Lars Hedegaard acquitted, without winning the right to speak freely in public about Muslim violence

Apparently, the Danish court has acquitted Lars Hedegaard on hate speech charges, stemming from Hedegaard pointing out that Muslim girls face sexual violence from their own families. But this acquittal was not because the court found that a Dane has the right to discuss such things in public, but because the court found Hedegaard did not know that his private comments would be publicized.

Yo, Danish judiciary, prosecutors, and politicians! right now, I'm flipping you the bird, in private!  More and more, one comes to think, well, maybe the rumours of the Hells Angels taking over Denmark in a coming collapse of the rule of law have something to them!
Scaramouche!: Breaking News: Lars Hedegaard Acquitted!

Statement by Lars Hedegaard on his acquittal :: IFPS-Canada:

Copenhagen, January 31, 2011

As my ancient forefathers, the vikings, would have said: It is always good to fight. It is better to win.

My detractors – the foes of free speech and the enablers of an Islamic ascendancy in the West – will claim that I was acquitted on a technicality, namely that the judge in the Court of Frederiksberg resolved that my supposedly offensive comments on the violations against little Muslim girls were not intended for public dissemination.

That is absolutely true. The judge chose the way out provided by my capable counsel.

However, the public prosecutor has been privy to the circumstances surrounding my case for a year – and yet he chose to prosecute me. Obviously in the hope that he could secure a conviction given the Islamophile sentiment among our ruling classes.

My acquittal is therefore a major victory for free speech.

I have no doubt that the massive support I have received from freedom fighters around the world has been instrumental in securing my acquittal.

This outcome will encourage people all over the West and beyond to speak up.

The battle for freedom is far from lost.

Courage!

The self-mutilation of Europe continues, now even Denmark lives in shame...

The following message from the Canadian Branch of the International Free Press Society and the linked page must serve to motivate us to carry the fight to the enemies of freedom everywhere:

As it has become known that the Danish public prosecutor is actually going ahead with his trial of Free Press Society President Lars Hedegaard, (set to begin on January 24, 2011), protests against the trial have arrived in great numbers.

A common theme in many of these protests and declarations of support for Lars Hedegaard is an awareness that the trial does not only have significance for free speech in Denmark but will have repercussions throughout the West.

We are asking for assistance in spreading the expressions of support from several noteworthy defenders of freedom of speech from around the world, complete article here: Massive International Support for Lars Hedegaard.

Massive International Support for Lars Hedegaard :: IFPS-Canada

Now's the time to donate if you want to defend free speech and resist the Islamization of Europe

Blazing Cat Fur: Urgent: Geert Wilders Needs Our Help ("he is not accepting Government funding and needs some dough to put him over the top, 10,000 wee folks makin wee donations can do that in a hurry"):

With four weeks to go before the general elections in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders and the Party for Freedom are now engaged in a life-and-death struggle against the forces of jihad. In the last couple of years Geert Wilders has emerged as the international symbol of the struggle against Islam.

The Party for Freedom (PVV) refuses government subsidy in order to remain independent. All other Dutch parties receive government money. Therefore, the PVV is facing a serious challenge in order to survive this election season. Dutch state television is engaged in a massive campaign to smear the PVV.

The Party for Freedom needs your help urgently. Every donation is welcome.

There is a Paypal button on the English-language site: www.geertwilders.nl

...
ING bank account of the Stichting Vrienden van de PVV in The Hague: 67.04.72.344

(IBAN: NL98 INGB 0670 4723 44, BIC: INGBNL2A)

Postal address:
Postbus 20018
2500 EA Den Haag

There is a Paypal button on the English-language site: www.geertwilders.nl

Free speech (and Kathy Shaidle) championed in Canadian Senate

Senator Nicole Eaton recognizes free expression is not just an "American thing", but fundamental to Canadian history (HT: Catfur):

April 13th, 2010

For immediate release


“Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I rise to address the state of freedom of speech in Canada.

Like other Senators who have spoken before me on this matter, I am alarmed by the erosion of this most essential right; alarmed because freedom of speech is an inextricable part of our Canadian identity. If we lose that freedom, we lose a part of our Canadian-ness. Freedom of expression in all of its many forms – including freedom of speech, the press, the arts, and religious and cultural expression – has always been one of Canada’s most important national qualities.

It is a golden thread, woven through our great historic moments and all of our great public controversies, and it has guided us to peaceful resolutions of our disagreements and helped us reach our highest aspirations. And, in our increasingly multicultural, pluralistic society, it ensures that everyone in Canada can find their voice, and have their say.

Freedom of speech is the great equalizer for Canadians who seek to address their claims by appealing to our national conscience. In Canada, one doesn’t need to have power or money to make a case – merely a passion to express an idea. This is one of the most attractive qualities we offer to new immigrants, many of whom come from countries where political or even religious dissent is a crime.

But free speech isn’t just part of our Canada today. It is also a great Canadian tradition. In his opening remarks on this subject, Senator Finley mentioned in passing the case of Joseph Howe. I’d like to expand on that, because it set such an important precedent for the freedoms we enjoy to this day.

In 1835 – nearly 200 years ago, and a generation before Canada was born as our own country – Joseph Howe was put on trial for seditious libel, because the newspaper he published had embarrassed local Halifax politicians by exposing their corruption. Howe knew that his own freedom was at stake – if he lost, he could have been imprisoned. But he also knew that much more was on trial that day: the right of citizens to scrutinize and criticize their government was in question.

Some would call that the right to offend!

Here’s what he said to the jury about what would happen politically if he were convicted:

“Were you to condemn me, these [politicians] would say there is no truth in those charges, there is nothing wrong, and matters would continue in the old beaten track. If you acquit me, as I trust you will, they must form themselves into a court of inquiry for self-reformation ; they must drive out from among them those men who bring disgrace on their ranks, and mischief on the community in which they reside…”

At the time, Halifax had fewer than 15,000 citizens. It was still a very new place, and its political and legal culture were still being formed. Howe’s case would set a precedent for Nova Scotia, and the rest of Canada, for centuries to come. Had the jury chosen to side with the Halifax elites – the politicians and other polite company who had been offended and embarrassed by him – corruption would have flourished, and democratic criticism would have withered. Howe’s passionate defence of freedom worked. The jury defied the judge’s instructions and acquitted Howe. And that great triumph set him on course to one day become Nova Scotia’s premier.

But let me quote one more passage from Howe’s speech. Remember, his trial was not long after the American Revolution, and the War of 1812. Canadians and Americans had taken two separate paths, and were still wary of each other.

Howe clearly rejected the American way. He regarded their revolution as an act of rebellion and disloyalty. He was a fiercely proud Nova Scotian. But here’s what he said:

“Let not the sons of the Rebels look across the border to the sons of the Loyalists, and reproach them that their press is not free.”

Howe wasn’t trying to impress the Americans. And he certainly didn’t believe that freedom of speech was only for Americans. In fact, the opposite: in his defence, he constantly referred to the Canadian and British traditions of liberty. To Howe, all modern free peoples enjoyed freedom of speech. Far from being merely an American concept, Howe regarded it as quintessentially Canadian.

Joseph Howe set a great precedent. But the nature of freedom of speech is that it constantly must be supported, for there are would-be censors in every generation. In 1935, exactly a century after Howe’s acquittal, across the country in Alberta, William Aberhart became premier, and like the political elites of Howe’s Halifax, he found Alberta’s newspapers to be troublesome and offensive.

