Results matching “holocaust” from Ezra Levant
Here's my Op-Ed in today's National Post, which is a rework of this recent blog entry.
Here's what it looked like on the page:
Anyways, here is the Op-Ed:
Why is it OK to pick on Christians?
I have never told him this, but I was tremendously disappointed when I first met Monsignor Fred Dolan, the Canadian vicar of Opus Dei.
It was about six or seven years ago, around the time The Da Vinci Code was published, and frankly I was hoping that he would be a dark and conspiratorial figure -- someone who would fit the words "ultraconservative" and "shadowy." I didn't quite want him to be an assassin, like the Opus Dei priest was in the book and film, but I surely wanted someone who was mysterious and secretive and powerful.
Like if the Pope had a CIA agent.
I admit it: I wanted an Opus Dei friend so I could shock the liberals in my life, and perhaps seem like I had a few exotic secrets of my own. And I thought it would be nice to have a friend who was more right wing than me.
To my regret, Msgr. Dolan is just a mild-mannered priest and worse, Opus Dei doesn't have any secret handshakes or midnight meetings. I don't want to sound lazy or selfish, but joining Opus Dei sure looks like a lot of do-goodery and just plain work (I asked Msgr. Dolan for a brochure and I read it carefully, even looking for hidden clues). I already had enough pro bono commitments and I didn't need any more. (As a Jew, I could join Opus Dei as an associate member).
I've stayed in touch with Msgr. Dolan since then and we're friendly. I admire his charity and his ecumenicalism. He sends me notes from time to time, about Passover or Holocaust remembrance, and he always asks when I'll be in Montreal again. In seven years, he's never tried to put the shadowy moves on me, and I'm starting to worry that he never will.
Pat Martin worries, too. Oh, does he worry.
Mr. Martin is the NDP MP for Winnipeg Centre. And his secret sources told him that Msgr. Dolan met with a dozen or so MPs in the Parliamentary dining room last week. (Actually, every MP received an invitation, and not even in invisible ink.)
Mr. Martin didn't attend. But he sought out reporters to tell them that Opus Dei members "give me the creeps."
That's fine, if rude. Though someone ought to tell Martin that The Da Vinci Code is not a documentary.
But then Mr. Martin went further: he criticized MPs for even meeting with Msgr. Dolan. "I can't imagine why a member of parliament would invite [Opus Dei] for a meeting on Parliament Hill," he said. "I certainly wouldn't attend anything associated with them."
Mr. Martin wasn't the only one worried that Msgr. Dolan might wave a wand and turn him into a newt. Gilles Duceppe, the leader of the Bloc Quebecois, actually asked about it in Question Period. Duceppe named two Conservative party volunteers who apparently are members of Opus Dei, noted that "a Conservative" invited Msgr. Dolan to the dining room and demanded that the Prime Minister "admit that his policy is influenced" by such people.
Neither of the women named by Mr. Duceppe works for the government in any way, and neither was known for their religious views-- until Mr. Duceppe took it upon himself to discuss their private lives in Parliament.
A reporter asked Mr. Duceppe if he wasn't being "a little Mc-Carthyite"; Mr. Duceppe brushed off the accusation and went further: Opus Dei members should not be allowed to participate in political life--even as volunteers --if they identify "as a group."
Stop for a moment and try that sentence out again, substituting the words "gay" or "Jewish" for "Opus Dei members." Jews shouldn't be allowed in politics if they "identify as a group." Sikhs shouldn't be allowed in politics "if they identify as a group." How does it feel?
Mr. Duceppe then went a little Dan Brown himself, claiming Opus Dei "have people in place ... so a lot of things prove that something's going on." He really said that.
Try our substitution experiment again. Gays "have people in place." Gays have "something going on." How does that sound?
Sounds to me like Mr. Duceppe is channelling a bit of Jacques Parizeau's "money and the ethnic vote" xenophobia again.
So what do we have here?
The obvious: Anti-Christian bigotry remains an acceptable form of intolerance in Canadian politics, and this bigotry has infected the parties of the left.
The mainstream media, and indeed the rest of the political establishment, ignores or even approves of this (CBC's Evan Solomon being a noteworthy exception).
Like Marci McDonald's book about Christians, Mr. Duceppe's comments are error-ridden and hysterical. For example, Duceppe implied that the meeting was for Conservatives only. But one of the MPs who attended is Mario Silva -- a Liberal MP who just happens to be gay. Lemme guess: That just proves how diabolical Opus Dei's master plan must be!
It's one thing for Messrs. Martin and Duceppe and Ms. Mc-Donald to dislike Christians. But what's new -- and disturbing -- is that this once-passive intolerance is becoming active: There is a concerted effort to name Christians and drive them out of office, to delegitimize the very idea of Christians participating in public life.
It's an attack on Canada's pluralism and religious freedom. It's unfair and it's un-Canadian. We'd never accept it if it were targeting any other religious group. So why is it OK to pick on Christians?
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.
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.
UPDATE: See correction at bottom
On Friday, when Stephen Harper appointed five new Senators, my Liberal frenemy, Jason Cherniak, wrote the strangest thing:
waiting for expressions of disappointment that Harper is not appointing Senators active in the Jewish community
Cherniak, readers will recall, is one of the last 100 Jews in the Liberal Party.
Well, it’s true that in those five Senatorial appointments, none were active in the Jewish community – or at least none were Jewish. But Harper has already appointed three Jews to the Senate, all of whom are very active in the Jewish community and philanthropy: Linda Frum, Judith Seidman and Irving Gerstein. Add to that Harper’s appointment of a Jew to the Supreme Court, and you’d think the man was trying to start a synagogue on Parliament Hill. And, to the chagrin of anti-Semites like the Toronto Star’s Haroon Siddiqui, Harper has appointed a Jew as the chairman of the GONGO Rights and Democracy, and a Jew-loving Gentile as its new president. (That’s really what all the opposition hullabaloo is about: R&D is no longer going to be allowed to send cheques to Palestinian terrorists.)
I pointed out some of this to Cherniak, who responded by listing a number of great Jews in the Liberal Party, most of whom are now in their 70s and 80s, and some of whom have actually been dead for quite some time.
In other words, the golden age of Jews in the Liberal Party – if it ever existed – is long past.
(I dispute that it ever existed; it was the Liberal government during the Second World War that turned back ships of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, with the motto “none is too many.” Liberals have mythologized and sanitized their party’s anti-Semitic past, the same way modern U.S. Democrats have willfully forgotten that theirs is the party of the KKK (including the lovely Senator Robert Byrd) and that the Republicans are the party of Abe Lincoln.)
But that’s the past. What’s the future? In my own travels, I find that on most Canadian campuses, the Hillel or Jewish students clubs are overwhelmingly Conservative. That’s the future.
Cherniak asked me: who is “the Jewish Senator” in the Conservatives, and I actually replied. But that’s a mistake. Even accepting the concept of “the Jewish Senator” is to agree to the ghettoization of Jews and to relegate being pro-Israel to the level of an ethnopolitical hand-out, not a function of a principled foreign policy. More than that, it accepts that a Jew's only place must be on "Jewish issues". The Liberals have so conditioned Cherniak into thinking that being pro-Israel is a ghetto issue, that he believes it: he thinks his place is to have one token in Parliament. Maybe he thinks it’ll be him, if he really serves the party loyally.
This also makes the false assumption that any one Jew can speak for the community – a fallacy proved every day by the “Official Jews” who run the Liberal-sympathetic Canadian Jewish Congress.
I’d rather have a government run by principled Gentiles like Jason Kenney, Stockwell Day and Stephen Harper, to name just three, who are pro-Israel for reasons of conservative principle, than a government stacked with either the “Jews of Silence” as Izzy Asper called the Official Jews, or worse. And by worse, I mean that according to Cherniak’s litmus test, a party dominated by Naomi Klein, Judy Rebick and Noam Chomsky (the NDP, I guess) would be the bee’s knees, but a party run by Israel-loving Christians wouldn’t.
There are plenty of Jews active in the Conservative Party. Much more importantly, there are people in the Tories, Jewish and non-Jewish, who for reasons of principle, not ethnicity, support democracy and liberty, be it in Israel or Taiwan or Iran.
But let me close with a little bit of research that I did, on a whim.
Cherniak is upset that Harper has only appointed three Jewish senators. Jews, of course, make up about 1% of Canada’s population, but Harper has made them 9% of his 33 appointees.
How about Jean Chretien? How did he do?
In ten years as prime minister, unless I'm missing someone, he didn’t appoint a single one.
And Paul Martin? Unless I’m missing someone, the only Jew he could find to appoint was a Conservative named Hugh Segal, Brian Mulroney’s former chief of staff.
I say again, simply counting Jews isn’t the right way to measure a party’s commitment to Jews or Jewish issues. But even on that basis, Chreniak’s desperate apology for his increasingly Jew-free party fails.
UPDATE: A correspondent points out that the Senate website to which I have linked to do my count only lists Senators who are currently sitting, so it excludes Jewish Senators who were appointed but have since retired. So, for example, a seventy-year-old named Yoine Goldstein was appointed for a short term by Paul Martin -- a little token for a little token.
Here's the full list of all Senators appointed by Paul Martin -- it's just Segal and Goldstein.
And here's the full list of all Senators appointed by Jean Chretien. It includes a three-year stint for Sheila Finestone, and that's it.
Seriously in ten years as prime minister, with 75 appointments, he chose one Jew for three years. That's Jason Cherniak's Jew-loving party for you.
I'm also advised of the hilarity that ensued when "Goldstein's seat" -- or as Liberals would say, "the Jewish seat" -- came open. The Official Jews around the country all busied themselves campaigning for "their" Official Jew -- they're power broker, their choice for "the seat".
Imagine the gnashing of the teeth when Harper ignored their official choices and picked his own. I can't tell you how happy I am that none of Harper's Jewish picks have the CJC hechsher.
I've criticized B'nai Brith before for their on-again, off-again support for Canada's human rights commissions and their censorship laws. Here's an example. Such support is odd, especially considering the fact that B'nai Brith itself was the target of a five-year censorship vendetta by Manitoba's Human Rights Commission, spurred by a radical Muslim complainant.
Well last week, to my surprise, I was contacted by B'nai Brith to help them assess the propaganda "fatwa against terrorism" issued by a handful of Canadian Muslim clerics, including Calgary's Syed Soharwardy.
I was happy to help reveal the true nature of Soharwrady. I documented for them not only Soharwardy's public statements (his call for sharia law to be imposed in Canada; his slanderous allegation that Christian relief workers in the 2005 tsunami were kidnapping Muslim children) but also his virulently hateful websites. I pointed them to where Soharwardy repeated blood libels against the Jewish talmud, called for the annihilation of Israel, compared Israel to Nazis perpetrating a Holocaust and other statements. Besides having sifted through so much of Soharwardy's crap on my own, I had also saved the vilest of Soharwardy's website comments to my hard drive, knowing that my scrutiny would cause him to go back and scrub his sites of the most anti-Semitic material.
Anyways, to my delight, the B'nai Brith issued two press releases on the subject last Friday (here's the first, here's the second). Here is the text of them in full:
B’nai Brith Canada concerned about sincerity of Islamic fatwa against terrorism
TORONTO, January 15, 2010 – B’nai Brith Canada questions the wording and intent behind a fatwa against terrorism that was undersigned by a group of North American imams. The recently-issued fatwa, which states that “any attack on Canada and the United States is an attack on the freedom of Canadian and American Muslims. Any attack on Canada and the United States is an attack on thousands of mosques across North America,” was spearheaded by Syed Soharwardy, the president of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada (ISCC).
Soharwardy and his organization have a track record of disseminating antisemitic and anti-Western sentiment. Although a lot of the disturbing material has been removed from the ISCC’s website, thanks to the probing efforts of Ezra Levant, B’nai Brith was able to acquire archived copies of the offending articles and statements.
“The fact that this fatwa limits itself to terrorism in North America and predicates its anti-terror positions on the damaging effects of terrorism only on the Islamic community is quite concerning,” said Frank Dimant, B’nai Brith Canada’s Executive Vice President. “Is the fatwa implicitly saying that terrorism directed against India, Spain, the U.K., Israel, and Canadian forces in Afghanistan is somehow permissible?
“Syed Soharwardy is the imam whose complaint dragged Ezra Levant through the Alberta Human Rights Commission for publishing the Danish Mohammad cartoons in the Western Standard. We were disgusted when we read some of the virulent antisemitic and anti-Western ravings that were posted to his organization’s website – some trivialized the Holocaust, others prophesized the extinction of the Christian faith, and still others went so far as to speak of a ‘slaughter’ and ‘annihilation’ of Jews.
“What Canadians would truly like to see is for reputable imams within the Islamic community to stand up and denounce all acts of terrorism irrespective of where they occur and who the targets are. And if Imam Soharwardy wants his fatwa to be taken seriously, he needs to publicly reconcile it with the anti-Christian and antisemitic ravings that have appeared on his organization’s website.”
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For more information, please contact, Dan Rabkin, Communications Officer:
416-633-6224 X 140 / cell: 416-312-9173
B’nai Brith Canada has been active in Canada since 1875 as the Jewish community’s foremost human rights agency
and here's the other:
Danish Mohammad Cartoon Syndrome infects Canadian media
TORONTO, January 15, 2010 – In light of the media’s relative inaction over the publication in a Canadian Islamic community newspaper of an article accusing Jews of killing children in order to harvest their organs, B’nai Brith Canada is questioning the “media chill” it has witnessed when it comes to antisemitism and anti-Western sentiment emanating from within the Islamic community.
“A horrific blood libel against the Jewish people was published right here in Canada and most of the national print and electronic media have been silent,” said Frank Dimant, Executive Vice President of B’nai Brith Canada. “We are concerned by the fact that such hatred has been met with almost complete silence by the media. We can only assume journalists fear being labeled ‘Islamophobes.’
“Major media outlets undertook the time and effort to interview us when the story broke about Al-Ameen publishing that despicable story, but we later learned that those stories were pulled. We are certain that if such hatred was being disseminated by other religious or ethnic outlets, there would have been outcry in Canada.
“We have all witnessed a ‘legal chill’ in previous years where there were frivolous attempts through our human rights system to muzzle and sanction Maclean’s magazine, the Western Standard and Ezra Levant, and even B’nai Brith for purportedly ‘crossing a line.’ Even though those attempts were unsuccessful, the lasting effect of having to spend such time and resources defending against frivolous complaints has created a chill within our society against speaking out against radical Islam and its manifestations. We are disturbed to see this ‘chill’ expanding into the media, a pillar of society whose freedom to report on issues of concern must be protected.”
-30-
For more information, please contact, Dan Rabkin, Communications Officer:
416-633-6224 X 140 / cell: 416-312-9173
B’nai Brith Canada has been active in Canada since 1875 as the Jewish community’s foremost human rights agency
I'm glad that, after they inspected Soharwardy's record, B'nai Brith did the right thing, and exposed him as an anti-Semitic liar.
I regret that I cannot say the same thing for Calgary's Official Jews. They have see all the same material about Soharwardy that B'nai Brith has; I (and my father) have sent it to them continuously literally for years. Instead of denouncing Soharwardy's anti-Semitism, they actually sent him an official "thank you" letter last month, which you can read here.
Read it, unless you have a strong gag reflex. Calgary's OJs tell Soharwardy it is "comforting" to have him in the fight against anti-Semitism. They say he promotes "values of acceptance and diversity". Seriously -- the same guy who says the Jewish Talmud calls for Jews to kill non-Jews, and says Christians kidnap baby Muslims.
Disgusting.
Gerald Caplan, an old NDP hack, wrote two absolutely bizarre columns for the Globe and Mail's website last month, about Stephen Harper and the Jews. I was pleased to be able to respond today. Here is the link to my article on the Globe's website. They gave it the headline "Explaining Stephen Harper's 'bizarre embrace'", which I suppose gets to the point of it. Here's what I wrote:
Christmastime can make a Jew feel self-conscious, which might explain why last month Gerald Caplan shared with us, not once but twice, his personal thoughts on the “the Harper government's bizarre embrace of Canadian Jewry.”
Bizarre wasn't the only word he used. He also called Canada's pro-Israel position perverse, fanatical, mindless and unseemly. He was even rougher on Israel's government, calling it extremist, its prime minister a radical and its deputy prime minister a supporter of ethnic cleansing. The only thing Mr. Caplan didn't do was accuse Israel and its supporters of being Nazis.
Oh, wait, he did that too: in a grotesque twisting of the New Testament's Book of Revelation, Mr. Caplan said evangelical Christian supporters of Israel only do so to hasten the “final Holocaust of the Jewish people” and that they want a “Jew-free world – Hitler's demented goal finally realized.” If he said that about the Jewish Torah or the Muslim Koran, he'd be charged with hate speech.
Believe it or not, that is Mr. Caplan being polite. He once accused Israel of “routine beatings, torture, killings and harassment of Palestinians by Jews” – an accusation so false and defamatory it was gleefully seized upon by Holocaust revisionists like David Irving.
Putting aside his personal vendettas, Mr. Caplan does ask a valid question: why are the Conservatives focused on the Jews? As an old NDP organizer, he knows Jews make up just one per cent of Canada's population, so they're not an important voting bloc. And whatever leverage the Jews used to have when it came to party financing was eliminated when the $1,100 annual donation limit became law.
Mr. Caplan says he's “always happier when people aren't paying us so much attention. Thanks, Conservatives, but no thanks.” I agree with him, actually. But it's not because of Stephen Harper and the Conservatives that Jews are news.
Jews have plenty of enemies who wake up every morning with the goal of antagonizing them, either politically or violently. It was Islamic terrorists who sought out the Chabad House in Mumbai. It is the largest voting bloc at the United Nations – the Saudi-backed Organization of the Islamic Conference – that demonizes Israel through relentless resolutions. It is Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who promises to wipe out Israel. It is Hamas and Hezbollah who fire rockets at Israeli civilians. A lot of Jews would like a break from the news, but that's not likely to happen soon.
Mr. Harper's innovation is not that he takes positions on these issues. It's that he has brought Canada's foreign policy into line with our national values – freedom, peace and democracy. And, domestically, the Prime Minister has drawn a bright line between legitimate criticism of Israel and outright Jew-hatred.
All of this represents a pro-Israel political philosophy with which Mr. Caplan clearly disagrees. But while he is entitled to his own opinions, he is not entitled to his own facts. And Mr. Caplan has a few whoppers.
In his nearly 2,000 words on the subject, he studiously avoids mention of Islamic terrorism either overseas or at home, and goes so far as to list the culprits behind Canadian anti-Semitic incidents as “kids, crackpot white supremacists or marginalized thugs.”
Perhaps Mr. Caplan missed it when Yousef Sandouga, a Palestinian immigrant, firebombed Edmonton's Beth Shalom synagogue. The judge called it a terrorist act. Was Mr. Caplan out of the country when Montreal's United Talmud Torah school was firebombed by Sleiman Elmerhebi and his friends, leaving a note praising Hamas? Has Mr. Caplan not heard of the Toronto 18? And who has been marching in Toronto, Montreal and Calgary, flying the flag of Hezbollah, the banned terrorist group? Those evangelical Christians again?
Mr. Caplan claims that Canada is an “anti-anti-Semitic championship,” where politicians try to out-bid each other for being pro-Jewish. His beloved NDP is a living refutation of that. Svend Robinson spoke for many in his party when he called Israel a “terrorist state”.
Both of Mr. Caplan's columns went to bat for a left-wing lobby group called Kairos that recently had a new $7-million funding request denied by the Conservative government. Here again, his facts need correcting.
He claims Kairos is “fighting injustice around the world.” Not really; they don't have a word of criticism for human rights disasters like China or Saudi Arabia. What they like to fight best – the only country for which they promote an economic boycott – is Israel. As for charitable acts, well, Kairos spent only 3.7 per cent of its budget last year on “anti-poverty grants.”
They're not a charity. They're a lobby group.
Mr. Caplan claims that Kairos never endorsed a boycott campaign against Israel, and he invites readers to check their website, claiming “they explicitly do not support such campaigns.” But Mr. Caplan has been duped: as soon as Kairos lost its funding, it engaged in an after-the-fact scrubbing of its website, deleting anti-Israel pages, and adding disclaimers to many anti-Israel links.
It's a shame that Jews and Israel are in the news so much. It would seem odd if Canadian political parties duked it out over the “New Zealand question” or their “Portugal policy.”
But as long as Israel and the Jews are targets, Canada's government will take a position on it. Lucky for us, it's the Conservatives taking those positions, not Mr. Caplan and his party that call democratic, liberal Israel a terrorist state.
I'd love your feedback in the comments.
I've written a couple of blog entries outlining the bigotry of Syed Soharwardy, Calgary's most vicious terrorist-supporting Muslim radical. I won't recap all of his hatred here -- there's just too much to treat it quickly -- but go back and read the details in my earlier reports if you like. If I had to choose the most telling comment from Soharwardy's anti-Semitic rants, I'd choose the page where he publishes this:
A great slaughter of the Jews will ensue and every one of them will be annihilated. The nation of Jews will be exterminated.
Not much wiggle room there. What the hell were Calgary's Official Jews thinking by letting such a bigot co-sponsor their rally against anti-Semitism last month? And what the hell is Judy Shapiro, Calgary's chief Official Jew, doing going to such a man's propaganda "Hannukah Party" later this week?
I've written about Soharwardy's bigotry and his other misconduct at his mosque before. Nearly two years ago, I received this laughable legal threat from his lawyer, to which I immediately replied: "let's rumble". I never heard back, which is too bad, because such a trial would have been a spectacular civic education for the city about the stealthy jihad against our values being perpetrated by Pakistani-born, Saudi-trained radicals like Soharwardy.
Well, I didn't hear back from Soharwardy's lawyer this time -- I heard directly from the bigot-in-chief himself! I won't give him the publicity of reprinting his whole rant, but let me choose two key passages.
The first is actually a pretty bold statement from the old Jew-hater. He doubles down, and says that everything he wrote on his websites is defensible. The call for the extermination of the Jews; the slanderous lie that the Talmud instructs Jews to murder Gentiles; the lovingly reprinted commentary from Muslim Brotherhood terrorist Al Qaradawi; the disparagement of the Jewish Holocaust, and the claim that Israel itself is perpetrating a Holocaust. Soharwardy doesn't back down an inch from any of that. Instead, he writes:
I will be delighted to discuss with you the contents of any article on ISCC and related websites, which you seem to find Anti-Semitic.
I "seem to find" the call for the extermination of Jews to be anti-Semitic. He'd be "delighted" to make the case to me directly. Wow -- sounds about as interesting as accepting an invitation from Jim Keegstra for a history lesson about the Holocaust.
The second point is just fascinating. As I've documented before, Robina Datt was a dissident at Soharwardy's mosque. She asked pesky questions, like "where the hell did the donations go?"
So she was beaten to the point of hospitalization.
Here's a contemporaneous report in the Calgary Herald. And here's pictures of poor Robina in a Pakistani-Canadian newspaper:
The crime was committed. It was reported in the Herald. Robina Butt was admitted to hospital and treated for her injuries. She told police that her attackers warned her to stop criticizing Soharwardy's mosque.
So what does Soharwardy have to say about this brutal attack on an innocent woman?
The most bizarre statement you could imagine: Soharwardy calls the whole thing -- including the woman's injuries -- "a plot against me".
The only thing he didn't say was that it was a Jewish conspiracy, but I guess that's a given when you're dealing with a man who attends rallies for Hezbollah.
So it's all a plot, designed to embarrass him. Except it's also a crime that needs to be investigated:
Calgary is not a lawless city. All these alleged crimes are under investigation with the Calgary Police. I have been reminding Calgary Police to complete their investigation and bring criminals to justice as soon as possible. I would urge you to do the same instead of posting false information about me.
Huh? It's all a fake -- but it's also real? Has some little imam been watching old videos of the O.J. Simpson trial?
Here's more from his real/fake explanation of the beating of Robina Butt:
I am confident that the above mentioned three incidents were staged. The majority of Pakistani community in Calgary believes these incidents were staged. It was a conspiracy... I have every confidence in Calgary police that soon the police will find the culprits and the culprits will face the Canadian justice.
So the police should hunt down the criminals who beat up Robina Butt... except that it wasn't a crime, it was all staged? I love the line that most of his friends believe it was fake. Do you really think ol' fire and brimstone actually took a survey of Calgary Pakistanis to ask them that? And even if he did, do you think that bizarre appeal to mob rule is more persuasive than what the police and medical experts had to say?
That may be how they judge battered women in Saudi Arabia -- in fact, being raped is itself a crime in Soharwardy's beloved Saudi -- and a woman's testimony in a sharia court is afforded only half the weight of a man's. Sorry, you old bigot: we don't try and convict battered women here by asking a bunch of your hookah buddies if the bitch deserved it.
Stop for just a moment and imagine what you would say if a woman was beaten to a pulp -- not just any woman, not a stranger, but a member of your own congregation. Whether you liked her or not, what would you say -- if you said anything? Would you really do what Soharwardy did: issue a public statement claiming that her injuries -- documented by a Calgary hospital -- were fake? Would you actually call a battered woman a liar? Would you actually say that "most people" thought she was a liar and a faker?
I think he knows it's thin ice -- because he lapses back to what he knows normal people would say: I encourage the police, yadda yadda. The only thing he hasn't copied from O.J. was his promise to help find the actual killers himself.
Syed Soharwardy isn't just a Jew-hater. He hates women, too.
Judy Shapiro should take a bodyguard along with her.
P.S. Just for old times' sake, let's close with a picture of the graffiti that was spray-painted by the thugs who attended Soharwardy's pro-Hezbollah rally in the heart of Calgary's Jewish neighbourhood. Hey, it doesn't say anything that Soharwardy's own website doesn't say, so what's the big whup, right Judy? And it was probably put there by Robina Datt to frame Soharwardy anyways.
Last week, I pointed out that Calgary's Official Jews invited notorious anti-Semites to co-sponsor a Jewish rally against anti-Semitism.
I know, it sounds too strange to be true. But it is.
One of those Jew-haters is Syed Soharwardy, a vicious, anti-Semitic bigot who trivializes the Jewish Holocaust, spreads blood libels against the Jewish Talmud, says Israel is perpetrating a Holocaust of its own against Palestinians, publicly calls for sharia law to be implemented in Canada, and participated in a pro-terrorist rally in the Jewish neighbourhood of Calgary, replete with a flag of Hezbollah.
I first came to know this odious man up close, when he hauled me before the Alberta human rights commission for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. Before that, the little thug actually tried to have me arrested by the Calgary Police Service for publishing those cartoons, as if we were back in his beloved Saudi Arabia, where the police take care of the infidels.
Syed Soharwardy is anti-Semitic scum.
Calgary's Official Jews freaked out when I publicized the words and deeds of this bigot, because they had so publicly cast their lot in with him. Some of the OJs wrote public comments on on my blog, and others wrote to me directly. All of their comments were the same, in that they ignored Soharwardy's anti-Semitism, and instead railed against me for my criticisms. In other words, they weren't embarrassed that they were friends with Soharwardy. They were embarrassed that they were caught.
So what did the Official Jews do about it? I mean, we know what they'd do if it were a white WASP who was espousing such bigotry: they'd press for his prosecution, as they did with Jim Keegstra.
But not with Soharwardy. They actually contacted him, and asked him to take down some of the most grotesque anti-Semitic comments from his website, so they wouldn't have to explain themselves to grassroots Jews who were asking the Official Jews what the hell they were doing.
To be clear: they didn't get Soharwardy to renounce his anti-Semitism. They didn't get him to explain it. They simply got him not to be so showy about it -- it was too embarrassing for them. Could he please take down the page from his website where he says the Jewish Talmud licenses Jews to murder non-Jews? If it's not too much trouble, sir?
