects and defenders of hate speech laws really think that they could maintain a monopoly over who could use these hate laws?

Perhaps back in the 1960s and 1970s, when these things were still new, the CJC's shortsightedness could be understood, if not forgiven. But really, in 2010? After Jew-hating groups like the Canadian Islamic Congress and the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada have availed themselves of the Jewish-created human rights commissions? Can Burny truly be surprised that others are trying out his trick?

It is nothing more than arrogance and solipsism that would make Burny think that a law could only be used by him. True enough, the Jews did set down plenty of jurisprudential sediment using these hate speech laws -- it was practically a Jewish monopoly until ten years ago. But in Canada we believe in rule of law -- in other words, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. If Official Jews can use hate laws to prosecute their political enemies, why can't Muslims?

And, indeed, why can't Nazis?

Did Burny really think that the Jews could ride on the back of the hate crimes tiger forever, without winding up in the tiger's mouth?

But that is not my quarrel here. Because the list that Nazis are now added to is not some human rights commission list; it's a police list, which presumably refers to the Criminal Code.

In other words, the Toronto Police are not putting Nazis on the list of political victims, but on the list of victims of crime. Perhaps they even have a basis for that -- again, it would not be surprising that self-identifying Nazis get the tar kicked out of them a lot.

Which is the real reason why Burny's comments are so repulsive.

All of the above is merely a recital of the problem with defining legally favoured groups: and that is, others will want in on that list, be they Muslim, Nazi or whatever.

That's not news.

What's news here is that Burny reveals just how illiberal he is when it comes to violence.

Because that's what we're talking about: crimes investigated by police, not speech investigated by HRCs.

Burny says that Nazis "can never be a victim".

Really?

Does Burny really think that a Nazi can never be the victim of a crime?

Does he really think that a Nazi ought to suffer a crime without the protection of the law?

Does he think that merely declaring oneself to be of a certain political view -- no matter how odious -- renders one an outlaw, outside the protection of police?

Is this just more of Burny's revenge fantasy?

To help you understand the illiberal nature of Burny's assertion, let us choose a less detestable victim of crime -- a prostitute.

No-one would ever say that a prostitute can never be a victim of rape. For even a prostitute has the protection of the law.

But Burny is saying one ought to be able to do anything to a Nazi -- that a Nazi can never be a victim of a hate crime. It's like saying a prostitute should be considered un-rapeable before the law.

Thank God that Burny is increasingly regarded as marginal, both within the Jewish community and in government. Because he clearly is still living in the 1960s, thinking that he can make changes to our laws that only harm his political enemies, and that his enemies themselves cannot use.

Could you imagine if Burny's legal theories were given force -- that the state could declare certain persons anathema, and that you could punish them in any way?

How long do you think such a puncture of the rule of law would take before it was Jews who were the ones you could molest with impunity?

And that, finally, is my point.

A real Jew, with a Jewish understanding of justice, would never state that a Nazi can't be treated as a victim of a crime.

A real Jew would rail against Nazis, detest them, defame them, debate them, disparage them -- but never deny them the basic human right to be free from criminal violence.

I never thought my esteem for Burny could fall any lower, but the man has hit rock bottom, and started digging.

Have you heard of Canadian Journalists for Freedom of Expression?

I bet you haven't.

Because in the great Canadian free speech debate of the past few years, they've been as silent as church mice.

According to their website,

We boldly champion the free expression rights of journalists and media workers around the world. In Canada, we monitor, defend and promote free expression and access to information. We encourage and support individuals and groups to be vigilant in the protection of their own and others' free expression rights. We are active participants and builders of the global free expression community.

Of course, it's just not true.

If you relied on the CJFE for your news about media freedom and censorship, you probably wouldn't have heard about a little kerfuffle back in the fall of 2005 and the spring of 2006, after a Danish newspaper published a dozen cartoons of the Muslim prophet Mohammed.

Things escalated to the point where in the single month of February, 2006, over 200 people were killed that in riots purportedly in response to those cartoons. It was the top story around the world.

Not for the CJFE -- they talked about everything and anything else, desperate to avoid giving offense to radical Islam.

In February of 2006, the magazine I published at the time, the Western Standard, reprinted some of the cartoons as a news story. We were slapped with two human rights complaints, another news story that continued for 900 days.

But the CJFE was still silent. They were hiding under their desks. Seriously: look at their 2006 news releases.

What cowards.