Aberhart’s election came in the face of nearly universal opposition by the newspapers of the day. By 1937, he was so frustrated that he introduced the Accurate News and Information Act, that required every newspaper in the province to run a rebuttal or a “correction or amplification” when ordered to do so by the government.

Alberta’s Lieutenant Governor refused to proclaim the law until the Supreme Court could assess its constitutionality; he was punished by being stripped of his official residence, car and staff. Even without that law, Aberhart prosecuted his war against the press. The Alberta Legislature ordered that a reporter for the Edmonton Journal, Don Brown, be jailed for misquoting a government back-bencher. Luckily, national ridicule caused the government to back down before they could arrest him.

In the spring of 1938, the Supreme Court ruled that Alberta’s Press Act was illegal, and that it violated Canada’s unwritten bill of rights – the same code of freedom that had protected Joseph Howe. And for its efforts in fighting against Aberhart’s censorship, the Edmonton Journal was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize, the first time the citation was awarded outside of the United States.

It was a great Canadian moment.

There are many of these moments in our history – some much more recently.
It wasn’t until 1955 that the University of Toronto shut down its “Art Room”, where, until then, students had to prove they were free of “mental problems” before reading controversial books like Ulysses. The books were later moved to open shelves.

In the 1980s, in the case of Vancouver’s Little Sisters book store, Canada Customs followed Memorandum D911, which arbitrarily declared any description of gay sexuality to be obscene – a vague rule that was eventually thrown out by the Supreme Court. Little Sisters continued its fight against Customs and Canada Post well into the 1990s.

And until Prime Minister Brian Mulroney overturned the order 48 hours later, customs police briefly made Canada the only Western democracy to seize copies of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, after Iran’s fatwa.

We’re in the 21st century now, and one would think that censorship would be obsolete, universally considered a relic of less enlightened times. But nowadays it’s not prudish customs agents or thin-skinned politicians who are the main threat.

It’s Canada’s “human rights commissions”, which would have struck George Orwell as being perfectly named.

These commissions were started with the best of intentions – to help the poor and the weak from being bullied out of a job or an apartment. But they have become censors, policing not death threats or incitement to violence, or any other real crime, but rather the fake crime of hurt feelings.

They have become what author Kathy Shaidle calls a “Tyranny of Nice”.

Section 13 of our own Canadian Human Rights Act makes it against the law to evoke feelings of “hatred or contempt”. But hate is a normal human feeling. What’s not normal is to make those feelings against the law. Of course we don’t want people to turn their hard feelings into crimes –that’s why we have the Criminal Code. But to have a government agency monitoring the Internet, searching for certain political views to prosecute is anathema to a liberal democracy.

In 2008, Maclean’s magazine was put on trial for a week for publishing excerpts from Mark Steyn’s best-selling book on Islam. And the Western Standard’s publisher, Ezra Levant, was prosecuted for 900 days for publishing pictures of the controversial Danish cartoons of Mohammed. Those are two famous cases. But there are plenty more people who have been investigated by the government merely for having a certain point of view.

Like pastor Stephen Boissoin (buzz-ON), who was given a lifetime speech ban by the Alberta human rights commission. And Father Alphonse de Valk of Toronto’s Catholic Insight magazine, and the Christian Heritage Party and Bill Whatcott of Saskatchewan.

Each of these men were prosecuted for expressing their religious belief. Not for doing anything harmful; just for saying something that someone else found offensive.

This shows a systemic bias in our human rights commissions – and that’s exactly the problem with vague, political censorship. It’s not about the law anymore. It’s about political favourites. But that’s just not how we settle our disagreements in Canada. We don’t have the state intervene in political or religious disagreements.

We let people decide for themselves.

There is a common thread to each of these free speech battles. In each case, the targets of censorship were declared “offensive” or “troublesome”. But in each case, the success of those troublesome critics helped make Canada more inclusive and more democratic. Canada is the most peaceful and tolerant country in the world, precisely because we allow people to disagree with each other passionately – and even offensively.

That clash of ideas is often noisy and occasionally upsetting. But through those vigorous discussions, we have been able to navigate our way through hundreds of years of challenges – and our national purpose has never been stronger.

Mr. Speaker, freedom of speech is not just an abstract Canadian ideal.

It is an active, living part of being Canadian. It is an integral part of the Canadian identity. Our citizens use it every day, more often than any other freedom. To study our history is to see each generation of Canadians stand up for that freedom when it is challenged like it has been several times recently with the Steyn, Levant and Coulter episodes. And to learn from our history is to know that we must protect that great inheritance today and whenever in the future it may be challenged again.

Thank you.”
........

Speeches By Senators Finley, Wallin, Duffy & Tkachuk

Those are all Conservative Party Senators, by the way, in case anyone is wondering where the Liberals stand on freedom of speech. I sure don't know.

What explains the bully (pulpit) at the University of Ottawa?

Is Francois Houle, the University of Ottawa Vice-President who feels compelled to warn Ann Coulter that she could be guilty of a crime, should she open her mouth on campus, just another academic barbarian who pretends to value free expression but really values asserting, from on high, who is in the right and wrong, or who is and isn't in the realm of acceptable discourse, so that we all know our place, preferably in relation to some black-hatted "extremist" devil?

Who knows? Who knows in this day when an academic is standing on principle, however poorly conceived, or is an aspiring player in the knowledge-sector academic leaders value most - getting money - an endeavour which has recently taken several Canadian schools to recruit in Saudi Arabia? It no longer matters, it seems, that this is a country famous for exporting its supremacist, antisemitic, Wahhabi ideology (infecting many North American campuses) and for demanding a new global approach to "hate" laws that will ban criticism of Islam or speech that encourages Muslims to question their faith. Who knows in an age when getting public universities to take foreign money seems to be a priority of the Premier of Ontario? All we know is that Ann Coulter is famous for professing, among other things, the desire to "invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity."

Is that a reasonable position? In any degree or circumstance? Who knows, if we don't have the freedom, or show a willingness, to discuss our global conflicts from all angles, and get to know each other's deep loves and resentments? Houle knows!

York University takes one small step...

As I have pointed out before, the defenders of free speech need to remember that it is wrong for those of us who are not government, those of us who are just involved in daily interactions and in control of our own rightful spaces, to allow people to misuse our shared freedom and to pollute our shared space in order to disrupt others' freedom to discuss the issues of the day. So I am happy to read that York University suspends student running anti-Semitic Website.

Maybe the alumni refusing to give money to York are having an effect. When one student fundraiser recently called me, he had a prepared speech explaining that it was only a small troublesome minority at York who are antisemitic (sound familiar?). I pointed out that whatever the case, it is the administration's siding with the thugs who shut down pro-Israel speech that insures (among other reasons) York will not be seeing my money.

But maybe York has now taken the first in a series of necessary steps. When the University sends an official apology to Frank Dimant, Daniel Pipes, Dr. Mordechai Kedar, Walid Shoebat, Rev. Majed El Shafie, and Faytene Kryskow, and invites them to York, all expenses paid, to give well-publicized public lectures, I will start to be impressed.

When universities allow the Muslim Students Association, a.k.a. The Muslim Brotherhood to dominate public speaking, should Jewish students leave?