Here's a Google cache of where that blood libel was published: see item 54, "What Talmud says about violence and hate". Until yesterday, it used to be here.
I guessed that the Official Jews would ask Soharwardy to take it down. So I saved it to my hard drive. You can see it here, in its full Jew-hating glory.
I've saved the other anti-Semitic pages on his website that I linked to in my earlier blog post. But they are by no means exhaustive. Take this nutty page, where Soharwardy publishes a rant claiming that Jews want to take over Jordan, Iraq, Syria and even parts of Saudi Arabia, as part of an international Jewish conspiracy, using "Jewish capital". The story ends happily for Soharwardy, though. Let me quote:
A great slaughter of the Jews will ensue and every one of them will be annihilated. The nation of Jews will be exterminated.
(Pssst! Official Jews, I've saved that page to my hard drive, too, so no point in having Soharwardy take it down now.)
There are plenty of pages on Soharwardy's websites where he compares Jews to Nazis, and accuses Jews of trying to commit a genocide against Palestinians. Here's one, where he blames the Jews for instigating Muslim suicide bombings against them:
Israelites are repeating the same cruel and brutal behaviour with Palestinians that they themselves faced during the World War II. In fact, the sufferings of Palestinians are getting worse day by day. Not only Israeli government wants to wipe them out but their own Arab and Muslim brothers and sisters are quietly watching their genocide.
This is the man who was invited to co-sponsor the rally against anti-Semitism. Really.
Soharwardy's hatred for Jews is not his only hatred. He hates other Muslim denominations, too. Read this rant against Ahmadiyya Muslims, a peaceful sect of Islam. Soharwardy rails against Ahmadiyyas, and then bizarrely implies that they support terrorism. Here's my favourite line in Soharwardy's press release about his fellow Muslims:
ISCC and MAT would like to request all the media organizations especially radio talk show programs that if they find any person who identifies himself / herself as Muslim and endorses terrorism please track that person's call and report to police. MAT and ISCC will be happy to assist the media in this regard.
The title of his press release is "Fake Muslims". It's about the Ahmadiyyas. And then he slides directly into an implication that they endorse terrorism. I say again: the man is a bigot.
Sometimes Soharwardy is literally crazy. Nutty as a Snickers bar. Check out this blather about one of his enemies, a group he calls "NewYorkees". Gee -- who could he possibly mean by that?
I really don't know what the hell he's talking about, but these "NewYorkees" are very good with the media, are anti-Islam and believe that "homosexuality is permissable". NewYorkees, NewYorkees -- who could he be referring to?
Soharwardy is a conspiracy theorist, too: here's a gem:
A new Holocaust may emerge in North America very soon. People are already talking about concentration camps and the Holocaust of more than 10 million Muslims in North America.
I present to you the main man of Calgary's Official Jews. He was a full-blown partner with the OJs in their rally last week. And guess what? He's returning the favour. He's inviting Judy Shapiro, the Calgary Jewish Community Council's community relations director, to attend a very special Hannukah celebration at his mosque.
And she's coming.
Here's the poster advertising the event. All of those groups listed -- the Canadian Association of Muslim Youth, the Al-Madinah Islamic Centre, Muslims Against Terrorism, and the Islamic Association of Canadian Women are all front organizations, shell organizations or downright fake organizations for Soharwardy.
Syed Soharwardy -- Jew-hater; Ahmadiyya-hater; Holocaust trivializer; Talmud-slanderer -- is having a little Hannukah celebration, as "proof" that he's not anti-Semitic. It's like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meeting with that nutty fringe sect of ultra-Orthodox Jews who don't believe in Israel. Ahmadinejad does it to pretend he's not a Jew-hater: look! He got a real Jew to shake hands with him! So it's obviously not true that he hates Jews!
Soharwardy's doing the same thing. But instead of flying in a nutty Neturei Karta rabbi for a photo op, he just calls down to the Official Jews, and they run right over. They're what Lenin called "useful idiots" -- they're happy to pose for a photo op with him, to give him moral cover for when he demonizes Jews, Israel and the Holocaust.
Do you think this is outrageous? Do you think it's insane? Well, it gets one degree more inexplicable.
You see, Judy Shapiro, the dupe who is going to Soharwardy's photo op, isn't just the community relations director for Calgary's Official Jews. She's also the wife of Richard Bronstein, the publisher of Calgary's Jewish Free Press, a small-circulation free newpaper that is mailed to Calgary's Jews. She's Mrs. Publisher.
Some readers will know that, along with the Western Standard, the Jewish Free Press (and the student paper at the University of Prince Edward Island) also published some of the Danish cartoons in February of 2006. And, just as he went after the Western Standard and me, Soharwardy hit the JFP with a human rights complaint, too.
Do you follow? Syed Soharwardy isn't just a menace to the Jews in general. He was a menace to the Jewish Free Press in particular. He sicced the human rights commission on them, for "hate speech". They capitulated, and went to a "mediation" with the thug. And they settled (Bronstein claims he didn't apologize).
And now Judy Shapiro -- Bronstein's wife -- is going to Soharwardy's anti-Semitic mosque next week to "celebrate" Hannukah by giving him a photo op.
That's not just being a dhimmi. That's some serious spousal Stockholm Syndrome going on.
Now, I don't give a damn if Bronstein agreed to go to the human rights commission's mediation with Soharwardy -- that's his business, and he has to live with himself. And I don't give a damn if he goes to Soharwardy's mosque. But his wife is an Official Jew. And -- look at the poster -- she's going in her capacity as an Official Jew. She's representing the entire Jewish community there.
That's bizarre enough, given how Soharwardy abused her husband. But she's carrying out her strange appeasement of her husband's tormentor in the name of all Jews. In my name, actually.
That's just gross.
It's even grosser that, in response to the revelations in my earlier blog entry, Shapiro hasn't cancelled her official visit -- all that's happened is that Soharwardy has been asked to take down some of his more flagrant anti-Semitic rants, at least until the Hannukah photo op is over.
Let me close on a note of sympathy and remembrance. I dedicate this blog entry to Robina Butt.
Robina Butt was a congregant at Soharwardy's sham mosque. She donated money, like he asked her to. But then Robina Butt made the mistake of asking Soharwardy where all the donations were going -- and why he hadn't filed proper corporate returns. Robina Butt became a nuisance to Soharwardy. Worse than that: she threatened to destroy his carefully crafted public image.
Soharwardy sued her. But she still didn't shut up. The woman just didn't know her place. (I've seen an undercover video of how Soharwardy shouts down the women at his mosque -- it's ugly). Who would stop this turbulent woman?
Someone had to. And so one day, when Robina Butt was at home, two people burst into her house and beat her to the point of hospitalization. According to Butt, they shouted: "We come from Al-Madinah; if you ever talk anything about Al-Madinah . . . this is the first instalment."
Al-Madinah, as you can see in the poster, is one of Soharwardy's shell organizations. Robina Butt had been asking about where all the money had gone. So this is what they did to her:
That's what happens to critics of the misogynistic bigot that Judy Shapiro is going to honour.
That's what happens to critics of the misogynistic bigot the Calgary Jewish Community Council invited to co-sponsor their rally against anti-Semitism.
Too bad. I remember a time when the Jewish community was against violence against women, whether it was done in the name of the Ku Klux Klan or the Al Madinah mosque.
One of the Official Jews who wrote to me actually said that Robina Butt's brutal beating was "two year old crap". Wow. They must be pretty invested in Soharwardy to disparage a victim of violence that way. Next thing they'll be saying is that Aqsa Parvez had it coming, too.
Then again, there was a time when the Jewish community was against the blood libel, too. Now, they just ask such slanderers to kindly take it off their websites -- at least until the Hannukah party is over.
I don't think that even Bernie Farber is that crass.
I've railed a lot against Canada's Official Jews -- the Jews who are Jews for a living, the Jews who claim to speak for all Jews. Bernie "Burny" Farber at the Canadian Jewish Congress is the worst, with his fetish for censorship. The B'nai Brith and Simon Wiesenthal Center are close behind.
But tonight I have to salute my home town Official Jews for being dumber than a bag of hammers.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a vandalism spree, where swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti were spraypainted on Jewish property around Calgary. In response, the Official Jews held a rally called "Calgary says No to hate". I'm not sure if hate was the real problem, or if it was the vandalism, trespass and other criminal acts. The Jewish community was stunned when the Calgary Police Service originally denied that the swastikas were evidence of a "hate crime", suggesting that it was no different than any other graffiti. Is it any less odd that the Official Jews would drop the word crime, and suggest the problem was merely the emotional state of the criminals?
But look at the list of co-sponsors for the Official Jews' rally: included amongst them are the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, the Islamic Association of Canadian Women and the Muslim Council of Calgary.
Who are they?
Well, the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada and the Islamic Association of Canadian Women are front organizations for the same man: a virulent anti-Semite named Syed Soharwardy. I know Soharwardy because he's the Jew-hater who hauled me before the Alberta Human Rights Commission for my high crime of publishing the Danish cartoons. You can read a bit about Soharwardy's disreputable conduct here and here. Soharwardy isn't just a Jew-hater, he's a woman-hater, too. When three women at his mosque started asking troublesome questions about his financial shenanigans, one of them wound up in the hospital, and another had her house torched. Here's a picture in the Pakistan Post of Robina Butt who, according to police, was assaulted by someone shouting warnings to her about her pesky questions to Soharwardy. This is what happens to Soharwardy's enemies within his own mosque:
To this day you can still see where that graffiti has been painted over.
Week after week the anti-Semites from the MCC and Soharwardy's group came back to the mall in the center of the Jewish neighbourhood. At first, they only waved the terrorist flag furtively. When they saw, though, that the police did nothing to stop them -- but rather accosted any pro-Israel counter-protesters -- the anti-Semites got bolder and bolder, to the point where they parked their cars in the Jewish Centre across the street -- on their way to a Jew-bashing rally! -- and spat on a rabbi passing by.
It was only when the owners of the mall got a restraining order against Soharwardy, the MCC and the other protesters, did the weekly festival of Jew-hatred retreat back into their holes -- oh, except the graffiti.
These are the people the Official Jews invited to be the "co-sponsors" of their rally against hate.
I happened to be in Ottawa on November 26, the date of the anti-hate rally. So I don't know if the Official Jews actually invited Soharwardy -- the Jew hater; the Talmud-smearer; the Holocaust trivializer; the terrorist-quoter -- to give a few words at the rally. I don't know if the Muslim Council of Calgary brought their Hezbollah flags with them, or defended Saddam Hussein.
But, as coincidence would have it, I bumped into a Member of Parliament who told me that he had heard one of Calgary's Official Jews, Adam Singer, on the radio saying that it was like Calgary was back in the 1950s again with all the anti-Semitism in the streets.
Come again? The 1950s? You mean when one out of two men on the street in Calgary were war veterans who had just come back from vanquishing Hitler -- not to mention the plenty more who didn't come back? There was the odd anti-Semite in Alberta before the war; Premier Ernest Manning had pretty well rooted them out of public life in the 1940s, and the shock of the Second World War silenced most of the rest of them, moreso in Alberta than, say, in Ontario. Alberta in the 1950s was a golden age for Jews, in business, religious life and public life. A perfect example of this was Harry Veiner, the Jewish mayor of Medicine Hat from 1952 to 1974. Those anti-Semitic Albertans of the 1950s!
Maybe it's Adam Singer and the Official Jews who need to have a little anti-hate workshop for themselves -- they've got to stop hating the province they live in, and hating their neighbours, and accusing them of being closet anti-Semites.
My MP friend marvelled at the alternative reality that Singer and his ilk would have to inhabit to claim that the kind of anti-Semitism evidenced here:
is the work of Nazis, or old-style anti-Semitism.
"Stop Israel's Genocide on Gaza" -- ah, yes, that's what every Jewish shopkeeper in Alberta was faced with in the 1950s!
There had never been anti-Semitism in the Jewish neighbourhood of southwest Calgary until Soharwardy, the MCC and their ilk invaded with their terrorist flags and their Jew-bashing chants. They came, they harrassed the Jews, and they left their vandalism. And Adam Singer and his clueless klatch invited them to share the podium with him at a rally against "hate".
It's not the Muslim radicals waving the terrorist flags that Singer is worried about; it's not the radical preacher whose female critics get sent to the hospital after criticising him. No, he's worried about a resurgence -- drop the "re", for there was never any "surgence" in Alberta -- of old-style Nazism.
What a fool. It's wilfully blind buffoons like Singer who gave Fort Hood their Nidal Hasan, by turning a blind eye towards the obvious threats, prefering instead politically correct platitudes.
I used to believe that Jews were smart. I'm sorry, but I just don't believe that anymore.
Freiman claims that section 13 targets only "dangerous speech" and not merely offensive speech. But that is simply not true; a glance at the dozen or so examples that the CHRC prosecuted in the Warman v. Lemire case shows that all but one were found by the Tribunal to be merely "political".
Freiman's arguments are so tired, I feel like I'm watching some 1970s re-run, and I'm not just making fun of his mega-comb-over. He trots out the shouting fire in a burning theatre line; and claims that hate speech -- mere speech! -- was the reason that genocides happened from Rwanda to Cambodia.
It's not true. Mere words cannot kill people. Only violence (and incitement to violence) can. But that requires that other, real human rights -- like the right to be free of violence; the right to self-defence; the right to private property, etc. -- be torn down, first. Hate speech is harmless unless the machinery of violence is there, too. Adolf Hitler could not have prosecuted the Holocaust when he was elected in 1933; it wasn't until he destroyed Jews' real human rights in the Nuremberg Laws and later that Jews were physically vulnerable. But enough about this obsolete philosophical debate.
Brian Murphy read my book, Shakedown. And he read Freiman's review of my book (which I had meant to post, and I'll do so later). And he notes that Freiman in that review acknowledged that the CHRC had flaws needing reform.
He asks Freiman whether or not hate speech laws could stop genocide.
And Freiman answers: no. He's honest enough to know that hate speech laws couldn't stop a Holocaust.
Freiman said something quite sad: he said that the great leaps forward that minorities have made in the past fifty years are at risk, and that censorship laws are what's protecting that.
Does he really have such a low opinion of his fellow Canadians? Does he really think that, were it not for the CHRC, his neighbours would throw him into the ovens?
Perhaps Freiman is using the CHRC as some sort of personal psychological therapy. That's fine -- we've all got our demons, and Freiman likes to point out that he was born in a displaced persons camp in Europe after the Holocaust. The man has issues.
And that's when Burny pipes up: invoking the Holocaust, and showing pictures of swastikas on Jewish headstones. It was a showy, maudlin display -- Burny's specialty. The fact that it was intellectually vacant is par for the course. Vandalism, mischief and trespass are already covered by the Criminal Code. Section 13 doesn't apply to that. But don't bother Burny, he's having another one of his victimology moments.
Rathgeber asks Burny a pretty good question: how does section 13, a censorship provision that applies to the Internet, stop vandalism of a graveyard?
It's a tough question, so naturally Freiman jumps in and takes it from Burny.
He doesn't answer it, of course. Freiman says that section 13 is "extraordinarly helpful" in fighting "hate".
Does he even believe what he's saying?
Rathgeber replies: we have section 13 -- but it didn't stop this, did it?
Burny can't stay still. He interrupts his interruptor with a ramble about using section 13 to educate young people.
They've been going for nearly two hours on this; there wasn't much light being shone on things by Lynch at the beginning; having Freiman and Farber mumble and push the Holocaust panic button when they get into a pickle, has moved from embarrassing to boring.
Rathgeber does everyone a favour and puts a question to Moon.
Chairman Ed Fast extends the meeting by a few minutes, and gives everyone a final quick question:
Jennings ends with a statement, natch. She says that, contrary to what Rathgeber says, "demonization" is in fact very objective. Tell that to the folks who tried to have this case heard.
Comartin asks about the qualifications of Tribunal members. Freiman says it's a good idea -- as if "more qualified" censors would be better censors.
Russ Hiebert asks Moon a question, referring to Alan Borovoy's concerns about the violation of civil liberties and due process. Moon says that it "would make sense" to fund defendants, too. Moon also says the language of the law appears vague. He emphasizes the burden placed upon any defendants -- not just those who go the distance to a hearing, but anyone who is unlucky enough to even be investigated.
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.
Khurrum Awan, the youth president of the Jew-hating Canadian Islamic Congress, has threatened me with a lawsuit. You can see the rambling, typo-ridden libel notice here. (Seriously, Khurrum: spell check. It’s free.)
Awan is an experienced practitioner in the soft jihad of “lawfare”, the abusive practice where lawsuits are filed against critics of radical Islam just to harass them and silence them, Erin Brockovich-style. He’s done it before: Awan fronted the CIC’s three identical “human rights” complaints against Maclean’s magazine for publishing an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s best-selling book America Alone. Awan wasn’t the actual complainant in those cases – the CIC’s president, Mohamed Elmasry, was. But Awan was the public spokesman for those nuisance suits.
What does the Canadian Islamic Congress believe in?
Why did Elmasry need a sock puppet? Well, for starters, here’s a video clip of Elmasry proudly justifying terrorist murders of Israeli civilians:
That’s pretty much par for the course over at the CIC. A couple of years ago, they distributed Nazi-style anti-Semitic cartoons door-to-door as part of their election efforts. Personally, my favourite Elmasry moment is whenever he denounces the Canadian media as being run by “the zhoos” – a line he repeated again and again without a flicker of embarrassment at a convention of the Canadian Association of Journalists.
That’s the Canadian Islamic Congress. They’re a great fit for Saudi Arabia or Egypt. They’re just not really ready for prime time in a liberal democracy. And now their youth president, Khurrum Awan, wants a full public trial – in a real court, not a kangaroo court – about, amongst other things, whether or not they’re anti-Semites.
I’ll take those odds. With Elmasry as his mentor, I’m guessing Awan is just a wee bit tone deaf on the whole bigotry thing.
It’s nuttier than a Snickers bar over at the CIC, but that hasn’t bothered Awan one bit. The CIC championed the cause of terrorist groups including Hamas and Hezbollah, and opposed the listing of them as terrorists under Canadian law. They actually defended the Butcher of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe. And then there’s the hired help: the CIC publishes screeds from anti-Semites like Greg Felton, whose views are as diverse as supporting Iran’s nuclear program to praising Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for questioning the Holocaust.
That’s Awan’s crew: Jew-haters, terrorist-lovers, censors and nuisance litigants. So it’s no surprise, dear friends, that he has decided to come for me.
A political document, not a legal document
Let’s walk through Awan’s libel notice page by page.
The first thing to note is that the letter is signed by Brian Shiller – who just happens to be the same lawyer representing Richard Warman, the serial complainant and litigant-of-fortune behind nearly 90% of all section 13 censorship prosecutions in Canada. Yes, that’s the same Richard Warman whose conduct was denounced as “disappointing” and “disturbing” by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, because Warman published anti-Semitic bigotry on the Internet. Warman joined a neo-Nazi organization, and published on their website that Jewish politicians were “scum”.
Classy.
Warman is suing me, the National Post and bloggers Kathy Shaidle, Kate McMillan and Connie and Mark Fournier.
Come to think of it, if Warman and Awan are ever waiting in Shiller’s office at the same time, I think they could pass the time quite pleasantly with a discussion about those zhoos, don’t you?
The zhoos: scum or media manipulators? Discuss.
And, of course, Shiller’s other client is Warren Kinsella, who has also filed a nuisance suit against me. One of Kinsella’s complaints is that I repeated his own boast that he had given help and advice to… Khurrum Awan!
In other words, these guys aren’t even hiding the fact that they’re part of a concerted effort to censor me, Mark Steyn and other critics of radical Islam and Canada’s abusive human rights commissions.
I think Awan actually drafted the libel notice, not Shiller
The libel notice is rambling, full of typos and comprised mainly of political arguments, not arguments that have any place in a defamation lawsuit. I think Awan prepared it, and Shiller didn’t even read it carefully before faxing it over.
Take a look at page 4 of the letter (page 5 of the .pdf): point 3 slips from the third person (“Mr. Awan”) into the first person (“me”). It’s pretty clear Awan wrote the letter and Shiller just signed it. Here’s a snapshot of that section:
That’s the thing about nuisance suits: they’re not substantively serious; they’re just designed to harass.
Perjury
Right on the first page of the libel notice is a pretty serious charge: Awan says I accuse him of committing perjury. That’s a grave thing to say about anyone, especially a law student or lawyer (I’m not sure which one Awan is now).
But there’s one problem with that: I have never accused him of perjury. The opposite, actually – I have, several times, noted that he was a serial liar to the public and through the media, but when he finally took an oath and testified in the B.C. show trial of Mark Steyn, Awan reverted to the truth. I specifically said he did not commit perjury. Here’s one example of what I wrote, live from the court house last year:
Julian Porter himself was at the meeting where Khurrum Awan and his junior Al Sharptons tried to shake down Ken Whyte and Maclean’s for cash and a cover story.
Porter asked Awan point blank if the CIC’s proposed “counter-article” was to be “mutually acceptable” to Whyte or of the CIC’s own choosing.
After obfuscating for a few rounds, Awan acknowledged that he never in fact offered a “mutually acceptable” article -- that was simply an after-the-fact lie, a little bit of taqqiya that Awan et al. has told the press.
Awan admitted that he made no such offer of a mutually acceptable author. It was to be the CIC’s own choice.
Awan and the other sock puppets had been lying for a year to the general public – pretending that they had made a “reasonable” offer to Maclean’s (as if there’s any reasonable way to demand a five-page rebuttal from a national magazine.) But under oath, Awan admitted that his public comments were false – he didn’t suggest that the rebuttal be written by an author mutually agreeable to him and Maclean’s. He demanded that Maclean’s submit to his choice.
I didn’t accuse Awan of perjury. I did the opposite – I recognized that when he was finally under oath, he finally told the truth for the first time.
Odds and ends
Awan’s libel notice isn’t a serious legal document. Instead, it’s reminiscent of the rambling, out-of-context “brief” that Awan prepared for use against Steyn at the HRCs. That wasn’t a real legal document, either – but then again, HRCs aren’t real courts.
I don’t propose to rebut the entire thing now; there are some amazing flaws in it that I would prefer to respond to after the Statement of Claim is filed. But let me address a few points:
Shakedown
Khurrum Awan admitted under oath he had tried to get Maclean’s to pay $10,000 in penance for running Mark Steyn’s book excerpt. I call that a shakedown, Al Sharpton-style.
Awan? He has it both ways; he claims the money would be for a charity, not for himself (again, I charge I never made). And then he denies it was a shakedown at all.
I think Awan is too used to writing logically incoherent letters to the editor. It will be fascinating to hear what a real judge thinks of Awan’s little scheme to liberate $10,000 from Maclean’s. Shakedown? Hell yes it was. And I’ll always be proud of Maclean’s that they didn’t pay.
Damn fool
Awan says that calling him a damn fool is defamatory. Well, unlike Awan’s favourite forums – human rights commissions – in real courts, truth is a defence to defamation. Whether or not Awan is a damn fool (or damned fool, to be more grammatically correct) isn’t really a matter of fact, though – it’s probably a matter of opinion. And, yes, it is my opinion that Awan is a damned fool.
If Awan asks a court to have a hearing into whether or not he’s a damned fool, I think he pretty much answers that question himself, don’t you think?
Awan sabotaged – by a Jew again?
A hilarious moment in Mark Steyn’s show trial was when Awan was confronted about an inaccuracy in one of his letters to the editor. In an Elmasry-like act of blamestorming, he blamed Jonathan Kay, the editorial page editor of the National Post, accusing Kay of changing what Awan really meant. Here’s my blog from that moment in the trial:
What a gorgeous new lie young Khurrum Awan has offered. He claims that his letter to the editor to the National Post (in response to my own article!) might have been edited by Jonathan Kay, to insert the lie that Porter has caught him in.
Awan is hoping that the Kangaroos will believe that Jonathan Kay added the words "mutually acceptable" to his letter to the editor.
Yeah, that's the ticket, Khurrum. You weren't lying in a dozen identical letters and Op-Eds. Jonathan Kay (I hear he's a zhoo!) and a dozen other editor across the country made identical edits to Awan's letter.
They should be the one answering to big, bad Julian Porter! He's mean!
That’s the same excuse Awan trots out again in 2009, claiming that one of his embarrassing letters to the editor was changed by someone at the Toronto Star, and that I should have known better before criticizing it! What a fascinating place Awan’s mind must be, full of kaleidoscopes and cacophonous music. What a lucky, lucky man to have such a fertile imagination.
Revisionism: was Awan co-counsel?
At Steyn’s show trial, I found it bizarre that Awan was both co-counsel for Elmasry, as well as a witness for Elmasry. That’s just weird – and it’s something that no real court would allow.
It was pretty evident that Awan was co-counsel: he was sitting at the table reserved for counsel. He assisted lead counsel, Faisal Joseph. He had helped to prepare the case; he scurried around, as junior counsel does, chasing documents.
But now he’s denying the whole thing
Again, it’s not really a strong legal point. But it does go to Awan’s bizarre relationship with reality. There were fifty reporters in the room that day, including one from the New York Times. Were we all blind – were we all lying? Or – is it possible – that Khurrum Awan, serial liar, is lying again?
I’m getting bored of Awan’s whining victimology
Look, it’s painful reading Awan’s letter. It’s not a real defamation notice – it’s a way-too-long letter to the editor, dressed up as a legal document. That’s sort of what Warren Kinsella does, too – he puts out press releases, but calls them libel suits. I guess it’s for guys who want to add a little bit of menace to their PR, but both end up coming across as bullies and blowhards.
Awan’s letter is an attempt, a year later, to change the embarrassing history of his big public campaign against Maclean’s. He was eaten alive by every journalist in the country, and was made a laughingstock in the blogosphere. Even his fellow sock puppets had the sense to abandon his suicide run. Not Awan: he’s still proudly out there calling for more censorship powers for the government. If I were a Canadian Muslim, I’d be pretty embarrassed that Awan was claiming to speak for me.
It’s boring to read such whining. Awan was whiny in response to Maclean’s magazine; he was whiny on the stand at the BCHRT. He’s whiny in his endless Op-Eds. And he’s whiny in this rambling libel notice. I guess it’s his right to whine; but he’ll soon find out that defamation law does not turn on whining, or even on hurt feelings. It does not turn on mockery or on hyper-sensitivity of plaintiff. It does not turn on politics or on victimology. It’s about true facts and fair comments – or, as our Supreme Court ruled last year: “We live in a free country where people have as much right to express outrageous and ridiculous opinions as moderate ones.” I’m glad Canadians have such liberty, though I don’t think it’s even outrageous or ridiculous to opine that Awan’s conduct is that of a “damn fool”, a liar, and someone who would do well to just shut up, try to practice law, and keep his head down for a very, very long time.
So what’s next?
If he’s serious, Awan will serve me with a Statement of Claim within a few weeks. That will formally start the process, and I will have to reply with a Statement of Defence. That’s where the costs come in.
My lawyers are getting pretty good at cranking out defences to these nuisance suits, but it still takes time to go through them, line by line, to make sure they’re properly rebutted. I estimate that the cost of filing a defence will be $6,000. After that, it depends on Awan’s conduct – for example, will he try to avoid disclosing relevant documents? Depending on what procedure he chooses, we could have examinations for discovery – depositions, as they’re called in the U.S. Those could cost $10,000. It’s too premature to do the math beyond that.
