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!

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.

Geert Wilders Defends Our Freedom

There is of course something fundamentally wrong with a society that allows its government to prosecute the government's leading political opponent for the inevitably arbitrarily-defined crime of "hate speech", the prosecutors of which avow that truth is not a defense if truth can be deemed hateful. So it's clear that the Netherlands, like much of Europe, is sick. And now with the opening of Geert Wilders' trial it faces a moment of truth: will it go deeper into the madness of totalitarianism or will it rediscover a respect for individual freedom and start to prosecute the real enemies, those who threaten violence against individuals speaking and living freely?

Walker with his blog roundup has great coverage of Day 1 of the Wilders trial. He has also provided video and translation of Wilders' statement to the court: Geert Wilders’ personal speech at pre-trial hearing:

Mister Speaker, judges of the court,

I would like to make use of my right to speak for a few minutes.

Freedom is the most precious of all our attainments and the most vulnerable. People have devoted their lives to it and given their lives for it. Our freedom in this country is the outcome of centuries. It is the consequence of a history that knows no equal and has brought us to where we are now.

I believe with all my heart and soul that the freedom in the Netherlands is threatened. That what our heritage is, what generations could only dream about, that this freedom is no longer a given, no longer self-evident.

I devote my life to the defence of our freedom. I know what the risks are and I pay a price for it every day. I do not complain about it; it is my own decision. I see that as my duty and it is why I am standing here. I know that the words I use are sometimes harsh, but they are never rash. It is not my intention to spare the ideology of conquest and destruction, but I am not any more out to offend people. I have nothing against Muslims. I have a problem with Islam and the Islamization of our country because Islam is at odds with freedom.

Future generations will wonder to themselves how we in 2010, in this place, in this room, earned our most precious attainment. Whether there is freedom in this debate for both parties and thus also for the critics of Islam, or that only one side of the discussion may be heard in the Netherlands? Whether freedom of speech in the Netherlands applies to everyone or only to a few? The answer to this is at once the answer to the question whether freedom still has a home in this country.

Freedom was never the property of a small group, but was always the heritage of us all. We are all blessed by it.

Lady Justice wears a blindfold, but she has splendid hearing. I hope that she hears the following sentences, loud and clear: It is not only a right, but also the duty of free people to speak against every ideology that threatens freedom. Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States was right: The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

I hope that the freedom of speech shall triumph in this trial.

In conclusion, Mister Speaker, judges of the court: This trial is obviously about the freedom of speech. But this trial is also about the process of establishing the truth. Are the statements that I have made and the comparisons that I have taken, as cited in the summons, true? If something is true then can it still be punishable? This is why I urge you to not only submit to my request to hear witnesses and experts on the subject of freedom of speech. But I ask you explicitly to honour my request to hear witnesses and experts on the subject of Islam. I refer not only to Mister Jansen and Mister Admiraal, but also to the witness/experts from Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Without these witnesses, I cannot defend myself properly and, in my opinion, this would not be an fair trial.

See also this recent interview given by Wilders explaining his positions, and also commentary by Bat Ye'or, Daniel Pipes and others.

Dutch diviners go Delphic?

nrc.nl - International - Dutchman acquitted of insulting Islam

A question I have raised from time to time in our discussions of free speech and laws targeting putative "hate speech", is how is it possible for any court to draw a line around hate speech without becoming politicized and, quite possibly, mystical. I'm still trying to get my head around this report on the latest definition of hate speech from the Dutch high court. It would appear that to be guilty of hate speech in the Netherlands you have to be "needlessly offensive" and offering a criticism of a group that has little bearing on the members' substantial ideas or behaviour. I suppose this is a reasonable way for a court to limit its exposure to politics without completely tossing out a law that threatens to politicize justice. Still, while limiting the exposure of religious critics to the law, it might seem the court only makes those cases where people will be pursued by the law into something noteworthy, as if we need to make a public spectacle of the needlessly offensive, like someone saying "the devil sucks!".