This is the question asked in Pajamas Media » Should Jewish Students Stop Attending UC Irvine? My own view is that free speech, let alone university attendance, does not belong to those who work to destroy the environment for free speech and free thought. I think no student, Jewish or otherwise, should attend any university that does not punish and expel students who shout down speakers and act around campus like thugs. As long as there is a choice that should be everyone's policy. Exodus is not giving up, in my view. Let the thugs inherit "Egypt" so the world, or at least those who believe that history is given shape (and not just eroded by) the will to power, can learn what thugs can achieve.

However, not a dime should be donated to universities that permit the terminally self-righteous to rule. The more serious question is when are we going to start organizing people to demand our governments penalize state-funded universities in the pocketbook when they permit the kind of intellectual vandalism that has happened at the University of California Irvine and many other schools in Canada and the USA.

Muslim terrorists take over Cambridge University, what's next?

The terrorism in academe continues; you can no longer say anything that offends Muslims at UK universities, whether true or not, or else. The totalitarian agenda could not be clearer (original source with more details on Islamic terrorism).

As Gil Bailie notes a propos of the Geert Wilders trial (now postponed for several months, as the court perhaps waits to see if Wilders might not be assasinated first) and free speech:

As René Girard argues, the real struggle in our world is not between violence and peace; it is between violence and truth. All attempts to avoid the former by silencing the latter will end in catastrophe.

I'm trying to decide whether it's worth juxtaposing something I just came across, the reaction to some "Jewish"/Anarchist violence in Russia/Ukraine in 1879:

Grigorrii Goldenberg, the assassin of Governor-General Kropotkin, was not so fortunate. He was transporting back some of the dynamite from Odessa, having learned of its location during another chance meeting with Kibalchich, when he raised the attention of some railroad porters who reported him to the police. They were waiting for him at Elisavetgrad Station down the line. He tried to run but was surrounded. He pulled out his pistol, cocked it and threatened to shoot, but numerous men from a crowd of waiting passengers jumped him and disarmed him. The policemen actually had to rescue him from a beating at the hands of the crowd when someone labeled him a "terrorist." They confiscated from him his suitcase, finding in it a pood (36 pounds) of dynamite.

Now that's how you deal with terrorists. But when it comes to those who terrorize Jews, the world seems to have forgotten. Those who would try to appease the Islamic mob will reap the whirlwind.

In defence of Muslims

Canada's leading Ismaili intellectual, Salim Mansur, writes:

As the trial of Dutch MP Geert Wilders for offending Muslims unfolds in Amsterdam, I am reminded of Oriana Fallaci’s post-9/11 writings on how she saw Europe wasted from within by the alien cultural force of Islam.
[...]
Fallaci attributed her understanding of Europe’s fate in part to the writings of another woman of great courage. In Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, Bat Ye’or, a Jewess born in Egypt and forced into exile, documented the recent history of Europe’s partnership with Arab states.

This Euro-Arab relationship has meant increased sensitivity in European capitals and among its political-intellectual elite for Arab-Islamic politics and culture. It is this sensitivity as political correctness that is on display at the Wilders’ trial.

But this sensitivity also inhibits the political-intellectual elite in Europe and North America from discussing the outrageousness of putting on trial Wilders, or anyone else, for speaking and writing on matters that might offend Muslims.

The demand by Europe’s officialdom — Canada’s officialdom is on the same page — that “free speech” must also meet the requirements of “responsible speech” when the subject is Islam is tantamount to repudiating Europe’s history that made her the cradle of the modern world of science and democracy.

The Wilders trial is indicative of Europe’s bleak future, as Fallaci had warned. This trial amounts to appeasing official Islam, which has demanded “defamation of religions,” according to a resolution adopted in the UN General Assembly in March 2008, be prohibited.

Moreover, in trying Wilders, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal has conceded space to the Islamists by accommodating, in practical terms, their demand for acceptance of Shariah (Islamic law) within secular society.

Abandonment

This can only mean abandoning those Muslims, especially women, who escaped from Islamic countries seeking freedom. They will become vulnerable once again to Islamists enforcing Shariah rule inside enclaves where Muslims reside within Europe.

And a Europe that appeases official Islam, while punishing its critics, will also be uncaring about the struggle for reform inside the Arab-Muslim world as in Iran. Such a Europe, as Fallaci so passionately raged against, will be then sliding into a new dark age.

And what does this darkness look like? Brendan O'Neil:

That relativism has been elevated over liberty can be seen in the fact that at the same time that more ‘extremists’ are allegedly running riot on campus, there are more and more codes of speech governing the extent to which other people can question, ridicule or mock these ‘extremists’, or even moderate religious and political speakers. At the end of last year I was invited to debate the head of the UK wing of Hizb ut-Tahrir at Queen Mary Westfield College in London. But under pressure from censorious student groups and the university’s administration, the debate was banned. It was moved to the University of Westminster a couple of weeks later, and there, both me and the representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir were informed about what we could and could not say. The university’s religious affairs liaison – a white convert to Islam – told us that before being allowed to speak we would have to read a document telling us not to insult or ridicule anyone else’s religious beliefs, political affiliations, sexual preferences and so on.

I read it, and ignored it, and later got booed for saying ‘Sharia law is inferior to Enlightenment-derived laws’. Yet this experience reveals much about the crisis of freedom in British universities. In one serious London university a debate is banned outright because the ‘extremist’ might corrupt the pathetic students, and in another serious London university the debate is allowed to go ahead but is severely governed by informal codes designed to preserve ‘respect for identities’. Such codes now exist on campuses across the UK. The extremist is allowed to speak, but no one is really allowed to say to him: ‘You’re talking bollocks, mate, and here’s why…’ Such informal rules protecting all belief systems and granting equal weight to all lifestyle choices really demonstrate what lies behind the ‘let the extremists speak’ argument: a relativistic climate in which universities doubt whether it is their job to assert Truth with a capital T over madder, weirder small-t ‘truths’, and where what looks like free speech is actually something very different.

If a student at a British university starts believing that some radical form of Islam is ‘the Truth’, it is most likely as a result of this intellectual cowardice rather than the strength of conviction of some visiting preacher. It is the climate of non-debate, of listening and nodding along to everyone, that can make things seem like the Truth by default. This creation of a relativistic mishmash of equally valid views sells students short as surely as does the outright censorship of ‘extremists’: it, too, creates a climate of conformism and question-avoidance, where the extremists are allowed to speak but only because ‘everyone must be heard and treated with respect’.

(HT: Blazing Cat Fur)

Freedom makes us Free

Laura Rosen Cohen has written an interesting polemic as a rebuttal to the arguments of the Canadian Jewish Congress, whose head used the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz as a moment to re-iterate the CJC's desire for hate speech laws. My contribution to the debate is in the comments.

A Professor gives advice on how to protect free speech: treat the universities in their current form with contempt

Via The Blog of Walker: Professor Robert Martin on Canadian colleges

For a Canada in which we may once again freely measure, represent, debate and enact a shared reality

It's "Canada Day", and while I have not made much time recently for blogging, this will soon change. But to that end, maybe it's time for a little stock taking. Where are we, as a nation, going, given the political culture of this country? A recent Mark Steyn piece provides a useful glimpse, if only for a moment on a beautiful day not to be completely wasted by our culture's political insanities: Blazing Cat Fur: Hey Jennifer Lynch- Coming to a newstand near you....