Frankly, I think that Awan’s case is as weak as the other nuisance suits that have been flung at me. But that’s not the point – the point is that they all cost money and hassle, which is why they’re being filed against me in the first place. They’re trying to demoralize me – to stop me from fighting for freedom of speech and due process. Awan in particular is mad that his great PR campaign has backfired, and that while he is now viewed as a thin-skinned censor, he only made Mark Steyn more famous and better loved. And Awan is angry that I’ve undermined his favourite weapon of lawfare: HRCs. He loves them – he abuses them – and he wants to continue. That’s tougher now, given his public humiliation at the hands of a hundred bloggers (including me).
Can you please help me?
In addition to Awan’s threat, I have four ongoing civil suits against me, as I’ve mentioned above. Some months there is very little legal work, but others are quite busy. My lawyers' bills range between $2,000 a month to $6,000 a month. If Awan follows through with a suit, it will be a $6,000 month.
If you believe in fighting against the anti-Semitic Canadian Islamic Congress; if you believe in standing up to Mohamed Elmasry’s junior president; if you believe that Awan’s complaints against Maclean’s and Mark Steyn were outrageous and punitive, and that he should be stopped; if you think he is indeed a liar and a buffoon – and a damn fool – then please help me out.
I enjoy the fight very much, because I believe I’m on the side of liberty and our western values here. I believe that Awan and company are undermining our way of life, especially our freedom to criticize radical Islam. He’s trying to silence me – which makes sense from his point of view, in a crude political calculation. But it’s not just, and it's not Canadian.
I promise I’ll fight back. Can you help me with the one thing I can’t do on my own, which is cover all my legal bills?
My family has been very supportive of me – my saintly wife understands that freedom of speech is something that must be defended, and she shares my concern about radical, political Islam – all the moreso given that we have two daughters now. If you can help bear the financial burden for our family, I’ll do the rest.
Yours most gratefully,
Ezra Levant
P.S. If you can chip in by PayPal, please click on the button below. If you’d prefer to send in a cheque by snail mail, that’s great. Please make cheques payable to my lawyer on this case:
“Christopher Ashby in Trust”
Attn: Ezra Levant defence fund
Suite 1013, 8 King Street East
Toronto, Ontario, M5C 1B5
Thank you very much. With your help, I promise to fight this battle all the way to the end.
"I am not a registered non-profit organization. Donations are not tax deductible for federal income tax purposes."
In a bizarre and tasteless trivialization of the Jewish Holocaust, Warren Kinsella, senior campaign aide to Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, has compared today's modern, liberal Czech Republic to Nazi Germany in the 1940s.
The bizarre outburst on Kinsella's blog was part of the Liberal response to the Conservative government's decision to reimpose visa requirements for travelers from the Czech Republic. Kinsella actually compared that decision to the Canadian government's disastrous decision in the 1940s to send fleeing Jews back to their deaths in the gas chambers.
Seriously.
Here's Kinsella's quote:
And, while we're on the subject of what we really want, we'd like a Minister of Immigration who isn't a xenophobic mouth-breather, now busily setting off a major diplomatic incident, and - as one expert put it - "taking Canada back to the days when it closed the door to Jewish migrants trying to flee Nazi Europe."
To save time, just vote Liberal in the Fall. We'll get rid of all of these twits for you, on one day.
I'm all for vigorous partisanship. If Kinsella thinks he can embarrass this government for reimposing visas on the Czech Republic -- as Paul Wells points out, a policy that would merely bring us back to status quo under Jean Chretien's Liberals, who also imposed visas on the Czechs -- then go for it.
But to compare bogus gypsy refugees in 2009 to the genocide of Jews in the 1940s? Well, that's a depth of tastelessness that only Kinsella could reach. Shades of his rant that Chinese restaurateurs secretly serve cat meat to their unwitting customers.
What a graceless little bigot. I'm sure the Canadian Jewish Congress is glad to be rid of him.
This would all be uninteresting, were it not for the fact that Kinsella is a spokesman for Ignatieff. Kinsella's trivialization of the Holocaust for partisan purposes fits well with Ignatieff's pattern of hostility to Israel.
During the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, Ignatieff sided with the world's anti-Semites and accused Israel of being a war criminal.
And in a stunning Op-Ed in the Guardian, Ignatieff called Israel "angry and embittered", compared it to crusaders and enforcers of Apartheid, called it part of a "death cult", and said that the United States military should impose a solution on Israel using brute force.
What a nut.
Normally I'd call on Ignatieff to renounce Kinsella's profane comparison. But I don't think he'd see a problem with it.
Kinsella's friends at the anti-Semitic Canadian Islamic Congress? Well, I'm sure they're just deeper in love.
Globe and Mail best-seller list
I don't think this link is current: the Globe and Mail's best-seller list has me at #3 (and Michael Ignatieff's new book at #5). I think that's out of date; I think this week we've actually switched places. Still, I remain amazed that a book that I thought was quite radical, and that deals with what could be called an eye-glazingly boring subject (a quasi-judicial tribunal? Even saying that phrase is a cure to insomnia!), has found purchase with the public in general. I don't think Shakedown's success has much to do with my literary prowess. I think it's a testament to the stunning story the book reveals: nation-wide corruption and abuse of our legal system that Canadians find shocking.
I hope the book's popular success is a signal to politicians that it's safe to bring in some reforms now.
A bad review
As loyal readers will know, the book has received favourable reviews from dozens of critics, especially from those who would be called "liberal". That makes sense. For, despite the fact that I am sometimes a partisan Conservative, the book isn't really about me, it's about freedom of speech, which belongs to everyone across the entire political spectrum. Left-wing or right-wing, freedom is part of our Canadian identity.
Unless you're Susan Cole, entertainment editor of Toronto's freebie weekly, Now Magazine. Her review is the first negative one I've received. And it's garnished with this delightful collage:
Catherine Ford, the retired editor and columnist at the Calgary Herald, has reviewed Shakedown in that paper. Ford made a career out of zigging where Calgary zagged -- she is a self-described "liberal feminist" in Canada's most conservative city.
Her review is a mix of flattering praise and political criticism. But given how polar opposite we are philosophically, I'm blown away by how positive her review is.
Just for fun, I did a historical search to see what Ford had written over the years about Alberta's human rights commission. She's had mixed things to say about them -- she obviously saw their political champions as her fellow travellers, but she was also aware of their abusive tendencies.
Here's a column she wrote way back in 1992, when the HRC found that a young male driver had the "human right" to pay as little car insurance as a young female driver, actuarial risk statistics be damned. She called the HRC a "horse's ass", which sounds about right.
Here's a more troubling column she wrote in May of 1997, where she approved of using HRCs to rough up people who had an anti-semitic view of history:
Personally, I'm all for harassing the revisionists through whatever tribunals are available, thus exposing them to contempt and showing children that such ignorance is rightfully dealt with through public scorn.
But Ford got that wrong in a big way: it's not the government's job to harass people through abusive legal processes, even if they are ignorant, and that's a terrible lesson in bullying and censorship to teach children. I agree that public scorn is a powerful tool to be used against bigots, but that's the job of private citizens and newspaper pundits, not the state with its prosecutors, fines and gag orders.
I was pleased to see Ford change her tune later that same year, in this column, where she wrote:
...the continuing efforts to censor the tired rantings of Holocaust deniers such as Ernst Zundel [are] so pointless, so wearying, so expensive.
...The proper counterattack is not whining to human rights commissions, but a rigorous program of education for anyone exposed to this garbage, especially children.
That's a pretty big about-face in seven months -- from touting the HRCs' harassment to calling HRCs an improper approach suitable only for whiners. I'm always leery of her solution: political "education" campaigns by the government. That's usually just another word for propaganda, but at least kids can ignore their indoctrinators, and their parents can correct them too. It's far less tyrannical than an abusive HRC with its force of law.
Here's Ford's review of Shakedown. Looking over it again right now, I have to say I'm amazed how flattering she is. If I can't get an arch-lefty like Ford to be truly mad at me, something's out of synch!
Ezra Levant is a smart man. Ezra Levant has good ideas.
Ezra Levant is a lawyer. Why this triad of competence doesn't come together in a pivotal book that could be instrumental in addressing the glaring problems of Canadian human rights commissions and tribunals and in changing them is simple: Ezra Levant is also a polemicist.
To the liberal reader, he's not interested in changing Canada for the better, despite his many convincing arguments, but in expressing his particular skewed version of the country and the institutions charged with hearing the aggrieved.
Levant rants. He doesn't listen. He wants people on his side, not necessarily on the side of what's best for everyone, including those Canadians who aren't big or small-C conservatives.
...Shakedown lays [it] all out -- the outrageous decisions made by human rights commissions across the country, the two-facedness of liberals, feminists, gay rights activists, at which Levant takes many gratuitous swipes. Levant, as all good polemicists do, cherry-picks the facts and couches his arguments in language and imagery designed to enrage social conservatives who see such advances as the rights of women and minorities not to be treated as second-class men as an assault on their rightful position at the top of the food chain. In the doing, he also infuriates liberals. That sort of prunes one's reading audience.
...Shakedown has a solid and compelling foundation--what good is free speech and freedom of the press if any malcontent can cite "hurt feelings" and bring the parties responsible in front of a quasi-judicial, politically appointed panel of amateur judges? Worse, to do so at no cost, not even if the complaint is judged frivolous or without merit? At the very least, anyone wasting taxpayers' time and money on idiotic complaints should be charged with costs, as is usually the case in real court cases. The spectre of having to pay for your own lawyer to deal with your hissy-fit keeps our courts relatively free of nonsense.
Canadians who want their country to be fair and open to all -- liberals to a fault, I guess -- need to read Shakedown. They could have been persuaded to do so if the author had chosen to put less of his own ideology into the mix and more of his considerable talents and experience into a book designed to encourage change.
He ends the book with a look at possible reforms. And had fair-minded Canadians encountered more of that earlier in the book, Levant's cause might be adopted by all of us. He outlines the two schools of thought: the "pruners" and the "weeders," allying himself with the latter.
...The whole point of trying to convince Canadians of all political leanings to read this book is contained in one of the author's final statements: "...Canadians now bend over backward to demonstrate our respect for others--both officially, through affirmative action and multiculturalism policies, and unofficially, in the way thirty-three million of us treat our friends, neighbours and co-workers."
And even a liberal feminist can get onside and applaud that.
It's not downtown.
It's not near their mosques.
It's not in the part of the city where most Muslims and Arabs live.
It's not near the media.
It's not a public place, like a park, suitable for a rally.
Stephen Harper's constituency office is there. But it's not his office -- it's where his staff handle concerns from his constituents. I doubt he sets foot in there more than once a season.
It's obvious why bigots like Soharwardy and Hage are having their hate festival there.
It's because it's the most Jewish part of Calgary.
Across the street is the Jewish Centre. That's where the Holocaust memorial is, too. One street further is a synagogue. There's a Jewish old folks home there. The street is even called Jerusalem Way.
The mall is owned by RioCan, which is Jewish-run. Many of the tenants and shopkeepers are Jewish, particularly the professional offices. A large portion of the customers are Jewish.
In other words, Hage and Soharwardy want to terrify Jews -- especially the kind of Jews who would be out in the afternoon: seniors and moms with kids.
That's why they're bringing their swastikas along -- just in case they see any Holocaust survivors.
That's why they're bringing their terrorist flag along -- like last time, in case they see a rabbi, they can spit at him.
Hagah and Soharwardy hate Jews. So they're going to the Jewish part of town for their hate fest.
They're bringing their Gaza-style social decay with them, too: fear, graffiti and anti-Semitism.
This photograph was taken this morning, on the east side of 14th Street, opposite Glenmore Landing.The Prime Minister happens to be the MP for the Jewish part of town. Anti-Semites are not only having hate rallies. They're leaving hate graffiti.
I think it's time the local MP issue a statement condemning it.
...Muslim Council of Calgary chairman Nagah Hage exhorted his flock of 175, including infants and teens, in both Arabic and English. Between the tirades that demonized Israel, comparing Jews to the Nazis, Hage whipped up the crowd by calling the Jewish state "barbaric, ruthless and arrogant" and led the crowd in a chant that said: "Olmert-Hitler, you're the same, the only difference is the name."
The demonization of Israel was portrayed in venomous placards and banners carried by children and parents. Israel was accused of "ethnic cleansing", "committing a holocaust", and of "outright murder". There were even swastikas on display...
I am sure this anti-Semitic chorus was loud enough to be heard across the street at the Calgary Jewish Centre. The most egregious placard of all equated Jews with Nazis--a disgusting display anytime, but particularly tasteless, given that the Jewish community's Holocaust memorial was a block away.
They chanted: "Stephen Harper, hear us say, Jerusalem will be ours one day." In other words, the rally really wasn't about Gaza -- it was about Hamas's stated plans to conquer Israel.
...When the crowd approached the Israel supporter a second time, eight police officers had to stand in front of him to protect him. So the crowd went back to chanting "killers of children and women"--and they didn't mean Hamas, who use civilians as human shields.For two full hours this disgrace continued--all on the mall's private property. Parking and business access was blocked, and many customers were clearly repelled by the Nazi symbols on the crowd's posters, and the chants. When one shop owner asked the police to clear the crowd because customers couldn't reach her shop, the response was "they would leave it alone and let it play out", as it was the "lesser of two evils".
Some
of the mob didn't just go to the mall. They actually had the temerity
to park at the Calgary Jewish Centre --adjacent to the Holocaust
memorial there--despite the private parking sign.
I understand that the same anti-Semites are planning to return to Glenmore Landing today for a repeat of their hate-fest.
Glenmore Landing is owned by RioCan. It's private property. Like most businesses, it invites the public onto their property -- anyone can come onto the mall and it's not trespassing. But such an implied invitation is not unconditional; the invitation is to come shop, not to block the mall, impede commerce, harass Jewish shopkeepers and Jewish patrons, and generally bring a taste of Gaza to Calgary. Just like a movie theatre having the right to refund your ticket and kick you out for being too noisy, RioCan has the right to bar those who would come onto its private property for inappropriate reasons. Comparing Jews to Nazis -- and harassing patrons -- is an inappropriate reason.
I wonder if RioCan will exercise its property rights and keep the Hamas supporters out. I wonder if the police will honour such a request if RioCan makes it. And I wonder how long Canadians will accept terrorist flags being flown in our city streets, rabbis being spat at, pro-Israel supporters assaulted, and anti-Semitic bigotry being chanted, like it was 1930s Germany. All of that happened last week at Glenmore Landing, with impunity. Will it happen again today?
According to a release, the CJC's press conference will be staffed by Bernie "Burny" Farber, Mark Freiman and Sara Saber Freedman.
Burny, as we all know, has a section 13 fetish. He has become Canada's loudest defender of censorship -- which is why I've changed the spelling of his name to Burny. He's the 21st century equivalent to a book-burner.
And that's a problem. Because it's one thing to use the law to bully a single political offender for "promoting hatred", and grind him through years of punitive legal hassles, with the final result being the removal of a single website on the Internet (how pitiful). But what do you do when there's 10,000 people who have engaged in hateful acts on the city's streets, and they're looking forward to doing it again next week?
Try taking 10,000 people to a human rights commission. (Oh, the commissions would love it, though, wouldn't they? Bigger budgets; a bigger sense of self-importance; more control over more peoples' lives.)
But you can't use section 13, actually, because it only applies to hate spread over phone lines and the Internet.
And the Criminal Code provisions require an enormous standard of guilt -- what we saw in those rallies, with the possible exceptions of the support for terrorist groups, is likely below the standard of a criminal conviction. Shouting "kill all the Jews" isn't specific or imminent enough to be taken as a real death threat. It might breach the criminal code provisions against hate speech. But how do you apply that to a mob of hundreds or thousands chanting their Jew-hatred, often in Arabic, often with masks hiding their identities?
Mark Freiman is a lawyer who has worked on the CJC's section 13 cases, and is a defender of those laws. Not encouraging.
The problem with Burny and Freiman is that they don't actually know how to fight real anti-Semites, because they've been fighting Internet anti-Semites for so long. It's like the difference between playing Guitar Hero really well, and then being asked to play a real guitar. They only know how to fight "hate" on the Internet, like a video game.
Burny and Freiman don't know what to do when they're faced with thousands of people who disagree with them. They don't know how to argue. They don't know how to organize. They've become lazy, outsourcing their political resopnsibilities to the government.
Sara Saber Freedman works for the Canada-Israel Committee, not the CJC. I imagine that her presence is as an expert on Hamas, Gaza and international issues. But I also think that she is there as some sort of grown up supervision. While Burny and Freiman have indulged their pet issue of censorship this past year, Freedman has actually had the real work of trying to promote Canada-Israel relations.
In other words, while Burny and Freiman have been playfighting, re-enacting the last Holocaust, even fighting against "Nazis" on the Internet, Freedman has been busy trying to prevent the next Holocaust, perpetrated by real people like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hassan Nasrallah and others.
I think she's there to keep an eye on Burny and Freiman, and make sure they talk about thousands of Muslim radicals, rather than their favourite subject -- Internet "neo-Nazis".
I look forward to hearing what they have to say. I wonder if Burny will be forced to call off his love affair with the Canadian Arab Federation, one of the many anti-Semitic groups Burny has engaged in "dialogue" with. They were one of the sponsors of the anti-Semitic rallies. I wonder if Burny can quit them.
(And will Jennifer Lynch, the chief commisar of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, quit the Canadian Arab Federation, too? The CHRC proudly lists the CAF as one of their "stakeholders". Will Lynch drop the CAF? Or will she continue to take their advice -- the kind of advice that allows anti-Semitic bigots escape the CHRC's prosecution, if they're Arab?)
I can't attend the press conference, but I'll review the media reports from it.
I have a feeling, though, that no matter what question you ask Burny and Freiman, you get the same answer: government censorship, though slow and cumbersome legal processes.
In other words, you have a wholly inappropriate response to a quick-moving, massive political problem.
When all you have is a censorship hammer, everything looks like a section 13 nail.
I predict all they'll do is ask for hate speech charges -- under the Criminal Code -- to be laid.
And I predict that, two years from now when the trial finally happens, whoever is charged will be acquitted, just like Ahenakew was, and with the newfound fame and following that Ahenakew has.
I've already given some of my thoughts about what should be done. Here are a few, in point form:
- Demand that politicians specifically denounce the bigoted rallies. This means the Prime Minister and MPs; the premiers and MPPs/MNAs/MLAs of Ontario, Quebec and Alberta; and the mayors and aldermen of Toronto, Montreal and Calgary. The fact that neo-Nazis and Arab crypto-Nazis have marched so brazenly demands a political rebuke.
- All the organizations that participated -- CUPE, the postal union, the various Palestinian lobby groups -- must be attacked using every tool of civil society. They must be marginalized in public; any politicians who truck with them must be marginalized, too; their leadership must be challenged legally and politically. Sid Ryan must face a backlash from his membership, including a lawsuit if an appropriate cause of action exists. A lawsuit to allow non-terrorist-supporting union members to witthhold union dues that are being used for such pro-terrorist ends is one that comes to mind.
- I think that one of the problems is the media itself. As Debbie Gyapong points out, the media is so historically illiterate, they don't see the anti-Semitism in these protests. I think that there ought to be a tour of newspaper editorial boards and TV and radio stations showing videos of these protests, and painstakingly explaining how similar they are to the S.A. and S.S. rallies of the 1930s in Germany. I think that public service-style or political campaign-style TV and radio ads should be aired as well, reaching directly to the general public, which is more sensible and less anti-Israel than the press.
- A large problem, of course, is that the Jewish community itself gives political cover to many of these anti-Semitic groups. I mentioned above how the CJC has trucked with the CAF. There must be a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to anti-Semitism before Jewish groups -- including synagogues -- have interfaith activities with Muslim groups.
- And it's not just Muslim groups. I understand that the Catholic Church in Montreal was in some manner involved with the protest there. I think that the leadership of the Jewish community must meet immediately with Catholic leaders to explain just how inappropriate that is.
I haven't thought much about Margolis since then, but a reader has brought to my attention a startling new interview in which Margolis refuses to call Hamas a terrorist organization:
"It now seems clear the last disastrous act of the Bush administration was giving Israel a green light to launch its final solution campaign against the Hamas government in Gaza."
Did you catch that? Israel is implementing the Final Solution. That's the name the Nazis gave to their plan to kill all the Jews.
It's classic anti-Semitism -- portraying Jews as Nazis.
Look, I'm not calling for a human rights commission complaint into Margolis's weird worldview. It's just really weird to see a well-dressed, well-coiffed man without an Arabic accent actually say, with a straight face, that Hamas isn't a terrorist group; it "takes care of its citizens" and "does a great deal" for Palestinians; and that the Jews are the ones planning the Final Solution -- all this when Hamas's patron, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has specifically threatened Israel with another Holocaust.
I have only one question: what is Margolis still doing in the pages of the Sun?
There were about 175 people there, including plenty of kids -- impressive, given that it was colder than minus 30, with windchill.
They kept warm by chanting Allahu Akhbar, and compared Israel's prime minister to Hitler. You can see a pretty fair report of it here.
Some of the protesters went into the mall offices, probably to keep warm. Once in there, though, they went right up to the door of Harper's office. The office was closed for the day, but they went right up to it. No police were there, nothing. I could only imagine what would have transpired had the constituency office door not been locked. I find it odd that the police didn't have even a single officer inside, in case of that eventuality.
There was precisely one counter-protester, with a tiny Israeli flag:
At
one point, the police told that counter-protester that if he didn't
leave, he'd be arrested for "inciting civil disorder". I'm not making
that up -- the lone pro-Israeli protester was told that, not the 175
people trespassing on the parking lot of a private mall. Maybe that's
why the cops were too busy to station someone inside.My point here is that the one counter-protester wasn't Jewish.
This protest was at Glenmore Landing mall, in the heart of what I like to call "Jewtopia" in Calgary. The Jewish Community Centre is literally across the street, on Jerusalem Road. The city's Holocaust memorial is there. A block further is a synagogue. You get the picture.
And the Jewish community didn't muster a single counter-protester. (A week later, the Jews had their own rally -- hidden away inside the JCC, lest anybody see it. Gentile participation: nil. At least they had a pro-Israel rally, though; Calgary's Official Jews have spent the past two years attending Syed Soharwardy's mosque in some masochistic display of "interfaith dialogue" -- this, with a man who still publishes columns by a terrorist leader on his website). Soharwardy himself attended this anti-Semitic rally -- I'm sure that won't stop Calgary's Official Jews from letting themselves be used as his PR cover.
Once upon a time, if a bunch of anti-Semites had come to the Jewish part of town, calling Jews Nazis, trespassing on private property, blocking access to Jewish stores, threatening a pro-Israel protester (and throwing a shoe at him), unfurling a terrorist flag, and cursing at a rabbi, self-respecting Jews would have at least asked the police to intervene, if not taken matters in to their own hands. Jews once actually did that sort of thing. Nowadays we cower.
I wonder if our community has that sense of survival, or pride, or confidence or even identity anymore. I don't see it in the community's leadership.
Izzy Asper had a phrase for Jews who would rather attend an "interfaith diaologue" with an anti-Semitic imam than condemn him. Izzy called them "Jews of silence."
Not all Jews are that way. I think a lot of Israelis here in Canada still have a survival instinct. And, probably because they grew up in Arab lands and had to fight every day, I think Sephardi Jews still have that identity, confidence and fire in them.
When I was a school boy at Calgary's now defunct I.L. Peretz School -- a Yiddish Labour Zionist school, thankfully devoid of the Labour part -- we were taught about the Holocaust, often by Lerer and Lererin Eichler, two Holocaust survivors themselves. I couldn't help but think, as I heard the stories of the 1930s, "didn't they know what was coming?" or "why didn't they do anything?". We know the answer -- the Jews of Germany thought that Germany was the heart of culture, too civilized to allow anything to actually happen. Many of the Jews were so integrated, they hardly even considered themselves Jews -- how could they possibly be in danger? Hitler was a fanatic; his stormtroopers were just young hotheads; everything would be fine. Besides: what could one do? I mean, really: what were you going to do?
That's the same feeling I get now. Everyone knows that the light on the dashboard is blinking. Things have gone nuts in places like France; so French Jews are emigrating en masse to Israel. Venezuela's remaining Jews are in a panic. Amsterdam's Jews are under siege. I'd say we're just a few years behind them on the curve.
But the Jews of silence do nothing.
Thankfully, the Christians will save us. Tonight I received the following letter, which I reprint in its entirety, with only a few identifying words redacted (simply because it's too late at night to ask for permission to print it it full!):
----- Original Message -----From:To: Ezra LevantSent: Sunday, January 11, 2009 9:11 PMSubject: IsraelHi Ezra,This is just to let you know, by way of encouragement, that we attended XXXX Church this morning. (My husband sings in a mens choir and they regularly participate in various church services around the city)As we entered the church we noticed there were two large flags unfurled at the front of the sanctuary. The first was, naturally, the Canadian flag but, to our surprise, the second was the Israeli flag. Pastor XX prayed for the state of Israel and the Jewish people positively in his prayer as well as mentioning the Gaza situation in his sermon. There was no moral equivalency happening in this church.I know this isn't the only evangelical church where this is happening.Sincerely,XXX
To which I replied, in part:
Canada's churches, especially of the evangelical variety, are more pro-Israel than many synagogues... Too many Jews are so afraid, that they want to "compromise" with evil, just to buy some false respite. And too many Jews are just sick of being demonized, so they choose to join the demonizers, and actually become anti-Israel Jews themselves. And plenty more just can't handle it, so they drop out of the discussion, essentially hiding from things.
I think that this is part of the war on terror. Jews are just the canary in the coal mine -- as always, and the State of Israel is just the Jew amongst the nations, and plays the same role. Israel's fight against Muslim fascists is merely first; France's, Holland's and Canada's will come later.
Too many people want to pretend that 9/11 didn't happen; they want to hit the snooze button on the alarm, instead of dealing with the new reality. I call those September 10th people. A surprising number them happen to be Jews. They're the kind of Jews who would rather go after a doddering, lone David Ahenakew than a mob of a thousand in downtown Toronto.
Thank God for September 12th people, especially evangelical Christians. I would place my life in their hands before those of the Official Jews anytime. I just hope that remains a hypothetical decision.
related
But really, verbal support for Israel in its war on Hamas is mere symbolism. It's important, because what our country says about Israel and Hamas is a reflection of who we are -- what we think of democracy, and violence, and our own moral code on everything from a nation's right to self-defence to the war on terror.
But, at the end of the day, Harper and Ignatieff are simply uttering words. The worst that they'll have to face are some disgruntled Muslim radicals in Canada, like the bigoted Canadian Islamic Congress. So what. And, given that Harper and Ignatieff are rhetorically the same, one would think the politics of the matter are neutralized.
But there is a much larger problem, a much more real problem, that the war in Gaza has revealed: massive anti-Semitism amongst Canadian Arabs and the Canadian Left.
Take a few minutes to watch this video, from downtown Toronto:
The CHRC itself acknowledges that they pursue nobodies through section 13. They justify it because they say that the Holocaust "began with words"....the people who promote hate on the Internet and elsewhere are, thankfully, relatively few and are operating on the margins of society. All they are doing it pounding out their dark words in their dark basements. Why not leave the hate geeks alone and get on with other more important things.
The answer is simple: words matter. And they matter a great deal.
I quote the Minister of Justice, the Honourable Irwin Cotler, when he addressed the House of Commons last spring on the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day:
Let us keep those chilling facts in mindThe enduring lesson of the Holocaust is that these genocidal murders succeeded not only because of the industry of death but because of the ideology of hate. ... As our Supreme Court has affirmed, the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers, it began with words. These are the catastrophic effects of racism. These are the chilling facts of history.
