Calling Richard Warman

UPDATE, Jan 22: I am removing the original post, not because I consider it libelous - it was simply a call on Richard Warman to respond to some allegations contained in articles that were formerly linked in this post. Because if true - and I think that many of the claims about the Canadian Human Rights Council are not in dispute, but are sad facts - these allegations need to be brought to the attention of responsible citizens and the government. But I withdraw these links now because at least one of them is to a person who is now qualifying as allegation what was originally claimed as fact; and so the trustworthiness of these links is in question. If anyone is sued for libel there is no good in any bloggers compounding the possible extent of any potential libel. What is not in question - and I leave the relevant link in the first Update below - it seems to me, is that the Canadian Human Rights Commission has supported the practice of "human rights" investigators going incognito and posting provocative speech on websites they are targeting, the better to make a case against them. This entrapment, not the content of any stupid comment about a Senator, is what I find so offensive and was the cause behind my original post. When the state uses such tactics to police political speech, yes even neo-Nazi speech, we must speak out against it and demand our politicians change the laws that appear to give sanction to this Orwellian tactic. Jews and others are not protected by Orwellian methods that could be used against them when victimary fashions change, as they seem to be changing at present.

UPDATE, Jan 21: in fairness, I will note that Richard Warman has apparently denied under oath that he wrote what is alleged [in one of the posts formerly linked here]. In any case, we can see from this Mark Steyn article that an agent of the Canadian Human Rights Commission has admitted that he posted at Stormfront, apparently for the purpose of creating a case against that website for hate speech. There needs to be a full public inquiry into what these "human rights" "witch hunters" are doing to go after those whom they deem hate mongers. It doesn't matter if they're hunting neo-Nazis. Jews and minorities are protected by a free society, not one in which the state dictates who is and who is not a recognized victim.
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Bingo!

A comment at Ezra Levant's, part of the ongoing discussion into Ezra's alleged thought crime:

Pretty soon a man who looks at a woman will be up on rape charges - no pun intended. I mean, he was thinking about it....wasn't he? Or is that the other way around....the woman will be up on rape charges?
Joanne | 01.18.08 - 8:25 pm

Covenant, or just Shut Up about my religion!

This is a time when even the Pope in Rome has to decline an invitation to speak at a university because a rabble of scientists can't bear to hear free speech on fundamental questions of human existence from a man who surely knows more about the anthropology that requires us to balance reason and faith, than do the dull-headed materialists whom, I find generally, don't give a moment's thought to why or how every word we speak transcends the merely material existence of grouped sounds or letters. So, I feel it is yet again our duty at this week's Covenant Zone meeting to discuss the secular left's current erosion of free speech in all Western countries. I hope some leftists will some day join us, since there is nothing more important at present, it seems to me, than that the left renew itself and its committment to productive debate and dialogue by covenanting with those whom, at present, the left only writes off as "reactionaries" and "fascists", ignoring entirely what conservatives are really about. No one's freedom can be preserved when rational debate and discussion has collapsed before a pervasive desire to appear the victimized group.

We meet every Thursday in the atrium of the Vancouver Public Library, central branch, in front of Blenz Coffee, wearing blue scarves. Please join us if you can.

In any case, there are a host of items in the blogosphere in regard to free speech fights. Here are a few that have come to my attention. Once again, I feel I must highlight Ezra Levant's fight. If you haven't seen his closing statement to the "Human Rights"/Wrongs Commission of Alberta, please don't miss his call for the Commission to find him guilty, that he may engage real courts in the need to reign in the abuses of our fundamental freedoms in these "Human Rights" Star Chambers.


Will the victim-baiting bureaucrats have the nerve to find Levant guilty, after he has professed his desire to be as offensive as possible to them, to assert a Canadian's right to be offensive in public speech? Will they risk a higher court, public opinion, and hopefully Canadian legislators, reigning them in, or will they admit Levant has a right to be offensive? Ezra has some advice for us on how to get more involved in the fight to protect each other's freedom, the responsibility of every covenanter.

At the least, consider signing this petition against the HRCs.
. The petition was initiated by John Pacheco whose blog is keeping abreast of our free speech fights.

Another good web site for material on the present fight that all Canadians need to engage is Free Mark Steyn!

Rex Murphy showed that he is one of the few journalists in the country who understands that the "Human Rights" Tribunals are not just a threat against those nasty conservatives, but against every and anyone who likes to open his mouth. The relative silence in the Main Stream Media on what is going on in this country's "Human Rights" Tribunals, their unwillingness to discuss the issue pro or con, shows that they have largely conceded any moral authority they once claimed to be free-minded informers of the Canadian public. They are cowards unwilling to fight for a right which while fundamental to everyone, arguably impacts more on their line of work, and the health of their business, than anyone's.

