Official Jews and Levantian Jews

I attended the forum last night sponsored by the Canadian Jewish Congress, Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, and the Temple Sholom: Responding to Antisemitism: Are we too thin-skinned?

There may have been 2-300 people there - I didn't attempt a count - most of whom were Jews and I would guess members of the reform Temple Sholom. Almost everyone had reached middle-age and I was quickly joined by some (judging from accents) German Jewish ladies who put me me in nostalgic mind of my grandparents, people who could never solve the mystery of antisemitism in their day and who consequently didn't know whether to run away or remain identified with the Jewish community.

My feeling was there was an assumed consensus in the temple about the answer to the evening's official question. No, we are not too thin skinned, though the question was rarely directly addressed and there was no questioning of the question itself, which I see as acknowledging a little too openly the mindset of the “anti-Zionists” who accuse neurotic Jews of using their supposed victim status to do nasty things to the Palestinians.

Mark Freiman

First to speak was the CJC's national President, Mark Freiman (the CJC's CEO, Bernie Farber had also been scheduled to attend but, we were told, he is suffering from laryngitis and the doctor wouldn't let him travel).

Freiman began by lauding both the government of Canada for announcing that it will host an international conference on antisemitism and the Parliamentary coalition that has set itself up to study antisemitism. Clearly, Freiman thinks antisemitism is a growing problem. He then offered a little history lesson, pointing to various assumed causes of historical antisemisitm (economic, theological, etc.) reminding us of the day when pseudo-scientific “antisemites” were proud of coining the name and racial theory. But he left the ultimate nature of antisemitism unspoken, as an apparent mystery. Today, he says, no antisemite wants the name, and in polite society everyone wants to appear anti-antisemitic.

Freiman, who generally impresses as having the mind of a highly-disciplined, poker-faced, lawyer then offered one of his few moves to sarcasm, rejecting those who tell us today we only have to (not) worry about kooks and crackpots typing on the internet in their parents' basements.

Let me interject that this was a cheap shot at those who love the (is it originally Mark Steyn's?) “basement Nazi” metaphor. Our argument is that while having a “human rights” speech police is for various reasons a bad or impracticable idea in the age of the internet, there nonetheless really is a growing antisemitism given today's left-Islamist alliance focused, nominally, on hating Israel. We further argue that it is the likes of the CJC who, in encouraging the Canadian state to assume censorship powers, only have the courage or desire (like generals fighting the last war) to focus prosecution on the non-Islamic, i.e. poor white, anachronistically “Nazi”, margins of antisemitism, knowing full well the problems that would ensue if official Jews and official Muslims in Canada went full-tilt in trying to silence alleged Jewish and/or Islamic “hate speech”. This in turn leads to charges that the “official Jews” don't have the courage of their convictions, and by extension to claims that our “justice” on questions of freedom of expression in Canada is becoming dangerously arbitrary, guided by the whims of a political correctness that can always backfire on Jews.

But, as I say, Mr. Freiman speaks like a lawyer dilligently arguing his side of the case, not that Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act was the central issue of the night (though it was clearly closely under the surface of the discussion). One might keep in mind that anti-group defamation law has been a central concern of organized Jews in Canada; groups like the CJC have been leaders in lobbying for such laws, going back to the 1930s. And it appears it is the CJC's intent to focus the recent moves by Canada's government and Parliament, to study antisemitism, on the new forms of left-Islamist, or “anti-Zionist”, antisemitism. But after this study happens, it was not made clear to me if Freiman wants our so-called “human rights” or “administrative” law to be the lead agent in trying to shut up the new antisemitism on the internet and in other public media.

Freiman went on to suggest that anti-Zionists are telling the Parliamentary inquiry on antisemitism that its existence is not necessary. Freiman then suggested that the age-old hatred of Jews is always in search of an alibi. Judeophobia survives like an organism by successfully mutating over time.

Freiman then attempted to explain when criticism of Israel becomes a problem of antsemitism. Briefly, his point was that when this criticism of the state of Israel has as its intent, at least in part, to convey some more general comment about the badness of Jews or Judaism, to convey some lesson on Jewish evil, then “anti-Zionism” is just another example of antisemitism or Judeophobia looking for respectability.

Accordingly, Freiman says the CJC will ask for a “broad and realistic” definition of antisemitism by the Parliamentary committee, one that includes anti-Zionism; and it will seek measures to monitor, assess, and combat antisemitism, but he did not specify. He concluded that this is being done not because we (the CJC) are over-sensitive, but because we are asserting Canadian values of tolerance, decency, and intellectual honesty.
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Robert Daum

The floor was then turned over to Rabbi Robert Daum, the newly-appointed, founding director of the Iona Pacfic: Inter-Religious Centre of the Vancouver School of Theology, at UBC. Rabbi Daum, raised and educated in the USA, contrasted the lawyer Freiman by speaking like a postmodern liberal academic whose principle purpose in taking the stage is somewhat less to assert oneself in conveying a series of tightly logical propositions, than to assert the importance of our giving much consideration to some supposed basis on which all sides can fairly contribute to the debate.

One of Daum's main points was that we have to be sensitive to the difference between intentional and inadvertent antisemitism. Our response to antisemitism must be sensitive to context; we have good reasons to be thin-skinned, given recent historical contexts, but still we must try to get inside the mind or world view of the other.

Speaking about today's “political” antisemitism, evidenced in charges of “Israeli Apartheid”, Daum said we are witnessing a devolution of discussion into a dangerous Manicheanism of simple-minded black and white, good and evil. Daum on the one hand declared he is repulsed by the current focus on boycotts of Israel; but he is also repulsed by Jews who, in heated debate, call other Jews names like “self-hating” or “kapo”. For Daum, such names are a refusal of a Jewish need both to guard jealously the use of language associated with the Nazis and the Shoah, and to understand the genuine motivations of our political opponents and the true complexity of our conflicts. The discourse that reduces all to a battle of heroes and villains is the central problem of our times, for it is only from within such a mindset that one can find the reason to excuse, for example, suicide bombing as simply a “misdemeanor” in a larger “heroic” struggle.

Daum thus, in supposedly rejecting binary thinking, falls into the postmodern trap and performs a yet bigger binary: that which pits the sensitive postmodern discourse theorist – Daum recommends we read the work of Bernard Harrison – against the simplistic Manichean. The message is ultimately Utopian for, in fact, there is no escape from binary thinking but only a perennial challenge to deepen our understanding of its basis in the origin of language. But I'll try not to use this reporting as an excuse to lecture on this central point of Generative Anthropology.

Daum then discussed the recent devolution, at Kelowna, of the United Church of Canada's national congress into a discussion of “Israeli apartheid”. He suggested that a need to respond to this was one of the motivating reasons for the evening's forum. However he then blamed the UCC fiasco only on fringe elements within the church and on rules that allow a single local presbytery to circulate egregiously offensive materials and resolutions.

He then made some comment which I did not entirely catch, about how the circulation of hate speech was a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the Shoah. He concluded by invoking the need to embrace “teachable moments”: when people within or without our (jewish) community inadvertently shame our community we need to respond not with arched backs but with an eye to building mutually respectful personal relationships.
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Philip Bregman

The moderator for the evening, Temple Sholom's Rabbi Philip Bregman, then took the floor joking that he was less kind that Daum; “if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...”

Rabbi Bregman then told a story about how he had just taken Barbara Kay's recent column on the rising antisemitism in Canada with him to the local Jewish day school. He said the column provoked from the students their own stories of antisemitism. He suggested this was something quite new in recent memory. Vancouver kids had in recent decades not reported, or only occasionally reported, antisemitic incidents to Bregman. And yet all of a sudden this week he had heard from five students, with more hands raised in the class, who had received antisemitic slurs. Bregman said these insults came from kids from a variety of racial backgrounds. He typified the incidents in terms of a tussle on the hockey rink or basketball court which results in a charge of “dirty Jew”. I thought he was probably re-presenting the actual language used: how many kids in Vancouver today would know to preface Jew with the classical “dirty” and not, say, the f word? One can imagine perhaps only those raised in particularly clean-obsessed religions, or with “old-fashioned”, Jew-as-market-cheat, antisemitism; but Bregman suggested his recent experience is evidence that the new antisemitism is a widespread political agenda “filtering down” now to youth. In any case, the invocation of the “dirty Jew” left me with the impression that something ritualistic was going on, whatever the basis in today's lived reality for the ritual's re-performance tonight.

Robert Matas and Barbara Yaffe

Two Jewish journalists were then invited to the podium to offer their own thoughts, partly in response to the prepared presentations of Freiman and Daum. First off, Robert Matas of the Globe and Mail revealed a deeply conciliatory intent, though as with Daum, I don't think he can escape from binary thinking. He did not deny the recent rise in antisemitism that the Parliamentary committee is discussing, but he also noted official statistics that suggest a decline in specific hate crimes, of which Blacks in Canada are twice as often the target as Jews (on a per capita basis?). He remarked on how the Calgary police, in responding to recent antisemitic graffiti attacks in that city, were notably pro-active in denouncing this vandalism as hate crime. He suggested this reveals a new sensitivity in Canada, one partly attributable to the efforts of the CJC.