That's not true of course. Words didn't kill anyone in Germany. There were anti-Semitic words for centuries in Germany. It wasn't until Jews had their true civil rights taken away -- their right to property, right to self-defence, mobility rights, economic rights, and ultimately their right to life -- that the Holocaust could happen. Jews didn't die because they lacked the counterfeit right not to be offended. In fact, pre-Nazi Germany had laws like section 13 -- they obviously didn't stop the Nazis. And now we see that our own version of those Weimar hate-speech laws have precisely the same effect 75 years later: no effect.
Well, that's not quite true, either. Because the very Islamists who were marching in Toronto are now amongst the chief users and abusers of our hate speech laws -- filing hate speech complaints at anyone who dares criticize radical Islam. The Nazis, too, used hate speech laws: first, they used the trials a forum for their own views; then, when they took over, they used the laws to go after their own political enemies.
So what is my point? Do I want section 13 to be expanded, to go after my own political enemies -- the bigots, Jew-haters and terrorist supporters in the video above?
Of course not. In fact, I'm glad to have seen that bigotry -- I'm glad it wasn't censored. How else would I know of the peril?
If there were any real criminal acts at that protest, they should be pursued. I don't think the death threat reached the criminal standard. And I don't think merely flying the Hezbollah flag is a criminal offence -- but if I was a cop, I'd say it's fair game to suspect a Hezbollah flag-flyer might well have other ties with Hezbollah. (Wouldn't you say the same thing if someone publicly flew a mafia flag, if there was one, and defended the mafia?)
I think the first thing that needs to happen is for Harper and Ignatieff to condemn these anti-Semitic rallies in forceful, even bitter, terms.
I think they have to be condemned as anti-Canadian.
They have to be -- to borrow a word -- denormalized.
Not criminalized. But it has to be made clear that anyone who flies terrorist flags, who calls for the death of Jews, who engages in flagrant anti-Semitism is outside of acceptable company.
Whatever unions or organizations or advocacy groups or mosques participated in that near-pogrom need to be blackballed. No government grants. No meetings with ministers or even MPs. No boilerplate government ads in Arabic newspapers that support the bigotry.
Public denunciation. Marginalization. Starting from the top: the Prime Minister himself.
Watching that video felt like watching a march of the nascent SA, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or Stormtroopers, the forerunners of the SS. They weren't quite as cohesive; they didn't have their standard uniforms yet; they were seething, but they didn't boil over into violence. But they had control of the streets of the biggest city in Canada, the city with the biggest Jewish community, the most multicultural, pluralistic and tolerant city -- they were the bosses of it. Look at the young toughs -- clearly enjoying it.
Most went home merely encouraged with their success.
But I have no doubt that many went home and decided to move from idle talk of anti-Semitism to action.
Montreal has seen anti-Semitic arson, as has Edmonton. Calgary has seen anti-Semitic assaults. After the vitriol on display, I can't imagine Toronto will escape it in 2009.
Let me close by quoting Harper's comments in Maclean's magazine. He was making the case for hate speech laws:
...they do exist for valid reasons, which is obviously to prevent public airwaves from being used to disseminate hate against vulnerable members of our society.Canada's hate speech laws didn't stop a mob of thousands of anti-Semites. They couldn't -- section 13 doesn't apply to rallies, or verbal exhortations.
We don't need hate speech laws to fight the grotesquery in that video.
We need a sustained, unyielding, embarrassing denunciation of that sort of protest from the Prime Minister, the Premier, the Mayor and everyone else with a bully pulpit.
Those leaders can't do much about the Jew-haters in Gaza. But they can tell the Jew-haters in our own country that that's not acceptable here.
...Contemporary examples of anti-Semitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:Working definition: "Anti-[S]emitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti[-S]emitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities."
- Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.
- Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as a collective - such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
- Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
- Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g., gas chambers), or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).
- Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
- Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
Examples of the ways in which anti-Semitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel taking into account the overall context could include:
- Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination (e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor).
- Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
- Using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
- Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
- Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.
However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.
I think that's a pretty good working definition. It makes sense; I mean, anyone who said that Ireland is an illegal country, and that it should be abolished, and that anyone who supported Ireland was a bigot -- why, they'd be called anti-Irish, if not just plain nuts. That's the central claim of Hamas and its supporters: that Israel itself has no right to exist.
The use of Nazi imagery is particularly odious. It has several malign purposes: first, to profane the real Holocaust, by dulling the meaning of the words "Nazi" and "Holocaust" by trivializing it. If a short skirmish between Israel and Hamas is no better than a Holocaust, than the Holocaust was no worse than this current battle -- in other words, it wasn't so bad.
The second thing, of course, is it pre-empts the proper use of the words Nazi and Holocaust, for example to describe the actual plans of today's anti-Semites, like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has positively called for a second Holocaust (while denying the first one.)
Finally, and most obviously, the malign purpose of using Nazi imagery to describe Jews is to compare Jews to the purest evil known in our modern culture. Comparing Jews to Communists or capitalists (the 1930s smear) doesn't cut a lot of ice in 2009. But the word "Nazi" still does.
That's why Sid Ryan of CUPE is an anti-Semite. That's why Syed Soharwardy, the imam who took me to the human rights commission, is an anti-Semite. Ryan compared Israel to the Nazis. Soharwardy, in a novel mix of stupidity and hyperbole, said what Israel is doing to Palestinians is actually worse than the Holocaust.
Here's a proud Liberal from B.C., and a frequent blogger on Liblogs.ca, who goes by the name of "Mound of Sound".
What's his view on Israel? He says Israeli soldiers deliberately kill women and children, and deliberately killed a Canadian peacekeeper in 2006.
He says Israel has "crosse[d] a line into barbarism." That's not a typo -- Israel is barbaric. Not Hamas terrorists. Israel has committed "brutal excesses". Again, not Hamas, but Israel.
Here's another one. Michael Ignatieff, says this Liberal activist, is
kneeling to pledge unquestioning fealty to Israel.
And this:
Israel has a lot of motives for bombing the hell out of the people of Gaza that have nothing to do with self-defence.
Really? Lots of motives for killing "the people of Gaza"? Let me guess: the Jews need the blood to bake their Passover matzos, right?
This quote is amazing -- not enough Jewish blood being spilt:
You might as well ask yourself how many Israeli soldiers suffered so much as a hangnail during this bombing campaign?
Or calling the Israeli action a "pogrom" -- the Russian word for the group murder of Jews. Hey, why not just call Israel's action a Holocaust?
Here's another B.C. Liberal blogger, who is calling for what seems to be a military intervention to stop Israel. Like other Liberal bloggers, he has condemned Ignatieff's support for Israel, claiming that it makes the Liberals guilty of murder, too. What's the response to his over-the-top posts? Another Liberal blogger, Western Grit, agrees.
And how about James Curran? He keeps digging himself deeper. First came his strange half-apology for claiming that a Czech politician whose great-grandfather was allegedly Jewish couldn't be loyal to the Czech Republic because he was a Jew, and thus he was biased and un-Czech.
(I'm still waiting for Curran to divulge where he got the "fact" that the politicians was 1/8 Jewish -- I assume it was from a neo-Nazi website and is false.)
Curran is now doubling down on his losing hand of ignorance and malice. His new anti-Israel lie is his claim that Israel has only now reestablished a corridor of humanitarian supplies to Gaza. Israel has routinely let in medical supplies. To claim the contrary is a damnable lie, a lie that paints Jews as heartless punishers of civilians. Forget Curran's absence of any mention of Hamas that deliberately jeopardizes Gazan Palestinians -- putting civilians in harm's way is their entire PR strategy, in fact.
And Curran doesn't mention the blockade on the Egyptian border of Gaza. Now why's that? My guess is it's because the Egyptian in charge isn't 1/8 Jewish, so Curran doesn't have an Egyptian to blame on that side.
Curran also says that Israel isn't allowing people in or out. Another damnable lie -- Israel frequently lets out those needing help, such as Arab Christians fleeing anti-Christian punishment at the hands of Hamas theocrats. Curran is probably just too ignorant to know about that -- or that the last batch of Christians to leave to Israel (going to Bethlehem for Christmas) were attacked by Hamas terrorists firing mortar shells. Oh -- and Hamas has brought back crucifixion as a punishment.
I haven't spent a lot of time digging through the muck in Liblogs.ca, but I've found a lot of anti-Israel propaganda, some of which crosses over into full-blown anti-Semitism.
This isn't about whether it's okay to criticize Israeli policy. Of course it is -- Israelis criticize their own government more than anyone else, I think.
This is about whether a legitimate, democratic, free country has the right to defend itself -- rather meekly -- against a sustained attack on it by an avowedly fascist theocratic murdering terrorist group.
These Liberal bloggers would not take the sides of terrorists against any other nation. The only thing that's different here is that it's a Jewish nation that's fighting back. Curran, and his three fellow bloggers too cowardly to use their own names, just don't like Jews, and they're not shy about saying it.
It looks bad on the party of Herb Gray, Irwin Cotler, Jerry Graftein and Bob Kaplan.
Occasionally I visit the Liberal analog to Blogging Tories. It's called Liblogs, and you can see it here. To my regret, it's awash in anti-Israel opinion, some of it troublingly anti-Jewish.
I haven't read every entry on Blogging Tories, but it's pretty solidly pro-Israel and anti-Hamas, especially its biggest blogs, like Small Dead Animals. Nor have I read every entry on Liblogs, but skimming it, it seems that the majority are hostile to Israel.
Take James Curran, just to choose one example. In this recent entry (click here if that link doesn't work in your browser) he states that, because "the rest of the world" thinks Israel is wrong, it's probably wrong. He cites the British PM calling for a ceasefire (good idea: the Israeli attack began precisely because Hamas quit its sham ceasefire, and rained down missiles on Israeli towns). And Curran also cites moral giants like China, Russia and, hilariously, Egypt, as proof of Israel's moral flaws. Perhaps Curran would like Israel to take those country's approaches when dealing with Islamist terrorists -- kill them all, and kill whatever civilians are in the way, too.
So Curran has a weak sense of right and wrong -- he thinks it's a matter of a vote at the UN. He has a weak grasp of how other countries deal with terrorism. Fine. But look at what Curran says when a commenter points out, as I did, that Karel Schwartzenberg, the Czech foreign minister, has spoken up for Israel. Curran writes, in his own comments section (at 4:22 p.m.):
Of course you already know by now that Prince Schwarzenberg's great grandfather was Jewish. No need for me to tell you that I'm sure.
and then, just to be crystal clear, he adds (at 4:44 p.m):
My point is that Prince Schwarzenberg's comments were based on his own bias and were not that of his country.
Right. I get it. Schwarzenberg wasn't speaking as a Czech. He was speaking as a Jew. You can't be both, you see. He has dual loyalties -- he must be dismissed as disloyal to the Czech Republic, and speaking only in the interests of his faith.
(His faith, of course, is Christianity. Even if Curran's allegation about Schwarzenberg's great-grandfather is accurate, Judaism is matrilineal; Schwarzenberg's family was never Jewish, under Jewish law. And even under the Nazi law of "mischlings", even if Curran's allegation were true, Schwarzenberg would have too little Jewish blood in him to count as a Jew. Who knew that Curran was stricter about weeding out the Jews than Hitler himself! I'd like to see Curran's source for his Jew-hunting claim. I've looked at three biographies of the man, and see no reference to it. Was Curran consulting an anti-Semitic website like Stormfront? Seriously, where did he get the idea for his slur from?)
By citing Schwarzenberg's imaginary Judaism as "proof" of the man's "bias", Curran moves from being merely uninformed and foolish, to being an anti-Semitic bigot. He probably doesn't think he is. He's just parroting the fashionable leftist line that Israel is demonic and the Palestinians -- no matter what terrorism they conduct -- are angelic. Look at Curran's comments page -- they're not exactly brimming over with dissent. That's today's Left for you.
It's too bad. The Left used to be the champion of Israel and the Jews. But that was only when the Jews were perpetual victims -- when they were rootless and persecuted, and especially after they were decimated in the Holocaust. But after the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel showed it was no longer the underdog, the Left chose a new victim to champion -- the Palestinians. Well, actually not the Palestinians. The corrupt, violent Palestinian leadership, a mix of tyranny, Jew-hatred and kleptocracy.
Curran will surely say he has no time for Hamas. But then he hasn't thought through the logic of his own bigotry: if he thinks that Israel is morally wrong to respond to violent attacks on its own civilians, then he is de facto supporting Hamas terrorism, whether he is too dainty to admit it.
I have my disagreements with Jason Cherniak, the founder of Liblogs, but to the man's credit, in his own small way (see his comment on Curran's blog) he's trying to save the Liberal Party from defining itself as the anti-Israel party. I hope he succeeds, but so far, so bad.
I'm proud that Stephen Harper and the Conservative cabinet are pro-Israel -- and as that party ratchets up government spending, foreign policy is probably my favourite thing about them. But I do not want the Conservatives to have a monopoly on pro-Israel sentiments. I think every Canadian party ought to be pro-Israel, because Israel mirrors our own democratic, liberal values in a very undemocratic, illiberal part of the world. Their fight against Islamic terrorism predates ours; they're merely the front line. We could be in the same violent mess as them in 20 years -- and Europe could be in 10 years.
In
the 2008, Liberal weakness on Israel, combined with Conservative
strength, helped tip the balance in a number of ridings, especially in
Thornhill. But I really wish Israel weren't an election issue in Canada
-- I wish that the overt anti-Israel views, and the subtle
anti-Semitism, of bloggers like James Curran is not indicative of where the Liberal party is headed under Michael Ignatieff.
UPDATE: I see that Curran has replied... by avoiding the matter altogether. Just to be clear: I think it's fair ball to oppose Israeli policy, just as it is fair to oppose Italian policy or Canadian policy. In a war between Israel and a terrorist group, opposing Israeli policy shows a weak commitment to principles like democracy, freedom, the rule of law, the right of nations to self-defence, etc., but it's fair. What moves from mere bad judgment to anti-Semitism is Curran's attack on the foreign minister of the Czech Republic because his great-grandfather was allegedly Jewish -- and thus, according to Curran, he's "biased", and doesn't truly represent Czechs. That's not fair comment; that's not a political opinion. That's anti-Jewish bigotry.
I have a lot of friends from the former Soviet bloc, half of whom escaped during the brief period of detente in the late 1970s and half of whom had to wait another ten years for the fall of the Berlin Wall. I never tire of hearing their stories of totalitarianism. It's not that I enjoy those stories; the opposite -- I hate them. But what they do for me is paint a picture of tyranny at the individual level, the "day in the life" level of existence in Soviet Russia and its colonies. I understand Communism from "30,000 feet" -- what it looks like in history books. But what did it look like on the ground?
I don't know any serious political dissidents (though I've met some, including the great Anatoly Sharansky). I just know regular people who lived in the world's largest prison, and tried to stay human.
(A quick story before the point of this blog post. One of my friends, Yevgeny, attended the University of Calgary immediately after coming over. As anyone who has visited U of C knows, their spacious lawns have concrete sidewalks on them, but the sidewalks don't always follow the path of where students want to walk, so people naturally tread on the grass to take short-cuts.
But not Yevgeny. While his classmates would walk wherever they wanted, Yevgeny followed the sidewalk obediently, even if it meant taking a longer route to get to where he wanted to go. It was absurd to his Canadian friends, who quickly asked him about it.
I wish I still had the original words that Yevgeny used to tell me about that moment, but it was the moment he realized what Communism had done to him: it had made him afraid to walk on the grass.
Back in Russia, if a student had wandered off of the official sidewalk onto the lawn, some bully in a uniform -- a campus security guard; a police man; a KGB officer; or maybe someone not in a uniform, any one of countless informants or wannabes -- would have immediately accosted him, demanded to see his identity papers, and scolded him for walking on the lawn. In Russia, you stayed on the sidewalk, you didn't walk on the lawn. A trifle to Canadian students wasn't a trifle to Russian students. It was a "tell" of deviance and anti-authoritarianism. It was precisely the kind of thing that political enforcers looked for, as an early warning sign for trouble-makers.
Yevgeny had been so brainwashed, so trained to conduct himself in perfect uniformity with the state, he had become an automaton. And it was at that moment in Calgary that he realized he could be free, and that he could walk on the damn lawn all he wanted. He could stomp on it. He could roll around on it. He wasn't a prisoner anymore.
Another Russian emigre friend, Laila, told me that it wasn't just political activists who were hounded by the KGB, and it wasn't just corner-cutters on lawns and other misdemeanour offenders. She said that the chief characteristic of everyone who got into trouble with the state in Russia was not their politics, but their personality: people who just couldn't swallow their individualism the way Yevgeny had trained himself to do.
Laila said it was eccentrics who ran afoul of the law; stubborn people; odd people; people who loved being different, or people who didn't even know that they were different. People who in the West would be called "characters" -- people whose oddities would make them rich and famous, or misunderstood and marginalized. But in the Soviet Union, they were nails sticking up inviting a thousand hammers to strike them. Perhaps they wouldn't bend when told to get off the grass; perhaps they would ask too many questions; perhaps they would show other "anti-social" tendencies; perhaps they would simply rub a powerful local boss the wrong way, and be marked for petty vengeance in a system dominated by the rule of men, not the rule of law.
Recall that Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's eight year sentence to hard labour was because he wrote a joke about Josef Stalin's moustache in a letter to a friend.)
I think of this and I mention this because I have been thinking about all of the people I have met over the course of the year in this fight for freedom of speech. Because "normal" people, bland people, go along to get along people, don't usually get caught up in censorship. People who are a little bit different do.
Whether it's a Christian pastor like Rev. Stephen Boissoin, who finds religion and is fired up with such a passion that he feels compelled to share his new faith with the entire world, but does so roughly instead of smoothly; or whether it's Guy Earle, the iffy comedian who must stand trial before the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal for telling lesbian jokes; or whether it's David Icke, the former British soccer star who has spent the past two decades describing a political conspiracy that includes an extraterrestrial element.
My point is: I love people who are a little bit different. Or at least I love that they're allowed to be. Of course, I love my right to privacy as well -- the ability to be left alone, and to separate myself from people who are too different for my tastes. But the concept of diversity -- true diversity, diversity of views, not just a window-dressing diversity of quotas based on race and sex -- is anathema to totalitarian systems.
And while Canada's human rights commissions mouth platitudes about diversity, they're actually the enemies of diversity, hounding and grinding political and even stylistic dissidents or psychological outliers for the fake crime of not being the same, of not loving the things the CHRC says they should, and of hating the things the CHRC says they shouldn't.
I'd rather live in a society where I have to put up with the occasional nutbar on the street corner than one where they'd be jailed; I'd rather live in a society where I have to rebut books of Holocaust deniers than one where those books were burned by the government. I don't want to live in a country where "it's wrong to be considered wrong."
Which brings me to Wally Keeler. He sent me a link to this video. Again, I have no clue where this was shot -- it looks like a coffee shop, or a comedy club. It sounds small; it sounds like a lot of folks there already know Wally. I get the feeling that, like me, Wally constantly bothers people around him about human rights commissions. And he likes to jab back at them in the way he knows how -- in his case, through poetry.
I think Wally's a hoot, and one day I hope to meet him, and go to one of his shows. I got his video when I was visiting my friend Laila, and so it reminded me of what she said: in Soviet Russia, people whose personalities were too much, wound up in prison.
Wally would have wound up in prison because his personality is too big, and he's too pushy about his freedom to be different.
If Jennifer Lynch and her mob at the CHRC had their way, he's be subject to a lifetime ban on his crimethinking, just like Rev. Boissoin is.
That's the inexorable result of laws that censor words and thoughts.
The Nobel Prize winner for literature, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, made an interesting statement in Stockholm, where he's picking up his prize this week. According to this report, Le Clezio said:
Who knows, if the Internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded - ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day.
It's a persuasive theory, and one that Ken McVay puts into practice every day. McVay runs the enormous website called Nizkor, that rebuts anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial conspiracy theories through arguments and documentation. McVay isn't as famous -- or as well paid -- as the Official Jews who prefer Internet censorship to the tougher task of actually rebutting anti-Semites. But he probably turns around more minds than they do, and he certainly does less damage to our civil liberties.
Le Clezio's theory is that information is power -- again, not a novel theory. And putting information into the hands of millions (or billions) of people is the first step to fighting against tyranny. I think that Le Clezio has an excellent real-time example, by the way, in China, where 20+ million bloggers, many of them anonymous, are the de facto "opposition" to the Communist government, exposing corruption, police abuses, torture and other heinous facts, even for just a few hours before the Internet censors there can react.
But who knows? Le Clezio is just a Nobel Prize winner. On the other side of the argument is Pearl Eliadis, who has made a healthy income off of the human rights racket for many years. And, unlike Le Clezio, Eliadis has actually coined a new word: "hatemongererer". Mr. Fancy Pants Nobel Prize Guy can't top that kind of intellectual horsepower, can he?
h/t KL
But his later years were not so kind to him. He became a crank.
In 2002, at a Saskatchewan Indian conference, he delivered a rant about Jews. Here's part of it:
But ah, the Germans used to tell me, and I got to know them well because I played soccer against them and with them and so forth. But they used to tell me that you guys are blessed. What we know about the Indians in Canada. They are blessed. But that blessing is being destroyed by the, by your immigrants that are going over there. Especially the Jews, they say, you know. The Second World War was created by the Jews and the Third World War, whatever it is, right now that war ... tha
t wages on Israel in the Arab countries. I was there too. But there’s gonna be a war because the Israelis and the “Bushies”, you know, the bully, the bully, the ah the bigot and so forth in the United States that tells you that if you’re not with me you are against me.
After his speech, he reiterated his remarks to a reporter, saying:
The Jews damn near owned all of Germany prior to the war. ... That's how Hitler came in. He was going to make damn sure that the Jews didn't take over Germany or Europe. That's why he fried six million of those guys, you know. Jews would have owned the goddamned world. And look what they're doing. They're killing people in Arab countries.
and:
How do you get rid of a disease like that, that's going to take over, that's going to dominate?
In other words, it was a weird mish-mash of racism, conspiracy theories, and leftist foreign policy, all woven together. So sort of like the Daily Kos.
He later told another reporter:
when a group of people, a race of people, can control the world media, then there's got to be something done about that.
So, pretty much what Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress says, but without Elmasry's fatwa approving of terrorist attacks.
What's my point?
My point is that Ahenakew is a kooky old man. He's racist. I doubt it's a deep racism, frankly -- I mean, how many Jews does Ahenakew bump into in a typical year in his home province of Saskatchewan, especially in his circles? It sounds like he's spent too much time surfing Left wing conspiracy theory sites -- I bet he's a 9/11 truther, too. The fact that he's Indian is just an interesting wrinkle -- he's basically a cranky old coot who has a long list of grievances, and the Jews are one of his many scapegoats.
Is Ahenakew violent? No, Does he advocate violence? No.
Does anyone in the world actually give a damn about what he says? No, other than his grandchildren who have to listen to him whenever they visit. But they probably ignore the old man, too.
David Ahenakew is a former somebody, who is now a nobody, who has views that are distasteful.
If a reporter hadn't been at the conference, none of us would know about it.
A reporter was there, and the resultant publicity marginalized Ahenakew even more in life, including stripping him of his Order of Canada. He was denounced nationally. He became a pariah.
And that's how it should be.
And it should have ended there, in 2002.
But it's 2008 now, and Ahenakew is still front-page news. And his nutty views, which should be in obscurity along with him, are in the news again, too. He's praising Hitler again, and hating Jews -- and the national (and even international) media are eating it up. Google News says there are 453 stories about him in recent days.
If you're in the PR business, you know that getting 453 different news stories in a week is an astounding achievement. That's a multi-million dollar advertising buy -- except that news stories carry much greater credibility with readers than do ads. Ahenakew could never have received such an audience for his views on his own.
Six years after the fact, and Ahenakew is facing his second trial for saying those bad words (his first conviction was overturned on appeal, and a new trial was ordered). I have no idea how many millions of dollars that has cost the justice system, but it's a lot. And all to persecute a man's foul words -- a man whose deeds of military service and educational reform were extraordinary. Ahenakew has never hurt a fly. But he's been charged with the crime of saying bad things.
He's being tried in criminal court, under the criminal code prohibition against hate speech. That's the only reason why he was acquitted -- because he's in the real court system. Had he been charged before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, he would have lost -- they have a 100% conviction rate.
I wonder if he'll be acquitted again. I mean, look at his words -- they're nutty, they're rude, they're anti-social, they're rambling, they're racist. But so what? Is that really a crime in Canada? (Actually, yes it is.)
In his first conviction, Ahenakew was fined $1,000. So let's say there's a great victory for Canadian justice here, and Ahenakew is convicted again, and fined, say, $2,000.
What has been achieved?
Other than the erosion of our right to have dissident opinions, I mean.
Well, there's the vast resources of the state that have been spent on him -- money diverted from fighting real crimes.
Ahenakew himself is obviously unrepentant. To the contrary -- he's surely now convinced, more than ever, of a Jewish conspiracy to silence him.
But that's not even the real achievement here.
The real achievement here is that a broken-down nobody is a media superstar, and that his odious views are receiving massive attention. No doubt, some Aboriginal youth look up to him as having stood up to the White Man, and stood his ground. He's a role model for defiance who made the white government blink at least once.
There is a glamour attached to him and his views that just wasn't there when he was a rambling old fool at a conference. Now, he's such a danger to the state -- his ideas must be so powerful! -- that the government has to silence him, using the brute force of the law.
It was the Official Jews who pushed for the creation of hate speech laws, both in the criminal code and in human rights commissions.
And what have those Official Jews achieved in this case?
They have turned a bigoted nobody into a bigoted somebody.
They have turned racist comments muttered to a hundred snoozing conference-goers into racist comments read with interest by hundreds of thousands of Canadians.
They have turned a baseless whiner into someone with a basis for his whining -- six years of prosecutions by the state being his basis.
Jews have always made the best talent agents. Michael Ovitz was apparently too busy to take Ahenakew's case. So the Canadian Jewish Congress stepped in.
Congratulations. They've created another monster -- just like Zundel, Keegstra, Taylor and others.
I know building up Ahenakew into a menace is great for fundraising letters sent to little old Jewish ladies. But really, other than that, can the CJC say they've achieved anything other than to promote the career of a little bigot on the prairies?
P.S. Here's my Calgary Sun column on Ahenakew, when his first conviction was overturned in 2006:
David Ahenakew's criminal conviction for "spreading hate" was quashed last week by no-one less than the chief justice of Saskatchewan.
The septuagenarian aboriginal leader isn't free to go just yet. He wasn't acquitted. His conviction has been set aside. The province may have at him again.
Already, a chorus of "human rights" groups clamoured for a retrial, forgetting freedom of speech -- even foolish, wrong or hateful speech -- is a human right, too.
Ahenakew should not have been charged in the first place. He muttered some conspiracy theory about Jews, and uttered some childish admiration for Adolf Hitler.
The proper response by colleagues, the public and the government should have been to rebut his absurd claims or ignore him.
He should have been socially marginalized by polite company, as any bigoted buffoon should be. But to criminalize such harmless dissension is an affront to the Canadian belief in the right to be wrong.
A retrial will likely fail for the reason the first trial failed: The law will probably find Ahenakew didn't have the requisite criminal intent to spread hate -- he was just riffing to a reporter. And should he indeed be convicted, he will surely appeal to the Supreme Court.
The zealous human rights set will transform this nobody into an international celebrity, like they did for Ernst Zundel, who was actually acquitted of his charge, "spreading false news" about the Holocaust.
Ahenakew shouldn't just be let go because bad ideas aren't a crime. He should be let go because he has become a giant placebo for the human rights set -- a distraction from real issues, real threats. He's a safe way for them to beat up on some harmless, old fool and feel pretty pleased with themselves.