One wonders how needlessly offensive comments that don't bear on the ideas or behaviour of at least some followers of a religion are to be decided. It might appear that to be guilty one has to be needlessly offensive towards a religious community in a way that is really not too consequential to the world of serious ideas. The court seems to want to leave the door open to serious criticism of religions, and yet criminalize those who are just plain rude and thus, one might think, eminently forgettable and inconsequential if not made into a public demon/martyr. In any case, one imagines finding someone guilty under this law will now become a bizarre process. Geert Wilders is the next challenge for the court:

"Stop the tumour that is Islam" is not an insult to a group on the basis of its religion, the Dutch high court ruled on Tuesday. An activist from the southern town of Valkenswaard, who had hung a poster using this slogan in his window, has been acquitted of the charge, which is similar to one of the charges faced by controversial Dutch anti-Islam member of parliament Geert Wilders.

The man from Valkenswaard had hung the poster after the 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim extremist. The poster read: "Stop the tumour that is Islam. Theo has died for us. Who will be next? Resist now! National Alliance, we will not bow down to Allah. Join now." [The National Alliance in the Netherlands is an extreme right movement.]

The high court on Tuesday explained its ruling by saying that it is not a crime to express insults towards religion. "Not even if that happens in such a way that the devotees feel their religious feelings are hurt", the court said.

The highest judge in the Netherlands said that only if a needlessly offensive remark is 'explicitly' geared towards a certain group, which is distinct from others in society based on its religion, can there be a matter of group insult as defined in article 137c of the Dutch criminal code. For an insult towards a group to be punishable, that group has to be 'collectively' hit in what defines that group, namely religion. Criticism towards opinions that exist within a group or the behaviour of people belonging to that group cannot be penalized, according to the ruling.

The regional court and the court of appeals had given the man a suspended sentence, but his lawyer took the case all the way to the high court pleading that the defendant only targeted a radical part of Islam that wants to disturb western society. He said the poster was at most a political opinion about a social evil.

The high court said the same criteria of group insult will apply in the prosecution of Geert Wilders. The appeals court in Amsterdam last month ordered that Wilders should be prosecuted for hate speech and inciting discrimination because of his statements about Islam and the short film Fitna.

The judge in that case will also have to determine whether Wilders' remarks are "unmistakeably aimed at a certain group of people that are distinguished from the others in society by their religion". Wilders, when asked to respond, called Tuesday's ruling good news: "This could have consequences for my case".

On which side of "hate speech" laws does the real barbarism lie?

Thomas Bertonneau's latest at The Brussels Journal discusses Peter Damian Ouspensky's Letters from Russia (1921), a refugee intellectual's account of the Bolshevik Revolution:

Ouspensky anticipates Solzhenitsyn in identifying Bolshevism (Marxism) as a pernicious German invention seized on by Lenin and his followers to justify their orgy of violence against a world they hated because it had the temerity to exist apart from their desires and wishes. “As a general rule,” writes Ouspensky in the fourth letter, “Bolshevism based itself on the worst forces underlying Russian life.”

Ouspensky repeats a refrain in all five letters that Bolshevism, being barbarism with a fancy vocabulary, constitutes a threat not only in Russia, but anywhere, hence also everywhere, because it is a destabilizing condition of ordered life, so arduously achieved, always to carry with it “barbarian forces existing inside [the] society, hostile to culture and civilization.” I could not help connecting a recent remark made by Sean Gabb in a Brussels Journal entry with the foregoing words by Ouspensky.

In a discussion of “hate speech” laws and their selective enforcement, Gabb notes that, “the soviet socialists and the national socialists kept control by the arbitrary arrest and torture or murder of suspected opponents,” but that these methods are currently “not… acceptable in England or in the English world.” Nevertheless, writes Gabb, censorious speech-legislation involving intimidating criminalization of certain words or verbal attitudes “has nothing really to do with politeness,” but is, rather, “about power.” So it is as well in the United States and Canada. Wherever governments and elites seek to control expression, whether or not as Gabb observes it has to do ostensibly with “diversity and inclusiveness,” the real agenda is to achieve “the unlimited power to plunder and enslave us, while scaring us into the appearance of gratitude for our dispossession.”