He then went on to defend the media against accusations of bias, particularly in regard to reporting on Israel. He suggested there is a great desire among his colleagues to be neutral and accurate and to get the story right, though he had to admit that the number of corrections his paper has had to publish, concerning stories on Israel, suggested there was often incompetence, which is not to be confused with antisemitism; the corrections also reveal a genuine desire to get it right. He was not happy that the media are accused of bias when they do their job, as he understands it, in providing a range of opinions on Israel. He suggested that when Jews shout “antisemitism” at the media, it just sounds to journalists like name calling, and it is thus counter-productive. Many "ethnic" communities have declared war on the media he said, but like Obama declaring war on Fox news, doing so only hurts them in the battle for public opinion. The solution, he suggested, is for people to engage the media which in turn will just hold up the mirror.

I will leave it to readers to judge to what extent such a journalistically orthodox desire to escape the binaries of us and them is self-deceiving.

Next up was Barbara Yaffe of the Vancouver Sun who was the only speaker to confront directly the question posed in the chosen title for the forum. She said we Jews have exactly the right thickness of skin, apparently well-adjusted by experience. She suggested that in her 30-plus years as a reporter she has encountered no community that is as sophisticated in dealing with the media as is the Jewish community.

And yet she said there is no question that Israel is vilified in this world - and so also in the media, a listener might assume - way out of proportion to its size as a country.

Speaking in point form, she said the challenge for the Jewish community is to know where to draw the line with legitimate criticism of the media. What is at stake is freedom of speech, and a Jewish community appearing to attack this freedom in combatting antisemitism could be the target of a serious backlash. We must be very specific where we draw the line, though she did not go into details.
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Questions

There was then a little time for questions from the floor. Questions had to be submitted, handwritten, on pieces of paper the organizers had provided and they were then filtered and handed to the speakers; only a small number of the submitted questions were asked.

Mark Freiman answered two questions, the first dealing with what is legitimate criticism of Israel. Freiman suggested any criticism that entails, as its likely solution, that Israel commit suicide or lose its specifically Jewish identity, needs to be rejected as antisemitic. He then answered the only question on the topic that is probably of most interest to readers of this blog. The questioner said s/he had been convinced by attending the recent Jewish Book Festival (i.e. Ezra Levant's presentation - see my piece here) of the need to do away with Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, and for Canadians to rely only on the criminal code to police hate speech.

Freiman replied by saying the Human Rights Commissions and the criminal code serve two different functions and target two different problems. He argued that the criminal code is designed to punish the evil doer and hence it has the highest evidentiary and procedural standards to insure protection of the innocent. On the other hand, “human rights”, and/or “administrative” law is aimed at the message itself (not the messenger) and is meant to condemn misuses of our public media and means of communications. He said explicitly that the purpose of the HRCs is not to punish but to denounce hateful messages.

Those who have been sent through the HRC kangaroo court mill and fined and suffered court orders that they not speak publicly, forevermore, on certain issues, would no doubt laugh bitterly at such a bald statement of legal theory that paid no respect to actual experience with the inevitably corrupting, i.e. politicized, attempts to apply such a law. But it was not clear if Freiman was offering a comment on the history of the HRCs or on the future direction the CJC will be lobbying for, as if it might one day be possible to have HRCs that don't punish those they target. He acknowledged there are difficulties and problems with the HRCs, but then seemed to discount these by saying there are problems with the courts as well. If we get rid of Section 13, he said, we give up our commitment to combat hateful messages.


I will take this last statement as the moment to offer some concluding observations on the event. It will seem ridiculous to many "free speechers" for someone to suggest that we necessarily give up our commitment to combat (illegitimate?) resentments, or “hate”, if we give up Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. One can be publicly active in denouncing and marginalizing sundry hatreds, without desiring for there to be an ultimate state arbiter deciding - only G-d knows how this could ever be done apolitically - just whose resentments deserve public denunciation and whose not. But that Freiman said this, to this kind of forum, in all sincerity, and, I suspect, touched a chord in doing so, is something we should maybe consider in the spirit of Rabbi Daum's call to get inside the head of the other.

What those of us who are battling against the existence of Section 13 inevitably confront is the nature of Jewish experience, and some of its established “common sense”, which has something to do with Barbara Yaffe's observation that Jews have the most sophisticated forms of “ethnic” organization in Canada. I am talking, I suspect, about a common sense rooted both in modern Jewish historical experience and in the very founding nature of Judaism itself.

Historically, Jews have of course lived as the other, as the minority within various societies. But this, in my understanding, has not been simply a two-way relationship of majority vs. minority, but a variously triangular relationship in which Jews have often had to contend, and sometimes ally, with either or both the aristocratic and official, or the plebeian or popular elements and resentments in their society.

Now is not the time to attempt any serious historical analysis, but i'll just note that in the experience of Jews in Western Christian nations, there developed from the eighteenth century the opportunity to become enfranchised co-participants in secular national cultures. Jews could now identify not only with Judaism but with a shared secular high culture. While the potential for scapegoating violence and discrimination that the Jews faced often came not simply from either aristocratic/official or from plebeian elements, but from both when it became convenient for the system as a whole to attempt to bond itself against “the Jew”, especially the jew of the marketplace (a bonding in which some secular Jews, or nominal converts to Christianity, like Karl Marx, attempted to participate), Jews could not simply live nonchalantly with a “pox on both your houses”. One had to place bets with one side or another.

Inevitably, as Jews became educated and had access to bureaucratic jobs in Western Europe, they were more likely to associate with aristocratic and official elements within their societies, and perhaps more often with high, and not popular, culture – and they could, indeed, in their often highly educated, and idealized procedural neutrality, be variously useful to those official elements. At the end of the day, it may be that no one is going to save you, as the rise of the Nazis demonstrated; but in the Europe of old, I think Jews did sometimes have a better chance of being saved from antisemitic violence by having a relationship with official society than by attempting, as perhaps did many a Jewish communist, the more difficult challenge of transforming popular culture away from its antisemitic resentments (of course communism had ambitions to also control high and official culture and not just popular culture).

In any case, respect for the law, and not so much for unconsidered popular resentment, is fundamental to Judaism. The point being, historically many Jews have had little reason to put their faith in nothing but a free-wheeling freedom of speech. It was not a realistic, immediately available, option in most places outside North America.

Still, I am one of those of who can't but look at the Nazi experience as proof of anything other than the idea that Jews may only be safe in a society that goes out of its way to maximize individual freedom, even if this means having to keep the state away from policing hate speech, and spending our own individual time and energy to encourage other individuals to take up the task of defending each other's freedom. Accordingly, one wonders how well does the founding logic of the secularizing, state-associating Jew of Europe work in the context of modern North America? I think a study of the Canadian Jewish Congress might allow one to claim that something of the attitudes of middle-class German and perhaps English Jews was transferred to North America in its development of an “official Jewry”.

I observe a speaker like Mark Freiman and genuinely admire his mind but it is nonetheless clearly the mind of a lawyer. If there is a problem, he looks for a legal solution, just as Rabbi Daum looks for an academic solution to the problem of antisemitism. I am not sure, whatever arguments the Ezra Levants of the world put in front of the Freimans that the two are ever really going to connect in a shared common sense, or whether that is necessary. A “Levantian” might try to invoke the idea that the only real solution can come within a maximally free civil society, with unfettered free speech. But, as I am suggesting, this is deeply counter-intuitive to one kind of Jewish experience rooted not just in modern history but perhaps in the very nature of Judaism itself.

To be a Jew is to carry the sign of the people who, depending on whether you favour a religious or an anthropological account, were either the first chosen by God, or the first to discover fully, through their own humanistic genius, the (idea of) the One God. The Jews were thus the first to define, or systematically explore, the idea of there being fundamentally only one kind of (human) Being, however variously represented that Being is by different cultures. Jews took a lead in transforming the polytheist understanding of our humanity. But, the point is, as Eric Gans argues, they could only do this, and remain Jews, by assuming a certain kind of legalistic identity.

What does it mean to remember Moses' revelation on Mt. Sinai of the G-d who does not offer his people a name to be called, but only a paradoxical statement: I am what I am?

If I take on the task of communicating my understanding of the meaning of that revelation to the entirety of humanity, I might well think that it best that I become a Christian for therein lies a means or reason to evangelize the world and not just my fellow Jews. But while Christianity may be a fine and great thing for most people, one that genuinely furthers the Jewish revelation, if I, as a Jew, take that route, do I entirely remember the human nature and meaning of the Mosaic, or indeed any, revelation into our common humanity? Does remembering the nature of this or any story well require there to remain some Jews walking about on this earth?

This is the paradox that every Jew has to face. It may well be – I believe it is – that essential to the meaning of our discovery of the one God, or his equivalent role in a secular anthropology, is the knowledge that someone had to go first in signing a covenant with this God, or someone had to go first in making more systematic what can only be intuitive, unstated, in the polytheist world - the idea that there is ultimately only kind of human Being, and a purely transcendent God who can't be named and invoked at will to change our fate in the worldly world as we seek, in our conflicts, to gain the upper hand over other children of God.

In short, in order to say "we're all the same", someone has to go first, someone has to be different, refusing, unlike everyone previously in human history, to have a special name for G-d.

Jewish chosenness is not a sign of G-d's favouritism; Jews believe, with experience, that they will be both rewarded and punished according to their conduct in keeping the covenant and that their G-d is eveyone's G-d. Rather, chosenness is fundamentally a sign of G-d's willingness to restrain himself, in order to make a deal with humans, and hence to assert the fundamental nature of human freedom to discover a world that need not be understood as infused with unknowable animal spirits.