Canada has real hate crimes to worry about, and real anti-Semites to battle who are far more dangerous than an old man in the prairies. We've got 17 or more men arrested in Toronto for allegedly plotting to blow up the CN Tower, storm the CBC and Parliament, and behead the PM, all because of a hateful philosophy of jihadism.
Where are the hate crime charges there?
Instead of addressing the hateful beliefs that united those suspects, the police went to extreme lengths to deny the obvious -- to deny that these men share the belief that Christopher Hitchens dubbed Islamofascism.
The Toronto suspects weren't motivated by money. They were motivated by hate of our western society and hate of the infidel Jews and Christians. Unlike Ahenakew, according to police, these men were actually planning to do something about their hate.
But hate laws aren't really about hate.
They're about abusing and stretching the criminal code to criminalize political dissidents. And, for whatever reason, radical Islam has been granted a special exemption by the arbiters of political correctness.
Why wasn't the head of the Canadian Islamic Congress, Mohamed Elmasry, charged with a hate crime when he went on TV last year, stating that every adult Jew in Israel -- which would include pregnant women, old men, young folks at a pizza parlour or dance club -- are legitimate targets for Palestinian terrorism?
Surely that was a lot more specific than the tired ramblings of old Ahenakew. Ahenakew has some politically correct Teflon -- he is aboriginal -- but Elmasry can trump that poker hand: He's a brown-skinned Muslim from Egypt who speaks with an accent.
Is there any other reason he got away with his apologia for the murder of Jews but Jim Keegstra the WASP was convicted for his more passive anti-Semitism?
Time to abolish this foolish law.
The blogosphere and mainstream media alike are cheering the news that Richard Moon's report has called for the repeal of section 13, the "hate speech" provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act that has been used as a weapon of political censorship.
I have spotted some frowning faces, though: Canada's Official Jews, who have dined out on section 13 for thirty years, are apoplectic that their meal ticket is about to be shut down.
What a perverse world when it's the Gentiles who are for free speech, and the Jews are the book burners. I'd be embarrassed to be a Jew if I thought that Bernie "Burny" Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress or Karen Lazar of the B'nai Brith spoke for anyone other than themselves. Frankly, they're a shanda to the goyim.
As I've pointed out before, the vast majority of Canadian Jews who have opined on the subject are for free speech and against section 13 -- see my partial list here.
Burny doesn't speak for the Jews. He speaks for the hard left. He revealed his colours during the recent federal election campaign, when he forced the CJC to join an anti-Tory coalition against global warming -- because you know that's a Jewish issue -- and then when he was the architect of the obscenely partisan election brochure published by the Official Jews. I was working in the Conservative war room at the time, and we called it the Jewish Green Shift -- the only difference between it and the Liberal campaign platform was it had no mention of a carbon tax.
Farber hates free speech, and he despises the Conservative government. He demonstrated that during the election, and his vitriolic response to Moon's report today just emphasizes it.
I've spoken at length to PMO staff and cabinet ministers about Farber's malign influence in the Jewish community. I've pointed out that he represents no-one other than himself, and how Farber is little more than a left-wing activist. My views are shared by many of the people in the Conservative government, who have actually complained to me that, on the rare occasion when they consult Farber on various issues, he leads them astray, giving his "blessing" to radical Muslim groups that later embarrass the government. That's not hard to believe, given Farber's love affair with anti-Semites like Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress, and Haroon Siddiqui of the anti-Israel Toronto Star.
Farber is a left-wing hack and an embarrassment to Jews. But what's the excuse for the B'nai Brith? They put out a press release denouncing Moon's report, too (I'll link to it when it's online). But the B'nai Brith has traditionally been more in touch with Canada's grassroots Jews, and less susceptible to politically correct leftism masquerading as the Jewish interest.
More to the point, the B'nai Brith itself has been hit with a spurious human rights complaint, merely for participating in a post-9/11 seminar in Winnipeg. The complainant in that case is a Muslim bigot named Shahina Siddiqui, formerly associated with the radical group CAIR-CAN, whose American affiliate has been named an unindicted co-conspirator with terrorist groups. In other words, the B'nai Brith itself is now trapped in a spurious, corrupt, abusive, endless human rights complaint itself -- and yet it still defends the process.
Just how stupid do you have to be, to be victimized by the HRCs, and still defend them? The B'nai Brith is doing its best to destroy the one positive stereotype Jews enjoy -- that we're a smart.
But here's the good news: no-one gives a damn what Burny and B'nai Brith think. We know where the public stands; we know where the civil libertarians stand; we know where Liberal MPs like Keith Martin stand; and now we know where the CHRC's own consultant stands.
It's one thing to be pig-headed, like Burny and BB. But at what point to the bosses at both of those organizations cut their losses? How much longer will the Official Jews keep doubling down on their bets against freedom?
I tell you one thing, if you wanted to increase anti-Semitic feeling -- and ill-will in the Christian community, which is actually the Jews' best friend -- there is no better way than to be the new fascists of Canada. Are they trying to out-bid Elmasry for that dishonourable title? How bizarre, that not 70 years after the Holocaust, it's our tribe that is the bully, our tribe that is calling for a limitation of freedom, and our tribe that is so disdainful of public opinion.
Thankfully, it's not really our tribe -- just the self-appointed King of the Jews, Burny, and his me-too chorus at B'nai Brith.
I'll have a post soon about how we can hurt Burny where it counts -- in the pocketbook, the one Jewish stereotype he fully manifests. He doesn't give a damn about freedom. But if 10,000 Jewish donors cut off the CJC from their annual UJA donations, he'll be forced to listen. More on that later.
(with apologies to Mindy for stealing her headline)
Who does Jennifer Lynch, the chief commissar of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, look up to as a role model?
A grotesque speech that she gave a few weeks ago, at the ironically-named Discrimination Prevention Forum in Ottawa, gives us a window into Lynch’s warped world. You can see her full remarks here. Below is her speech in italics, with my comments interspersed.
Welcome to the 2008 Discrimination Prevention Forum. This marks the fourth year we’ve brought together decision-makers from the private, public and non-profit sectors to identify emerging issues, share knowledge and develop tools to promote human rights. We are certainly gaining momentum.
Gaining momentum? I like confidence in a gal, but this is just laugh-out-loud funny. The past year has been an annus horribilis for the CHRC; not a week goes by when some new illegal act on their part doesn’t come to light, or some gross violation of natural justice is traced back to them. They’re a national – no, international – laughing stock, and Jennifer Lynch herself is a source of major embarrassment in the Conservative government. The Justice Minister, once Lynch’s defender, is publicly calling for the trimming of her powers. Gaining momentum? I think Lynch must have hired Baghdad Bob as her speech writer.
I think Albert Einstein would be impressed… The Nobel-prize-winning scientist once observed that intellectuals solve problems, but geniuses prevent them. So thank you all for showing up to apply your particular genius to the prevention of discrimination.
Ah yes. The human rights commissions – full of geniuses, eh? You know, all the best people go to work for them. Winners like Muslim supremacist Arman Chak, who came in dead last in Alberta’s bencher elections; Sandy Kozak, drummed out of a police force for corruption. These are “Canada’s finest?” As Golda Meir would say, Lynch should be more modest – she has plenty to be modest about. But would Albert Einstein really be impressed with Lynch and her crew of bullies? Einstein was a German Jew who fled the Nazis. Lynch’s staff, as a matter of course, join neo-Nazi organizations, and spread anti-Semitic filth online. I’m guessing Einstein would use phrases like “national embarrassment” or “disgrace” or “offensive to the memory of the Holocaust” or "Never Again" to describe Lynch and her neo-Nazi staff.
From year to year, we generate more interest in the global human rights community. I extend a warm welcome to our distinguished international guests, Mr. Divine Chemuta Banda, Chief Commissioner of the Cameroon National Human Rights and Freedom Commission, and Mr. Moise Segue, also from the Cameroon Commission.
Sorry, did I say national embarrassment? I meant international embarrassment. When I worked in the Conservative Party’s war room during the election, I met two senior Conservatives who were involved in Lynch’s appointment. Both brought up the subject of Lynch with me, unsolicited. And both were quite sheepish about it. One told me that Lynch’s personal aspiration is to be seen as an nternational human rights champion, and that her passion is jetting around the world as some sort of Louise Arbour wannabe. What a laugh. It’s true, Lynch has spent tens of thousands of taxpayers dollars jetting to five star hotels in various continents, living the high life while talking about “human rights”. But look at who she’s praising here: Cameroon’s “National Human Rights and Freedom Commission”. She gives them a “warm welcome”. She calls them “distinguished”. Of course, that’s just Lynch’s way of hoping they’ll give her some invitation to go to Cameroon on Canada’s dime for some week-long junket. But who exactly is she praising so highly?
Cameroon is one of the world’s worst countries, in terms of democracy, human rights and freedom. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that there is an inverse relationship between countries that have “human rights and freedom commissions”, and countries that actually practice real human rights and enjoy freedom. It’s just like names of countries: democratic states have boring names like the Dominion of Canada or the United States of America. Dictatorships usually have names like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or the old Democratic Republic of Germany. If you have to use your name to assert that you’re a free country, you probably aren’t.
Cameroon has been ruled by a brutal dictator, Paul Biya, for 26 years. Transparency International ranks Cameroon 138th in the world in terms of corruption – that is, it’s one of the worst. Is that where Lynch got the idea to hire Sandy Kozak as her right hand woman?
Parade Magazine’s annual list of tyrants ranks Biya one of the 20 worst dictators in the world. Here’s their charming write-up of the man.
And here’s part of Freedom House’s 2007 description of press freedom in Cameroon:
Journalists were arbitrarily arrested, detained, harassed, intimidated, and physically abused in 2006, while some publications were confiscated by the state. In January, unidentified assailants set fire to Freedom FM, a private radio station that had yet to begin operations. In 2003, the government had originally forced the station to close before it ever began operating and refused to lift the ban until 2005. In November, after receiving numerous threats leading up to a radio show asking listeners to offer their opinion about the Paul Biya regime, Agnes Taile, host of the popular program on the local Sweet FM, was abducted from her home, beaten, and left for dead. Other instances of harassment of journalists included the illegal five-day detention of Duke Atangana Etotogo, managing editor of L’Afrique Centrale, by the military security services in September after he published articles addressing corruption and incompetence within the army.
I bet Lynch is so jealous! In Cameroon, political censors don’t just get to harass websites – they can go after radio stations and newspapers, too!
And here’s an excerpt from Freedom House’s 2007 country report freedom about Cameroon:
The courts are highly subject to political influence and corruption. The executive branch controls the judiciary and appoints provincial and local administrators. Military tribunals may exercise jurisdiction over civilians in cases involving civil unrest or organized armed violence. Various intelligence agencies operate with impunity, and opposition activists are often held without charge or disappear while in custody. Indefinite pretrial detention under extremely harsh conditions is permitted either after a warrant is issued or in order to “combat banditry.” Torture and ill-treatment of prisoners and detainees are routine, and inmates routinely die in prison. Amnesty International called for an investigation into reports that dozens of extrajudicial executions were carried out in 2002 as part of an anticrime campaign. Despite repeated requests, the Cameroonian government has never granted entry to Amnesty International’s representatives. In the north, traditional chiefs known as lamibee control their own private militias, courts, and prisons, which are used against the regime’s political opponents.
I could quote Amnesty International, etc., etc., but you get the point.
Every dictatorship has a Potemkin “human rights” division like the one Lynch praised, designed to trap foreigners in a fake liberal discussion, while the dictatorship conducts its brutal activities. It’s a form of propaganda – a political front, designed to confuse. I don’t know if Lynch is stupid enough to buy it, or if she knows full well it’s a ruse, and actually appreciates fellow practitioners of Orwellian sleight of hand.
On with the speech:
We are pleased to have with us Mr. Graham Fraser, Commissioner of Official Languages, and Chief Commissioner Barbara Hall, from the Ontario Human Rights Commission, who bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to our gathering.
Barbara Hall brings a wealth of experience and knowledge? I suppose that’s technically true. It’s one of those ambiguous phrases, like when a friend writes a truly awful play or novel, and asks you “well, what do you think?” and you say “you’ve done it again!” Yes, Barbara Hall has plenty of experience as a politically correct censor and abuser of liberties.
Just last week, our Commission participated in the Kenya International Conference of National Human Rights Institutions. On behalf of the CHRC, I serve as Chair of the International Coordinating Committee of National Institutions for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights.
The aim of the ICC is to promote and strengthen National Human Rights Institutions. We do at an international level what the CHRC does here in Canada, through conferences, training programs and working groups.
Did you know that Jennifer Lynch chairs the “International Coordinating Committee of National Institutions for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights”?
Do you think that’s a good idea? Do you think a woman who presides over a beehive of corruption like she does should be teaching Kenyans about rights and democracy?
Or – is it the other way around, again? She holds tyrannical Cameroon in the highest esteem. How about Kenya, a violent country where it’s universally accepted that the president rigged the last election, plunging the country into chaos?
When member organizations identify gaps in human rights protection, the ICC brings the issue to the attention of the international community through the United Nations.
Right. The United Nations, where human rights abusers like China and Russia have a permanent veto at the Security Council, and where dictatorships like Iran sit on the Human Rights Council. I’m sure they’ll get right on human rights abuses.
There has been an enormous advance in human rights in the last several decades, since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Incidentally, 2008 marks the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a significant milestone in our history. So much has evolved and progressed, but we acknowledge that not all is perfect and that there are issues in the workplace that need to be addressed.
Of course there has been human rights progress since 1948, but it’s been slipping away. Latin America is falling under the thrall of authoritarians like Hugo Chavez; Islamic fascism is gripping Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and is seriously infecting Nigeria, and has eyes on Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, etc. Somalia and other African countries are failed states where human rights are meaningless. And Russia hasn’t been this unfree since 1989. China is more brazen than ever in its disregard for human life. This is more self-congratulatory blather from Lynch.
Other countries see the Canadian Human Rights Commission as a source of innovative ideas, and a catalyst that inspires advances in human rights around the world.
More self-love from Lynch. God help those poor countries if it’s true. Perhaps Lynch is teaching them how to get 100% conviction rates for political crimes like section 13.
The three-pillar approach we take – resolving disputes, expanding knowledge and, most importantly, preventing discrimination – is widely imitated by others.
Here in Canada, with your help, our emphasis is shifting more and more away from a focus on complaints processing and compliance, to a focus on prevention.
What does “prevention” mean in the context of hate speech? I know what it means: creating a chill in the public square such that journalists, bloggers, and even large media companies like Maclean’s are reluctant to talk about anything politically incorrect for fear of being abused by the CHRC’s processes. That’s hate speech “prevention”. Fr. Alphonse de Valk of Catholic Insight was toyed with by Lynch’s right hand woman, Sandy Kozak, for months – forcing the septuagenarian priest to spend $20,000 on lawyers – before being let go.
That’s prevention. Do you think Fr. de Valk will offend Frau Lynch (Frau Lynch – I think I’m going to keep using that) again? No. He’s been inoculated.
Of course, we must maintain effective methods for processing complaints, and we do.
That’s just a gorgeous sentence. Just read that again.
Effective processing of complaints? Forget their abusive investigations into hate speech. Look at some of the CHRC’s other abominable work – including a case that took them 25 years to try. That’s effective? Did Lynch’s audience giggle when they heard her say that whopper?
Yet human rights complaints are essentially the “back end” of the process. They represent a failure of prevention. And such failures are expensive. They cost us in civility, in morale, in time, in energy, reputations and in money.
Oh really? That’s true for the victims of Frau Lynch. Her victims spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars – or, more often, go to trial so poor they can’t afford a lawyer. It burns up their time, for sure. But for Frau Lynch and her brownshirts, such delays and expenses are the stuff bureaucratic empires are made of. Without such “failures”, they’d be out of work.
In increasingly tough economic times, it’s important to remember that the investment we make in preventing discrimination is not an expensive frill; it’s prudent business practice.
But it’s not tough economic times for the CHRC, whose budget and staff complement are at an all-time high – over 200 brownshirts, many making six-figures. And “tough times” haven’t slowed Frau Lynch’s jet-setting or expensive lunch tabs one bit.
Furthermore, resolving problems after the fact doesn’t deliver systemic change. To do that, we need to focus on the “front end” – to fully integrate human rights into daily practice so as to prevent violations from happening in the first place.
What would a world be like where Frau Lynch’s twisted view of human rights were “fully integrated” into, say, the workings of a newspaper’s editorial offices, or the correspondence of MPs? We have a word for the total integration of the state’s viewpoint into the lives of its citizens: totalitarianism, the exact word used by Stephen Harper in 1999 to describe HRCs.
Coming together in fora like this one has helped us clarify what it takes to create a respectful and inclusive human rights culture in the workplace: it means putting overarching policies in place, building employment equity measures into business plans, measuring human rights as a core competency, supporting it with training, and modernizing communications in tone and content.
It’s actually pretty hilarious to hear Frau Lynch talk about business practices. The CHRC was audited in a confidential government review, and received poor or failing grades in every single benchmark that was assessed. They received a total failure in having a written code of ethics – they simply don’t have one. If the CHRC was a country, and Frau Lynch was its president-for-life, I’m guessing Transparency International would rank it below Cameroon.
All of those measures add up to fulfilling the pledge of Corporate Social Responsibility, which can only be achieved when an organization’s internal culture is truly aligned with the expectations it sets for its frontline employees.
Hey. I’ve got a question. Again, it’s a touch rich for a “human rights” commissar whose staff join neo-Nazi organizations to lecture anyone about corporate culture. But who the hell appointed Frau Lynch to be the corporate nanny for Canada? "Corporate Social Responsibility"? From this corrupt political hack? Forget the personal chutzpah of it – where the hell does the Canadian Human Rights Act say that this sort of corporate meddling is Frau Lynch’s mandate? Like I’ve been saying for months, when you appoint Joe Clark’s chief of staff to be the chief commissar of the CHRC, you get what you pay for.
The emerging field of Integrated Conflict Management Systems offers some relevant methodologies for achieving this.
Here at the Commission we are currently developing a Maturity Model for human rights. This is a tool that your organization will be able to use to promote a self-sustaining human rights culture and monitor your success. Later this afternoon, you’ll be listening to and learning from world expert Deborah Katz from the United States Department of Homeland Security about how a Maturity Model works.
I’d like to see the CHRC try a “self-sustaining human rights culture”, on themselves first. How do hundreds of neo-Nazi posts on websites fit in with that "Maturity Model"?
We hope this initiative – and others that you’ll have the opportunity to explore during this Forum – will support you in continuing to build capacity, anticipate diverse needs and integrate the protection and promotion of human rights into your daily practice.
Your commitment to realizing these goals is evident in your presence here today, and we appreciate the contribution your participation makes to our shared understanding of current and emerging issues.
We trust that the dynamic exchange of information and experience will support us all in building on past successes to conceive and implement the measures necessary to enhance human rights in the future.
At the end of the day, the differences we make in our individual workplaces have an enormous collective impact on the world we share, making it more just and more equitable.
Thank you for being here, and enjoy the next 2 ½ days.
Are you embarrassed that Frau Lynch was speaking for our country? I am.
But I think I have a better understanding of what she’s about. She’s want to be part of the global human rights industry, jetting around, first class, from five-star hotel to five-star hotel, reading meaningless clichés to people who are playing on their BlackBerries instead of paying attention. All of this goes on under brutal security, and with plenty of caviar. Outside, behind a row of riot police, are people whose real human rights are being abused. Seriously: Cameroon? Kenya? Those places are civil rights cesspools; Frau Lynch is meeting with their propaganda arms -- she's a willing part of their deception. And she's well-paid, and well-perked for it.
And who can blame her? Whenever she goes into her office in Ottawa, she’s met with more embarrassing stories about the conduct of her own staff. A real leader, loyal to Canada, would clean up her agency. Frau Lynch would rather travel the world – and hobnob with the tyrants of Cameroon, and pledge loyalty to the UN. Seriously -- at the Remembrance Day ceremony this month, she didn't even mention our Canadian wars, but she praised the UN. Exactly who is she loyal to?
Perhaps Cameroon will give her an honorary doctorate from the University of Yaounde. That’s about what she’s worth.
Fire. Them. All.
I sent a thank-you letter to a donor who had given to my legal defence fund. I received the following letter in return, and I republish it with permission, with no changes other than to delete his name, and to bold the most heart-breaking sentence:
Dear Ezra,
Thank you for your letter and not only. You are in the forefront for all of us, so I consider my duty to support you.
I was born in the Peoples Republic of Poland. My Father lost his all family in the Holocaust (“it’s wrong to be considered a Jew”). My Mother lost her Father and Brother during Stalinists purges (“it’s wrong to be considered wrong”). Not surprisingly, my Parent’s utmost neurotic parental preoccupation was to ensure that I suppress any natural tendency toward free thinking and never say anything deemed incorrect by those in power. And when I did stray (as I did often enough), their reaction was hysterical. They never succeeded and eventually relented, but I was also lucky. When in 1965 the foreman of my workers apprenticeship, com. Malodobry (Littlegood – I am not kidding) visited my Faculty to ensure that student [name redacted] never becomes an engineer in the “socialist Poland”, the Dean responded: “Mr. Malodobry, I have bad news for you. Com. Stalin died 12 years ago”. So, as you can see, I do owe.
After coming to Canada in 1978, I was mildly surprised by one of the earlier Polish immigrants, who warned me: “[name redacted], do not display your instinctive non-conformism in front of the Canadian government employees. It will not do you any good”. Well, fortunately, I also know how to behave in entirely conformist way as well. However, in spite of all the years of schooling and conditioning, it still feels so unnatural… Actually, quite infuriating!
Ezra, you fight for my human right to be “considered wrong” and you fight against government and anybody’s monopoly to decree who is wrong. That’s the fight of my life and luckily for me, you happen to be a lawyer. And - I am afraid – that might be an exception among lawyers, too.
So thank you again for the job so well done!
With best regards,
[name redacted]
I do not want to be in a country where it's wrong to be considered wrong. Because, as my correspondent's letter reminds us, in a tyranny being wrong can mean anything the tyrant says is wrong -- being Jewish; being a non-conformist, whatever.
I would rather live in the cacophony of freedom than in the tyrannical monotony of Nazi or Soviet Poland.
Am I comparing Canada's human rights commissions to the tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin? Of course not. But the difference is only in degree, not in direction. And the fact that Canada's HRCs do not have the awful power of the Soviet "comrades" mentioned above is something that grates on those who inhabit the HRCs. My correspondent is a Jew, and he reminds us why censorship should be so odious to real Jews -- not the Official, Professional Jews of the Canadian Jewish Congress and others who have become little more than ethnic political bosses and grievance hustlers, Canadian Al Sharptons.
But Canada's HRCs are on the march; over the course of four decades, they have slowly, quietly, accreted more and more power, more power than they were originally mandated, more power than they were permitted in the 1990 Taylor decision by the Supreme Court. And they're not done their slow march; as Ian Fine, senior counsel for the Canadian Human Rights Commission -- and a Jew himself! -- declared on national television, as far as he is concerned, "there can't be enough laws against hate" -- hate being whatever he and his cronies decide is hate.
In the past year, I have met dozens of people at all levels of Canada's human rights commissions, from junior staffers to senior executives. Some are just ordinary joes luxuriating in a government job. But too many are the type of people who are actually attracted to HRCs because they themselves have a tyrannical instinct in their personality. They are people who are generally inconsequential in their own lives -- not particularly talented, not particularly successful -- but when they put on the uniform of the state, they are very powerful indeed, and people will listen to them and do as they say, damn it.
There are petty tyrants in every walk of life. But we can avoid or ignore them -- or fight them. Not so when they have the power of the state behind them.
Let me give you my own example. If some unknown, untalented, untrained, inexperienced literary critic like Pardeep Gundara had criticized the Western Standard magazine that I published, I could have ignored him (which I would have done). But Gundara -- a laughable literary critic -- suddenly had the power of the state behind him to weigh and measure our magazine's efforts, as the Alberta HRC censor assigned to adjudicate my case.
Nobody gives a damn what Gundara says, when he says it on his own. At least I don't, and I was the publisher. But when he says his bit as a petty tyrant of the state, people have to listen to him. Or at least I did. That, no doubt, gives him great pleasure, and a feeling of great power, power that he surely lacks in every other aspect of his life. He couldn't earn my respect for his laughable literary and political views. So what -- he could extract obedience from me, by virtue of his position in the Alberta government.
Of course, Gundara's arrogance pales next to that of his colleague Lori Andreachuk, who ordered Rev. Stephen Boissoin to cease giving public sermons (and sending private e-mails) about his Christian views. Had she done so in her private capacity -- a divorce lawyer from Lethbridge -- Rev. Boissoin would have ignored her, or more likely tried to save her anti-Christian soul. But put her in the seat of the HRC, and Rev. Boissoin would have to bend to her will, damn it.
And even Andreachuk pales next to Richard Warman, who has perfectly gamed the system to enforce his political edicts. Once upon a time, Warman ran as a radical candidate for the Green Party, but was rejected soundly several times. Fed up with trying to convince his fellow Canadians of his rectitude, he launched a career of censorship -- suing libraries, websites, newspapers and bloggers who dared to disagree with him.
Warman has filed literally half of all "hate speech" complaints before the CHRC, and 15 of the last 17 trials have had him as the complainant. (He's also made a pretty penny off it, being awarded more than $50,000 tax-free by the human rights tribunal.) The fact that Warman provokes and entraps his targets by engaging in anti-Semitic, anti-gay and anti-Black bigotry online in the guise of a neo-Nazi seems to have given him no moral qualms and no legal qualms to the CHRC, which has not only prosecuted his complaints, but paid for his expenses.
Fingering one's political enemies to the state would be very familiar to my Polish correspondent, to any Chinese survivor of Mao and to any Russian who grew up being forced to idolize Pavlik Morozov, a Ukrainian child venerated by the Communist Party for turning in his own parents for anti-Soviet remarks made over the dinner table. Two generations of Russian children were taught that his example of parricide was the highest form of patriotism.
My point is this: human beings are no different today, in Canada, than they were fifty years ago in the Soviet Union or seventy years ago in Nazi Germany. We are made of the same frail stuff; we must remain on guard; we must continue to call good and evil by their proper names.
There are those among us who would rather punish their neighbours than to persuade them of things. There are those among us who believe that political ends justify brutal means. There are those among us who are attracted to bullying jobs, who take pleasure at meting out pain, who laugh as they humiliate others. That's who are attracted to Canada's human rights commissions. I believe that many of the people who work for Canada's human rights commissions, in a different place or time, would have been attracted to the Communist Party or the National Socialist Party, working to ensure political hygiene in the Motherland or Fatherland.
My correspondent's letter is a reminder to cherish our freedoms, our right to be dissidents, our right to be wrong, and our right "to be considered wrong".
Take a look at this press release from the confused, impotent Simon Wiesenthal Center:
See update, below.
Here is that Maclean's article from 1966, about how the Canadian Jewish Congress sent an "agent" to pitch in to organize the Canadian Nazi Party. Just like Grant Bristow twenty years later, and Richard Warman forty years later, it was a case of the "cure" becoming worse than the disease. The scans are about 30 MB; I've put a 12 MB version here:
John Garrity, the CJC agent who helped out the rag-tag band of wannabes, didn't do as much as Grant Bristow did, in terms of organizing neo-Nazis, and he didn't do as much as Warman did, in terms of spreading anti-Semitic and racist hate. But the fact remains, the Canadian Jewish Congress pitched in, helping to prop up the haters they were publicly fighting against. And -- surprise! -- in a self-serving article, Garrity wrote that his work was extremely important, and that the rag-tag nobodies he helped out were a real menace. The only thing missing was the pitch for readers to donate money to the CJC and the rest of the anti-hate industry.