David Warren is one of the few other mainstream journalists who is committed to the fight for our shared freedom. Muslims Against Sharia is also taking a lead in defending Levant. I see their comments throughout the blogosphere.

If we don't all get involved in defending each other's freedom, fighting for the covenant that will make us complete human beings, we will be left with self-righteous busy - bodies to tell us what is and is not permissible speech

Castrati

For Kinsella:

In many ways, the typical Evangelical Protestant and conservative Catholic exhibits the virtue of tolerance in a much grander sense than the liberal religionist who thinks that no religions are true. For it is only when you believe that you are right and others wrong that the virtues of graciousness and respect become real, manly, virtues. The liberal religionist is like a man without genitals bragging of his chastity.

-Frank Beckwith (h/t>The Four Mass'keteers: Liberal Geldings)

France's Kindergarten Horrors

Seine-Saint-Denis, one of France's highest profile battlegrounds between teenage thugs and police, was in the news again last week, as the French newspaper Le Figaro took a closer look into the statistics on the increase in juvenile delinquency.

Out of 82 556 cases in 2005, 3474 of them dealt with children under 13 years of age. What kind of people are these children destined to grow up to become? If you can bear it, read through this partial translation of several of the individual cases they site in their investigation, previewing the next generation of urban violence for France:

Eyes rolled up, with his breathing "wheezing, sonorous, animal-like", earning him the nickname "the exorcist", "Aziz" is rabid. Hyperactive behavior, insults, punches… the last time he struck someone, it was a teacher. Who brought charges against him. Aziz is not one of those hardened teenagers who hang out in gangs, he is five years old and lives in the city of Saint-Denis…

Aziz is not an isolated case. The rejuvenation of delinquency in the difficult neighborhoods is a regular phenomenon. Aged from 3 to 10 years old, these mini gangbangers, called "extremely disruptive children" by the administration, are not content to steal candies, but instead fight, smoke, loiter in the streets, torch cars, etc.

For instance like "Bemba", 7 years old, who comes to school stinking from gasoline, after having burned cars with his brothers in the neighboring parking lot. Or even the 3 year old child dubbed "Hannibal Lecter", in reference to the cannibal character from Silence of the Lambs, for his having bitten the nose off a little girl. Or mentioning "Kader", 6 years old, who, under the influence of his step-father, smokes cannabis each night "to sleep better". "Hakim", 9, has stabbed his own mother with a knife. It was six years ago. After many other serious misdemeanors, he is today imprisoned in Fresnes. All these children… come from Seine-Saint-Denis.
...
For Patricia, mother of three children living in the city of Floreal in Saint-Denis, the rejuvenation of delinquency has been observable "for about a dozen years, with an emboldening and a feeling of impunity since the riots of November 2005". She is worried for her little girl, Chloe, aged 10, who has been assaulted several times at school : "It is no longer possible for our children. They have no chance here", she says… "Is it normal to leave three or four year old children outside until 11 at night ?", she says indignantly. It’s the surest path "to put them on the road to delinquency", adds Isabelle, a counselor in a recreation center for the last 8 years. A few months ago, while pregnant, she was struck repeatedly in the stomach by "Maxime", 7 years of age...

In the examples of these feral children, are we seeing human beings stripped of their humanity, reduced to an unnatural existence, fallen to the level of animals… or do we encounter here mankind in its natural, default state, awaiting the trio of gifts which raise us above the animals, and make us humane: self-examination, self-criticism, and self-control, all applied so as to effect self-directed inner change.

“We are our own worst critics”, goes the old saying. If only it were true..! All too often, it is we ourselves who are likeliest to find excuses for our worst acts, it is we in our self-pity who are the most ready to whisper justifications to ourselves, to lullaby our guilty consciences back into silent slumber. Being cruel to others, this story suggests, is a choice that comes frightfully easily to human beings, if we can see choices of such unrestrained cruelty in ones so young.

Wanting to be good: surely this is the seed that every good parent aspires to plant within their children. Maybe it is the case that the seed is already born within us, part of our natural equipment, and merely waits for a loving family and civilization’s welcoming embrace to nurture it through the seasons like a fertile field, so that maturity may yield a harvest of desire for returning that love through civility. Maybe it waits in a locked room of the mind, for someone to come along with the key.

One humane voice in this article sends out a cri de coeur for her daughters, and in her lament there is the challenge: I am living up to my side of the bargain, why are you not living up to yours? Why don’t you choose to cull the weeds from the garden, so that they do not choke out the life of the flowers we are trying to raise. For what lessons will the young Chloes of the world draw from their youthful experiences? Will they find there further evidence for the need to be good, or more excuses to believe that it’s not so bad to be bad? The experience of history attests that some will cling to the search for reasons to live a good life, keeping themselves from succumbing to the easy choice of committing cruelty against their fellow human beings. Whether sowed by an unseen hand, or landing through the whims of fate, some such seeds always, thank God, seem to find fruitful soil in every time and place.