Humanity will forget something about that which happened at Sinai – someone being chosen to go first - if everyone becomes a Jew or everyone a Christian, or Muslim. Jewish survival is a living reminder of the distinctive nature or burden of firstness, a reminder that is realized or renewed through the various distinctive forms of Jewish identity today. It's not particularly heroic this identity, but generally a simple sign of faith in the given law, as the basis of freedom through learned discipline that the humanly-consistent Creation offers to us. There are thus "official Jews" and their supporters who genuinely believe in the possibility of a "hate speech" law that could be administered in a way that treated all people equally, without politicizing the definition of unacceptable speech, without these laws being one day corrupted and used to promote antisemitism. I think they're wrong, but sincere.

As noted, the keeper of the sign of firstness, a Jew, cannot be an evangelizing knight or a soldier of Allah without ceasing to be a Jew. Since he cannot readily be a dashing hero to the gentile, Jewish identity often takes refuge in respect for the law, a sign of solidarity with both fellow Jews, and humanity. But today a Jew can also remember the lesson laid down at Sinai by furthering the spirit of Exodus and discovery for all humanity by involving oneself in the opportunities the secular world provides for going first in some new kind of human discovery, be this in science, the arts, the law, etc.

In any case, whatever you think of my analysis, one of the claims made a few times at the forum is that we need to attend to the problem of communications as it is so easy for miscommunication of our genuine intent to occur in passionate debates over antisemitism. And it is perhaps true, as I have been suggesting, that there are not a lot of ways for Jews to speak, as Jews, to the rest of humanity without risking a slippery slope on which they might stop being distinctively Jewish and disappear in a common, forgetful, mission to evangelize the world. Thus the Jewish community, while involving itself today in all arenas of civil society, tends, when it looks for a representative Jewish voice or position, to defer to the learned and to the law, to an “official Jew”. Ezra Levant, in contrast, may be good example of someone who is remembering Sinai by extending the meaning of Exodus in our times.

An inclusive perspective may entail realization that neither the Freiman, nor the Levant, can simply do away with the other if we are to sustain Jewish identity. This may be a paradox we cannot solve, which is a happy realization for an irresolvable paradox is one that never dies; but if so, it is a paradox with which we will simply have to fight, hopefully in productive ways, forever.

So perhaps Jewish organizations, by their very nature, are always going to attract lawyers who are going to tend to seek legal solutions to the problems they feel they have to confront. And so there needs to be “Levantian Jews” to question “official Jews”, forever. The happy thing is, every Canadian gets a vote on the issue currently in play. Contact your MP and tell him or her what you think of Section 13 and whether we need government to police antisemitism, and by extension any other form of prejudice some group may hold against you, though of course we could have "hate speech" laws that targeted only antisemitism. I wonder how well that would work.

UPDATE:
Don't miss Jonathan Narvey's pre-forum comments.

Do you have a question for Jennifer Lynch, Head, Canadian "Human RIghts" Commission?

If so, check out BCF's post for ideas on how to send them along to the Parliamentary Committee that may yet have her as a witness:
Blazing Cat Fur: Questions for Jennifer Lynch of the Canadian Human Rights Commission on Section 13 (1)

I think your questions should provide the Committee with documented information and not be too pointed about what they must ask; give them some room to come to their own understanding of the scandal. So far, I am so unimaginative, all I can come up with is: "Ms Lynch, when are you going to put a stop to the racism at the CHRC in respect to Section 13 prosecutions?"

Get out (of) your pens!

Blazing Cat Fur (Arnie) reminds us:

The CHRC has mounted a Kamikaze effort [in appealing the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal decision in Warman v. Lemire, which declared Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act unconstitutional] to defend the odious Section 13 (1). It is imperative that we ask those organizations who support 13 (1)'s repeal to seek Intervenor Status in the upcoming judicial review of Warman v. Lemire .

Do your bit, write the organizations listed below, where appropriate ask if they plan to seek official status at the judicial review, offer to assist if at all possible with a donation. Nag Harper, nag Nicholson nag your MP, nag the members of the Justice Committee. Send a letter to the editor of your local daily, or write your favourite columnist.

This is your fight, take a swing and make it count for Free Speech. Let our opponents know that we will not negotiate and we will not beg for what is rightfully ours.

Blazing Cat Fur: Rally the Troops for Free Speech - A campaign for intervenor status in the Judicial Review of Warman v. Lemire

Now Marc Lemire, for all his work in uncovering the outrageous police-state-cum-loony-tunes conduct at the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission may not, on his own dime and lawyer's mind, be able to put forth the best, or most complete, of legal briefs as to the inherently unconstitutional nature of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. (I say inherently because if taken to heart, no people could actively covenant, in the basic human logic of constitutionalism, with a law over their heads saying they could be legally accountable - fined or banned for life from discussing certain topics - for merely saying something that in future might be construed as making some group look bad...) What's more, Lemire's personal history, his involvement in white nationalism, does not make him the best poster boy for convincing liberals that our "Human Rights" act is not itself a tool in the fight against totalitarianism but is rather an example of what Charles Taylor calls "nomolatry" or "code fetishism", an idolatry that becomes itself a form of scapegoating violence through a lust to identify and punish various social losers/code breakers whose words in some far corner of the internet are built up into horrendous thought crimes to serve the desire for a righteous war against black-hatted evildoers.

So, there is a need for other parties to intervene in the CHRC appeal of Warman v. Lemire. And to that end, we need to be encouraging, with letters and potentially dollars, those organizations to which the court might grant intervenor status. Cat Fur has addresses; he even suggests we write the fans of Section 13 to tell them politely to give it up! Faith in our constitution of citizen self-rule Cat Fur has; let's catch and iterate his sign. Put your name to a letter.

Blazing Cat Fur: Rally the Troops for Free Speech - A campaign for intervenor status in the Judicial Review of Warman v. Lemire

Canadian "Human Rights" Commission to appeal Warman v. Lemire

However, what the courts think of Section 13 is less and less important. Canadian public opinion, as reflected in the MSM and on the internet is heavily opposed to Section 13. As such, the law cannot stand in a free society and representative democracy, as long as the political parties continue to hide from the debate and refuse to make a public and election issue out of what is only a political hot potato if you are among those who fear you must pay the moral blackmail of the institutionally-entrenched, but not representative or responsible, victimary left.

It remains to be seen, however, which agents of the state will recognize that they live in a free society and representative democracy. If the government has had any role in encouraging the CHRC to appeal the Warman v. Lemire decision, it needs to be denounced for its inability to make a public stand and/or take responsibility for changing what is widely and rightly perceived to be an atrocious law. If the CHRC is appealing on its own initiative, it's time these power-hungry bureaucrats were shut down.

Canadian Human Rights Commission :: Resources :: What's New

PuOrwell

Even a genius like Orwell could not have imagined Canada in the age of the "Human Rights" Act. The latest news is that the Canadian Human Rights Commission, in an apparent purification ritual, is now investigating their erstwhile crusader, Richard Warman, for hate speech, not apparently moved by the recent decision of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal that the hate speech section of the Canadian Human Rights Act is unconstitutional. Instead of turning on themselves, questioning their own self-righteous conduct, disbanding, and seeking redemption for their years of working with those who post hate in order to better prosecute the websites they have targetted, the CHRC crowd now seems to want to investigate the long-persecuted Marc Lemire's claim that Warman posted hate speech on Lemire's white nationalist site. It looks like Warman, the logical outcome of a law that allows busy bodies to police speech that might one day promote "hate", must become the regime's scapegoat. How ludicrous does this all have to get before the government has the courage to take a stand and shut all this nonsense down?
CHRC investigates Richard Warman for hate speech - Ezra Levant
Blazing Cat Fur: I love the irony but I really don't want to see Section 13 (1) rehabilitated

Canadian Human Rights Tribunal Refuses to Apply the Law

While the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has no authority to make constitutional rulings, Athanasios D. Hadjis has nevertheless ruled, in Warman v. Lemire, that he will refuse to uphold that part of the law, Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, that deals with "hate speech" given the Tribunal Member's own personal understanding of the Charter of Rights and of the Supreme Court's Section 13-affirming Taylor decision. Hadjis is washing his hands (not only of the bad law but perhaps of his own previous involvement in the invidious "human rights" game) and kicking the can to the politicians and, possibly, the higher courts. Will freedom of speech in Canada be served by the ultra-cautious PM Stephen Harper (Mackenzie King the II) or by the power-hungry Michael Ignatieff (the wannabe Trudeau the II). Now that Ignatieff is stating a blanket refusal to vote with the minority government in Parliament, Canadians may have to pick their Prime Ministerial poison in a fall election.