Let's get serious. Barely 20 years after Nazi Germany was crushed into powder by the Allies, with Canada taking an oversized role in the battle, when the streets of Canada were teeming with war veterans who hated Nazism with every cell of their body, when Nazism had been utterly discredited in the public mind, when there was no possible chance of that ideology finding intellectual purchase in Canada, let alone actual power, the CJC was trumping up the menace -- led by a vain, 24-year-old nobody.
Why?
Because that's the moral hazard of the being in the anti-hate business. If there's not enough hate, you have to change your line of work. Or: as the CJC did in 1966, and as they're doing today through the human rights commissions, they drum up a fake danger, manufacture a menace, help them out even, and then expose the whole thing and posit themselves as the remedy.
I just don't know what's wrong with the Jews sometimes. We have enough real enemies out there -- even in 1966, before the West turned against Israel after the Six Day War ended the Jews' status as the world's underdogs, and with it ended the pity honeymoon that had existed since the Holocaust. Even then, the Jews had enough real enemies, and there were real enough Jewish issues. Today it's far worse, with radical Islamists planning the next Holocaust.
I just don't get it. But Bernie "Burny" Farber and the rest of his industry know a good gig when they see one. They're just running the Garrity-Bristow-Warman game one more time. It makes them heroes in their own mind, and it gets them lots of press. But it's dishonest. And today, with militant Islam on the rise, there are enough real fights to fight without making up fake ones.
UPDATE: A commenter writes to say that he was there in Toronto when Beattie, the 24-year-old leader of the rag-tag Canadian Nazi Party had its rally in Toronto -- with 20 people in tow. The commenter's point was to suggest that I have overstated the CJC's role in assisting the Nazi Party. Maybe -- though any support is bizarre. But what I actually glean from the commenter's report was the opposite message: that Beattie and his "party" could only muster 20 followers in a city of millions. This was a national threat? Of course not. But with a little finessing, it could be built up into a menace that would terrify Jews and Gentiles alike.
Brought to you by the CJC.
I am sympethetic to CSIS these days. They have an enormously challenging job to keep Canada safe from real threats -- such as those being plotted continuously by foreign jihadis and their domestic agents. It is partly to CSIS's credit that the acts of terrorism Canada has endured in recent years have been low-level activities, difficult to detect in advance -- such as the fire-bombing of a Jewish synagogue by a Muslim radical in Edmonton; or the fire-bombing of the Jewish school library by Muslim radicals in Montreal; or the assault on a Jewish teenager by a Muslim radical in Calgary.
Perhaps it's precisely because CSIS is now engaged in a real battle against real threats that it no longer -- as far as we know publicly -- spends government time and money building up neo-Nazi organizations like the Heritage Front.
During the 1980s and 1990s, CSIS -- that is, the taxpayers of Canada -- helped organize and build Canada's leading group of white supremacists. Funding, strategy, organization support -- all of it came from the government.
Their point man was Grant Bristow. He was one of Canada's neo-Nazi leaders, who worked as an agent for CSIS. Without Bristow, Canada's neo-Nazis would have been less-organized, less prominent and more poorly led. Thanks, CSIS.
Now, I understand the need for undercover police work to stop some tough-to-fight crimes. And there might even have been a few cases where the other neo-Nazis that Bristow met were genuine threats of violence. They probably were. But there's an important moral and practical difference between sending in some infiltrator and building up the biggest neo-Nazi group in the country. At what point is the cure worse than the disease?
CSIS and Bristow didn't just track potentially violent criminals. They engaged in political dirty tricks. They attempted to take over the Reform Party when it was in its formative years. The "discovery" -- funny how that leaked out, eh? -- that CSIS's front organization was trying to take over the Reform Party was a political embarrassment for that party, and the unfair legacy of that accusation continues even to this day. That wasn't crime-fighting; that wasn't even the more nebulous "hate-fighting". That was using a government agent and a government front to smear a political opponent that both the Tories and the Liberals of the day hated. No wonder CSIS got the green light. (The fact that Warren Kinsella's "definitive" "history" of Canada's "hate organizations" strategically omitted mention of Bristow, adding him in only to later editions once Bristow was outed, is simply more proof of the partisan infection of Bristow's mission.)
I mention all of this because that key CSIS neo-Nazi organizer, Grant Bristow, had an Op-Ed in yesterday's National Post, defending... the Canadian Human Rights Commission, its patron the Canadian Jewish Congress and even Bernie "Burny" Farber. Besides a modest recitation of how brave he was, and how brave Burny is, Bristow gave his opinion that:
The Canadian Human Rights Commission has been at the forefront of the war against hate in this country for decades. I personally believe it played a key role in eviscerating Canadian hate groups in the 1980s and 1990s.
But that's simply not true. The CHRC didn't have the mandate to go after real criminals. And it certainly didn't shut down the Heritage Front -- that would have meant arresting Bristow, a CSIS agent himself. The Heritage Front unwound party because of its own incompetence, and largely because Bristow abandoned his leadership role there when his cover was blown. The CHRC really had nothing to do with it.
That's an obvious point to anyone who looks at the Canadian Human Rights Act itself. It doesn't deal with real acts of violence -- such as street fights, or death threats. It deals with "hate speech" on telephone lines and the Internet. That wasn't the problem with the Heritage Front -- indeed, it has never been the real "hate" problem in Canada, but a placebo for the human rights industry to noisily and showily deal with, while ignoring real threats.
Bristow knows nothing about the CHRC -- he was never a complainant under its sections; he never worked for it; in fact, the only possible relationship he has with it is as an offender of its thought crimes provision, he himself having generated an enormous amount of "hate", while undercover.
Bristow's Op-Ed -- besides being a self-serving piece of revisionist history (revisionism being something that the Heritage Front was always good at) -- conflates real crimes, crimes of violence, with "thought crimes" that the CHRC seeks to police. Whatever grains of truth lie at the bottom of Bristow's autohagiography apply to matters for real police to solve. The CHRC has no role in stopping violence. Bristow can marshall whatever "authority" he has towards discussions about policework, but his experiences in thought crimes policing are nil. If Bristow has any credibility, it's in regard to street crime, of which he has plenty of experience, not thought crimes.
But Bristow popping his head up now -- in a clearly ghost-written Op-Ed -- serves to remind us of some of the lessons of that awful CSIS experiment in neo-Nazism. Even with CSIS's police oversight, in the form of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, Bristow got out of control, and the Heritage Front started to engage in political adventures. Imagine how much worse it is at the CHRC, which has no oversight committee.
No need to imagine, actually -- you can see how contorted the CHRC has become, how self-righteous, how it violates its own laws constantly, how it has become a political weapon. Like CSIS creating Canada's biggest neo-Nazi group -- creating it, instead of fighting it! -- the CHRC has become Canada's largest disseminator of hate speech itself -- creating it, instead of fighting it. Richard Warman himself has admitted, under oath, to posting hundreds of messages on neo-Nazi websites, and other CHRC staff have also admitted to joining those neo-Nazi groups, under codenames like "Jadewarr". That's one of the reasons why the B'nai Brith renounced HRCs today -- the cure has become worse than the disease.
CSIS created Canada's biggest neo-Nazi group. The CHRC has generated more neo-Nazi hate than any other entity in Canada. You can even see examples of one "covert" neo-Nazi talking to another, each "investigating" the other. Anytime I see a conveniently-timed outburst from some racist group, especially if it's online, I immediately think of Bristow and Warman and the rest of them. (Example: the white pride "rally" of two dozen misfits in Calgary on the eve of the spectacularly embarrassing March 25th human rights tribunal hearing in Ottawa. Frankly, even Fred Phelps' looming visit to Red Deer smacks of an act of an agent provocateur.)
And Burny? He's at the heart of it. Because he need hate groups to be big and strong, if his anti-hate obsession is going to remain valid and important. (Correction: He needs impotent "hate groups", like the Heritage Front to be big and strong. There really are big and strong hate groups out there, like the Canadian Islamic Congress, but they're a little bit too big and strong for Burny to, well, do anything. When was the last time the CJC filed a "hate speech" complaint against a Jew-hating Muslim?)
There is a grotesque symbiosis between the Canadian Jewish Congress and the hate groups; they need each other, actually. The hate groups need a Jewish demon, who lives down to their worst stereotypes and prejudices. The CJC needs Nazi caricatures, to play on old wounds about the Holocaust -- not troublesome threats of a Muslim jihad.
I have copies of an old Maclean's magazine article from the 1960s in which the Grant Bristow of that day was hired by the Canadian Jewish Congress to help build the Canadian Nazi Party. Jewish money was actually used by the CJC to start a Nazi party. I'll get those scans in a useable form and try to upload them shortly. It's 40 years later, and Burny is still doing the same thing -- except that CSIS is paying the freight today.
I believe that going undercover to fight real criminals is sometimes appropriate -- subject to proper internal controls, to make sure the cure isn't worse than the disease. Those checks and balances weren't strong in Bristow's case, which is why he was able to smear the Reform Party politically. And the fact that CSIS actually built up the biggest neo-Nazi group in the country is another ethical problem. But at least SIRC, CSIS's Internal Affairs oversight committee, realized that (here's their report).
The CHRC doesn't have an internal affairs department, and as I've written before, it doesn't even have a code of ethics. That's the problem -- or one of them at least. The fact that a long-time neo-Nazi organizer like Bristow speaks out in the CHRC's defence isn't persuasive. Rather, it only points out the problems with government provocateurs like the CHRC.
This is definitely a two-siren blog post.
The B'nai Brith, historically one of the most partisan supporters of Canada's human rights commissions, has made a dramatic break from the human rights industry, "urgently" calling for a "major overhaul" of Canada's human rights commissions. You can read the full text of their press release on the subject here.
The B'nai Brith is Canada's oldest and largest Jewish service club, dating back to 1875.
Frank Dimant, the Executive Vice-President of BB, said "we have to ensure that commissions do not become abusers of the very human rights they are charged with protecting" -- a clear shot at the HRCs' continuous violation of freedom of speech and freedom of religion, as well as their well-documented procedural abuses and corruption. The Canadian Human Rights Commission, for example, is now under four different investigations, including by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
David Matas, BB's senior legal counsel, was also quoted in their press release, pointing to several illegal and abusive traits of HRCs, including that the same complaints can be filed with multiple HRCs, as was done by the anti-Semitic Canadian Islamic Congress in their complaints against Maclean's magazine and Mark Steyn. According to Matas, "Commissions cannot become avenues of harassment in which complaints are simultaneously made in several jurisdictions. The remedy is to introduce rules that will allow for one jurisdiction only."
Matas also suggested deep re-education for the HRCs' corrupt censors, accusing them of ignorance and anachronism. “The remedy for ignorance is education and training. Investigators must be required to undertake compulsory in-house courses that meet these needs. They must always be able to distinguish between hate and protected political speech," he added. That's a pretty clear shot at political censors like Richard Warman and Dean Steacy, the latter of whom actually testified that free speech is not a Canadian value -- despite its entrenchment as a "fundamental freedom" in our Charter of Rights, our Bill of Rights, and our inherited unwritten U.K. constitutional corpus.
Finally, Matas called for costs to be awarded against clear nuisance litigants, like the CIC and the Jew-bashing imam Syed Soharwardy, who simply walked away from his Alberta HRC complaint about the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, after saddling taxpayers with $500,000 in costs, and me with nearly $100,000 in costs (another, identical complaint, continues against me.)
Matas said: “Costs must be levied against those whose clear aim is to abuse the system by launching attacks designed to harass bona fide respondents. This would be a deterrent against those who deliberately seek to hijack and corrupt the human rights system in pursuit of their own ideological bent.”
Again, you can see the entire release here.
This is enormous, because it ends the false unanimity amongst Canada's "Official Jews" in support of HRCs. As I've written here, most real Jews are not for censorship; it's just the personal obsession of a few "Professional Jews", like Bernie "Burny" Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress, and Leo Adler of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
It's not surprising to me that B'nai Brith was the first to bolt the troika of Jewish groups that has turned a blind eye to the HRCs' corruption. As I wrote several months ago, as the HRCs continue to beclown themselves in the public square, those who are allied with them will start to incur political damage, especially with this Conservative government. (The CJC, with its impeccable Liberal connections, doesn't much care.) But I don't think the B'nai Brith's about-face was done to please the government; I think it was done in response to the B'nai Brith's own constituency: grassroots, severely normal, Canadian Jews.
Unlike the CJC, and certainly the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the B'nai Brith actually has active members, and local branches across the country, made up of volunteers. They're like the Jewish Rotary Club -- normal. They're not a hot-house of professional political lobbyists like Burny, who has his own political agenda, and is using the CJC's name and reputation to prosecute his own hobby-horses. Grassroots Jews know that the real threat in 2008 isn't a handful of teenaged kids talking tough about being Nazis in some website fantasy -- really, the political equivalent to an online fantasy role playing video game. The real threat is a wave of radical Islam both internationally and here in Canada -- including the CJC's new ally, the Canadian Islamic Congress. The B'nai Brith understands -- as David Matas makes crystal clear -- that the Canadian Islamic Congress is an illiberal, abusive, human rights-violating enemy of Canada and enemy of the Jews. The CJC? Well, the CJC's newest legal committee member, Warren Kinsella, actually gave help and advice to the Canadian Islamic Congress. I'm guessing that if a B'nai Brith officer tried that, he'd be fired the next day.
I am excited that the B'nai Brith has so publicly broken ranks with the rest of the Professional Jews, and has clearly accused not only the Canadian Islamic Congress of harrassment, but has taken pretty dead aim at the CHRC and its investigators, too.
But, even amidst my enthusiasm, I must still acknowledge some depressing realities:
1. The B'nai Brith remains an intervenor against Mark Lemire in the Warman v. Lemire nuisance suits\ that is clearly as abusive as anything the Canadian Islamic Congress has filed;
2. In that Lemire case, the B'nai Brith's lawyers have conducted themselves in lock-step with the CJC and the CHRC, including supporting the section 13 thought crimes provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
3. The B'nai Brith has stopped short of calling for the abolition of section 13. In other words, they have not taken that final step of realizing that censorship is not a Jewish value, it's not healthy for a liberal democracy, and it has only served to discredit the B'nai Brith -- and make anti-Semitic nobodies into glamourous international celebrities.
Still, this is a huge step -- the first and hardest step. The B'nai Brith has announced today that they no longer drink the human rights industry kool-aid. They're not going to continue turning a blind eye to the corruption and abuse that's rampant in the industry.
I expect two things will happen:
1. The human rights industry will respond with execration, demonizing B'nai Brith and Dimant and -- as Kinsella usually does -- accusing them of being supporters of Holocaust deniers and white supremacists. I know that sounds nuts, but ad hominem attacks are really all the intellectually bankrupt HRC industry has left.
2. I also expect that real Jews, normal Jews, grassroots Jews, Jews who lead normal lives -- as opposed to the Official Jews, the Jews Who are Jews for a Living -- will respond with enthusiasm, and that the B'nai Brith will attract both money and people away from the CJC.
I hope that the B'nai Brith will find its new path so rewarding -- intellectually, morally and politically -- that it will, in time, take the final step and acknowledge that the section 13 "thought crimes" law is unsalvageable, and should be abolished altogether.
Why don't you take a moment and send Frank Dimant, BB's boss, a letter of encouragement. Understand how hard it must have been for him to repudiate decades of collusion with the human rights industry. Wish him well in the weeks ahead, when he'll be abused by his spurned lovers in the HRCs, and the dhimmis in the CJC. And tell him that he speaks for Canadians -- Jewish and Gentile -- and for Canadian (and Jewish) values of true civil rights much more than the corrupt poseurs at the HRCs.
You can e-mail Dimant here.
Yesterday I wrote about the conviction of a Muslim supremacist named Mustafa Taj, who attacked a 16-year-old Jewish girl in Calgary, violently beating her and her friends, and even throwing one of them onto the train tracks.
Taj was sentenced two days ago in Calgary.
The Canadian Jewish Congress had nothing to say about this real act of violence -- it prefers tackling Internet websites that say rude things, rather than genuine street thugs who actually hurt Jews.
One of my blog's readers sent this note to the CJC's spin doctor:
"It is crucial that when hate plays a motivating role in criminal acts, this fact is recognized by the courts," Farber added.
In 1979, John Taylor was the first Canadian convicted of "hate speech" offences under section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Taylor, a kooky Nazi sympathizer, set up a phone answering machine with anti-Semitic messages on it, and handed out pamphlets telling people to call. He was convicted, and when he refused to change his answering machine message, he was sentenced to a year in jail. Taylor -- then in his seventies -- served nine months. Here's the Wikipedia entry on him, which is more or less accurate.
So nine months in the clink for... having a rude answering machine message.
Fast forward to 2006. A Muslim immigrant named Mustafa Taj approached four teenagers at a subway station in Calgary. He demanded of them, "who's Jewish?" When sixteen-year-old Nichola Cordata said "me", Taj said "I'm Muslim and hate Jews" and slapped her face and pulled her hair. Cordata's friends tried to help, and they were beaten, and one was thrown on the train tracks. Taj called Cordata a "Jewish piece of crap".
This week, Taj was sentenced to a year in jail, but he'll get credit for "double time served" because he has been held in remand. So he has just three months left.
I'm not sure if statutory release applies to such a short sentence; if so, he'll get out even earlier as a matter of course. And if regular parole provisions apply (I'm rusty on those), he'll be out on full parole in a month, and on day parole in just a few weeks. (If there are experienced criminal lawyers reading this, please correct me in the comments section.)
So, let's recap.
A cranky old coot sets up a phone answering machine that says anti-Semitic things. He's a harmless fool. And he serves nine months in jail.
A Muslim serial criminal beats up a Jewish girl and her friends because she's Jewish. He gets a three month sentence, on top of a few months in remand. He'll be out in a month.
If only John Taylor was a "Muslim youth", instead of a cranky Nazi wannabe! Then the Canadian Jewish Congress and the rest of the "human rights" establishment would have ignored him.
I clicked on the CJC's website today, to see what they have to say about this. Cue crickets chirping. [See update here.] I'm sure the CJC's Bernie "Burny" Farber and Warren Kinsella will have something to say when they get back from their romantic lunch with the Canadian Islamic Congress.
You see, it's hard to take on violent Muslims. It's politically incorrect. It actually takes work -- not just sitting in front of a computer screen. And it's dangerous -- look what happened to Theo van Gogh.
Better to chase after some ageing, impotent Nazis denying the last Holocaust, than the young, violent Muslim radicals planning the next one.
I had the pleasure of making a presentation as an expert witness to the U.S. Congress's bi-partisan human rights caucus today.
I didn't count, but I'd estimate that there were over 100 people there. I met quite a few readers of my blog, and even a donor to my legal defence fund -- what a warm welcome in a far away city! There were a surprising number of journalists, including Luiza Savage, Maclean's magazine's Washington Bureau Chief. And there were a lot of religious liberty NGOs, including those from the Bahai, Hindu and Buddhist communities -- including several in bright orange monk's robes.
As a Canadian, I had forgotten that, in the U.S., every Congressman (and certainly every Senator) has their own foreign policy staff. Many such advisors were present, as well as lawyers from the U.S. Department of Justice, the House Justice Committee, and the State Department.
My fellow panellists were impressive, especially the Turkish scholar whose specialty was documenting the treatment of apostates in Muslim countries, and the State Department lawyer who is the point-person in response to the international diplomatic campaign to have criticism of Islam criminalized. And -- very usefully -- the second secretary of the Pakistani Embassy was there. It was very striking to hear, directly from the source, the plans that Pakistan and the rest of the Muslim world have when it comes to censoring their critics through the twisting of Western legal apparatuses. It was like getting a glimpse at the other team's playbook -- and having our worst fears confirmed. Frankly, I was surprised that she showed up.
I'll get into more details in a later post; it was a fascinating discussion, and the question-and-answer session was particularly clarifying. But for now, allow me to post my prepared comments. I've put in bold a few of my favourite comments. If I had to think of my most important suggestion, it would be for the U.S. Congress to add Canada to its watch list of countries that abuse human rights like freedom of speech and freedom of religion. What do you think?
Thank you for that kind introduction, and for the invitation to be here today. It’s an honour to be asked to give a briefing at the U.S. Congress, and especially to the Human Rights Caucus. Your work is very important.
My expertise in the subject matter of today’s session was not acquired voluntarily, but by unhappy experience: I have been the subject of government persecution for my political and religious views for nearly 900 days. Unfortunately, stories like mine are not uncommon in the world. But they’re not supposed to happen in Canada, one of the freest countries.
In February of 2006, I was the publisher of a Canadian magazine called the Western Standard. We published a news story about the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, and the riots in the Muslim world that followed. To illustrate what all the fuss was about, we accompanied the story with pictures of several of those cartoons. It was a news story in a news magazine.
Before our magazine even hit the streets, a radical imam named Syed Soharwardy asked the police to arrest me – for blaspheming against Islam. The police didn’t, of course. But the Alberta “human rights commission”, a government agency, accepted Soharwardy’s complaint, and then an identical one from the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities. The government has been investigating me ever since, including summoning me to a 90-minute interrogation. According to access to information documents, no fewer than 15 bureaucrats are working on my case. I’m a major crime scene!
Since then, Canada’s largest news magazine, called Maclean’s – our equivalent to Time magazine – was sued in three different human rights commissions for writing about the demographic growth of Islam in the West. And the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, the largest newspaper in Atlantic Canada, is being pursued by Nova Scotia’s human rights commission for printing an editorial cartoon depicting a local Muslim activist in a niqab – even though that is how she dresses.
In other words, Canadian human rights commissions -- secular government organizations -- are prosecuting religious fatwas. It’s a soft jihad against any criticism of radical Islam. It’s called “lawfare”, and it’s a greater danger to our western values of freedom, religious pluralism and the separation of church and state than the hard jihad of terrorism is. Even if targets like Maclean’s eventually “win”, they lose; the process is the punishment – and the chill affects everyone else.
Canadian human rights commissions, however, are not respectful of the sensitivities of all religions. Less politically correct faiths are regularly prosecuted by them. This May, an Alberta pastor named Stephen Boissoin was given a lifetime gag order, never to say anything critical of homosexuality – not in a church sermon, not even in private e-mails. As well, in what can only be called a Maoist verdict, he has been ordered to renounce his religious beliefs, and to publish a self-denunciation in the local newspaper.
This is Canada we’re talking about. Not Iran, not China, not Cuba.
How did this happen? How did Canadians lose their rights, on the one hand, to criticize radical Islam, and on the other hand, lose their rights to practice Christianity?
The answer is a combination of good intentions and bad intentions.
The good intentions came from do-gooders who, thirty or forty years ago, set up these human rights commissions with the noble ideal of promoting harmony amongst different religions and races. But those good intentions came with the power of the law to censor people who said rude, even racist things. So it became illegal in Canada to say anything that was regarded as hateful, even if it was non-violent. We invented “thought crimes”.
The actual wording of the laws is to ban anything that is quote, “likely to expose a person to hatred or contempt”. Note the word “likely” – you don’t actually have to do anything wrong. You can be convicted for a “pre-crime”, something that hasn’t happened yet. And look at what’s illegal: causing emotions. Not real harm or damages. Just exposing someone to feelings. By the way, the truth of what you say is not a defence. And at the Maclean’s magazine trial last month, half a day was spent determining whether their jokes were funny. They even had a joke expert.
Don’t laugh – literally. Just three weeks ago, a comedian was ordered to stand trial for telling off-colour jokes in a night club. Warning to Chris Rock: don’t bother coming to Canada.
According to Alan Borovoy, of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, even a documentary about the Holocaust is against the law, since it could, possibly, cause people to have feelings of contempt for Germans.
At first, these thought crimes were targeted at people so odious, no-one spoke out in their defence. Neo-Nazis mainly – including an 80-year-old man named John Taylor who served 9 months in jail for having an anti-Semitic phone message.
We don’t like anti-Semitism or other bigotry; I certainly don’t. But instead of the traditional answer to offensive speech – more speech, better speech, truer speech – Canada took the easy way, and simply outlawed hurt feelings. Instead of doing the hard work of building a truly tolerant society, we thought we could wave a magic wand, and legislate bad feelings out of existence.
But legal precedents cut both ways. So, after thirty years of prosecuting people who were critical of Jews, now Canada’s human rights commissions are being used by radical Muslims to prosecute people who criticize radical Islam – and being used by gay rights activists to prosecute pastors like Reverend Boissoin, religious newspapers like Catholic Insight, and even the Bishop of Calgary, Fred Henry, for a letter to his diocese against same-sex marriage.
To paraphrase Father Martin Niemoller, first the human rights commissions went for the neo-Nazis, but I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a neo-Nazi. Then the human rights commissions went for the fundamentalist Christians, but I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a fundamentalist Christian.
Because we didn’t fight for freedom of speech and freedom of conscience for people who were hard to like, now we’re having to fight for those fundamental freedoms for ourselves. It’s always better to fight in the first ditch rather than the last one.
The legal onslaught against freedom of speech and religious pluralism continues. There are 14 human rights commission in Canada, employing 1,000 people, and with an annual budget of $200-million. It’s an industry, and it needs social strife to stay in business. So it positively drums up discontent. This spring in Alberta, 60,000 new immigrants were taught English as a Second Language using a workbook all about how to file grievances, including against un-funny jokes.
I’m pleased that a political backlash is growing in Canada. Across the political spectrum, from both the Liberal and Conservative parties, from newspaper editorials on the left and the right, and from NGOs ranging from EGALE, Canada’s largest gay right lobby, to the Canadian Association of Journalists, to the liberal Muslim Canadian Congress, public opinion is waking up to the dangers of these human rights commissions and their thought crime laws. The public is starting to revolt.
So why should Americans care? I can think of three reasons. And what should Americans do? I can think of two things.
1. Americans should care because Americans have always cared about liberty around the world, especially political and religious liberty. It is one of America’s greatest characteristics: a love for the well-being of other countries. Being a Good Samaritan is in your nature, and the world is freer because of it.
2. America should care because what happens in Europe and Canada soon comes – or tries to come – to the U.S. When it comes to censorship, we’re a laboratory for bad ideas. And the coalition between foreign trouble-makers and domestic busy-bodies is an idea that is spreading here, too.
3. Despite your First Amendment, human rights commissions are popping up all over the U.S.
The city of Philadelphia’ s “human relations” commission has a staff of 33, and a multi-million dollar budget. Last year, they prosecuted Geno’s Steak House because they put up a sign asking customers to order their Philly Cheese Steaks in English. We might agree with Geno’s sign or disagree. But to have a government agency prosecute them is a threat to the First Amendment. And, if it’s a steak house today, it could be a news magazine tomorrow. And if it’s do-gooders today, I can assure you it won’t be for long.
So what can Americans do?
1. The first thing you can do is what you always do: continue to monitor the erosion of freedom around the world, including through Congressional committees like this one. Publish annual reports shaming foreign countries for their abuses of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Put Canada on that list, to let our government know what they’re doing isn’t acceptable.
2. And rededicate yourselves to your First Amendment. Understand that the erosion of freedom doesn’t always happen with a bang – it can happen with a whimper. And that, when it comes to free speech, it’s usually unpopular people who are censored first. But if they can go for a neo-Nazi yesterday, it’s Geno’s Steak House today, and then a Christian pastor or a news magazine tomorrow.
I believe in a pluralist society where I can be Jewish, he can be Christian, she can be Muslim, and we all get along peacefully – we can agree to disagree about political or religious matters. The use of our own Western laws to crush such disagreement, and end healthy debate, is a threat to all of us, and the U.S. Congress should be on guard.
Thank you.