It wasn't until two and a half months later that they dipped their toe tentatively in the water by having a panel discussion -- featuring, amongst others, Haroon Siddiqui, one of only a handful of journalists in the whole country who actually support censorship and the power of human rights commissions to censor the media.

A panel discussion. No statement in defence of free speech. No "boldly championing" anything. No "defending and promoting" anything. Certainly no "support" or "active participation".

In other words, the CJFE is a bunch of cowards, and have been for years.

What an embarrassment they are, as compared to PEN Canada or the Canadian Association of Journalists.

If you look at the names of the directors of the CJFE, the source of their cowardice, wilfull blindness and hypocrisy is pretty clear: the bulk of them are the very editors and producers who themselves took part in the nearly-uniform censorship of the cartoons in the first place.

It would be quite some feat for the same "journalists" who executed the self-censorship to begin with, to then oppose that same censorship, wouldn't it be?

I don't know how up to date the list is, but the website includes plenty of high-ups at the CBC (which censored the cartoons) and even the editor of NOW magazine, which not only censored the cartoons, but has disgraced itself by being the only newspaper in the country whose official editorial position is in support of human rights commission censorship.

It borders on false advertising for such people to call themselves "Canadian Journalists for Freedom of Expression". They just aren't.

They've marginalized themselves. I mean, seriously -- have you ever heard them mentioned, anywhere, ever? They have made themselves obsolete.

I know I have ignored them.

But then I came across an item in the blog Free Canuckistan indicating that the sleeping lifeguards at the CJFE had awoken long enough to come to our rescue, some four years after we nearly drowned, by putting out some sort of report on the state of freedom of speech in Canada.

This would be quite something to see: after four years of pondering, what did they have to tell us?

You can see the report here (large file). Let's start with an astounding statement on page 5:

Marci McDonald writing about Canada's "Christian right" is about as convincing as Ted Byfield would be if he ever wrote a book about the nuances of the Quebec sovereignty movement.

It's just not within their field of expertise -- or even the language they speak.

That's a gentle way of saying McDonald doesn't know what the hell she's talking about.

Here's an excerpt from McDonald's book in the Toronto Star.

It's hard to find a single paragraph that isn't plain old wrong.

My favourite, from this little excerpt, is that McDonald lists Joseph Ben-Ami as a central figure in the rise of the Christian right.

Joseph Ben-Ami. Joseph Ben-Ami. That name. It's almost like -- how do I put this -- HE'S JEWISH.

He's so Jewish he wears a yarmulke, all the time.

Maybe McDonald thinks he wears it because he's a Catholic cardinal.

And then there's the "Christian advocacy group" called the Canadian Constitution Foundation.

Oh, really?

I was on the board of the CCF for a year or so. I'm pretty familiar with their bylaws, their staff, their projects, etc.

You might not be familiar with the CCF -- McDonald clearly isn't -- but you've probably heard of some of their more important court cases.

Their first client was a Nisga'a chief, named Chief Mountain. It was a constitutional case about Indian land claims.

Their other famous cases include R. v. Kapp, where they fought for racial equality for Japanese-Canadians.

The one that has received the most press was this case, where they went to bat for a cancer patient who was tired of waiting in line for medically necessary treatment.

My favourite was this one, where they went to bat for bar owners who had been overcharged liquor taxes.

Christian advocacy indeed!

But the way you know for sure that the CCF is a Christian front group, part of the great Christian conspiracy, is their director of litigation -- the woman who quarterbacks their cases.

She's a secular Jew named Karen Selick -- a woman who is, in fact, quite a passionate atheist.

Does anyone think that McDonald actually interviewed Ben-Ami or Selick before writing about them?

Does anyone think McDonald even Googled them?

I even make an appearance in the book, I'm told.

I guess Ezra Isaac Levant sounds pretty Bible-ish. But really, New Testament, Old Testamant -- what's the difference, right?

I've enjoyed some of McDonald's work before. But her clueless coverage of the Christian right is an embarrassment to her, and those who publish her without even a most cursory fact-checking.

McDonald set out to reveal the biases in conservative politics. But the only bias she has revealed is her own.

So, for the first time in history that we know of, the Prime Minister asked the Queen's secretary in Canada to consult with the Leader of the Opposition about the appointment of the next Governor General.

Of course, Stephen Harper didn't have to do that; it was a courtesy, and a novel one at that.