Canadian Human Rights Tribunal

[290] In my view, it is clear that Taylor's confidence that the human rights process under the Act merely serves to prevent discrimination and compensate victims hinged on the absence of any penal provision akin to the one now found at s. 54(1)(c), as well as on the belief that the process itself was not only structured, but actually functioned in as conciliatory a manner as possible. The evidence before me demonstrates that the situation is not as the Court contemplated in both respects. Thus, following the reasoning of Justice Dickson, at 933,one can no longer say that the absence of intent in s. 13(1) "raises no problem of minimal impairment" and "does not impinge so deleteriously upon the s. 2(b) freedom of expression so as to make intolerable" the provision's existence in a free and democratic society. On this basis, I find that the Oakes minimum impairment test has not been satisfied, and that s. 13(1) goes beyond what can be defended as a reasonable limit on free expression under s. 1 of the Charter.
[...]
V. Conclusion
I have determined that Mr. Lemire contravened s. 13 of the Act in only one of the instances alleged by Mr. Warman, namely the AIDS Secrets article. However, I have also concluded that s. 13(1) in conjunction with ss. 54(1) and (1.1) are inconsistent with s. 2(b) of the Charter, which guarantees the freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression. The restriction imposed by these provisions is not a reasonable limit within the meaning of s. 1 of the Charter. Since a formal declaration of invalidity is not a remedy available to the Tribunal (see Cuddy Chicks Ltd. V. Ontario (Labour Relations Board), [1991] 2 S.C.R. 5), I will simply refuse to apply these provisions for the purposes of the complaint against Mr. Lemire and I will not issue any remedial order against him (see Nova Scotia (Workers' Compensation Board) v. Martin, 2003 SCC 54 at paras. 26-7).
"Signed by"
Athanasios D. Hadjis

He "simply refuses"; that has the nice ring of civil disobedience, doesn't it? But will anyone in government try very hard to notice? In any case, I think a tentative "congratulations" to all those who have been fighting Section 13 is in order.

Blazing Cat Fur of course is keeping track of all the relevant links

Human Rights Tribunal does not have the arrogance to police elected politicians

But one wonders why this wasn't obvious to the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission that put this case to the Tribunal. (I'm just guessing that there are people who think it their profound ethical duty to try to pass judgment on all and sundry, and hence to rule the world, in the unimpeachable name of "human rights".)

The Canadian Press: Human Rights Tribunal dismisses discrimination complaint against former Sask MP (HT: Walker):

SASKATOON — A Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has dismissed a discrimination complaint against a former MP who distributed political pamphlets that included messages such as "Stop Indian Crime."

Jim Pankiw sent other similar messages to his Saskatoon-Humboldt constituents in 2002 and 2003 in taxpayer-funded mailouts called "householders" that are issued by MPs.

His pamphlets included comments that linked some aboriginals with higher crime rates, lack of accountability for crimes, extortion, blackmail and terrorism.

Complaints were filed against Pankiw that argued the pamphlets would be likely to expose aboriginals to hatred and contempt.

The tribunal ruled that the mailouts are not subject to the Canadian Human Rights Act because they do not provide a service to the public but rather to MPs by allowing them to share their political views with constituents.

"Not all discriminatory conduct is caught by the act," the tribunal wrote in its ruling, released Friday.

"The tribunal finds that the three householders in question sent by Pankiw are not subject to the provisions of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Accordingly, the complaints have not been substantiated and are dismissed."

Pankiw was not immediately available for comment.

The three pamphlets in question called for the end of hiring quotas, court sentencing provisions, hunting and fishing rights and tax exemptions for aboriginals. The pamphlets also said treaties should not be valid in modern times.

One pamphlet, titled "Stop Indian Crime," showed a photograph of the Oka protest in Quebec in 1990. The caption under the photo described an aboriginal protester as a terrorist.

Daniel Poulin, a lawyer for the human rights commission, said since the pamphlets aren't subject to the act, the panel was unable to consider whether Pankiw's statements were objectionable.

"The tribunal did not look at the actual content of the statements or the householders," Poulin said from Ottawa.

"It's a complex decision. It is a difficult issue, and its deals with whether the pamphlets are a service under the act. It is a very unusual case."

The tribunal noted the act states that communication-related discrimination is limited to statements that are transmitted by telephone or over the Internet. It does not apply to parliamentary householder pamphlets.

During a hearing into the complaints last fall, Pankiw told the tribunal he simply believes aboriginals should not be given special treatment by governments or society.

"You can't discriminate in favour of someone without discriminating against someone else. Discrimination is wrong," he said. "I am an egalitarian. I believe in equality of all people."

Pankiw gave as an example the case of a woman he knows who didn't get into law school because a certain number of seats were set aside for aboriginal students.

Moon report

The bottom line is that the Canadian Human Rights Commission's hand-picked investigator, law professor Richard Moon, is recommending repeal of s.13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. His argument is mostly pragmatic, mostly in dialogue with the wording of past legal decisions and existing legislation and international "human rights" codes. While seeing various practical limits to existing law, the Moon report, not surprisingly, does not provide any kind of serious challenge to the reigning orthodoxies of postmodern thought, what some of us call the "human rights" world view.

While recommending repeal, Moon also recognizes that Jenniffer Lynch and the rest of the gang at the CHRC need not promote his recommendations to government, and so he has provided them with a variety of alternative arguments, such as changing s. 13 so that "hate speech" cases under the Human Rights Act will be dealt with more like criminal prosecutions, and encouraging Internet Service Providers and Press Councils to do more on their own to police and silence what they deem to be hate speech. The impracticalities of such suggestions are already being noted.

I want to finish reading the report before commenting further. Many other bloggers are already providing good first reactions to the report. If I can add anything it will be after a leisurely read and an analysis of Moon's way of thinking through the human problem of "hate" and the reasons why humans need freedom of expression.

You can find the report here (pdf), summarized by the CHRC here.

Deborah Gyapong has many useful posts up, including response from Ottawa politicians, as does Jay Currie. Looking at the impractical side of Moon's recommendations is Mark Steyn.  Meanwhile, Ezra Levant is analyzing Jennifer Lynch's response as an attempt to throw Moon's report under the bus.

Sadly for this blog, Blazing Cat Fur sees this to be a moment of apparent victory and thus time for a blogging hiatus. She has worked with amazing energy to provide us daily coverage of the "human rights" and free speech debate, often attracting the unwanted attention of disparate traders in hate and victimhood, and my best wishes go out to her.
-------------
On the other side of this debate, Bnai Brith has issued a press release (via email):

TORONTO, November 24, 2008 – B’nai Brith Canada has reacted with mixed reviews to the release today of the Report to the Canadian Human Rights Commission Concerning Section 13 of the Canadian Human Right Act and the Regulation of Hate Speech on the Internet prepared by University of Windsor law Prof. Richard Moon.

“Doing away with section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act governing hate speech, a key suggestion put forth by Prof. Moon in his Report, would be a step in the wrong direction,” said Marvin Kurz, National Legal Counsel to B’nai Brith Canada. “However, we do favour in principle the type of middle approach also outlined by Moon, which opens the door to necessary reform of the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

“The Moon Report proposes amendments to both section 13 and the Criminal Code that have the potential to dramatically alter existing standards for combating hatred. A careful review of the recommendations of the Report and their potential public policy implications is essential before any action is taken.

Thoughts on Warren Kinsella and Bernie Farber's arguments in last night's Michael Coren show debate on free speech and Section 13

Unfortunately, video of last night's Michael Coren show debate is not yet up on the internet, as far as I am aware. I saw some of the debate, a friend's clip, featuring mostly Warren Kinsella talking. And so here are some general thoughts on how I would approach Warren Kinsella's and Bernie Farber's arguments in favour of retaining Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Basically, Kinsella and Farber's arguments are only convincing if you assume a certain context for them. Their arguments, as most people know, are rooted in the response to the Holocaust, to the assumption that the normal culture of a normal modern Western society is not only capable of, but there is a sizeable risk of, turning into the kind of society where every class and profession will make its willing contribution to building the next Auschwitz.

If we lived in that kind of society, we wouldn't be having this debate about "free speech", in the first place. But if I thought we did live in such a society, I wouldn't hold quite the same positions I hold. (Most obviously, I probably wouldn't be trying to argue with the state, but rather undermine it or run away.) So it seems to me that our debate ultimately rests on how we apprehend our shared reality today.

K & F's post-Holocaust assumption is that our differences - all those for which "discrimination" is supposedly outlawed in Canada's "human rights" codes - are non-negotiable, except by the judiciary and in the highest backrooms of the government. It is a belief in the impossibility of normal society itself dividing the things or issues at stake, a belief in a non-negotiable indivisibility that affects so many of our debates, from abortion to schooling to employment law to "hate" speech.

Yet believing we do live in such a potentially genocidal society has all kinds of negative implications for those who must defer to Kinsella's and Farber's expert class, instead of fighting things out in freer less centralized arenas. It makes all of us less free. And ultimately that is the challenge we need to put to people: do you realize that only greater freedom can solve certain kinds of post-postmodern problems - the problems now posed by our previous "solutions" to the Holocaust - and that we are not in the 1930s? If we live forever with Farber's thoughtless "genocide starts with [bad] thoughts" then we can be sure that we will remain trapped in a world where all kinds of discussions can't be had. To question gay marriage, e.g., is to threaten a queer Holocaust... But how is such an understanding really liberating for anyone?

And so K and F should be questioned not largely in some abstract philosophical world but in terms of pragmatic realities in Canada today. (That is what K and F's opponents in the debate, Noa Mendelsohn Aviv and Mike Brock were starting to get at in the clip I saw.) I don't think you can tell people whose lives are genuinely threatened to grow a thicker skin; but you can tell people that there are many downsides to playing the group whose lives are ostensibly threatened - as if that's the only way your leaders and patrons can get "heard" - and who are thus in need of the state to put a chill into their "enemies".

