It used to be illegal to mask your face in public in Vancouver

- because we had a right to live without unnecessary fear of the other. And maybe that bylaw, originally targeting the KKK, is still on the books, I'll have to check. Why is it so hard today for people obsessed with Western society's alleged victimization of various others not to understand that our others are engaging in potentially violent othering too? Anyway, this is just an introduction to George Jonas' latest in the National Post: Canada's medieval rights commissions

Canada's "human rights" commissars are ready. Having spent the last couple of years positioning themselves as our brave new multicultural world's vanguard against such reactionary traditions as free speech, they now feel it's time to extend their horizons. This year's target is the criminal justice system.

HRCs wish to be recognized as "experts." They're seeking intervener status before Justice Frank Marocco of Ontario's Superior Court, who is asked to determine whether a Muslim woman should remove her veil while testifying as a witness at a hearing in a sexual assault case.

Apparently the original presiding judge said yes, please, take it off. He didn't add, as I might have: "Remove it, dear lady, because you're now in Canada, and here it isn't our custom to try people on the evidence of masked witnesses."
[...]
Ontario Human Rights Commissioner Barbara Hall's troops are pawing the ground to be heard in the matter. Predictably, their view is that a believer's right to exercise her religious practices trumps the right of an accused to a fair trial. The way the law has evolved in Canada, they say, it's the courts' duty to accommodate outlandish customs. How could it be otherwise, when the vital right of a Muslim woman to be ritually veiled is balanced against a mere bagatelle, such as a man's rightoid to give full answer and defence to the criminal charges against him?

Ah, you're describing a Monty Python skit, someone might say. No, I'm not. I'm describing Canadian reality.

Here's an institution, ostensibly established to safeguard human rights, including, among others, a right Canada's Charter of Right and Freedoms calls fundamental, the right to a fair trial. Crossexamination-- "the engine of truth" as a legal cliche has it --is integral to a fair trial, and seeing a witness' face while testing his or her veracity is integral to cross-examination. Given this, what is there to say about "human rights" officials offering themselves as "experts" to testify that the right to a fair trial in 21st-century Canada takes second place to a medieval Muslim notion of feminine modesty?
[...]
Barbara Hall & Co. are masquerading as the defenders of human rights, the very rights and freedoms they're seeking to undermine.

Hall's commissars aren't demanding access to Judge Marocco's court as advocates for shariah. No, they're calling themselves experts on Canada's evolving law. They're not urging the courts to accommodate veiled Muslim witnesses, they're stating as their expert opinion that, as a matter of law, accommodating such witnesses is the duty of Canadian courts. In other words, they're trying to parlay their ideology of Advanced Matriarchal and Transsexual Multiculturalism into expertise on Canadian law. That's a fraudulent pitch, made under false pretenses -- at least, that's what I'd say if the judge asked me.

Battered "Human Rights" Kommissar Syndrome?

What will the "feminists" say to this admission from Barbara Hall, head of Ontario's "Human Rights" Commission (HT Catfur):

It was her response to Steyn's criticism of OHRC's silence on honour killings that shocked me.

"There are thousands of things that happen in the province of Ontario on a daily basis and we don't comment on all of them," she said.

But, I spluttered, women are being murdered.

"As I said, we are a small commission.

"There are many problematic things that happen in our community and we have to make choices because we can't respond to everything," Hall said.

So honour killings are merely "problematic"?

Here's a woman who's advocated for years on behalf of women's rights. She found time to crucify Steyn and Maclean's, but she's too busy to raise the issue of women who are being murdered over some hideous interpretation of "honour"?

Connect the dots...

It takes a village (because an entire country wouldn't stand for it...)

Edward Michael George: The Ministry of Love:

Of all the revelations to have come out of the MacLean's/Steyn/ Levant business, I find this to be the most horrifying by far.

...Well, that's the kind of effect it seems Barbara "human rights commissioner" Hall is having on all kinds of people. The photo of Hall accompanying the National Post story quoting her vile mission statement, was alone enough to set off a spike in passport applications, and inflate real estate prices in the free state of Arkansas by four percent, or so speculates a friend in the know.

But John Pacheco has a contender in the most horrifying revelation contest. After all, Hall is but a provincial boob/exorcist, in the manner of the true Toronto, the once aptly labelled "Belfast of Canada". Hall all too blatantly takes it upon herself to save the country from our racial and religious evils, and she blows extravagantly public about her heroic work. If she had her way, I dare say she'd ban the Loyal Orange Association and the Catholic church. I know it all sounds archaic, of things belonging in another era, but that's our point. Too much publicity will sink this racist ship.



Yet the true banality of evil, so banal and once hidden in bureaucratic backwaters that we're hesitant to remark, lest appearances deceive our somewhat innocent minds, not sure if the damning loss of governmental integrity, well displayed elsewhere amidst this unfolding "human rights" travesty, this historical shame on Canadian public life, is really all there in the strings of evidence Pacheco weaves together . The evidence is quite suggestive, but in need of proper questioning by a duly established commission of investigation, with subpoena powers. Nonetheless, I fear the shagginess of our "human rights" emperor's dress is clarified by Ezra Levant's re-presentation of the evidence.



It is now for Canadians to decide the hue of the shag. To this end, I commend your attention to Mark Steyn's fundraiser for the Freedom Five. Only in courts of law, with all sides duly lawyered, might our need for greater truth be served. God knows our politicians have so far proven largely too cowardly to stand up and openly investigate the "human rights" empire, this string of Potemkin villages standing in for a lost but yet salvageable civilization.