Canada, it seems, has become a country where the policing of those who might say things mildly critical of the reigning religion are told to shut up, or else lose their jobs, reputation, etc. It's a country where parliamentarians cannot respond rationally - they cannot even begin to recognize - arguments that "human rights" commissions are actually destroyers not defenders of real human rights.I could and will in future expand on the Gnostic religion that is so afraid of hearing criticism, or even alternative conceptualizations, of its world view - lest the Gnostic's trips into an unreality where his Utopian desires must not, or so his faith tells him, be obscured by the lesser men who have come before him, be indeed exposed to some of the resistant facts of a fallen world that is not and cannot be as our Messianic or Maternal visions would remake it.But for the moment, for those who want to take up the question seriously, I will take my time for reflection and point you towards Tom Bertonneau's latest in the Brussels Journal, for he so ably takes up the task of elucidating the Gnostic mentality, its hysterical reactions to criticism, to those whose common sense presents stumbling blocks to the great visionaries. He takes us further in understanding the Gnostic's need for a puritanical speech code.

But, as Bertonneau concludes, a refusal of a political religion to come to terms with contrary realities cannot last forever. The world, as it actually is, wins out in the end. So this period in our national history may be coming to some kind of collapse into a future we cannot know and which we must prepare ourselves to meet, should we wish to live in a nation bound by covenants and not just one or another's dark and destructive will to power:

One can predict, generally, that the radical spasm through which Europe and North America are now passing will eventually remit. De-creation can only be called creation for so long before the fraud becomes undeniable and the masses become disenchanted with their formerly charismatic leaders.

The trouble for all of us is that, in the meantime, in “the weird, ghostly atmosphere of a lunatic asylum,” as Voegelin writes, the agitating elites can wreak enormous harm.
[...]
Quite apart from election results, the extremism and intolerance of those currently in power polarizes the society increasingly, day by day, with no terminus of the process in sight; nor will their polarizing activities cease, should they lose their majority. Gnostic propaganda is nowadays organized as a colossal communications-network. Certainly American society is therefore in the rhetorical phase of a civil war, or perhaps in the policy phase, now that liberals have the votes to justify their schemes and do as they please. Even if the USA did not advance to some kind of actual civil war, the damage to civic institutions and to trust among people will have been, as it already is, profound and lasting.

One might agree with Voegelin, who was writing sixty years ago, that, “the end of the Gnostic dream is perhaps closer at hand than one ordinarily would assume.” But this need not mean that the aftermath will resemble the status quo ante, or be in any way familiar to those who, during the period of nightmare, held fast to the truth of the soul.

...a thought with which to marshal our resolve on this Dominion Day.

No one blasphemes Canada's state religion like Kathy Shaidle

It's great to see that 600 people paid five bucks a piece to hear her. The other well-known speakers might have been part of the attraction, but something tells me it was the heretic Shaidle - previously denounced by a local hack and various righteous bores in attempts to shut this event down - who was the star of the night.

Blazing Cat Fur: Packed house for Levant, Shaidle, Mansur talk in London. Shaidle:

But then again, the Left draws most of its motivating energy from imaginary problems, like global warming, DDT, backalley coathanger abortions, and the chronic boredome of American housewives in 1950s suburbia. The Left is very concerned about something they like to call “social justice”, which I define as the stubborn application of unworkable solutions to imaginary problems.

Like Spinal Tap’s second drummer, who famously “choked to death on someone ELSE’s vomit,” Canadian leftists have always resented their neighbors in the United States for having a romantic, large scale Civil Rights Movement during the 60s and 70s.

So the HRCs became the Canadian Left’s state-sponsored version of the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit ins but, without the stirring LIFE magazine photos and crappy folk music soundtrack.
[...]
The problem with the HRCs is most commonly presented as an issue of freedom of speech. However, I’d like to raise two additional aspects that don’t get as much play.

First, the HRCs are engaged in class warfare. The majority of “hate speech” cases are brought by highly educated, highly privileged white liberals -- against less educated, working class, blue collar “reactionary” whites, who insist on speaking to each other about topics like immigration, using old fashioned, politically incorrect language.

Therefore, the enforcement of Section 13 is an expensive exercise in state sponsored snobbery, in which people’s own hard earned tax dollars are used by their “betters” to scold and shame them. Worse, the process silences people who already feel linguistically, politically and educationally disenfranchised, angry and powerless. We often compare the tribunals to 1984, but to me they’re more like Pygmalion.

As British writer, Brendan O’Neill wrote:

Today’s Top-down ‘anti-racism’ has nothing whatsoever to do with ensuring equality of opportunity for all); rather it is about policing people’s behaviour and etiquette, especially amongst the lower classes. Accusations of ‘racism’ are no longer about indicting someone for their views on ethnic minorities but rather have become a snobbish judgment on their lack of breeding. ‘Racist’ has largely become code for ‘underclass’: uneducated, uncouth, thick, fat, ‘not one of us’.

Thus, the impact of official ‘anti-racism’ is not to make society more free and equal, but more authoritarian and censorious.

How to promote "homophobia"...

During the dark days of Soviet oppression, there was a joke that did the rounds in Russia. ‘ Homosexuality is a crime and the punishment is seven years in prison locked up with other men. There is a three-year waiting list.’

Don’t laugh too loudly. It could soon be illegal to repeat a joke like that.

Fighting fire with fire, the UK passes [planning to pass] more hate speech laws :: International Free Press Society

What are the limits to putting faith in freedom of speech?

Yesterday, B'nai Brith Canada released the following press release (received via email):

B'nai Brith Canada calls on Toronto police to investigate display of flags of all banned terrorist groups

TORONTO, March 18, 2009 - B'nai Brith Canada has called on Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair to expand its investigation into the display of flags belonging to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a banned terrorist group in Canada. The Jewish human rights organization has asked Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair to include in his investigation the display of other terrorist flags, notably Hamas and Hezbollah, to determine whether Canada's anti-terrorism laws have been breached.

"We commend the Toronto Police for launching an investigation into the display of the flag of the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist group outlawed in this country," said Frank Dimant, Executive Vice President of B'nai Brith Canada. "However, there have been many other instances of flags of other banned terrorist entities, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, that have been in full public view at rallies, most recently early this year
during the period of the Gaza conflict. The appearance of the Hamas and Hezbollah flags at public rallies has often been accompanied by chants of 'Death to Jews'.

"We call on Chief Blair to expand his police investigation to include the display on our city streets of the Hamas and Hezbollah flags as well. We hope that other jurisdictions will also take similar action.

"The display of terrorist symbolism must be recognized as the promotion of a dangerous agenda of hatred and violence. Surely, the open promotion of such hatred runs counter to Canada's values of tolerance and respect for all people, and undermin

Today, Blazing Cat Fur was kind enough to forward me the following story:

Toronto, March 19 (IANS) Toronto police late Wednesday gave its clean chit to the use of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) flags by Tamil protesters at a rally here Monday.

Earlier, police had said they were investigating whether their action violated Canada’s new anti-terror laws.

A police spokesman said their lawyers found “nothing illegal” about the use of LTTE flags by the protesters. “The best advice that we have from our lawyers is that it does not contravene any law,” a spokesman was quoted as saying by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The LTTE flag features a tiger jumping through a ring of fire and two crossed rifles.

The current Conservative government banned the LTTE in 2006 for using suicide bombers and child soldiers in its goal for an independent homeland for Sri Lankan Tamils.

More than 50,000 Tamils had joined in a “human chain” in the heart of the city, urging Canada to lift its ban on the LTTE and seek support for an independent Tamil Eelam.

Justifying the use of the flag, Canadian Tamil Congress spokesman David Poopalapillai told IANS: “What we waved at the rally was the national flag of a future Tamil Eelam. It is not the flag of any organisation or the LTTE.”