Taking this step almost guarantees these opponents will become enemies and not potential interlocutors in a debate that can hope to find a basis - i.e. the ongoing debate whose healthy existence continually renews the basis - for mutual co-existence, either nationally or internationally. It may be true that there can be little accommodation or dialogue with those who hold to some more primitive understandings of what is sacred and non-negotiable to their group. But to the extent there is any hope for finding something sacred that individuals in a free society or global economy can share and divide, we don't get anywhere near there under our present victim-worshiping discussions and regulations in Canada, it seems to me.

Kinsella is the quintessential liberal, with a great faith in implementing expert/"judicial" processes to mediate problems of "hate". That sounds good to a lot of people because it is what we have been told for a century or so now and especially in the last forty or fifty years. But it is not enough to defer to the experts; at the end of the day there has to be some acknowledgment of reality: can our experts and "judges" today really achieve the task the Kinsellas want them to achieve? Do their careful processes get results? Do they create a sense of justice? Or do all the best laid plans no longer work? Does justice appear arbitrary and political no matter how much careful mediation is attempted? Does justice become indebted to a need for victims to wave around?

Many of us in Canada today no longer have faith in the post-war system. That's the reality. The basic problem, as I see it, is that our expert class mediation - e.g. mediation of some words alleged "likely" to harm - in pretending to appear fair and disinterested, actually requires highly involved and interested "investigations", i.e. bureaucrats engaging in lengthy politically correct talk sessions, in mediating a now politicized law, that go on for years and never really provide a sense of just closure. Offensive words by nobodies can take up years and millions of taxpayer dollars. All kinds of writing is chilled because no one knows if they can say what they want to say, e.g., about Islam as a political religion. If all the experts and "human rights" officials in Canada can't help us transcend the debates and conflicts we're having, which I think to be evidently the case on many issues of "multiculturalism", then we need a new way of mediating our rivalries. But it will take some shared good faith to go there.

When Kinsella offers an emotive argument - "what about the kid who comes out of his house and finds a racial slur on his mailbox"? - I would say well that kind of thing should probably be dealt with under the criminal law of making threats, or possibly vandalism. But for Kinsella to then drop that personal context and go into the abstract world where we should prosecute anyone who makes racially derogatory comments on the internet is to say that a) we believe there really is a threatening "normal" and potentially Auschwitzian culture out there (except this time the state is on the good side), and not just a few mentally ill or terminally resentful people best ignored; and that b) the members of racialized group x cannot but escape their racialized status and stand up as free individuals not too worried about the racists out there and not wanting a victim-championing cure that is worse than the disease. But that all depends on the reality out there in Canada today; and that is what we have to make the Kinsellas debate.

But in order to really win that debate we have to do more to use this debate in a way that is truly liberating for all involved (keeping in mind that some sacred things, in certain political religions, just can't continue to exist and be at peace with the modern world that now sustains us all). We too have to argue in ways that help us move towards creating the reality in which fear of Auschwitz makes less and less sense; that is what the present debate should really be about. Debate on section 13 needs to become the sign of a new and freer shared order that we are ever trying to build.

The other side only wants to trap us in a limbo of fears. Kinsella and Farber want to throw out red herrings like "what about child pornography?", knowing full well that people will allow for those who have, say, certain literary fantasies, but will not stand for those who abuse children. Ultimately these invocations of an evil that, according to K and F, needs a new and improved expert/speech limiting class to redeem the expert/speech limiting class of the Nazi state, are shoddy ways to make an argument about our shared reality. It is to ignore, most of all, that Auschwitz required much more than bad words: it required a people committed to a state of total war against some imagined evil. Auschwitz may have started with the first guy to hate Jews, but it required World War II to really happen.

It is not enough to invoke that first moment of hate as a justification for state action, especially since resentment of the other is a universal human necessity or inevitability, fundamental to our fallen human reality. We need also to be worried, rather more worried, about justifying the state's righteous calls to war against "the normal" - that evil other within us all. That is what the other side in this free speech debate is doing. They are the righteous (Kinsella's manner on tv is rather supercilious!) defenders of the state and expert class against evil norms. So I'd argue it is they who are taking the first steps to the next genocide. Yes, that's (only) a little hyperbolic, but at least I'll admit it.

I call Farber and Kinsella's position as potentially conducive to genocide in order to insist on some proper symmetry in our claims on a sacred, but I believe infinitely divisible and exchangeable object of common national interest - individual freedom. We need that symmetry to allow for the truly free exchange we can have without undue fear, and that I have faith will best mediate both side's present fears. Kinsella and Farber don't want that symmetry; they want to be the superior experts of a tv-mediated elite with a privileged access to and role in defining the sacred things of our nation. They want to patronize and institutionalize a victim class in the name of "human rights". Time to move on.

Something you're not likely to see at just any party convention

People voting overwhelmingly for the freedom inherent to real human rights; their number included the Justice Minister, Rob Nicholson (whose department has until now been producing some horrendous legal arguments in defense of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act):

From:Stephen Taylor - a blog on Canadian politics » Blog Archive » Rob Nicholson on section 13a

More from Ezra here (one of his friends counted 99% of the floor in favour of the resolution) and here.

Support Resolution P-203: Repeal Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act

A lot of bloggers did some quick work, co-operating in the kind of loosely organized freedom that the internet encourages, to put together a flyer for this week's Conservative Party of Canada convention in Winnipeg. At the convention, a resolution (P-203 - pdf here) proposed by the Victoria and Kelowna-Lake Country riding associations, calling for repeal of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, will be discussed.

My great thanks to all the bloggers involved. And a vote of full support from Covenant Zone (where at least a few possible CPC votes are up for grabs!) for any and all motions to repeal Section 13 (and the provincial equivalents).

Here are some jpegs of the flyer (click to enlarge).





Anyone wanting more in this line might check out the leaflets (here and here) we handed out at the Maclean's/Mark Steyn trial before the BC Human Rights Tribunal.

Notes from the Lemire trial: Warman woes

Today sees closing arguments from Marc Lemire's defense. Free Dominion continues to live blog. Here are some excerpts from FD's blog that I found of interest (may update later). First, in respect to the "immigrant poem" which is apparently one of the key pieces of evidence that the CHRC has used to charge Lemire with hate speech, Lemire's lawyer Barbara Kulaszka is arguing, in respect to the CHRC's Hannya Rizk:

Rizk was asked by Richard Warman not to tell Lemire about JR Books Online because he was going to go to the police about JR Books Online. He did that, and Rizk testified that she regretted not telling Lemire. She testified that it was Warman that gave her the training in how to do those searches. Other commission employees were surprised to hear this, because that was not Warman's job to give her the training. This corrupted the whole investigation because this was Rizk's first Section 13 complaint and Warman seems to have had too much influence over Hannya Rizk.

Rizk should be in independent investigator. It is outrageous that the complainant was teaching her to do the investigation.

In response to Hadjis' question about why Lemire didn't complain to Federal Court about the Commission's conduct, Kulaszka said, "If Mr. Lemire was a multi-millionaire, I'd be very happy to go to Federal Court".

Lemire registers domain names for people.

In cases where whois data has been used in tribunals, there has always been corraborating evidence.

Just before the hearing, Lemire was served with two large CDs with material from JR Books Online.

Without corroborating evidence, you should not find that Mr. Lemire is liable under Section 13 for JR Books Online.

The submission is that no prima facie case has been made, and Lemire has no case to answer.

Hadjis indicates that he wants Barbara to address the abuse of process.

The immigrant poem is a posting on the Stormfront website. It was allegedly printed off by Warman on the same day it was allegedly posted. URL does not show Stormfront, it shows an anonymizer called the-cloak.com.

Hadjis asks if this was in the original complaint, and she says it was not.

Hannya Rizk testified that Warman told her about the Canadian Immigrant Poem June 21, 2004. He laid the complaint in November 2003, Lemire learns of it the end of March 2004. In the meantime, Lemire took down the messageboard (before he knew of the complaint). Rizk wrote a memo that she could not access the board and it was disclosed when she brought the file to the hearing.

Barb presumed there was a little bit of panic because the complaint was "slipping away on them". In June, 2004, he comes up with the Immigrant Poem. Rizk gets notice of the poem in June, but it was allegedly printed in February. It was not revealed to the respondent for nearly a year.

He was given no opportunity to give his side of the story. The report was simply made recommending that the matter go to tribunal.

Rizk went on the Stormfront website, but she was never able to find the poem. In her report, Rizk states that the investigator's search did not reveal the poem, however, the investigation showed that Lemire was a member. When asked why she included it in the report, then, she replied, "To show what Mr. Warman had given me!".

This shows the undue influence that Warman had over Rizk. Bernard Klatt also looked for the poem in 2006 and he couldn't find it. The archives were part of the searchable database.

Hadjis: Is there an inferrence to be drawn that the poem was never there?

Barb: Mr. Warman's credibility is sadly lacking. Her job was to find the poem and she went there and couldn't find it. He doesn't even allege that it falls within Section 13, but she still included it.

When asked why he used the-cloak, Warman said he didn't remember...sometimes he used it, sometimes he didn't.

Her submission is that it should not be found that the poem was posted on Stormfront by the respondent. Even the url was not on the poem, it was just the-cloak.com. There is no prima facie case.