How about kids wearing the ubiquitous T-shirts of the murderer Che Guevara? Or even listening to the fading shock star, Marilyn Manson, named after a murderer?
And those are just my own political dislikes -- I'm sure some politically correct social worker will one day soon declare that wearing a cross is an "emblem of hate", and seize kids from Christian parents. And I bet the folks down at Dundas Square think Rosenthal's Star of David is an "emblem of hate", too,
The point here is that once we start to criminalize mere ideas - instead of real acts (or threats) of violence, it comes down to subjective politics -- and thus we're all vulnerable.
In that regard, Rosenthal is making the exact same error as Bernie "Burny" Farber and the Canadian Jewish Congress. They're tearing down our civil liberties to get at their enemies. But they're so short-sighted that they don't see that they're setting precedents for their own kids to be seized. We're starting to see the Islamo-fascists mimic the CJC in the human rights commissions, targetting their Zionist enemies like Mark Steyn and me. It won't be long before the CIC tries to mimic Rosenthal ("thanks for setting the precedent -- we'll take it from here!") to take kids away from Zionist parents.
By the way, swastikas didn't kill a single Jew in the Holocaust. The destruction of real civil rights did -- oh, like taking kids from their parents. Seizing children from society's dissidents is something Nazis would do -- just like book burning. Shame on Rosenthal and Burny for acting like those they claim to despise.
Here's a friendly review of the fight for free speech in this week's Eye Weekly, a Toronto magazine with an arts/left-wing flavour. A few excerpts from a great big article:
..Complaints were filed [about the Western Standard's publication of the Danish cartoons] with the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission, to which Levant responded politely — hoping that they could work things out. But the complaint by the Edmonton Muslim Council wasn’t going away, even though the Western Standard did, suspending its print edition — and annual boat cruises — last October, after losing around $4 million in four years of operation.
That opened a window of opportunity for Levant to investigate the investigators: for prosecuting the publishing of images of Muhammad, was the Canadian government facilitating the enforcement of sharia law? How could the 15 bureaucrats handling his file be experts in every field, as their jurisdiction required them to be? And why was he expected to take their opinion seriously?
...The curtain rose in January of this year, when his defiant appearance before a human rights investigator was filmed — and promptly posted online, putting Levant’s daily blog diatribes in context. The debate that sparked the complaint has been eclipsed by a different one, turning Levant into a foe of the Jewish status quo, which has historically availed itself of similar Canadian bureaucratic channels to shut down outlets for anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, he finds himself being supported by left wingers squinting to see beyond Levant’s well-cultivated partisan persona. “My personal temperament is that of a scrappy guy. I won’t say I don’t enjoy fighting back, but there are real costs involved with me doing this — even if I’ve received support on the legal side, there’s also the matter of stress, and time.
...Censorship of objectionable content seemed to be a recurring theme in Canada when material classified as pornographic would have to be physically imported across the border to be seen, heard or read. First they came for the art movies, then they came for the rap albums, then they came for the lesbian bookstores… and then, over time, dangerous artistic ideas were no longer put on trial.
When it comes to human rights commission tribunals on the editorial content of magazines, however, it seems the wake-up call is coming from inside the house. Like the earlier battles around border bureaucrats, the human rights commission fight, pivotally, is one of justice administered outside the criminal and civil courts. In human rights tribunals, unlike in hate crime or libel proceedings, the accused has no right to be judged by a jury of peers, no right to confront the accuser, no method of recovering legal costs in cases of frivolous prosecution, and none of the traditional defences for speech violations — fair comment and truth, notably — are available to defendants. If a complaint is deemed worthy of investigation, the tribunal becomes simultaneously investigator, prosecutor, judge and jury — a situation, critics point out, hundreds of years of constitutional tradition has removed from Western justice systems.
Levant feels his case deserves to be taken at least as seriously as the proposed amendment to Bill C-10, which threatens to withdraw tax credits from Canadian filmmakers who cross a moral line, resulting in protests from the arts community. Gradually, he’s gained support from organizations like PEN Canada, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and gay rights group EGALE — strange bedfellows for someone mostly recognized as a ranting neo-con stereotype. Yet he shoots down any suggestion that his world-view might be perceived as quirky.
...Omar Ha-Redeye, a 29-year-old University of Western Ontario student who contributes to the blog Law Is Cool — where human rights commissions aren’t being dismissed out of hand — feels Levant has abused his high-profile platform.
“The only distinguishing feature between this case and the previous ones is that the respondent has taken it upon himself to start a campaign against the human-rights commissions, rather than resolve it quietly and efficiently,” says Ha-Redeye. “Had he taken on the issue prior, there’s a possibility they would have summarily dismissed the complaint as a frivolous retaliation for his activities.
“The problem is that Levant has conflated this issue with other HRC issues, and quite deliberately. These commissions have done enormous good in Canada in the past — their informality, which he criticizes, is intended to provide flexibility.”
At the other end of the spectrum sits Denyse O’Leary...
“The commissioners strike me as middle-class busybodies anxious to meddle in anything they can,” she says. “Failed professionals who will blender into any area, and then assess that. It seems to me that they lack a sense of boundaries, and imagine that they can remake society into whatever they think it should be.
“No society can be free if being upset is seen as a source of harm. Part of being an adult is to deal with what upsets you. I see things that upset me all the time.”
And what Ezra Levant seems most upset with are the people he feels have betrayed him most — the “official Jews” who turned hate monitoring into a career, making celebrities out of people espousing unpopular views in far-flung places, like Hitler-loving First Nations chief David Ahenakew.
Leo Adler, director of national affairs for Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre showed up to heckle Levant, claiming that since the number of anti-Semitic websites based in Canada has gone from one to 8,000 over the course of 13 years, the law is therefore more necessary than ever. The quarter century separating Adler from Levant may well just be a generation gap, however. Does the power to post something online equate to actual power?
“The biggest problem is that people like him want to re-fight World War II,” says Levant. “However, the threat is no longer Hitler’s Holocaust — it’s Ahmadinejad’s.”
Remember, an attempt to make this point by republishing cartoons is what sparked this issue in the first place. The book that Ezra Levant signed a deal last week to write was spawned by his months of research into human rights commissions in Canada, putative experts in everything from public pot smoking, to transsexual labiaplasty, to the editorial content of magazines. Told he could solve his case with a cash settlement, Levant balked, and turned it into an investment in his public profile. But he insists that it’s not all about him. “The story is about human rights used as a sword to hurt people rather than shield them, and how there are massive abuses in this parallel justice system.
“I refuse to be the latest in an assembly line of people ground into powder.”
We've talked about Pearl Eliadis before. She's a member of the human rights jet-set -- a former director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, a woman who has seen the world on our dime, fighting against what she calls hatemongererers. Here's my introduction to Eliadis.
As I mentioned recently, she gave a rant at the luxurious HRC get-away the other weekend at beautiful Niagara-on-the Lake.
A friend has sent me a copy of her PowerPoint presentation, which you can view here.
It's the kind of thing that human rights grantrepreneurs love to do -- give a self-serving PowerPoint presentation to other human rights workers, in a five-star hotel, on the government's tab. I'd like to know how many thousands of dollars Eliadis got paid for that, on top of a lovely weekend by the lake, but I'll likely never find out.
Let me draw your attention to a few things in Eliadis's presentation that offer us a window into the mindset of the HRC industry.
Look at her description of the media response to recent HRCs' attacks on freedom of speech. She calls it "hysteria."
My first thought, of course, was to file a human rights complaint against her. Hysteria is rooted in the Greek word for uterus, and it was considered a women's malady. In other words, Eliadis is engaging in both sexism and able-ism. But I digress. I know what Eliadis means. Media hysteria simply means things she disagrees with. Just like "hate speech", means political ideas she disagrees with, and "discrimination" means Canadians' day to day choices she disagrees with. It's a lot easier to denounce someone as mentally ill (hysteria) or criminal (illegally discriminating) than to argue with them. That's a trick that Bernie "Burny" Farber knows.
But look at what she claims is hysterical: the use of the phrases "thought police", "convictions" and even "prosecutions".
But what else is the order from Alberta's HRC, telling Rev. Stephen Boissoin that he must renounce his religious views, if not the work of thought police?
And what do you call the issuance of such an order, along with thousands of dollars in punitive fines, if not a "conviction"?
And, to take my own case as an example, what is an 850-day, 15-person investigation by the government, if not a "prosecution"?
Is that really evidence of "media hysteria"? Or is Eliadis's name-calling simply her way of avoiding a difficult debate?
On her next page, Eliadis says that this subject has gone from "an interesting debate" to a "storm of controversy". I guess the difference, for her, is that what she called an interesting debate was when no-one was challenging her. Now that her arguments are being demolished by the blogosphere and mainstream media alike, it's mere controversy. Whatever gets you through the night, I guess.
On page 9 of her presentation, Eliadis tries to make the case for strict regulation of speech, claiming that it's "the most powerful human act". I suppose in an intellectual sense it is. But I'd say that murder is a more powerful human act. My point being, speech itself never killed anyone. The Jews of the Holocaust weren't killed by name-calling; the were killed when they were killed by violence. Their "right" not to be hated wasn't a real right. Their right to property, mobility, freedom of association, self-defence and ultimately to life were taken away. Speech couldn't touch them, other than their feelings, until Germany undid the real human rights protecting Jews.
Eliadis calls speech a "powerful weapon". But that is only true metaphorically, just like TV's "Crossfire" is not really a cross-fire, and a media "scrum" is not really a scrum, etc. Eliadis is being deliberately tricky; she is using a metaphor for violence, a metaphor for a true crime, to try to criminalize mere speech. It's a common trick, and you see it often with the mis-use of phrases like "gay bashing", which are used interchangeably to mean mere criticism, and actually physical "bashing". It's a deliberate attempt to blur the lines between words and violence. On page 11, she does this again, claiming that speech "poisoned" the environment. Again, poisoning someone is a real crime, which is why those words are stretched and misused to cover mere rudeness.
On page 13, Eliadis hints at her real agenda: hijacking and commandeering Canada's media, and subjecting them to HRC meddling. She wants "poisonous" -- hell, why not just say "murderous" while you're at it! -- speech in the mainstream media to lose its "immunity" from Eliadis and her group of would-be editors. She loved Rick Salutin's comment that "money controls the media", a Marxist complaint that seems touchingly quaint, in the era of the Internet. Neither Eliadis nor Salutin spring to mind when I think of the word "modern", so they probably don't know much about how the Inter-Webs work, but money is no substitute for good ideas, as the New York Times's shareholders are discovering.
As happens quite often, Eliadis reaches for foreign legal traditions when she wants to supplant our own legal traditions of liberty. Readers will recall that Ian Fine did so in his debate against me on CPAC -- he complained that we're out of synch with the United Nations -- run by such moral exemplars are China and Iran. So, too, Eliadis excuses her soft fascism by appealling to an obsolete, unCanadian foreign treaty, on page 14, claiming that we need to impose "special responsibilities and duties" on our media. Needless to say, those special duties will be in fulfilling Eliadis's world view.
Perhaps the most telling page in Eliadis's PowerPoint is on page 16. She is obviously referring to Mark Steyn, when she talks about Muslim demographics and "controversy entrepreneurs". That's quite a comment coming from a grantrepreneur like herself. Just a reminder: Steyn didn't file the complaints against himself that cause the "controvery"; the Canadian Islamic Congress did, and three human rights commissions humoured them. As a leftist might say, Eliadis is blaming the victim.
(I think the world needs "controversy entrepreneurs". To me, that means someone who helps the public work through controversial issues of the day. That includes scholars, the media, politicians, think tanks -- anyone who deals with spicy matters. The human rights commissions would shut down any meaningful disagreement over controversial matters. If that's the choice, I'm on the side of people who actually plumb disagreements, not paper them over.
But do HRCs actually paper over controversies? These days, HRC positively advertise for controversy -- whether it's Barbara Hall's call to have racial complaints "spike", or Alberta's 60,000 brochures teaching new immigrants how to bitch about life to HRCs. I think the real controversy "entrepreneurs", in the bad sense of the word, were in the hotel with Eliadis.)
But look at what she says then: it's largely irrelevant that Steyn's facts are true. If Steyn uses those true facts to "vilify" someone -- say, radical Muslim terrrorists -- he's still guilty of a human rights crime. Truth is not a defence. Eliadis compares Steyn to Rwandan radio stations exhorting murder. That's an execrable comparison -- Steyn has not been accused of inciting murder; again Eliadis blurs mere speech and violence. But, again, it wasn't a Rwandan radio station that killed people. It was soldiers with machetes.
Let me conclude as Eliadis does, with the quote she wanted to leave her fellow HRC activists with:
"there is no real freedom of speech if the media do not provide an outlet for other viewpoints more nearly equal to the outlet they reserve for their own."
Again, it's a Marxist comment; and it's hopelessly outdated in the era of the Internet. But it shows the lean and hungry eye with which the HRCs look at Canada's media.
I'm glad that every journalist in the country (except Bernie "Burny" Farber's friend, Haroon Siddiqui) gets it: they're coming for Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn today, and for the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star tomorrow.
UPDATE: A commenter or two points out that Eliadis engaged in outright fibbery in one of her PowerPoint slides. She claimed that, as part of the "media hysteria", the Ontario Human Rights Commission's guilty-verdict-without-a-trial was called a "drive-by shooting". Uh, no it wasn't. It was called a "drive-by verdict" (by Mark Steyn himself), which is actually funny, and true.
But that fact isn't quite useful enough for Eliadis, as she tries to portray her critics as violent, is it? So she amends the truth; changes the facts; and then presents it to her echo chamber of fellow human rights jet-setters. What a liar.
Fire. Them. All.
The Canadian Islamic Congress is back in the news, comparing Mark Steyn to James Keegstra, a convicted criminal and Nazi sympathizer.
Of course, it wasn't Mohamed Elmasry, the president-for-life of the Canadian Islamic Congress, who uttered that defamation. He doesn't like to talk to journalists -- they're too prone to ask him about his comments on national TV that any adult in Israel deserves to be murdered by terrorists.
It was Wahida Valiante, Elmasry's deputy.
She was speaking at a conference of Canada's human rights commissions, paid for by tax dollars.
Stop right there for a moment: the CIC, which currently has two live cases before Canadian HRCs -- the case that just finished a five-day hearing in British Columbia, and a pending case at the Canadian Human Rights Commission -- was on a panel at a conference organized and paid for by human rights commissions.
The CIC is still suing Maclean's. It is a party before two HRCs. And yet the HRCs invited the CIC as their guest -- surely paying for her expenses, if not an honorarium.
In other words, they invited one side of the lawsuit. They didn't invite Maclean's or Mark Steyn.
It's the moral and legal equivalent of a judge in a criminal trial inviting the police and prosecutors over to his home for dinner while the trial is still going on.
Such an act of bias would immediately lead to a mistrial, and disciplinary action for the judge. But that's real courts, and real trials -- you know, with boring old rules written by dead white men. That law stuff about being "neutral" isn't for kangaroo courts.
According to this report:
...Wahida Valiante, national vice-president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, said the commissions are the only recourse available to minorities treated unfairly in the media.
She repeated the CIC's complaints that membership in press councils is optional, and that criminal hate speech charges require the consent of the federal Attorney-General, which leaves human rights commissions as the only option.
She compared Mark Steyn, the author of the Maclean's article in question, titled The Future Belongs to Islam, to James Keegstra, an Alberta high school teacher who taught and tested his students on how Jews "created the Holocaust to gain sympathy."
"They basically talk about the same theories," she said. "This is not a civil dialogue."
She said that, in Germany, long before the Holocaust, "it was the words that set the stage for what happened later on.... We may end up with the same fate, and that is at the heart of why [the complainants] wanted to take this on."
It is staggering chutzpah for a member of an officially anti-Semitic organization like the Canadian Islamic Congress is, to invoke the memory of the Holocaust. The CIC are avid supporters of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who proudly brags about the next Holocaust, one that he's planning. And the CIC themselves endorse Jew-killing, as Valiante's own boss, Elmsary, told us on TV.
But put aside her Jew-hatred for a moment; and put aside the outrageous bias that the HRCs show by feting her at their conference.
She's comparing Mark Steyn to James Keegstra, a convicted criminal. She says that Steyn's theories are "basically the same" as Keegstra's neo-Nazism. I have no doubt that Valiante received applause from the assembled HRC bureaucrats, especially from the Muslim supremacist who works for Alberta's HRC, Arman Chak, if he was there.
Mark Steyn is a great man, with international success. He is invited to meet with presidents, prime ministers, kings and queens, with leaders of industry and media and charity. He operates at the highest levels. So it might not make sense for a man of his stature to stoop down so low as to file a defamation action against Valiante.
But I'd love to see that little Jew-hater on trial, explaining how Steyn -- a philo-semite and Zionist if ever there was one -- was "basically the same" as an anti-Semite of the rank of James Keegstra.
It would be a waste of Steyn's time and a distraction from his more important work. But I think it would be a useful missile into that anti-Semitic rats nest.
And: Steyn has a precedent to follow. Several years ago, Valiante wrote a similarly defamatory remark about Daniel Pipes, the American scholar who studies Islam. She said nearly the same thing about him -- claiming that he supported a Nazi-style genocide against Muslims in America. Needless to say, Pipes said no such thing, and the bigoted CIC, fearing a massive loss in court, agreed to publish an apology on their website, which you can read right here:
In the April 29, 2005 edition of the Friday Bulletin, the Canadian Islamic Congress and Ms. Wahida Valiante published on its website an article entitled Worth Repeating: Media Propaganda: Hitler, Bush and the "Big Lie". The Canadian Islamic Congress and Ms. Valiante apologize without reservation and retract remarks in the column that suggest that Dr. Daniel Pipes is a follower of HItler or that he uses the tactics of Hitler or that he wants to ethnically cleanse America of its Muslim presence.
Clearly, Valiante hasn't learned her lesson. Maybe it's time Steyn had a lawyer teach it to her again.
Today at my speech at the Jewish Civil Rights Association, I challenged Leo Adler of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to a proper debate. Considering he sat through about an hour of my monologue before being able to put a brief question in a Q and A session, you'd think he'd go for something a little more even-handed. I'd fly back to Toronto anytime to do it -- and I'm sure we'd get a helluva crowd. If 100 tickets to this event were sold on a couple of weeks' notice, I'm sure that a debate between the two of us could, truly, move close to 1,000. I'd be happy to donate the proceeds of such an event to a charity -- I'd pick Ken McVay's Nizkor project, because I care about rebutting Holocaust deniers, and I can't think of a guy who gets better bang for the buck.
Of course Adler won't debate me, though. He's not really into that sort of thing.
So why did he attend what must have been a frustrating, even demoralizing, event today?
Why did he pay money to listen to what must have sounded like fingernails scratching on a chalkboard for an hour?
Why did he suffer the gentle hostility of a room full of free speechers?
Because it's June. 2008, not January, 2008. In January, 2008, the idea of abolition the section 13 thought crimes provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act was unthinkable. Today it's being publicly advocated by federal cabinet ministers, and every media organ in the country from left to right.
Who knows? By the time December rolls around, by which time I expect true changes to be afoot, the bravest of the Official Jews might even deign to debate me. It's not something they're used to, but it's a very Jewish thing to do. They should try it some time.
I think that most conspiracy theories are merely attempts by people to seem more clever than they are -- or certainly more clever than everybody else. They're also a handy way to blame cosmic forces for one's own problems or misfortunes.
Jews have long been at the center of many conspiracy theories.
Including the conspiracy theory that Jews want to censor the speech of their critics.
Unfortunately, on that last one, the Official Jews seem eager to everything possible to make that conspiracy theory seem real.
The Canadian Human Rights Commission's "hate squad" has plenty of Jews, from Harvey Goldberg, to Ian Fine. Irwin Cotler, also Jewish, was a Justice Minister who eagerly prosecuted many hate speech cases. And, of course, many of the section 13 hate speech cases are packed with Jewish interveners -- the Canadian Jewish Congress, B'nai Brith and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. That's a lot of Jews. And even Athanasios Hadjis, the Greek tribunal chair, was in a formal political coalition with the CJC before his appointment.
In other words, as I said at lunch today, Canada's Official Jews seem to be trying their best to prove the conspiracy theory true.
This censorship cabal has certainly persecuted its political enemies, not just in the HRCs, but also under the Criminal Code provisions -- like Jim Keegstra, or David Ahenakew. As I said today, the Jews turned these nobodies into stars.
Men like Ken McVay of Nizkor are perfect antidotes to these conspiracy theories -- in his case, a Gentile volunteer who painstakingly rebuts anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
Men like the SWC's Leo Adler feed these conspiracy theories -- in his case, reflexively piling on to any political enemy of the Jews who is caught in some hate speech web.
I'm embarrassed that so many People of the Book are involved in high tech book-burnings. But I'm angry that they're doing so in my name, as a fellow Jew.
It's just a handful of Official Jews; most normal Jews I know are hostile to censorship. But when you call yourself the "Canadian Jewish Congress", you fool a lot of people -- just like something calling itself a "human rights commission" fools a lot of people, too.
NOTE: I've got to run to a meeting now, but I thought I'd put up a quick post about my speech today. I'll come back to edit and improve this later. But for now, here are my first thoughts:
I enjoyed my speech to the Canadian Jewish Civil Rights Association. So did many of the attendees, including other bloggers, commenters and donors to my legal defence. They obviously were supportive to begin with There were also a few undecideds; at the very least I gave them some new ideas to think about. And then there were a few hard-core censorship types there. Or at least one -- Leo Adler of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
I talked about the few Jewish experiments in censorship, and how each of them ended badly -- Caiaphas the High Priest censoring Jesus; Jewish participation in building Soviet Communism that then devoured them; and then Jewish use of Weimar Germany's censorship laws that were later deployed with gusto by Adolf Hitler.
Other than those examples, I really couldn't think of any Jewish censorship, because Jews, historically, have been victims of censorship, not perpetrators of it -- only natural, given that Jews have been a perpetual minority for two millennia.
I talked about section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, and how it is impossible to defend against. I talked about its bizarre "pre-crime" nature; about its attempt to regulate emotions like "hatred and contempt". I talked about how the Canadian Human Rights Commission itself propagates hate on the Internet, going online in drag as neo-Nazis, spewing bigoted venom.
It was a good, old-fashioned rant. And then came the questions.
There were some good ones; Michael Teper asked what would happen if human rights complaints were filed against Jewish rabbis who taught a Torah that called for homosexuality to be punished with stoning. It was a good question -- because that's pretty much what got Alberta's Rev. Stephen Boissoin a lifetime speech ban on the subject, courtesy of Alberta's HRC. And then there were some other good points, too.
I had just finished answering a question by referring to a recent meeting of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and how that group's supporters are not in favour of censorship, when Leo Adler himself, the boss of Canada's SWC, came to the microphone.
Not surprisingly, Adler didn't really have a question. That's fine; but it just wasn't the right forum for a debate. I had just given a 45-minute rip-snortin' assault on human rights commissions, and telling Jews not to use Nazi-like tactics of book-burnings against our enemies, but to take the approach recommended by most of Canada's gay lobby, namely to oppose censorship, even of offensive anti-gay comments. You just can't rebut that in a 30-second comment.
Adler went on for a few minutes, and I interjected a bit here and there. I think that some in the crowd were sympathetic to him, merely because I had used his organization as an example of what not to do for much of my speech. But taking over the Q & A session just wasn't the right forum.
I told him I'd debate him in a proper debate anytime, anywhere -- and I meant it.
Adler disputed that the censorship campaign of the HRCs was a product of what I call "Official Jews". He didn't like it much when I listed all of the Jewish lawyers in the room at the Warman v. Lemire hearing, and pointed out that non-Jewish interveners like the Canadian Constitution Foundation were refused standing (as was the Civil Liberties Association), both of whom happen to be against censorship.
Adler pointed out that the tribunal chair, Athanasios Hadjis is not Jewish. True enough, I pointed out -- but I noted that Hadjis had entered into a "coalition" with the Canadian Jewish Congress in his political life before he became an HRC "judge". That little skirmish really went nowhere.
But then Adler made my point for me, writ large: he noted that when the SWC started fighting against Internet hate, there was just one anti-Semitic website, and that now there are 8,000 of them. I think Adler was trying to prove just how big of a problem that is (though, in a world with a billion web pages, I'm not particularly alarmed). But I pointed out it did the opposite: if, despite destroying our fundamental freedom of speech, and building a jurisprudence of censorship that anti-Semites like Mohamed Elmasry are now using against Jews, Adler and company haven't been able to stop the proliferation of anti-Semitism on the Internet, wasn't that proof of his own failure?
I called Adler and his fellow "Official Jews" the super-agents who turned nobodies like Jim Keegstra and David Ahenakew and Ernst Zundel into international superstars. I pointed out that Weimar Germany's anti-hate laws didn't work either -- other than to give Hitler a head start when he took over. I just thought that summed it up perfectly: a man who claims Internet hate has increased 8,000-fold on his watch, but keep swearing by his high-tech book burning.
Adler sat down after a while, and I told him I'd love to debate him. I didn't have a chance to speak to him directly. But Wendy told me that she overheard Adler talking with a colleague, saying he'd never agree to debate me. "I don't debate liars," was what she reported he said.
I'm not lying, actually. Everything I said in the debate was accurate -- from the Official Jewish involvement in the censorship business, to the CHRC's own role in disseminating hatred online, to the RCMP and Privacy Commissioner's investigations of their hacking, etc., etc. I've probably read 5,000 pages of human rights information in the past six month, from rulings to affidavits to news stories. I think I'm better-briefed than Adler himself, who presumably does other things for the SWC besides work their censorship file.
Like Ian Fine, the hapless senior counsel of the CHRC who debated me a few weeks ago in Edmonton, I think Adler genuinely doesn't know just how rotten the CHRC and the whole "anti-hate" industry has become. Fine was clearly caught off guard in his debate against me, challenging me to "prove" one allegation after another, which I proceeded to do using his own CHRC documents. I think Adler would be even more poorly briefed.
But let's say I was lying. Why wouldn't Adler want to debate me? He obviously is concerned enough about me and my campaign to end his censorship to attend my speech. It must have been painful for him -- paying $20 for the pleasure of listening to me demolish the CHRC. Every time I cracked a joke that got a laugh, every time I made a point that got a collective "ah" or "hmm" must have irked him. But he sat through that punishment for the chance to try to challenge me.
He failed. The forum was wrong. But why wouldn't he like the proper forum? This very day the Toronto Star came out with a lead editorial calling for the abolition of the section 13 hate speech section. Clearly many people across the political spectrum are persuaded by the ideas expressed by me and others. Surely if we're all acting on lies, Adler has a duty to show the world the truth.
But he won't debate a liar.
And that's his problem.
I'm not a liar. But Holocaust deniers are. Many anti-Semites are, especially with their blood libels and other smears against Jews. Being a Jew -- or at least being a Jewish leader like Adler -- means debating liars all the time. It means taking the effort to show people the truth.
But Adler is above that -- whether it's a neo-Nazi, or little old me.
That's his problem. And, unlike the neo-Nazis he's censored in the past, I'm not going to shut up for him.
Ken McVay, the Gentile founder and operator of the wonderful Nizkor website, debates all Holocaust deniers he finds. He seeks them out -- and rebuts them with documents, facts, arguments and just plain hard work. That's less glamourous than getting the government to order your opponents silenced, but it works.
I don't know if Adler thinks he's above debating liars, or if he's too lazy, or if he's just not that good a debater, and he knows it.
You would think that a religion also known as The People of the Book wouldn't be much into book burning. Oh, I know that in 2008 our human rights commissions, and the Official Jews who support them -- the Canadian Jewish Congress, the B'nai Brith, the Simon Wiesenthal Center -- don't actually burn books. That's too 20th century. Now we order political deviants to to shut down their websites. And if the deviant is a Christian pastor, we order him never to send an e-mail or give a sermon.