I would say that “hate crime” and “hate speech” laws represent a trial balloon of totalitarian methods. Such methods are barbarous. They betray the basic decency of the Western achievement. They take root in “the worst forces,” as Ouspensky says, “underlying our life.” Now “ought” is a counterfactual word. But it strikes me that if history taught only one lesson to the civilized it would be that as soon as any visibly power-hungry group succeeds in an agenda of intimidation, no matter how minor, sensible people dedicated to their own freedom ought to respond with all necessary resistance until the aggressors have themselves been intimidated into a retreat. Better indeed to quash such attempts before their first success, but that is a more difficult proposition. Ouspensky’s book explains what happens when timidity rather than vigor is the keynote of response to internal barbarism. So does a great library of other books, all of which came later, however, than Ouspensky’s.

(Brussels Journal)

There is no perfect system: Ed Morgan on hate and free speech

Blazing Cat Fur brings our attention today to an article by Toronto law professor, and former Canadian Jewish Congress top official, Ed Morgan. Professor Morgan explains his about face on the question of Canada's "human rights" hate speech laws, from a supporter to an opponent.

What is noteworthy in Ed's narrative is not that he came through some application of careful legal reasoning to turn on the laws that the CJC has taken a lead in supporting. Rather, his revelation, perhaps like all real revelations, came through an experience of why such laws are not compatible with the pragmatic truths of human interaction in one's time and place.

In other words, there are actually very few opponents of the "hate speech" laws that hold some absolutist position on "free speech", a position defended by some philosophical argument they take to be unimpeachable. The cause of freedom of expression is ultimately a pragmatic one (and I hear no serious arguments against things such as libel laws or the criminalization of incitement to violence, or threats.) I think most defenders of free speech realize that any concerted campaign of vilification against any individual or established group of fellow citizens that was not simply a reasonable or sincere argument against an ideology, religion, or failure to share in the cultural basics by which a free society renews itself, but a campaign against their very existence, would be intolerable.

But the question, best addressed by pragmatic experience and intuition, is how should we respond to intolerable hate speech. The common gut reaction that "there ought to be a law..." appeals to our sense of primitive justice. And I do not mean to be condescending to this "primitive" sense, for I think it is in touch with something true and fundamental to our humanity, as is any honour/shame code, notwithstanding the historical limits (the restraint on freedom and social-cultural growth) of all such codes when taken very much to heart.

Such limits are illuminated by the example in Morgan's article:

This past spring, I was asked to defend the leadership of Hasbara Fellowships at a York University discipline hearing. Hasbara is an activist Jewish student organization that decided, in the face of relentless anti-Israel events at York, to fight bad speech not with censorship, but with more and better speech. Instead of asking for a ban on anti-Israel activities, they counter with strong pro-Israel events – often with a dose of in-your-face chutzpah. Fighting bad speech with good speech has turned out to be the right way to go, and I’m happy to say that we’ve had some legal success with the strategy.

The complaints filed against Hasbara allege that the very image of the blue-and-white Israeli flag appearing on the group’s pamphlets is hateful and must be banned. The complaints filed against Maclean’s allege that the very discussion of radical Islam contained in that publication is hateful and must be banned. That anyone can take either complaint seriously shows how dangerous the suppression of speech in the name of anti-hate can be. It turns out, if we read our history correctly, that the Holocaust began not only with words, but with book burning. Once we go down the road of censorship for the sake of promoting tolerance, we may soon be standing at the heights of intolerance.

How can university officials (not least at a university that once identified itself as a Jew-friendly institution) even entertain the argument that the Israeli flag is a symbol of hate? I know real thinking has been in short supply in our universities for some time now, but seriously...

This kind of thing happens because once we institutionalize the concept of hate speech laws, in an otherwise free society of many identity groups, it becomes extremely difficult, and I think probably impossible, to hold the line to insure those laws are used only in extreme circumstances (circumstances that would not likely ever emerge in a society keen to protect its shared freedoms) and not corrupted by a human pride and arrogance that would understand "justice" as the insuring that every group has an equal go at humiliating or scapegoating its enemies.

After all, human conflict is an inescapable fact of life, and in certain respects all the more so the freer and more complex our society. The temptation to have a go at restraining the other, towards whom we feel conflict or resentment, with such laws becomes almost impossible to refuse because we know that the very same temptation is being entertained by our others. Tit for tat, honour and shame, get them before they get us... all the true, but primitive, human intuitions about justice and reciprocity come into play.