If you find that the poem was posted, I would submit that there was nothing wrong with that poem. If this poem comes within Taylor, what else is going to be caught. It is a satire. A commentary on the state of immigration. No person is exposed to hatred or contempt with Taylor by this poem.

Mr. Warman ran off this poem (he says) on the very day it was posted. Who could be exposed to hatred when he ran it off and it was gone. Who was going to be exposed to hatred or contempt?

Barbara suggested that there is no evidence that the poem was there for more than one day.

Taylor ruled that there had to be a series of messages, not just one message where a 100 people phoned in. There had to be a series of messages to show that they were using this public utility to promote hate propoganda. That is the problem when you get a whole series of precedents set by cases where people are unrepresented, or they don't show up.

The immigrant poem was posted on lots of sites that were not "neo-Nazi" sites, and it criticizes Canadians for allowing unfettered immigration.

Marc Lemire has 409 posts on Stormfront, yet Warman only had one posting by Marc Lemire that he entered as evidence (the immigrant poem). Out of all of these postings on Stormfront, Warman could only find one that allegedly falls within Section 13, and it is a poem that you can find on Discover Vancouver.

Warman's posting on Stormfront have already been found by a CHRC investigator as violating Section 13. It was not just one message, it was many messages. The complaint was dismissed as being vexatious, but the investigator did find that Warman's posts on Stormfront and VNN fell under Section 13. Taylor sets a very high bar, and the immigrant poem does not meet this test. It as also not been proven under the balance of probabilities that it was posted by Lemire, and there is no proof that it was there for more than one day.

And later from the other Free Dominion blogger, fourhorses, we read:

Kaluszka

showing that Warman was relying upon everything on Freedomsite

Lemire's application for Rogers opped to by Warman and the Commission

The Commission and Warman restricted what was going to be on the tribunal, which then dropped the Anne Cools posting.

Application allowed by Hadjis
Warman brought application to quash the subpeona.

Affidavit obtained by Rogers - copy sjhown to Warman and Vigna in hearing room. Not seen by Hadjis.

Talking about Warman's excitement andd sspontaneous reading the paragraph about Rogers no longer having the data.

Asking why Warman would want that Rogers info which would exonerate him to be quashed and why he was so happy when Rogers no longer had the info.

And later:

Kaluszka

On Freedomsite

Marc Lemire's name as owner/operator is posted
along with disclaaimer and method to contact the webmaster

-

Talking about how Warman didn't complain about Lemire's site for several years
until the day Paul Fromm files a complaint against Warman with the CHRC and posts some of this on Freedomsite.


-----------------

wow !
[...]

Kulaszka

going deeper into Maximum Disruption techniques and how Warman utilized the police to seize peeople's computers, shut them out from proper defenses
[...]

Warman can actively retaliate against any respondent with no recourse against him
Kulaszka gives multiple examples

Hadjis defending this process

Kulazka
Talking about actions against Fromm by antiracist activists because Fromm stood up.

Hadjis admits the legislation is one-sided across the board
[...]
Talking about Warman posting as Pogue Mahone in terms of trying to initiate a conversation with Lemire.

Dean Steacy, using Jadewarr on Stormfront initiating a conversation with Lemire about Lemire's complaint to the Commission about Warman. Had to go to federal court to find out who Jadewarr was. Lemire was a respondent under a complaint when this act by Steacy was done.

An abuse of process, she says.
[...]
Waarmaan denies knowing who Jadewarr was, yet Steacy contraadicted him later.


- back to the swapped documents and the Jadewarr log on.


Hadjis
wants her to move along


Kulaszka
back at those doccuments
Warman was present at the Jadewarr sign on and download just prior to the Beaumont hearing


- her submission is what happened here?
Warman lied to you over a very important matter
Warman knew exactly who Jadewarr was.

What's worse, Vigna, counsel for the Commission was complicit with the deception, knew Warman was lying and went further on the basis that the d\ocument was unclear.

That Lemire would have asked very different questions if Vigna and Warman had not deceived.

Says no wonder why Fothergill doesn't want you to look further, why he doesn't want you to look at other documents.

/
That Vigna was taaken off the case once these things came out - he had to be taken off the case

Mrs Blight took the case over. Whaat happened is very very serios. What else has Mr Warman lied about ?

Free Dominion's Connie Fourier is also live blogging. Here is her summary of what FourHorses writes above:

Kulaszka continues:

When the complaint was laid the freedomsite messageboard was the foundation of the complaint. Hadjis ordered that they give particulars of the complaint, and they stated that every post on the messageboard was a part of the complaint. This stayed in effect right up until the start of the hearing. At which point, Barb brought a motion for the subpeona of Rogers Cable to determine the indentity of the Ann Cools posting. This posting goes to many issues in this case, including in the way that messageboards can be used to entrap an webmaster, entice others to make similar posting ie. testing the virtue of people. Let's throw it out and see if we can catch a few fish. Warman went to freedomsite to run off posts, research etc, and the freedomsite server was keeping log files. On each of the days that Warman accessed the site, he had the same IP address. When Klatt did a search, he found that the Ann Cools post had the same IP address as Mr. Warman. Klatt also provided testimony concerning the matching characteristics of two user profiles.

Warman denied every having registered a profile on the freedomsite. Hadjis asked him very specifically and he denied it. When Barb showed him the profile for Lucy, he "stood corrected". He was evasive, he couldn't remember anything. At the end of the submissions, there were 157 instances where he couldn't recall things. This was one of the things he couldn't recall, but he recalled immediately when he saw the profile for Lucy. Both profiles (Lucy and 90sAreOver) had same IP address, same browser, anonymous emails, provided same option information, etc.

Poster of the Ann Cools posting only came on the site once. It is the submission of the respondent that Mr. Warman made the Ann Cools posting. Based, not only on the technical evidence, but also on how he acted. Not only on what was submitted for the case, but also on his response to the Rogers subpeona. Hadjis ruled on Dec 6, 2006 - Warman intended to rely on the entirety of the freedomsite messageboard. The respondent made an application for a subpeona of Rogers. That application was opposed by Warman and the Commission. Then, the Commission and Warman restricted what was going to be a part of the case. This evidence did not include the Ann Cools posting. Hadjis allowed the subpeona, Warman tried to quash the subpeona. The information was provided by Rogers, the information was given to Warman and, without notice, without asking Hadjis, he was so excited, that he stood up and read the paragraph that said the information was no longer available. These were not the actions of someone who was innocent and wanted the information to exconerate him. He changed is case to not include this post. Why would the Commission go along with that when, when you read the post, it clearly falls under Section 13?

Anyone can post on a messageboard using any name. That is exactly what Warman did, and within a few months he laid his complaint. Barb is relying on that as evidence of abuse of process. It is not as if Mr. Warman would never do this. He was a regular poster on Stormfront and VNN and the messages have already been found by an investigator to violate Section 13. It is not as if this was beyond his ability or his inclination.

Most of the posts in the complaint were posted by Craig Harrison. We know that because Warman found out that they were posted by him. On the board, itself, there was no indication who he was. He used anonymous names. That goes for every posting (except for Mr. Lemire's posts) that the commission wants to hold Lemire liable for. There were only two posts by Mr. Lemire.

What this case is about it, essentially, that they wish to hold the webmaster of a small messageboard liable for the anonymous postings posted thereon. There was a way to complain, by emailing Mr. Lemire. Nevertheless, Warman never filed a complaint with Lemire, never notified him. Even though he was watching the board trying to find out who Craig Harrison was. Eventually it was Matt Lauder, Warman's friend, who found out who Craig Harrison was in December 2002. A year went by, no complaint, then he laid a complaint on the day that Paul Fromm sent a letter to the Chief Commissioner complaining about Warman's actions. Paul Fromm was using the freedomsite email to send out his letter. That night, Mr. Warman went home and started printing off the documents he was going to use in his complaint.

Warman didn't include articles on freedomsite that were posted by Matt Lauder, because Lauder is Warman's friend.
[...]
He made a speech about Maximum Disruption to the ARA. Section 13 is made for someone who wants to disrupt someone's life. ARA - anti-Racist Action is a violent bunch of street thugs.

Barb reading from the Maximum Disruption speech.

Section 13 is only one part of Maximum Disruption. After he lays a complaint, he sends it to the police. The police can then raid the place, and you can have an order against you that you can't go on the internet. He did this with both freedomsite and JR Books Online, but it didn't work in this case.

He also went to the police about Harrison.

Section 13 is such an abuse for a respondent when it is not tied to real harm. Everything else in this Act is tied to real harm. Someone has been denied a service, or harmed in their employment. In Section 13, there is no real harm, anyone can bring a complaint.

Hadjis: In other parts of the Act, anyone can bring a complaint, but it is the victim that gets the remedy.

Barb: It has to be acknowledged that there has to be real harm under the other sections of the Act. It is not like Section 13, you have a situation in the federal government or Air Canada etc, there is a situation that needs a remedy. In that case, the Act does work. They go to mediation etc. The exact opposite is true under Section 13. Warman has been able to be a serial complainant and he has filed, so far, about 26 complaints.

There is no cost to a complainant to lay a complaint or to carry it out to a hearing. Warman is consistently called by the commission as a witness. He gives his testimony and he leaves the CHRC to prosecute the case. The respondent cannot leave. If the matter goes to the tribunal, a large financial penalty can be imposed, as well as a cease and desist order. The tribunals have made it clear that the penalty is being used as a symbol, basically, to show society's approprium for the respondent's conduct.