I'm giving a talk today to the Canadian Jewish Civil Rights Association on the subject of free speech. I'm glad to learn from the organizer that the event is standing room only. To me that is a sign that grassroots Jews, normal Jews, Jews who aren't Official Jews, are increasingly offended by the pro-censorship line taken by our self-appointed betters. But, as I've said before, pretending that Bernie Farber of the CJC represents Canadian Jews is like pretending that Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress represents Canadian Muslims. More and more Jews look upon the likes of profesional race-hustlers like Farber the same way Clarence Thomas looks at Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton: Get a real job and stop embarrassing the rest of us. Or as we Jews would say, Stop being a shanda for the goyim.
Just tonight, a friend gave me a report about a major Simon Wiesenthal fundraiser, held in Toronto a few weeks ago -- their "Spirit of Hope" event, featuring former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former U.S. House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt, and CNN's Glenn Beck. Those are pretty big names, and other than Beck (on whose show I've appeared a couple of times) I wouldn't think they'd be following Canada's human rights commissions and their censorship laws.
My correspondent writes:
Glenn Beck said sarcastically "maybe I'll move up here to Canada" and Gingrich retorted "watch out, Glenn, if you do that the human rights commission up here will probably shut down your program and throw you in jail." (Paraphrase).
About half the audience exploded in spontaneous cheering, laughing and applause. No one looked angry or booed - I got the impression that the other half of the audience didn't understand the reference.
That confirms another report of the event, here.
What does it mean? It means that many Jews, even fancy society Jews, understand that freedom of speech is an essential Jewish value, and that censorship is an essentially violent and barbaric substitute. Censorship says: "I can't convince you, or I'm too lazy or worried to try, so I'll silence you by force." How un-Jewish.
As I've written before, disagreement and debate are woven into Judaism itself. The entire Jewish Talmud is an argument between two "houses" of thought. As Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, said, "the test of democracy is freedom of criticism." I can think of a half-dozen Jewish cliches and jokes that go to the Jewish love for disagreement and noisiness, and even offensiveness. "Two Jews, three opinions". Or, as the rabbi who introduced Mark Steyn at the Vancouver Hillel fundraiser two weeks ago said, "after Mark's speech, we'll have an answer and answer session".
The second thing to learn from that Wiesenthal dinner incident is that very serious people in other countries -- on both the left and the right -- are watching what is going on in Canada, and they are deeply unimpressed.
The third thing -- and this is my point, actually -- is that the Simon Wiesenthal Center, whose high-powered guest speakers trashed Canada's human rights commissions and whose well-heeled dinner guests applauded that trashing, is one of the most vicious interveners in Canadian Human Rights Commission censorship trials.
In other words, the SWC's boss, Leo Adler, is utterly disconnected from his own membership on the essential matter of free speech. Adler raises money from opponents of censorship to spend in the pursuit of censorship.
Surely, of all the Jewish groups intervening for censorship, Adler, with his focus on the Holocaust, should be the most sensitive to book burnings. But he's not. Perhaps it's some weird vengeance, some psychological therapy, some turn-around, where the Jews get to burn the Nazi books now. That's precisely the kind of immoral, unprincipled vengeance that some self-appointed gay activists are now indulging in, too, when they persecute Christians using the HRCs.
Here's another gay website that condemns the anti-Christian bigotry of the Government in Alberta, as expressed in that province's human rights order against a Christian pastor. I'm going to post the whole thing, with some of my favourite comments in bold:
What my gay brethren are doing in Canada is wrong, wrong wrong. I am compelled to side with the conservative Catholic, David Warren. In free Canada, Warren could have called me sinful; I could have called him an idiot; but neither of us could have silenced the other through prosecution. Stephen Harper’s Canada is no longer a free country. The “conservative” PM has failed to challenge and dismantle the left’s apparatus for thought control. Anyone who publicly deviates from multiculturist values can be legally persecuted at the whim of some twice-baked fruitcake. (Yes, I’m mixing metaphors today.)
Gays are in vengeful mood after centuries of abuse. I understand that. But they are fools to seek remedy in collectivism. Gays are few, and traditional cultures remain hostile. The only safety for deviants is a state that protects the individual. Collectivist gays aren’t the only minority exploiting the multiculturist courts. Islamists are busy establishing enclaves for Sharia. Once these have been secured, Canadian gays will be targeted for murder by Islamic extremists. Who will protect them? The ninnies in the “human rights community?”
Every word of that applies to the Jews, too. Are Jews -- everywhere a minority, everywhere "deviants" -- really going to be safer in a collectivist world, where the government has maximum power, or an individualist world, where every person has constitutional rights to be eccentric, dissident or even "deviant". It's a rhetorical question; Jews (and gays, and Blacks, etc.) know the answer already. There is always a low-level of illegal anti-Jewish, anti-gay, anti-Black violence. It's managed by the criminal law.
But the true butchery in history -- such as the Holocaust, which killed both Jews and gays -- has always been perpetrated by the state.
It's tough to gauge political momentum in Ottawa, especially from 3,000 kilometres away. But I think that the campaign to abolish section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the thought crimes section, is positively buzzing.
A lot of little things are happening at once, like vibrating molecules bumping up against each other. As Debbie Gyapong reports, Keith Martin has written to all the MPs on the Justice Committee, asking them not only to review section 13, but also the corruption at the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
(Here's a list of the Justice Committee's members. It's chaired by Art Hanger, the Conservative MP for Calgary Northeast. Why not take a moment to write to Hanger to encourage him to dig into the CHRC -- if I know Hanger, I don't think he'll need a lot of convincing. You can e-mail him here.)
At the same time, the mainstream media is fully engaged in the story of human rights commissions and their abuses. Reporters like Joseph Brean are now regularly tracking the story and weighing in from time to time (as in this newsy update, pegged to Mark Steyn's Toronto visit). And Peggy Wente continues her series on the subject with a devastating critique of Barbara Hall's latest adventure at the Ontario Human Rights Commission, on top of her last salvo about the CHRC's half-million dollar award to a sensitive wannabe mountie. Wente's column is read by a lot of folks who don't usually surf the conservative blogosphere.
Look for coverage to ramp up again in two weeks as Maclean's and Steyn head into trial at the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal. I predict front-page reporting in the National Post, the Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun, and editorials of thoughtful outrage from coast to coast.
Last week's new human rights complaint, filed against the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, will be an ongoing fountain of news stories and editorials, too. If there were still any doubters, this latest attack on the free press makes it clear that section 13 and its provincial equivalents are a menace to anyone with an opinion -- not just to "neo-Nazis" or "conservatives". The fact that this complaint, like the one against Steyn and me, was filed by a radical Muslim should also disabuse Canadians of some illusions. A crack in our national armour of liberty has been found, and the jihadists are focusing all of their attacks on it. Steyn has, of course, a must-read Maclean's article on this troubling trend.
There has been an interesting crescendo of legal activity, too. Maclean's magazine came out, all guns blazing, telling the Canadian Islamic Congress that they will never "settle" the CIC's complaint against them. In other words, when Maclean's loses at the B.C. Tribunal in two weeks, they'll appeal to a real court. Maclean's is the kind of litigant with the resources to go all the way to the Supreme Court. It was very encouraging to see them exhibit the will to match.
The National Post, too, joined the legal fight this week. Like Maclean's, they could have chosen to pay some danegeld to extricate themselves from Richard Warman's lawsuit; instead, they decided to fight. That decision was clearly a principled one, since a $10,000 settlement offer would likely have been all that was needed to get a relieved Warman to discontinue the action against them. The Post will spend much more than $10,000 fighting. It's impressive to see a display of principle like that. (Though it is pragmatic, too, in the long run. If the Post were to get a reputation as a legal pushover, there would be a long line of shake-down artists lining up at their door).
All of these things are happening around the same time; all of them are jiggling and jostling the molecules in this complex story.
But the chemical reaction really heated up when the Department of Justice released its outrageous legal brief in support of section 13. The kind of junk arguments in that memo -- that slavery and the Holocaust wouldn't have happened had there been hate speech laws; that the legal defences of truth and fair comment ought not to apply to "hate speech"; that Jews rely on hate speech laws for their self-esteem, etc. -- are the sort of thing one encounters all the time at human rights commissions. But what made this so stunning was that it was a memo written by two of the Justice Minister's own lawyers, Simon Fothergill and Alysia Davies, not some arms-length commission. These weren't CHRC nutbars. They were Rob Nicholson's own nutbars. And 50 pages really lets a guy and a gal express their nuttiness well.
That memo caused a buzz on my own website, spiking traffic, and not just from outraged readers (including appalled conservatives and Conservatives). Judging from my visitor statistics, plenty of folks in Parliament, the Justice Department, the Federal Court of Canada and various human rights commissions were very interested in the public reaction the memo got -- including that it got a public reaction at all. I understand that Blazing Catfur, who has done a particularly good job at rebutting the junk law in that memo, has received a spike in nervous visitors from both the Justice Department and the CHRC, too.
But the memo (which you can read here if you have the stomach) has caused a ruckus bigger than the blogosphere. I have had two reporters -- who haven't reported on HRCs before -- e-mail me to get background on the memo. One reporter -- to his credit! -- didn't even believe the memo was real, asking me for corroboration that it wasn't a "forged document". That's exactly how I reacted to so many of the insane details about the CHRC when I first encountered them: I simply didn't believe they were real. (I mean, if a Hollywood screenwriter came up with this, it would be rejected by test audiences with a "yeah, right!")
I'm told that Nicholson's memo has been e-mailed around Parliament Hill, not just amongst reporters, but amongst government MPs and even cabinet ministers. It has moved the embarrassment from the confines of the CHRC -- which could always be disowned as an arms-length nuthouse -- into the bosom of one of the most important ministries in the Conservative government. Simon Fothergill and Alysia Davies work for Rob Nicholson; they spoke in his name.
Put yourself in Nicholson's shoes for a moment.
Three months ago, when this issue was starting to percolate into his political consciousness, he put out some talking points for Conservative MPs, the purpose of which was to throw the hot potato to someone else. That's standard operating procedure for any government, let alone a minority government: put out fires, don't start them. Here is some of his spin:
The Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal are independent agencies that administer the Canadian Human Rights Act, according to procedures specified by the law, without interference from the government.
and
The Department of Justice continues to monitor the Commission and Tribunal to ensure that our human rights system remains effective.
But those talking points just don't work anymore -- it's not an "independent agency" that's in the mess, it's the Justice Minister, because of Fothergill and Davies.
And, when example after example of the CHRC's own corrupt processes are brought to your attention -- not just by the mere public, but by Keith Martin -- how do you still cling to this old talking point:
If asked about the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) and its process: Refer letter writer to the CHRC’s website which has very detailed information pertaining to its mandate, discrimination and harassment, dispute resolution and much more.
No, I think the problem has spread from the CHRC into the Justice Department. I think it's becoming an embarrassment that can't be sloughed off on others. HRCs are becoming denormalized -- and if Nicholson doesn't do something about them on his watch, he risks having his own government become tainted by them. I think he'll act -- even if it takes some gentle encouragement from caucus, cabinet and even the Prime Minister. It was Stephen Harper himself who, in 1999, told B.C. Report magazine:
Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society… It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff.
I think this campaign has momentum. And we haven't even heard from the Privacy Commissioner yet. I stand by my prediction that we will see real changes before the year is out.
Here is professor Alexander Tsesis.
He is the American professor on whom Canada's Conservative government relied so heavily in their 50-page legal brief in support of censorship.
You'd think that the Canadian government would be able to find a Canadian to make the arguments that Tsesis made, but it's hard to find someone who will shovel so much complete drivel with a straight face. I mean, how often do you come across this, written stone-cold sober:
black people would not have been the main victims of slavery in the antebellum American south without the support of extensive mass mythology about their alleged inferior qualities.
and:
[Hitler fomented] a mass delusion that Jews were responsible for bad times, and as a result, a Holocaust could be perpetrated against them without general opposition.
So Blacks were enslaved and Jews were murdered not because their real rights were destroyed by governments, but because of "mythology" and "delusion".
As I noted in my earlier post on this subject, it's no surprise that the only other political client that this moonbat has is Sen. Ted Kennedy. I wonder if Tsesis got that gig by writing a scholarly article that Mary Jo Kopechne died because those murderers at Oldsmobile didn't equip their cars with SCUBA gear.
It's not weird for Kennedy to hire an obscure leftist American professor -- birds of a feather, etc. But it's weird for the Canadian government to do so. They even repeatedly call him "Dr." Tsesis, though his c.v. reveals no basis for such a title. Maybe the team at the Department of Justice just wanted to hire someone who got his law degree at the Illinois Institute of Technology, just for the novelty of it.
So that's the Conservative government's expert.
By contrast, here is professor Anuj Desai.
Take a look at Desai's biography.
Desai doesn't have a contract with Sen. Kennedy to recommend him. But he does have a math degree from Harvard, an International Affairs degree from Columbia and a law degree from UC-Berkeley, where he was editor of the California Law Review. He clerked for two courts in Washington, D.C., and has worked or lectured in Taiwan, South Africa and Holland -- not to mention at the U.S. State Department.
For some reason, he couldn't find time to do what Tsesis brags about in his resume: writing the memorable A Snapshot into the life of a hobo, published in Xpressions. But not all of us are destined to soar with the eagles.
Why do I mention all of this? Because Blazing Catfur actually did some digging into Tsesis' scholarly reputation in America, and found it to be, uh, mixed.
The man the Conservative government loves so much that they gave him an honourary doctorate is considered to be a buffoon in his home country.
I'm not going to duplicate the excellent work that Blazing has done, which you can read here. Blazing wrote to Desai, who has torn Tsesis' work to shreds (or, as Blazing put it, New York Post style, "Tsesis' thesis torn to pieces"). I'll let you read it from Blazing directly. Maybe the first, very polite sentence from Desai's reply will tempt you to read the rest:
Go read the rest!
By the way, despite (actually, because of) the appropriately negative reception the Department of Justice's memo has received, I believe that we're winning this battle. In fact, the timing of the 50-page obscenity was perfect -- they had been working on it for more than a year; their filing of it now only serves to raise the temperature on the issue. In effect, it's a challenge to Rob Nicholson and the Conservatives by their bureaucrats: Who's the boss? I hear that's the Prime Minister's favourite thing to hear from leftist 'crats. We'll see.
Look, I know the concept of "the worse, the better" is dark. But that legal brief was the lawyerly equivalent of Barbara Hall's outburst -- a provocative, embarrassing, self-destrutive act from the other side of this debate. Legal briefs like that were going to be filed anyways; a hundred examples of this sort of thing has been happening for decades without anyone paying attention. Now we're paying attention.
Look at the reaction to it: I've received over 100 comments in a day to my post on the subject, precisely because it's so outrageous. And I imagine that the Conservative caucus -- and Nicholson and Harper -- have heard from 100 people, too.
The public pressure is building. I can't even keep up with all of the Op-Eds, news stories and radio interviews on the subject these days -- you've got to go to Free Mark Steyn to read it all. This is part of the denormalization.
The legislative reform will follow, as surely as politicians love votes.
I'll repeat my earlier prediction: I believe we'll see the first concrete steps towards reform before the end of 2008.
And, if I may daydream a bit, I predict that, in the future, it won't be the guilty white liberal Marxist "Dr." Tsesis who is hired by Canadian DoJ lawyers. It will be Professor Desai, a man of high scholarly achievement who, like Keith Martin, just happens to be more of a minority than Richard Warman, Dean Steacy, Barbara Hall, Alexander Tsesis or any of the other human rights hucksters out there who claim to speak for minorities.
Finally, Rob Nicholson, the Conservative government's Justice Minister, has weighed in on section 13, the thought crimes provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
He's in favour of section 13.
Here's a 50-page legal brief (3 MB file) his department filed, against Marc Lemire's constitutional challenge to that section.
I would sum it up as follows:
1. The Conservative government believes that the constitutionality of section 13 has already been approved by the Supreme Court, and so it shouldn't be questioned again; and
2. In any event, section 13 is a reasonable limit on free speech.
My two general responses would be:
1. In the 18 years since the constitutionality of section 13 was examined in 1990, the Canadian Human Rights Commission has taken a more and more abusive approach to its application, exceeding the narrow permission granted by the Supreme Court eighteen years ago.
2. The government's arguments that hate speech is the precursor to violence -- and that laws banning speech are necessary to prevent violence -- are absurd. They're logically false and they're historically false.
Read some of the junk history in the brief. Like paragraph 56, in which the government argues:
The triumphs of Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany through audaciously false propaganda have shown us how fragile tolerant, liberal societies can be.
Take a moment to absorb that sentence, and then think for yourself.
Nazism in Germany was odious not because of its "audaciously false propaganda", but because it murdered people by the millions. It's not the propaganda that killed the Jews; it was the fact that their property rights, their rights to self-defence, their economic rights, their mobility rights, their rights to life and liberty were taken away.
But look at the second half of that sentence: tolerant, liberal societies can be fragile. First, the Weimar Republic had within it the legal and constitutional seeds of Nazism, that Hitler exploited -- anti-hate speech laws being amongst them, and weak constitutional protections of real rights, too. But more importantly, what is the government's implication here? That tolerant, liberal societies are not strong? That, instead, we need the stern hand of a state political censor? Isn't that exactly the opposite of the lessons of Nazism?
It gets even more muddled. Look at paragraph 58:
...history teems with examples of times when lies, distortions and propaganda empowered groups like the Nazis to repress speech...
Read that again. The government is arguing that we should limit speech because we've seen how the Nazis could limit speech. Huh?
It wasn't propaganda that repressed speech. It was laws against speech that repressed speech. And those laws were passed by the Weimar Republic. But putting that aside, what exactly is the argument here? That we'd better ban speech first, before the Nazis do?
Paragraph 60 takes the cake. It's a list of examples of "violence" that the government says was granted "social acceptance" because of free speech. Black slavery in America is included in that list.
But slavery existed not because of White propaganda, but because Blacks were not given their rights. To focus on the propaganda isn't just ridiculous, it ignores what the real problem was: a lack of civil rights for Blacks. All the propaganda in the world couldn't enslave Blacks; free Blacks in the northern states weren't spared hate speech, just as Blacks everywhere in America today aren't, either. But besides being an offensive nuisance, hate speech can't enslave Blacks. In fact, the opposite point is the lesson of slavery: abolition came about precisely because of free speech, first in the UK and then in America. As Abraham Lincoln supposedly said to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."
Read paragraph 61 of the government's brief:
black people would not have been the main victims of slavery in the antebellum American south without the support of extensive mass mythology about their alleged inferior qualities.
Really? Is that all it took to enslave Blacks -- "mass mythology"? And without that, they would have been free? The same crock is served up in paragraph 62: Hitler fomented "a mass delusion that Jews were responsible for bad times, and as a result, a Holocaust could be perpetrated against them without general opposition."
Is that what happened? Hitler hypnotized Germany -- put them in some trance, some "mass delusion"? Just like the U.S. South was all living in some "mass mythology"?
If so, then why did Hitler have to pass the Nuremberg Laws? Why did he have to strip Jews of their real rights, if all it took to implement the Final Solution was some propaganda? Even medieval slave traders couldn't act without legal sanction -- the Vatican had to pass edicts in 1452 and 1455, etc., authorizing the enslavement of certain races. Even in the dark ages, men had natural rights that couldn't be taken away except for by government intervention. It's that government intervention that kills people, not the free speech of private citizens.
So who is this nut the government keeps quoting?
His name is Alexander Tsesis, a professor at a middling U.S. law school. Tsesis has two political clients: the Canadian Justice Department, and Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachussets, tied with Barack Obama as the most left-wing senator in America. Tsesis is a left wing kook -- but the Canadian government hangs on his every word.
When the government lawyers do their own reasoning, they're even fuzzier. Try to make sense of paragraph 109:
Propaganda against different religions and cultural groups encroaches on the freedom of Canada's diverse peoples to entertain their own beliefs, declare them openly without fear of "hindrance or reprisal" and to manifest them in practice.
What does that mean? That because someone says something mean about Scientologists, Scientologists are any less free to "entertain their own beliefs"? How exactly is one man's propaganda a "hindrance" to another person's faith? And how did the word "reprisal" sneak in there? We're talking about propaganda here -- mere words. We all agree that violence or other infringements on real rights should be illegal. So why is that in there, other than to scare people who don't know the difference between words and actions?
How about paragraph 113, where the government argues that censorship protects the "self-worth" of "the Jewish community". Really? Is that all it takes to give Jews self-esteem? And is giving Jews -- or anyone else -- self esteem the job of the government? And does that important goal trump someone else's freedom of speech?
Now let me state the obvious: the decision by the Justice Department to intervene was made before Rob Nicholson was the minister -- even before the Conservatives were the government. It was made when Irwin Cotler, the Liberal, was minister, if I'm not mistaken. Ever since then, federal lawyers have been beavering away in support of section 13, along with other tax-paid lawyers from the CHRC (and the gaggle of Jewish censors from the Canadian Jewish Congress, B'nai Brith and the Simon Wiesenthal Center).
Putting aside politics, if a previous Justice Minister instructed his lawyers to intervene in support of censorship, it's those lawyers' duty to do so until their instructions change. And, since the Conservatives have not yet changed course on section 13 -- or any other aspect of the Canadian Human Rights Commission -- it should not be surprising that Justice Department lawyers are still serving up the kind of junk history and psychobabble that is evident in this memorandum.
There are probably hundreds of cases in the bowels of the Justice Department that are ongoing from previous administrations. Most of them are likely non-partisan matters. But not this one -- this is intensely ideological.
It is the worst of politically correct, historically inaccurate, junk sociology, dressed up as a legal brief. It's the kind of stuff that radical law professors love. And it's precisely the kind of thing that Stephen Harper has been good at rooting out -- such as the awful Court Challenges Program.
I simply don't believe that a single member of the Conservative government, let alone the Justice Minister or the Prime Minister, would agree with, or even understand, the following passage (from paragraph 116):
"on a macro level, the general tone of society can affect the mind", and can lead to incivility and the "breakdown of community protection"
I don't even think the lawyers who drafted the brief even know what the hell that means. But they're just following old instructions, and they'll continue to do so until someone in the Conservative government yells "stop!"
I'd like to invite readers -- and fellow bloggers -- to go through the memo in detail. Give it a good fisking. Don't be intimidated by all the legalese; focus on the arguments, the logic, the history, the psychobabble, the plain old unintelligible political correctness of it.
And, if you happen to be a Conservative Member of Parliament, ask yourself: does this legal brief speak for the government? And, if you happen to be the Conservative Justice Minister, what are you going to do about it?
I attended the Canadian Race Relations Foundation conference on Friday. Other than Jason Kenney, the National Post's Kevin Libin, and me, there was only one white male in the audience of 100. I don't think I would have noticed such a thing were it not a foundation supposedly dedicated to diversity. I'll get back to that point in a moment.
More importantly, I recommend to you Libin's front page story in Saturday's Post about Kenney's speech, if you haven't read it yet. Some excerpts:
Jason Kenney, a Cabinet member and Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity, labelled "dangerous" the "illiberal tactics" employed by some activists in the name of tolerance.
"I think it's very important for those of us engaged in anti-racism efforts to ensure the tactics we use, the approaches that we take, are consistent with respect for the liberal values of the Charter of Rights, of the Canadian constitutional framework, of our democratic parliamentary institutions," Mr. Kenney told the crowd of about 100.
..."There is a large and growing debate about freedom of expression and the role of the human rights commission, and organizations that seek to use these commissions to deal with what they believe constitutes thoughts or opinions reflective of hatred or xenophobia," Mr. Kenney said. "I would also hope that we think long and hard about the central role, the foundational role, of such values as freedom of expression in our constitutional framework, and that we do not lightly undermine those constitutional values in our efforts to combat racism or hatred."
That's the toughest broadside yet aimed at Canada's human rights commissions. "Dangerous". "Illiberal". "Undermine those constitutional values". That's tough talk.
So far, it is still only talk -- but it shows a growing school of thought within the government: Canada's HRCs are out of control, and are paradoxically becoming a menace to real human rights, like freedom of speech.
That the cabinet minister in charge of domestic human rights and multiculturalism would call "anti-hate" activists on the carpet so publicly and pointedly is dramatic. In a way, it is as important as Keith Martin's private member's motion to repeal section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the thought crimes provision. Martin's motion is more precise. But, as a motion (as opposed to a bill), it is what lawyers might call obiter dicta -- a non-binding statement of opinion, not a change in the law. Martin's motion is a call for a Parliamentary rebuke of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Kenney didn't bother to wait for the vote!
(Have these two men even met on this subject yet? They ought to; at the very least, even if the Conservatives aren't yet willing to formally endorse Martin's motion, they should ensure that the motion actually makes it to a vote.)
The Post covered Kenney's main points well -- they were really the only news of the day. But there were a few things about the conference itself that, while not meriting the front page of a national newspaper, would surprise severely normal Canadians -- that is, the taxpayers who paid for the conference.
As Libin's article mentioned in passing, there was a question and answer session after Kenney's 45-minute speech. Not a single question was regarding his remarks about human rights commissions. Most of questions -- and both Libin and I were stunned by this -- were not really even questions, but hostile comments about the government's decision to boycott "Durban II". That's the upcoming sequel to the 2001 international "anti-racism" convention that descended into an orgy of anti-Jewish hatred that even the U.N.'s Mary Robinson, no friend of Israel or the Jews, called "horrible". I think at least three of the questions on Friday complained about Canada's decision not to attend.
Their questions to Kenney had a mild anti-Israel flavour -- two of the delegates on Friday actually complained about how much they have to hear about the Jewish Holocaust -- but it was nothing more than you'd see at a typical NDP convention these days. But then it hit me: they weren't bitching about Canada's decision not to go to Durban because they were anti-Zionist. They were grousing because the government's decision meant that their exciting, all-expenses-paid junkets to South Africa were cancelled, too.
If Canada sent a government delegation, Canada's "anti-racism" NGO's could go, too. If not, then not -- or at least not on the taxpayers' dime.
(By the way, can an NGO really be an NGO -- a non-governmental organization -- if it is organized, or paid for, by the government? Friday's conference wasn't for NGOs. It was for GONGOs -- government organized non-governmental organizations.)
The entire conference suddenly made sense to me.
Why had there been no heckles from the hard-left crowd when Kenney spoke?
Why had the foundation's directors and staff been so obsequious to Kenney?
Because they all depended on Kenney and his department for their grants and hand-outs. Did they really care about Kenney's ideological differences with them? Did they really care about his views on freedom of expression, or anything else for that matter? With a few exceptions, most of them didn't. They wanted to know why they couldn't go to their next junket, to have a week-long reunion at a five-star hotel in exotic South Africa with all of their other "anti-racism" friends from other countries.
Another question suddenly made sense: a woman of colour complaining to Kenney about how hard it was for minorities to get jobs in the federal government. (The answer, of course, is the public service's strict requirement for French-English bilingualism, especially at senior levels.) But she wasn't asking in the abstract. She was presenting herself -- and the rest of the room -- as candidates.
This wasn't a conference, in the main, of civil servants with cushy public sector union jobs. These were "anti-racism" grantrepreneurs -- people who had to hustle, every year, to liberate $50,000 or $75,000 from this government agency or that one, to keep going. They were what economists call "rent-seekers" -- or what Ayn Rand called "moochers and looters". Civil servants would have booed Kenney, because they already have secure sinecures. But these people don't.
That wasn't just my hunch. It was made crystal clear to everyone in the room -- especially Kenney himself -- by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation poobah who thanked Kenney.