He said: “Under the Canadian ban on the LTTE, one is (not) allowed to raise funds. But one is free to espouse any political cause in a peaceful manner. That’s what we did Monday in a peaceful manner.”

It is not the first time that protesters in Canada have waved the flags of banned organisations.

Supporters of Hezbollah and Hamas, which are also banned in Canada, have often waved their flags at protest rallies.

In fact, B’nai Brith, the national body of Canadian Jews, Wednesday urged the city police to expand its probe into the display of LTTE flags to include Hamas and Hezbollah.

It seems to me that it's for the best, right now, that the law distinguishes between funding terrorists and waving their flags, though I would argue the Tamil Tigers are not the same kind of terrorists as are Hamas or Hezbollah: the Tigers can still be taken somewhat seriously as a movement of national liberation that strives to build a viable state that will take responsibility for its people in the community of nation-states, that would one day, if successful, negotiate its existence along with Sri Lanka's. In contrast, I see neither Hamas or Hezbollah as really wanting a responsible Palestinian (or Lebanese) state that would negotiate with the realities of Israel's existence; rather they are fundamentally motivated by a desire to destroy Israel, and also to kill Jews wherever, according to some Utopian vision of a non-national world ruled by a renewed Caliphate and universal Sharia. In other words, those who wave the Hamas or Hezbollah flags are, to my mind, advocating genocide, not national liberation, and this, I believe, is how many Canadian Jews and others experience the sight of these flag wavers on our streets. It seems to me the Tamil Tigers, however evil, nonetheless indulge in suicide bombings for somewhat less Utopian or nihilistic reasons.

But such differences aside, I find B'nai Brith's position an interesting problem for us free speech advocates because in thinking how best to defend free speech I don't think we can have any general rules or principles that should be thought always to apply in all imaginable situations. And it's not a simple question of free speech needing to come to an end where incitement to violence (or fraud, libel) is happening, because how do you know where that line is: there are always degrees of incitement, or risk of violence, we have to weigh in allowing for free speech (keeping in mind that there is often a greater risk in not allowing for the mediation of tensions and resentments that free speech provides).

So it is a question of what kind of freedom can be tolerated in a given time or place, with a given assumption of risk, and thus of knowing what kind of time or place you're living in. I would imagine that when a once free nation becomes home to, say, ten or more percent of people who are committed Islamists, people who are committed to replacing the liberal constitution with Sharia law, you can't both seriously defend the existence of a free society and still admit the same freedom to wave genocidal terrorist flags, as you might have done when there was no serious threat of constitutional overthrow.

In other words, free speech may be the best way to keep a society open and to avoid conflicts stagnating and building up, with no ready way to release pressure, with none of the mediation and insight into reality that comes with free speech. In most times and places, free speech may well be the best way to avoid a social conflict ever leading a society towards civil war. But when constitutional overthrow or civil war is a clear enough possibility on the horizon, the tolerance for incitement, political or tactical organizing, and public provocations, inevitably will or should change to some degree.

In other words, the defense of free speech is not best done in abstract metaphysical language that attempts to build an all-purpose model of reality that can be applied in all times and places; rather our defense of freedom has to be tied to a way of thinking that is always modeling the reality in front of us, in the here and now. The cry of "free speech" must be tied to an understanding of the need forever to fight to maximize or reveal the yet untold uses of freedom, given that there will always be people who resent and try to limit human freedom because freedom threatens their model of reality.

What's more, while we have a high obligation to allow people freely to argue through the resentments and philosophies that have evolved within our own society - we need to allow ways to work through the conflicts that have evolved as part of our nation's history - I don't think we have the same need or obligation to import from other countries all manner of belief, especially in respect to people who would overthrow our constitutional system. I don't think the same degree of freedom of speech needs to be granted to imported revolutionary ideologies as we might grant to our home-grown would-be revolutionaries.

But to what degree, in this global village, are ideas or anyone really outside our system of democratic rule? There is now a single global economy and communications network; does that mean we are now a single global civilization? I think it probably does; but that still does not mean, it seems to me, that each and every nation has to entertain freedom for all ideologies that would overthrow the nation's constitution. It depends, not on some abstract principle, but on an ongoing engagement with reality and risk. The problem is that we live in an age when "risk" is often invoked by our control-freak elites to justify all kinds of unnecessary government strangling of our freedom. Unless we have a government that loves and respects our freedom, because it sees itself as representative of same, those of us fighting for a free society will tend to defend the freedom of all even at the risk of providing fertile ground for the kinds of Islamist movements that are actively suppressed by many states in the Islamic world. So, I think we need to learn about and dance through this reality with more than one possible move or idea in mind.

In any case, I am interested in what readers think of B'nai Brith's proposal.

The costs of engineering "gay marriage": silencing critics?

This letter from Sean Murphy of the Catholic Civil Rights League in today's Vancouver Sun has me thinking a little about social engineering: Social engineering spawns long-term consequences

The letter is responding to yesterday's opinion piece by the naive Leonard Stern who argued

With almost four years having passed since we resolved the same-sex marriage question, it's hard to remember there was controversy in the first place.

The debate wrapped up without drama. Parliament passed the Civil Marriage Act on June 28, 2005, Canadians said okay, and the country went back to its business.

It's amusing, in a been-there-done-that sort of way, to see our American neighbours in the throes of internecine battle. A number of states have passed divisive declarations banning gay marriage. For all his supposed liberalism, even Barack Obama is conflicted about gay marriage. Many Americans seem to feel that gay marriage is a radical and dangerous proposition.

The Canadian experience shows that those anxieties are misplaced. Our social fabric hasn't unravelled...

I call this naive for the idea that the social consequences of gay marriage can somehow be known in a mere four years. But what about the Catholic, Murphy's claims regarding social engineering?

Leonard Stern appears to lead a sheltered life. His smug and condescending reflections about "the Canadian experience" are superficial and highly selective.

He overlooks attacks on freedom of expression, like efforts by the Alberta human rights inquisition to punish and silence a Christian pastor. He trivializes the head tax levied on the Knights of Columbus by its B.C. counterpart as the cost of exercising religious freedom. He ignores the fact that B.C. teachers opposed to the "new order" dare not speak publicly, lest they be suspended, fined or (like Chris Kempling) driven out of the state school system. He fails to notice the Corren Agreement, a private contract between the B.C. government and two homosexual activists to suppress parental authority in education.

Man inhabits a moral environment that is every bit as complex as the physical environment, and just as susceptible to significant damage as a result of ill-considered human activity. Four years is hardly sufficient to evaluate the long-term consequences of an unprecedented experiment in social engineering. But even four years is enough to recognize that the interests of a free people are not served by repressive measures hitherto characteristic of totalitarian regimes.

After living through or remembering the totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century, for most people today I think our first assumption when hearing the term "social engineering" is that it is bad, for it leads to horror stories like that of artist Maureen Mullarkey who writes of having been the target of a homosexual hate campaign, aiming to ruin her career and shut her up, merely because at one point in her career she represented gay culture in her art and then recently had the temerity to donate money to the side opposing gay marriage in California's bitterly-fought referendum on the issue. To some, that's the ultimate in homophobic hypocrisy, and reason for a frenzy of character assassination.