Since conflict is a fact of life, and since resentment only increases in scope and scale the more free and socially or culturally complex one's society, the pragmatic question of seeking relatively non-violent ways of deferring this conflict become paramount. And if the pragmatic choice, some kind of muddling through, or some new kind of conversation that defers tensions without trying to find any permanent "solution", can increase the overall freedom in our society, we need to favor it even if it seems contrary to our more basic intuitions about justice. We cannot necessarily appeal to our core desire for more formal justice and lust after more laws to restrain people, especially where the application of such laws is inevitably politicized.

From this realization comes the pragmatic argument that Ed Morgan offers today, the realization that the best way to fight bad speech is with good speech. If we want a free society, it is our responsibility to stand with those who are unjustly hated, and not make it into a matter for constant intervention from centralized authority, be it the university administration of the national state.

B'nai Brith: putting their "faith" in criminalization of Judeophobia

UPDATE: fourhorses at Free Dominion points out some of the government agents whom B'Nai Brith should be targeting next, according to their own logic in the following post.

UPDATE 2: And let's not forget how our criminal law can be corrupted once judges must play the game of defining and punishing "hate" speech, rather than clear incitement to violence:
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A number of the bloggers who have been calling for an end to Canada's "human rights" commissions, or at least to the powers of these commissions to police our freedom of expression, saw this recent press release from B'nai Brith as a hopeful sign that that organization was reconsidering its record of working with Canada's "human rights" commissions to prosecute internet hate mongers. Those who had hoped that Canada's organized Jews would stop fighting the last Holocaust by fooling themselves into thinking that going after socially marginal "neo-Nazis" was somehow a politically serious act, and who had called instead for Jewish organizations to concentrate on the threat of a next Holocaust posed by antisemitic Islamists and allied leftists who, in Canada, are now using the "human rights" codes to attack critics of political Islam, including Jewish defenders of individual freedom, will probably be disappointed at the recent decision of B'nai Brith to put its faith in Canada's criminal hate speech laws. However, at least B'nai Brith's target is now those one can take a little more seriously as promoters of a second Holocaust.

Today came the news that B'nai Brith is lobbying the Ontario Attorney General to prosecute under the criminal code, in order to combat the rampant Jew hatred, posing as anti-Zionism, at Ontario's universities:

TORONTO – B’nai Brith Canada has urged Ontario Attorney General Chris Bentley to proceed swiftly with hate crime charges against demonstrators who took part in an anti-Israel event last February at McMaster University.

Protesters chanted “death to Jews” and “Viva Jihad,” while waving signs that promoted hatred and violence.

In a letter to Bentley, B’nai Brith Canada said that Hamilton Police urged that “you proceed with hate crime charges in connection with the anti-Israel rally held at McMaster University on Feb. 29, 2008. As reported by various news outlets, including the Hamilton Mountain News, hate-filled slogans such as ‘death to Jews’ and ‘Viva Jihad’ traumatized those in attendance.

“We urge you to…proceed with hate crime charges against demonstrators who actively promoted hatred and violence.

“B’nai Brith Canada’s 2007 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents illustrates the growing trend of antisemitic incidents across Canada taking place at educational settings. This is especially true with regards to university campuses where incidents rose dramatically, more than doubling from 36 cases in 2006 to 78 in 2007.

“While free speech is undoubtedly a fundamental component of Canadian society, it should not act as a shield for protesters chanting ‘death to Jews’ and ‘Viva Jihad.’ As universities across Canada gear up for a new academic year, we look to your leadership to signal that poisonous messaging that promotes hatred and violence against a particular segment of the community – in this case Jewish students – will not be tolerated, on or off campus.”

In the letter, B’nai Brith acknowledged that Bentley has fought hate crimes throughout Ontario: “We are well aware of your ongoing commitment to combating hatred against all of Ontario’s diverse communities and welcome your ongoing efforts on this front. Please do not hesitate to call upon B’nai Brith, which stands ready to lend its expertise and assist in any way possible.”

Frank Dimant, B’nai Brith Canada’s executive vice-president, said, “We are calling on the Attorney General to act on the request of the Hamilton police. Failure to bring this matter to a resolution is at odds with the severity of the offence.

“Campus is an important microcosm of society where there can be no immunity from hate. As universities across Canada gear up for a new academic year, any further delay leaves Jewish students at risk.”