Very large fines have been imposed on people who don't have much money. Remorse is taken into account. There are no defenses of truth, fair comment or intent. The respondent prepares his own defence, and the commission carries on even if the respondent does not attend. After the complaint, if the respondent makes any comments or retaliates in any way, they are given large financial penalties. In the Kybur decision, Warman was awarded $30,000 for retaliation because he went after his job. If Warman goes after a respondent's job, there are no consequences.

The complainant and his witnesses are protected, but the respondent and his witnesses are not protected. Paul Fromm has been harassed and intimidated by anti-Racists. They demonstrated outside his house, threatened to burn him out, and broke up a fundraising meeting for Marc Lemire.

Hadjis: It is one-sided legislation. Why should the victim of a false harassment claim be any different than the victim of a false hate speech claim?

Barb: It is a process that is so punitive that people aren't going to say anything that, by even a slight chance, might fall under Section 13, they aren't going to say them. If they run a messageboard and they are being held liable for the comments of others -- there is no free pass -- they are not going to run a messageboard, they would be crazy to.

The issue here is freedom of speech. It is a fundamental value.
[...]
Dean Steacy, using the name jadewarr, also contacted Lemire on Stormfront. He tried to initiate a conversation with Lemire. When told that he could have used a reply to dismiss Lemire's complaint against Warman as vexatious, and Steacy admitted that he could have. This was an abuse of the system, he was testing the virtue of Mr. Lemire. Mr. Lemire was a respondent when the conversation by Mr. Steacy was initiated. Steacy testified that he signed up on freedomsite, but we did not learn of that until his testimony. It was never revealed to Mr. Lemire in any kind of disclosure.
[...]
Barb's submission is that Warman lied to Hadjis over a very important matter. He knew exactly who jadewarr was. Harvey Goldberg didn't even know who jadewarr was, but Warman did. Vigna, council for the commission, was complicit in this deception. He said they needed to get a clear copy. If they had been honest, this hearing would have been very different because we would have asked very different questions of Mr. Warman. What went on is unbelievable, actually.

When it became clear that jadewarr was going to be an issue in Federal Court, Mr. Vigna lost his serenity and he was taken off this case because he had to be taken off this case. Ms Blight took over.

What else has Mr. Warman lied about?

Good work Free Dominion!
View topic - Lemire Final Argument - LIVE BLOGGING - Day Two :: Free Dominion - Principled Conservative - Party and Canadian Politics - Canada Blogs

Section 13 called into question by chair of Canadian Human Rights Tribunal

Today's big news from the Lemire hearings:

TORONTO — An adjudicator of a human rights hearing into an Internet hate case expressed serious misgivings Monday about whether a provision used to attack hate speech can continue to exist in the Internet age.

The Human Rights Act provision permits anyone who objects to even a borderline case of alleged hate speech to expose the author to a costly, cumbersome human rights adjudication process, said Athansios Hadjis - who is presiding over a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal against Internet webmaster Marc Lemire.

Citing a recent case in which Maclean's magazine columnist Mark Steyn defended himself against a complaint from a Muslim group, Mr. Hadjis said it may be all too easy for an individual to be “dragged through the process.”

Mr. Hadjis said that the controversial provision created to combat hate messages left on telephone machines operated by member of the far right - made sense in the past. However, he said that its usefulness may be in the past.

Hate messages on telephone message machines tended to be overt, he said, whereas the ocean of opinions on the Internet include many that are borderline cases of hate.

“Maybe the scale is tipping the other way,” Mr. Hadjis interjected during closing submissions at the Lemire hearing. “There is so much grey zone here that it may tip the scale back the other way.”

“Suddenly, the chilling effect catches not only individuals who set up telephone messages...but just about everyone who posts anything on the Internet,” Mr. Hadjis said. “What we have is the reality of the Internet - open to all; everyone participates...” he said.

globeandmail.com: Rights laws outdated in Internet age, hearing told
I guess that while some "human rights" bureaucrats might look at the potentially endless instances of internet "hate" as an endless make-work project for thought controllers, others are beginning to see the nightmare that would really follow any attempt to consistently apply a law like the Canadian Human Rights Act's Section 13. No doubt some in the game want to cut their losses, perhaps through some kind of legal ruling on the constitutionality of Section 13, and thus deflect attention from all their various activities, before we find a government with the courage to make serious investigations into the "human rights" speech policing regime.

See also National Post report by Joseph Brean

Ultimately it is the law that must be changed, by citizens living in freedom

There is speculation in the blogosphere thanks to this post at Free Dominion that the Canadian Human Rights Commission is getting ready to throw Richard "maximum disruption" Warman under the bus. Some may see this as the CHRC looking for a scapegoat to avoid further public scrutiny of its own establishment. While I might quibble that this would be to misuse the term scapegoat, there is no doubt a risk that we may be now encouraged to forget that, whatever becomes the public historical legacy of Richard Warman, Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, now often known as "Warman's law", was bound to lead to all kinds of injustices, to a highly politicized legal and judicial process, and hence a low-level civil war between conservatives and leftists, whether or not Richard Warman ever got involved in the leftist war against the leftist conception of "hate" using typical leftist tactics. The Canadian state was bound to be backing such a war the moment it wrote into law Section 13. It is impossible for such a law not to become a political tool, unless it be widely ignored and left unused. At least "maximum disruption" Warman has honestly recognized this fact.

Citizens disturbed by the latest revelations in the documents represented and linked at Free Dominion should re-affirm their commitment to a free society in which policing of hatreds becomes the responsibility of individuals and institutions in civil society. The moment we give this job to the state - the moment criminal or "human rights" law becomes concerned not just with wrong actions but also with "wrong" thoughts - especially in a society that defines itself as "multicultural", we have effectively given up our freedom to the whims of those who will define for the competing groups in society what is and is not politically acceptable. We will become locked in resentful group identities and will not lessen hatreds but only fail to mediate them effectively. Instead, we must re-affirm individual rights and responsibilities in ways that maximize our shared freedom. We must protect each other from hate.

At Covenant Zone, we are trying to do our part to maintain the culture of freedom and democratic self-rule in Canada. To this end, the "end" without end, the "end" that allows for no dangerously Utopian visions of an end, such as the leftist conceit to be fighting to end hate and conflict (and only becoming their yet more dangerous agents in the deluded Utopian process) we meet every Thursday (in spirit we meet forever without end) to keep the conversation of free people going. If you can join us here in Vancouver, please do, in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, 7-9 pm, in front of Blenz Coffee. If you can't, consider creating your own Covenant Zone.

Blazed by Cat Fur

National Post: Human rights issues open to vigorous debate

... Ms. Eliadis had harsh words for the growing contingent of bloggers who lambaste the commissions, and have been invigorated by the prominence of the Maclean's complaints.

Ms. Eliadis singled out one in particular, blazingcatfur. blogspot.com, as "poisonous" for referring to her panel at the conference as a "Texas cage match."

She said it was evidence of the "appalling tone" that is "illustrative of how badly this debate has gone."

In my misspent youth, I went to enough conferences where the victimary religion ruled to know that few self-respecting victimologists can pass up a chance to move from the mundane work of creating and defending victims to actually claiming for themselves the sacred centrality of the victim.

So I am not entirely of the view that Pearl Eliadis is not without some satisfaction in being compared to a professional cage wrestler, wearing some kind of funny costume no doubt. Like the faked wrestling match, it is much better to be able to accuse your enemy of some unspeakably appalling crime than to actually debate her. Reason, logic, free speech: stain of Western phallogocentrism, dontchaknow. No, it's much better in certain conference circles to point the finger and make the accusation that usually gets a pass in our postmodern times: she's a right-wing victimizer!

But then one is not entirely surprised to hear that a "human rights" functionary thinks the debate in the blogosphere is "appalling", a debate that I, in my resentful naivete, have taken as one of the few recent signs of serious engagement with democracy in this country, of people unwilling to defer to government bureaucracies for all their needs, and most of all the need to openly witness and contest each other's ideas.

But then Pearl Eliadis conveniently forgot to note that it is not just we crazy bloggers, we few, we very few, but also the editorial boards of many Canadian newspapers who have roundly criticized, almost if not entirely unanimously, the current operation of our "human rights" law in relation to freedom of expression. Times are a-changing, and those once so sure of their righteous role in protecting resentful Canadians from each other have been figured as a yet greater threat. How can that be? One is left staring at the head lights, with this for an argument:

Pearl Eliadis, a prominent human rights lawyer, responded that what Mr. Borovoy thought 40 years ago should not determine the current state of human rights law, and that the arguments against human rights commissions dealing with complaints against media are premised on the notion that "new rights are bad rights."

Dohh! new is obviously good! how could I have forgotten the progressive creed so quickly! and dare I question who it is declaring these new "rights"?

She said the commissions are "strategically and uncomfortably poised" in "dynamic tension" among NGOs, government, voters, industry and other influences, and it is "almost proof of their relative success that nobody is happy."

almost, eh? So close to an argument, and yet so far...

"There's a narrow band of intolerant bigots out there who are jumping on to this bandwagon and are using this debate to propagate particularly hateful views," Ms. Eliadis said in an interview. "What the free speech absolutists are saying is that, once you take that core element of speech and transport it into mass media, suddenly it becomes immune. I don't understand why speech should be immune from discrimination law. The media should not enjoy more rights or immunity than anyone else."