But, I might ask, can the Catholic and the Gay activist not see any common ground, despite their differences? Don't they see that, in the longer historical perspective, both the Catholic family and the nascent gay family are the fruit of the same Western tradition and while it is a tradition that has evolved, it has not been without its social engineering. "Gay marriage", whatever the many varieties of sexual partnership in the human past, would be something unimaginable in any traditional society where marriage is fundamentally a question of how the production of children, and their place in the social order, is to be recognized, organized, and licensed.

What's more, the nuclear family that is one of the distinctive features of Western civilization is the product of the church's long war to substitute the extended family, clan, and tribe, with a new kind of symbolic family in the church. By outlawing things like cousin marriage, by making priests officially celibate (i.e. without recognizable heirs), by promoting the idea that the church was a corporate family with a claim on inheriting personal or family wealth, the strength of the extended family of traditional society was over time diminished in favour of the nuclear family. And, as the resources or insularity of the clan were diminished, the nuclear family's dependence on interacting in all kinds of ways with other nuclear families to build a social safety net along with a productive economy grew. The nuclear family is weak and thus pressured to create the kind of free individuals who can interact with other free individuals in taking care of the weak family in interaction with the larger "family" once conceived in terms of the church and then in terms of the nation. Western society is built around a culture of mutual trust in strangers, as free individuals consecrated, during much of our history, by sharing in communion in the life, death, and rebirth of Jesus. And ultimately it is the Western idea of a sacred personhood that makes gay marriage possible. Homosexuality is surely common throughout human history, but homosexual marriage would be and is something inconceivable in the minds of those rooted in traditional societies. In other words, gay marriage requires the kind of secular culture that is specifically a secularized form of Christianity, a secularized form of the Christian eucharist that makes each individual into a divine, free, person. That many a Western homosexual conceives of his or her gay family in opposition to the church is only a sign of the two "families'" close historical connection, of their rivalry for common ground. As we never tire of noting, many Western homosexuals are much more anti-Christian, in general, than they are, say, anti-Islam even though the latter faith constitutes a culture arguably much less tolerant of gay rights.

Since the Christian nuclear family is the product of a long history of what one might call "social engineering", one wonders what it means for the Catholic to now attack the social engineering or thought control that is part of the movement for same sex marriages today. What, in other words, allows one to speak negatively of certain social engineering while accepting the fruits of other engineering as the proven results of a successful "evolution"?

While I think it's clear that the Western nuclear family has proven a historical success, at least up until now (when its inherent fragility is exposed in a society that no longer reproduces its numbers from generation to generation) how do we know that "gay marriage" is not the social engineering equivalent of, say, the hippie commune, or perhaps something yet more dangerous? Will homosexual partnerships lead to families somehow reproducing themselves with children and raising these to be the kind of individuals who can succeed in a free society premised on the mutual interaction of strangers? Or will homosexual marriage prove itself an attractive, socially acceptable alternative to the hard work of the nuclear family's child rearing? Will gay marriage lead to people making valuable contributions to our society that outweigh any effects of developing an attractive alternative to the child-rearing family? In other words, might gay families become some rough equivalent of the celibate priesthoods of old?

At this point in time, we all have our own intuitions and desires in respect to such questions, but the lessons from the laboratory of history are far from known; these will take decades and quite possibly centuries to become widely recognized. I have my own prejudices but of one thing I'm sure enough to state boldly: "social engineering" can only work to the extent it is grounded in a true revelation into human nature. And consequently it is incumbent on those on both sides of this issue to be open to free debate that we may reveal our unfolding human reality to each other. Those who would silence opposition to gay marriage are simply giving us reason to doubt the long-term viability of gay marriage. Those who would outlaw gay marriage are trying to cancel an experiment, but on what rational forecast of the potential risks? Only a serious engagement in elucidating our shared reality can help us answer these questions.

To my mind, both Catholic families and gay families are today products of the Christian revelation into the nature of the person and his or her relationship to the means by which human societies generate themselves through sacrificial (and anti-sacrificial) processes. The manifold truths and revelations of the Judeo-Christian tradition cannot be discussed in this post, truths I believe can be largely demonstrated in purely anthropological and historical terms, while bracketing the question of God's existence (a question that, in today's lame debates over atheism, tends to sidetrack many from recognizing the larger anthropological issues at stake - why do we have a God concept in the first place?).

What those defending gay marriage need to do is show, in the years to come, either how the same-sex marriage is a way of extending and renewing the productive tradition of Judeo-Christian revelation into the possibilities of a free, individualized, personhood and its ability to work with millions of strangers and other nuclear families in insuring the continuing strength and fertility (i.e. faith in the future) of Western societies, or how the idea of gay marriage is rooted in some fundamentally new revelation that will allow for the kind of success in "social engineering" that the Christian nuclear family, in opposition to the extended clan, has had. On the latter possibility, I, for one, see yet no evidence of any great new revelation into our common humanity propelling the calls for gay marriage, and so I fear that the purely anti-Judeo-Christian stream of "gay" thought will not lead to success and will maybe only revisit the kind of failed, totalitarian, social engineering that characterized, for example, the Nazi and Communist movements.

One either interacts with other free individuals and families in ways that build covenants for the future growth and security of our shared society, or one indulges in destructive fantasies premised on some kind of narcissistic detachment from a larger social purpose. In overcoming the traditional society and clan, we have learned the dangers of imposing any settled understanding of life's purpose on the free individual (we can all benefit from his or her freedom to further our understanding of our shared reality and its possibilities, not least when this freedom leads to failure, and especially when failure can be freely admitted); but we should not give up the idea that our lives have a purpose beyond ourselves, one that is rooted in a shared human reality. Let Catholic brothers and gay sisters fight an honest fight, frank, honest, but sportsmanlike, to discover and further articulate the shared human truth behind our differences. Shutting people up is for losers.

Deserter? my royal canadian foot!

Blazing Catfur calls for attention to the latest antics of Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff's advisor, Warren Kinsella: Kinsella's attempt to pressure TVOntario (the government-owned tv station, in Liberal Party-governed Ontario) to ban "racist" Kathy Shaidle from offering her opinions on Steve Paikin's interview show. Having failed in his campaign, Kinsella is now having a run at Paikin: Blazing Cat Fur: They don't call him the Impotent Lying Jackal for nothing...It's just sad now

Kinsella likes to portray himself as a defender of multiculti values, and of Canadian Jews against hate speech. He also styles himself a fan of Barack Obama. I wonder how he is coming to terms with the latest revelations of Obama's antisemitic tendencies (see here, here and here). I point this out just to point vaguely to the paradoxes of our times that may be driving Kinsella in his five inches of fury: the revelation that left-liberal political correctness and its accompanying "human rights" discourse turns out, when fully revealed, to be antisemitic. Kathy knows this, she knows that PC is anti-freedom which is part of the reason I guess she makes such a show of being politically incorrect in an attempt to wake us up to the real nature and cause of freedom. Yes, there are places and times when we are pushed closer to freedom, not oppression, by being called school-yard names. But try telling that to the Human Rights Commission. Kathy may not always be in touch with those places and times, but those who would pressure TV producers to ban her will probably never know how to judge in anything other than a blind self-righteousness. They certainly won't let others think for themselves and provide the feedback we all need to overcome our delusions.