For me, the question is whether a chant of "death to Jews" can be seriously taken as an incitement to violence, rather than a vile comment on the highly politicized legacy of the Holocaust. While a free society must tolerate the expression of pretty much all resentments, it should draw the lines at actions that are violent or that are seriously and directly intended to encourage violence.

But this is to say we should not confuse the issue in terms of "hate speech", since pretty much every human being has hateful expressions of one kind or another in his or her speech. What should be illegal is clear and direct incitement to violence, not words that some (inevitably politicized) seer can interpret as passing Canada's judicial tests for words "likely to expose a person or group to hatred or contempt". Ultimately the test of incitement to violence would likely be that violence did indeed flow more or less directly from the act of incitement.

I think B'nai Brith is intellectually confused if they think the widespread problem of Judeophobia and the left-political Islam alliance against Israel, America, and all free societies can be tackled through the heavy hand of the criminal law. Throwing student radicals in jail will not teach such people to like Jews or Israel. It will surely have the opposite effect much more often. It will create martyrs and thus foster the cause of the hate mongers, further encourage conspiracy theories of a Jewish lobby controlling Western governments, and only encourage the forces of moral relativism to say: well if one can't say that about Israel/Jews, nobody can say similar things about Islam, or Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, etc. etc. And given the current inability of Canada's "multicultural" politicians to make distinctions between relatively free and tyrannical cultures, we will likely have all kinds of necessary expressions of cultural or political contempt threatened by criminal sanctions. Again, let me remind that I am not defending actual incitements to violence. But any attempt at outlawing resentments would just be a Utopian project bound to fail in all kinds of ugly and dangerous ways.

The colonization of our universities by hateful antisemites and conspiracy theorists - much teaching in the humanities today is a sophisticated form of conspiracy theorizing where human reality is wrongly presumed to be constructed by one or another form of the will to power - is a tragedy of great proportions. But in the face of this calamity we cannot bow to our emotions to strike back in ways that might appeal to our sense of injustice, or our own desire to practice a will to power, but not to our pragmatic reason.

I have often argued that the only real protection for Jews from the age-old, but ever-modernizing, threat of Judeophobia is not the heavy-hand of the law but rather a widespread determination from our neighbors and co-citizens to defend the reality of a free society. What protects us is faith that there are others among us who will "get our backs", who will defend the individual against collective sacrificial violence from any quarter. Jews need to be ever vigilant that they are not falling for the old illusion that finding and prosecuting a "scapegoat" or two among the legions of Judeophobes will solve the problem. Yes, real violent criminals need to be prosecuted; but there is no reason to think that criminal prosecution solves the problem of Jew hatred. Weimar Germany frequently prosecuted Nazis; that did not stop their rise.

A free society cannot be defended by government but only by an ethic that is inculcated in sufficient numbers of individual citizens who know it is their responsibility to stand up to hate mongers wherever they are. If we leave this task to the governments, popular resentments, of which Judeophobia is always a leading contender, not the love of individual freedom, will sooner or later rule the day.

A free society cannot be built on fear of hatred but only by coming better to understand the human or anthropological nature of resentment, that we may further human self-understanding accordingly. We must do the hard work of facing down hatred by talking freely in ways that help people understand and mediate the resentment that makes Jew hatred both something unique among the various racisms of the world, and a sign that provides a clue to something fundamental to our shared human, often resentful, nature. The Jew, as member of the "chosen people", those first to develop monotheist thinking in a serious way, is obviously a symbol for some aspect of our universal humanity that we need better to understand.

I would suggest to B'nai Brith that the very fact that many leftists at our universities have made implicit or explicit alliance with Islamists, that they are ready to appease and encourage the most resentful forces of an anti-modernity, anti-freedom, anti-global economy movement suggests that the most fundamental lessons of the Holocaust have never really been learned. I would suggest that the nature of antisemitism is less than fully understood by most Jews and intellectuals in the West. I would then go on to suggest that no one should fall into the trap of thinking that he can prevent the next Holocaust by relying on criminal law and not on the work of expanding human self-understanding, work that can only be done in a society where freedom of expression is, with only a few exceptions (laws against personal defamation, fraud, incitement to violence), unlimited.