Choosing a Governor General is a very sober decision in our democracy, one of the last political acts that remains above partisanship.

So what did Ignatieff do?

Within hours of being asked, confidentially, for his advice, there he is on Parliament Hill, scrumming about it -- and announcing to the world that Michaelle Jean ought to be reappointed, because of her race and sex.

Let's ignore the obvious objections to Ignatieff's continued use of the Graves Strategy of culture war, in which he tries to pit Canadian against each other based on race, sex, geography, class, etc.

Let's ignore how his partisanship is corroding that office and, as Andrew Coyne points out, puts whomever her successor will be in a difficult position.

But what does it say about Ignatieff's ability to keep a secret? A state secret?

Michael Ignatieff is demanding access to every scrap of information about the Afghan war -- every military secret, every diplomatic secret, every national security secret. All of it. Not only is he demanding it for himself, but for his entire caucus -- a caucus that includes, for example, Borys Wrzesnewskyj, the Hezbollah sympathizer.

Ignatieff is given a confidential call by the Queen's secretary, and he can't wait to rush down to Parliament to tell all of his gossipy friends in the media about it.

He's so damned excited about being in on something, about knowing something that others don't, that he is just bursting to tell people -- to hell with the consequences to the country.

Do you really think we could trust that man with our most vital national security secrets?

That chatty cathy, that gossipy little girl can't keep a simple phone call from the Queen's secretary secret, without wanting to rush down to the cool kids in the press gallery to impress them.

And we're expected to believe that he would respect the secrecy of our national security documents?

The quicker we can send this spoiled brat back down to Harvard, the better for all of us -- including him.

There's something seriously wrong with the Canadian Jewish Congress.

I put to you two recent facts that tell the story.

The first is their threatened lawsuit against Maclean's magazine and Mark Steyn. Mark describes it here; I'm less interested right now in the disagreement than with the means the CJC sought to resolve the disagreement: they threatened to sue Steyn and Maclean's over what was clearly a fair comment.

While not Jewish himself, I cannot think of a more dedicated advocate of the cause of Israel or Canadian Jewry than Mark Steyn. He sees clearly the threat of radical Islam, and knows that is the threat of our generation -- not the fetishization of the Nazi Holocaust 75 years ago, as the CJC does; but warning against the looming Holocaust that is the aim of radical Islam.

That takes courage -- courage that the CJC lacks.

Steyn doesn't just talk the talk. He fights the fight -- even submitting to a five-day show trial at the hands of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal for precisely his campaign to expose the threat of radical Islam.

You'd think the CJC would regard him as a hero, or at least as an ally -- most Jews I know sure do. But while secular groups like the Civil Liberties Association intervened in support of Steyn, the CJC stayed silent. Well, that's not quite true, is it: they were amongst the only defenders of the censorship provisions of Canada's HRCs.

So that's how they treat our truest allies: abandon them in their time of need; threaten to sue them over hurt feelings.

Gotcha.

But how does the CJC treat a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite like Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj?

Oh, I don't throw that appellation around lightly. Besides calling for the legalization of the terrorist organization Hezbollah, and calling for negotiations with them even while they're banned, and flying to Lebanon himself proposing to meet with them, Wrzesnewskyj actually -- this is just too hard to believe -- called up the Globe and Mail, unsolicited, and demanded that Jason Kenney should come home from his "jaunt" to Auschwitz, when Kenney was there for a commemoration.

It's an odious man who thinks that; but it is a bizarrely brazen man who picks up the phone and calls up the paper to announce that.

That's Borys Wrzesnewskyj.

So how do you think the CJC treats him?

How do you think they treat him, compared to Mark Steyn?

The high priests at the CJC give Wrzesnewskyj their blessing.

They ask him to say a benediction for the father of the president of the CJC, Mark Freiman. And when Wrzesnewskyj reads out their scripted words, the CJC goes into full propaganda mode for him, publishing his remarks and e-mail blasting them out to every Jew in the country for whom they have an e-mail address.

So let's recap.

A Jew-lover like Mark Steyn: the CJC threatens to sue.

A Jew-hater like Borys Wrzesnewskyj who condemns the remembrance of the last Holocaust, and condemns the warnings of the next Holocaust: the CJC whitewashes and deodorizes. That kind of cleansing must have that old anti-Semite just laughing and laughing at them.

Good God, there's something deeply sick about the Canadian Jewish Congress when they no longer can tell our community's best friends from our worst enemies.