I was just watching Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1941 propaganda film, 49th Parallel (view here). The final scene of the film, which begins roughly at the 1.44.30 mark features a brilliant performance of Canadian diction and values by Raymond Massey, playing a melancholy soldier. Watch the whole thing; many lines jump out at me (for they echo strongly in these times of Jihad) but if I had to quote just a few, I'll pick these, as Massey addresses the Nazi officer who believes in some mystic ties that bind him to his race and can't understand why an AWOL Canadian soldier who whines about his government can still put great faith in the ultimate authority on which his nation's system of government is based:

Why you spoonfed louse. I can grouse about the food and the C.O. and anything I blame please; and that's more than you with your Gestapo and your stormtroopers and your Aryan bushwa. Ah nuts! What's the good of talking to you? You can't even begin to understand democracy. We own the right to be fed up with anything we damn please and say so out loud when we feel like it. And when things go wrong we can take it and we can dish it out too.

Jonathan Kay's take on Paikin and Kinsella.

Say no to CRTC regulation of the internet

Under the guise of forcing us to pay (via a tax on our ISPs) for the creation of "Canadian content" the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission is looking to get into the game of regulating the internet and privileging certain content. BCF has the links.

Details on how to communicate with CRTC here:
BIG BLUE WAVE: Tell the CRTC: DO NOT REGULATE THE INTERNET, PERIOD!

Jason Kenney's moral clarity on antisemitism and the Canadian Arab Federation

GayandRight: Jason Kenney's Speech at the Anti-Semitism Conference....

Ladies and gentlemen, in November during a trip to Kiev I paid my respects at the Babi Yar Holocaust site where more than 33,000 Ukrainian Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis over a two day period in 1941.

For me this brought to mind a new dimension of the unfathomable evil of the Holocaust. Babi Yar was not about the mechanised and perversely discreet killing of the gas chambers. Here men in uniform lined up and shot 33,000 individual human beings one by one non-stop over a period of two days. Even for those who were just following orders there had to be some deep blackness in their hearts, some hatred that allowed them to dehumanise the innocent individual human beings who they shot down one by one.

A few weeks ago I was in Mumbai, India, where I went to visit Chabad’s Nariman House. I was literally sickened walking through the debris, seeing the blood-splattered walls. To stand in the place where Rabbi Gavriel Holzberg and his wife Rivkah were tortured and slaughtered. As I later looked out on Mumbai from the rooftop of Chabad House I marvelled to think that in this huge, teeming city of 20 million the killers had meticulously, deliberately sought out to target this one rather obscure, peaceful place, and this particular man and his family.

Why did they do so? Because and only because they were Jews, and as such because they represented all the Jews. 68 years and thousands of miles separate the ravine of Babi Yar from the debris of Nariman House, but these places are connected by the same uniquely durable and pernicious evil of anti-Semitism. Even peaceful and pluralistic Canada sees signs that this evil is newly resurgent. The 2007 audit of anti-Semitic incidents by B’nai Brith, Canada’s league for human rights, recorded over 1,000 reported anti-Semitic incidents, up by 11% from the previous year and also reflecting a doubling of the number of reported incidents over the past five years.

Just a day, Friday, as I was boarding the flight for London, as a simple concrete example of this new environment, one page of one of our national newspapers, two articles. One about Jewish university students at one of our major universities being attacked by a mob shouting anti-Jewish slogans at them. And another article, man sentenced for firebombing Jewish institutions.

We in Canada are beginning to experience the same. Of course we’ve always had the old-school anti-Semitism, and it’s still present. The manifestations from the extreme right and their presence on the internet. In my assessment it’s marginal, small and a shrinking form of anti-Semitism, but one which we can never forget. We do have robust hate crimes laws to deal with those manifestations of anti-Semitism, but we do see the growth of a new anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitism predicated on the notion that the Jews alone have no right to a homeland, the anti-Zionist version of anti-Semitism.
[...]
[quoting Stephen Harper] "...we must resist the error of viewing the Holocaust as a strictly historical event. It’s not good enough for politicians to stand before you and say they remember and mourn what happened over six decades ago. They must stand up to those who advocate the destruction of Israel and its people today. And they must be unequivocal in their condemnation of anti-Semitic despots, terrorists and fanatics. That is the only way to honour the memory of those who were consumed by the Holocaust.”
[...]
As minister responsible for our multi-culturalism programme we have adjusted our programme to move away from celebrating our differences to focusing on social cohesion and building bridges between communities, combating radicalisation of youth.

For instance, I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to support an exciting new venture launched by the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Canadian Somali Congress, which will provide young Canadians of Somalian origin, typically refugees, with an opportunity to find internships in Jewish-owned businesses and professions so they can meet and de-stigmatise people from other communities.

I follow with great interest your government’s programme to sponsor British high school kids, secondary school children, to be able to go and visit the death camps in Europe and to learn firsthand and report back to their peers the reality of the Holocaust. And I’m hopeful that we can find ways to participate in similar programmes.

Also very importantly, our government takes a zero tolerance approach to expressions of anti-Semitism in the public square. There are organisations in Canada, as in Britain, that receive their share of media attention and public notoriety, but who at the same time as expressing hateful sentiments expect to be treated as respectable interlocutors in the public discourse. I think, for example, of the president of an organisation called the Canadian Islamic Congress, Mohamed Elmasry, who notoriously said three years ago on live television that all Israelis over the age of 18 can legitimately be killed. They are combatants, and therefore legitimate targets for elimination.

I think as well of the leader of the Canadian Arab Federation, who notoriously circulated an e-mail when my colleague, our shadow Foreign Minister, Bob Rae, was running for the leadership of his party, calling on people to vote against Mr. Rae because of Arlene Perly Rae’s involvement in Canada’s Jewish community. The same individual, the same organisation, the Canadian Arab Federation, just last week circulated - including to all parliamentarians - videos which include propaganda, including the inculcation to hatred, of children by organisations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

These and other organisations are free within the confines of our law and consistent with our traditions of freedom of expression, to speak their mind, but they should not expect to receive resources from the state, support from taxpayers or any other form of official respect from the government or the organs of our State. And I would encourage all other governments to take a similar approach to organisations that either excuse violence against Jews or express essentially anti-Semitic sentiments.
[...]
my proudest moment as minister was a year ago this month when I announced on behalf of our government that Canada would withdraw, and has withdrawn, from the Durban 2 process. We did so deliberately. We did so after having participated in the initial preparatory meetings. We did so being fully conscious of Canada’s tradition as an international champion of tolerance, pluralism and mutual respect. And that’s precisely why we withdrew from the Durban process.

We withdrew from a process that sees Iran sitting on the organising committee, a country whose president has repeatedly engaged in inciting genocide against the Jewish nation, a conference in which Libya plays a central role on the organising committee, a conference where many of the key organising meetings were set, no doubt coincidentally, on Jewish high holidays to diminish the participation of Israeli and Jewish delegates, a process which re-invited to participate all of the NGOs that turned the original Durban conference into the notorious hate-fest, including those responsible for circulating copies of the Chronicles of the Elders of Zion and organisations which outside the conference venue held up portraits of Adolf Hitler, and a conference which as well re-invited those NGOs made it difficult or impossible for Jewish NGOs to come as observers, including the Canadian Council on Israeli and Jewish Affairs.

Now, I understand and appreciate the position of some governments to continue to wait and see how this process develops. I think many of us made the wrong decision several years ago to unwittingly legitimise the process. And I understand the position of some European governments that they want to watch and wait and see what Washington does. I find that a bit surprising. I always thought Europe prided itself as having its own independent foreign policy aligned with its own values and interests. That’s certainly the position of the government of Canada. We would encourage our friends elsewhere to remember that the Trans-Atlantic relationship includes Canada, and that we have taken what we believe to be a principled position on the Durban process.