Hell we all all know that the kind of doing that is talking or writing is no different from other kinds of doing, like punching someone in the face! or refusing a job! It would be simply inconceivable that someone resentfully blowing off steam in words might be be doing something ugly but nonetheless useful, either to them or to us, wouldn't it? Even worse would be the possibility that it might be useful or it might not, it might be good or it might be dangerous, but there's no way anyone, not even the sharpest lawyer, can be in a high holy position, at this point in time, to know.

My response, in short, Dear Ms. Eliadis, is that we are not a narrow band of intolerant bigots. That's just your wishful projection, the primitive figuration of a victim/scapegoat that is one of the oldest religious tricks in the book (and if there is anything we need protection from, it is this, this death cult that is the postmodern "human rights" world view).

No, Dear Pearl, the resentment that runs through our society is in all of us; it is a fundamental aspect of the human condition that cannot be legislated away, but only more or less mediated through more or less freedom of expression. And to appoint privileged arbiters and punishers who get to decide which hates to prosecute and which to leave immune, is only to raise the stakes in the wars of resentment. Much better, as a general rule in a rather peaceful country like Canada today, to make speech so free that almost everything we say is lost in a sea of words and is instantly forgettable. For if we can give up our primitive needs for bad guys/victims to put at the centre of attention, the more deeply resentful will find that in time they are not centres of attraction but just forgotten losers.

Way to go Catfur: you're hissing off the right people.

But if anyone wants a free and open debate on that or any claim made here, I will be pleased to accomodate you.

Demo Leaflet #2

What the Public is Saying about the "Human Rights" Trial of Mark Steyn and Maclean's

Slogans collected by the Covenant Zone blog,

from its readers, for a

Demonstration

AGAINST Section 7 of the British Columbia Human Rights Code, and Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act;

AND, on Behalf of Mark Steyn's freedom to write, and Maclean's freedom to publish, whatever they see fit, even when it comes to discussing the relationship of Islam and the West.

NOTE: some comments refer to what Dean Stacey, of the Canadian Human Rights Commission said while giving testimony to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal: "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value."
---------------------------------------------

Free speech: NOT just an American concept/ It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. Welcome to the HRC/ Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. The HRC welcomes you to the beginning of the end of your lives!/ Advice from the HRC: "To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing."/ It's the end of our freedom as we know it!/ Guilty until proven innocent/

You are Mark Steyn! More speech, not less/ Talk isn't cheap anymore/ Free speech means speaking the unspeakable or it means nothing at all/ Someone please tell me what to think. I went to a Canadian university/

But 2+2 Does Equal 4/ Stalinist show trial/ True + Free + Fair = Hate/ Commission Wrongs don't make Human Rights/ Our Canada includes the right to intellectual thought and speech/ Today they've come for Mark Steyn. Next time it may be for YOU/ Canadian HRCs believe: "Freedom of Speech is an American concept"/ Are we still free to say "No" to the HRC?/

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play on the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? - John Milton/

I bear witness that there is no truth but in freedom and Steyn is a prophet/ Socialists stifling free expression of thought inside the Human Rights Tribunal/ "Because it is my bloody right to do so!" - Ezra Levant/ Kangaroo Court now in Session/ Stop Fascist Star Chambers/

Once were Nazi fighters/ Canada: the True North Strong and Regulated/ First they came for Steyn.../ Make Speech not War, man/ His Words, My Rights/ Free is a four letter word/ Silence says Nothing/ Free Speech, no human rights leech/ Inquisitions were for the Middle Ages/ Democracy not dogma/

Who's really on trial here?/ Human Rights Commissions: You pay us to shut you up/ Human Rights Commissions: We tell you what (not) to think/ Human Rights Commissions: We know what's bad for you/ Free Steyn, Free Speech, Free Canada/

Mark Steyn hates me; do you see me complaining?/ Free Speech is the FUNDAMENTAL human right/ Stifling one Steyn at a time/ Free Speech: Use it or Lose it/ I am Mark Steyn, when I'm told I am worth half the value of a man/ Canada? Or 1930s Germany?/ Free Mark Steyn, Free Us, Free You/

"I am Spartacus"/ My grandad died for freedom of speech in 1940/ Dieppe: did they die in vain?/ When you silence one of us, ten will arise to take his place/ I can't be there in person, but my spirit and voice will be marching besides all of you/ No, I am Spartacus/ HRCs: Orwell screwed up the year/ We Are Mark Steyn/ Keep your bureaucrats off our thoughts/ Keep your thought police out of my head. I will say whatever I damn well please/

You can get more loot with a CHRC complaint than you can with a gun and a smile/ 1984 was meant to be a nightmare, not a social plan/ Free Speech is also a Canadian right/ Ban Star Chambers/ "Tie that kangaroo (court) down, Steyn"/ Separate Mosque and State!/ Free Elmasry!/ Mark Steyn improved my understanding

Rob Nicholson and the Conservative government start to stand for real human rights

The Minister of Justice is backing a proposed Parliamentary inquiry into the Canadian Human Rights Commission and Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Kudos to Ezra Levant, and many other bloggers, who have done so much on this issue:
Government to launch inquiry into CHRC "investigative techniques", section 13 - Ezra Levant

Ezra and a moment of revelation into the "human rights" cult

Ezra Levant recounts his debate with Ian Fine, Senior Counsel for the Canadian Human Rights Association:

...At another point in the debate, I tried to show the absurdity of banning any hateful words through a law that doesn't permit legal defences like truth, fair comment or even common sense. I pointed out that Fine himself had given an interview with the National Post in which he read out a bigoted remark, namely: "a n*gger will try to kill you just for a slice of pizza or a piece of chicken ... By Aryan standards, negroes are dangerous animals".

Fine read that to show the kind of hate the CHRC wants to fight. But that explanation, which is reasonable, is not a legal defence. I jokingly said to Fine that, since he uttered a comment that is "likely" to expose someone to "hatred or contempt", I should file a section 13 complaint against him. I said it unseriously -- I was pointing out the ridiculously arbitrary and overreaching nature of the law. But -- and I'll want to check this again on CPAC -- he actually looked ashen when I said it, as if he agreed with me that he had broken the law, and was ashamed of it.

I think in that moment, I glimpsed what made Ian Fine tick: he has drunk the anti-hate industry's Kool Aid without a drop of skepticism. I think he genuinely thought, just for a moment, that I was serious when I said he was a bad man for having said the word n*gger, even in the context of anti-racism. I think he's been immersed in a groupthink environment, with zealots, where diversity of opinion, let alone criticism, is non-existent. I think he genuinely believes that his little anti-hate squad is saving Canada from turning into an Arctic version of Rwanda.

I think that's why he froze up when I pressed him on Richard Warman's online bigotry -- it just didn't compute for him; it doesn't make sense in his unified theory of the world. I think it's why he's in denial about the hacking charges. I think it's why he was silent when I pointed out that, without Warman's serial complaints, section 13 would fall into disuse -- surely a sign that Canada is not beset with the problems for which he offers himself as the solution.

I think it's a bit of a cult over there, and for thirty years no-one has dared to question them -- and the past four months has been terrible.

I'm not the only one to call the CHRC's self-image and world view "bizarre" -- Joseph Brean of the National Post used that exact same word in his story about Fine's first attempt to explain the CHRC's behaviour. In that interview, as in today's debate, Fine simply asserts that his critics are armed with "misinformation". Mere assertions don't pass for arguments, though -- except, of course, in the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, which has given Fine a 100% conviction rate. I think Fine's wiring overheats when he is presented with dissonant information.

There was a stunning moment at the end of the debate. It caused groans in the audience, and both Martin and I quickly jotted it down to make sure we got it right: one journalist in the audience asked Fine not just to give the "official" line, but to tell the crowd what he personally thought about section 13 and other censorship. His answer: "there can't be enough laws against hate."

If Ian Fine had his way, section 13 wouldn't be abolished. It wouldn't even be maintained. It would be expanded. He said he wouldn't rest until there was "no hate" left.

Wow -- legislating an end to hate. Why not legislate an end to war, hunger and broken hearts, while you're at it?

That's nutty utopianism. Which is fine for old Marxists in universities. But it doesn't work so well when it's married to the power of the state -- the power to exact large fines, to issue lifetime publication bans and gag orders, and to grind respondents through years of abusive hearings.

It's shocking how blind people can become by dint of their need for Utopian promises. They should pass a law against human self-hatred, to institutionalize fully the tail chasing these "human rights" dogs are all about. Then we will have to love ourselves for what we are: fallen resentful beings who can't get back up by trying to outlaw our nature. To overcome our resentments we have to know what we are and work through them honestly, and sometimes publicly (some things we can only see and learn through interaction with and honest feedback from others), without help of fanciful legal prohibitions.

Imagine if Ian Fine actually had to go out and debate, lead, and teach, in face of hatred, instead of just going out and trying to round up the haters for prosecution. By Ezra's account, it seems he'd not be capable of doing the job. In becoming part of the CHRC mindset, he's trying to take a short cut, the easy way out of this world and into a Utopia that can only be imagined, not realized here on earth. The rest of Canada should not kid themselves into faith in legal magic, however widely it is practiced in this fallen and deluded world. Canadians should learn to go out and do the job the bureaucrats won't and can't do.