The recent news that the Obama government will be sending officials to Durban II naturally revolts us. Let's be thankful that some in Canada are not so immersed in ideas of moral and cultural relativism that they would defend the right of hate-mongering groups to receive government monies as if they were just any other special interest ethnic group. The defense of free speech must include a criticism of any government that would fund hate and build a state on top of an exchange among group, and not individual, identities. A multicultural empire where self-appointed elites claim to represent one or another group and to negotiate on behalf of said group in the backrooms of the byzantine state is not compatible with a truly free society where people can be free as individuals to speak their minds. But let us not be quick to write off those who agree with this while still calling themselves, as free individuals, Muslim, even if their idea of Islam, or their own business with the state, is yet somewhat incoherent to us:

The Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC) has welcomed the move by Minister Jason Kenney to cut funding of groups that spread hate and promote division.

In a statement, Salma Siddiqui, senior vice president of the MCC said, for too long successive Conservative and Liberal governments have been funding groups who, under the guise of multiculturalism, have been promoting an overseas agenda to the detriment of Canada

Earlier this week Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced a review of all federal funding of the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) after Hamas and Hezbollah flags were raised at a CAF backed rally. Reacting to the criticism, the president of CAF labeled Minister Jason Kenney a "professional whore."

Ms. Siddiqui said she was not only shocked at the language used by the CAF president, but was surprised to learn that the Arab federation was being generously funded by the very government it was lashing out at. It was revealed that CAF receives nearly $500,000 from just one government department.

The MCC demands that all future funding of CAF should be made conditional to a guarantee that the Arab organization will not behave as a mouthpiece of Hamas and Hezbollah in Canada and that it will embrace Canadian values, not those of Iran.

She said this condition should apply to all multicultural organizations. “I echo the words of Minister Kenney who said, ‘We should not be rewarding those who express views that are contrary to Canada's best liberal values of tolerance and mutual respect,’ added Ms. Siddiqui.

Rob Breakenridge has a record of the CAF's dirty deeds.

See also:

Last year, the National Post editorial board hosted Mouammar and a CAF colleague for an editorial board meeting. To our collective shock, they laid blame for virtually every problem the world faces on Israel — including the alienation of Arab-Canadian children in Canada's public school system. (One explained that he had sent his daughter for education overseas — because the inclusion of Israel in Canadian textbooks was too traumatic for her to endure.)

It's a disgrace that this group ever got a cent from Ottawa. I hope Kenney doesn't stop at slashing the CAF's funding — he should eliminate it.

(HTs: Catfur)

The ebb and flow of Canadian academic freedom

First the evil news from scaramouche:

Déjà vu at York U: Don’t look now, but Toronto’s York University has morphed into a German campus circa Der Fuhrer—or a Gaza campus circa today. I just received the following desperate plea via e-mail:

To Whom It May Concern:
As students at York University Keele Campus we would like to urgently bring to your attention several appalling incidents, which took place today, February 11th 2009 on our campus.

After an attempted media conference, regarding a successful campaign of “Drop YFS”, a racial riot broke out deeming the members of “Drop YFS” racist. “Drop YFS” is a student led group with students from different backgrounds, faiths and beliefs. In addition, the Jewish students involved in “Drop YFS” belong to Hasbara at York, Hillel at York, and other Jewish groups on campus.

“Drop YFS” is a student run initiative to have the executive members of YFS (the undergraduate student government) held accountable for their inactivity during the strike. The media conference was put in place to thank the students for their 5000 signatures, and to congratulate the students for their success.

The conference was interrupted by mobs of people who broke into chants, racial slurs, and anti-Semitic threats. Students fearing for their lives at York University had to be protected and escorted out of the room by Toronto Police - as they were trapped inside this room unable to leave, afraid. The entire Jewish population of York is intimidated, and no longer feels secure on campus. The Jewish members of “Drop YFS” were solely targeted today for their religion and their political views.

There is video footage of this taking place, and we are more than willing to answer any of your questions. Please contact us:
Aaron Rosenberg
aaron_r123@hotmail.com
Elinor Izmaylov
elinorizmaylov@hotmail.com
Please forward this to as many people you can – the community at large must become aware that Jews on campus no longer feel safe regardless of their political views.

Enraged mobs of Jew-haters hurling threats and racial slurs? Where are our politicians? Where are the media? Where’s the Canadian Jewish Congress?
Where’s Barbara Hall?

As far as i can tell, the video is not yet on the web. Background on this story here.

We previously reported on Queen's University's own speech enforcers here Today comes the welcome news that Queen's is dropping the crazy idea. But in true Canadian slackademic fashion, the Americans are to blame for the crazy idea in the first place!

Calling it "incompatible with the atmosphere required for free speech," Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., on Wednesday scrapped its controversial "dialogue facilitator" program.

It caused a scandal last year when it was revealed the six student "facilitators" were mandated to intervene in private conversations to encourage discussion of social justice issues and discourage offensive language.

In a report to the administration, a panel of experts expressed "strong reservations about unsolicited interventions into the lives of students" because of the risk of "making students feel unsafe or under surveillance because of their opinions."

The panel included Leora Jackson, the school's rector, John Meisel, an emeritus professor of political science, and Keith Norton, the former head of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. They had "serious concerns" with how the program was set up.

The panel faulted Dean of Student Affairs Jason Laker for importing an American model of diversity promotion, from the National Coalition Building Institute, while failing to research any comparable programs at Canadian universities.

It's time we all stood up as Canadians and let York University officials know that theirs has become a pariah institution and that it is completely unacceptable that they have become a place for antisemitic riots. From my own experience of York, I blame not only the left-Islamist student alliance, in support of CUPE teachers and their union's official antisemitism, but also the ideologies promoted by many of the senior non-CUPE faculty.(HTs: Blazing Cat Fur)

---------------
UPDATE: Here is a first-hand account of the York incident and here is the B'nai Brith press release (via email):

‘Pandemonium at York University reflects dangerous trend
of anti-Jewish agitation on campuses,’ says B’nai Brith Canada –

B’nai Brith delegation to visit York campus this afternoon

TORONTO, February 12, 2009 – B’nai Brith Canada has expressed deep concern over disturbances yesterday at York University, with reports of Jewish students fearing for their safety and being escorted off campus by police. Turmoil erupted following a press conference by some students to announce that they had successfully garnered 5,000 signatures on a petition demanding the recall of York Federation Student leaders. Amidst the pandemonium, Jewish students were pushed and shoved, antisemitic slurs were shouted, leaving Jewish students to seek refuge in a locked room away from the frantic mob.

“We are disturbed and appalled by reports of Jewish students fearing for their safety and being scared to be identified as Jews on campus,” said Frank Dimant, B’nai Brith Canada’s Executive Vice President. “Just last week we met with York University student leaders who communicated incident after incident of deliberate intimidation of Jewish students, and marginalization and isolation on campus.

“We have requested an urgent meeting with York University’s administration to ensure that immediate measures be put in place to restore order and safety to campus life.

“We have already been in communication with police and demanded that the safety and security of Jewish students at York University and other campuses be dealt with as a matter of top priority.

“A senior delegation of B’nai Brith Canada officials will be on campus this afternoon to witness first hand a day in the life of a Jewish student on the frontlines against antisemitism, anti-Zionist and radical forces that care nothing about democracy, human rights and the rule of law.”

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UPDATE 2: Video showing the aftermath of the riot (with police escorting students out of the Hillel centre while the mob chants) are here.