For too many others, however, the chorus of violence will be a siren song they will let drag them away from the struggle to live in search of what it means to be good. It is so much easier to be cruel, it is seemingly the natural, instinctive choice, or so this article portends. Having chosen one step along that path, each act of cruelty easily greases the wheels to enable another, until habit casts us into a state of self-justification unhampered by any self-restraint, untamed by any self-expectations. Then people choose to burn cars. Then people choose to allow people to choose to burn cars.

To want to be good demands that a person be at eternal war with himself. The odds of victory in such a battle are stacked against us, as every day is filled to overflowing with evidence suggesting that living a good life is an unnatural, and therefore unattainable, objective.

Fortunately, there is help in this inner conflict against our own nature. There exists a tool that can provide us with the hope of forestalling defeat on the inescapable battlefield of life. It’s a bottomless resource that helps us renew our commitment to the struggle, despite a thousand excuses and justifications for surrender. It’s a flickering candle shining light on how to continue even in our darkest hour of despair, when we come closest to losing the courage of our convictions that this war is worth the fighting. It’s a blessing that grows as we grow, teaching us to live for more than the present moment, to connect to the far distant future, of our own lives and that of our progeny… to see ourselves as combattants in a conflict so enduring that it exists beyond time itself.
That tool is the Judeo-Christian value system. Whether bestowed upon us from above, or derived miraculously by us down here below, it exists to help us avoid choosing evil. That there may have been bad parents, bad teachers, bad Christians, does not give us the excuse to believe that parenthood is bad, teaching is bad, Christiniaty is bad.

Some of us admit that we need all the help we can get to continue to search for what it means to live a good life. Our battered bones search for a crutch, our tempted souls reach for a guardrail, our punctured vanities humbling themselves sufficiently to see the existence of all this assistance, of God, our worst critic, yet at the same time our ultimate ally in this fight.

For Your Information

This is over a year old; I wonder why I haven't seen it linked until now.
YouTube - Killing of Non-Muslims is Legitimate (British Mullah)Note how Westernized in speech and manners this British Mullah is, yet note also how absolutely foreign to Western values, beyond those of gangsters, this man is. Anyone who wants to keep apologizing for the "religion of peace" when orthodox, Sharia-backed, guys like this are so sure of themselves and their support among their brothers here in the Western heartland, that they have the nerve to say on a globally-televised BBC World program that all non-Muslims are not innocent but are rather legitimate targets of coercion, extortion, and violence, is living in a dream world, unable to come to terms with real human conflicts.

It's clear that the conversation freedom lovers should be having is which Muslims do we deport, or send to an island in the Arctic if no other country will have them, and how many Muslims behave in ways likely leading to assimilation into Western society, hopefully by making a very public commitment to reform of Islam, in the manner of Muslims Against Sharia? Unless and until we make Muslims like this Mullah Chaudri pay seriously for uttering such orthodox filth, unless and until we make Muslims face real and hard choices by which they can display their allegiance to Western values, or become our enemies by actively or tacitly supporting guys like Chaudri, it should be clear that we are not keeping the peace by appeasing the orthodox hate mongers, or providing an arena or debate in which moderates can be liberated/liberate themselves from violent orthodoxy, but likely only increasing the death toll in any forthcoming wars, a death toll that will become unimaginable if the orthodox Muslims win the wars and try to feed six or seven billion humans under Sharia economic rules and Islamic science. And yet, as I understand it, over a year later this man still walks freely in Britain. The Labour government in Britain is the enemy of a free humanity, both Muslim and infidel. I believe in free speech, as far as it can go, but this guy is calling for the violent overthrow of the British constitution and death or quasi enslavement of all non-Muslims. I think that's crossing the line, pretty much anywhere but in the appeasing nowhere land of moral and cultural relativism. Do you live somewhere, or nowhere?

Liberal Fascism

I just listened to a podcast from a couple of weeks ago, Helen and Glen (the instapundit) Reynolds interviewing Jonah Goldberg, author of the new book, Liberal Fascism.

The title and cover of Liberal Fascism, featuring a smiley face with a Hitler moustache, are a little provocative. We often denounce the Left on this blog, but we also admit in our more private moments that the Left, which one might define as the critique of bourgeois norms, will always be with us (notwithstanding that the Left are now the bourgeois mainstream), that it will always have a role to play. This is to suggest that the problems with the Left today can be transcended in a renewed leftism that becomes again a productive part of the Western tradition, and not its most serious, variously deconstructing, nihilistic, Gnostic, enemy.

It sounds as if Goldberg's book provides a serious argument, grounded in intellectual history, for arguing that the contemporary American Left's preferred policies look very much like the Nazi party's socialist program, just without the Nazi's rabid antisemitism and racism; this is not to forget that today's left often practises (not always ignorantly) forms of antisemitism and paternalistic racism. Here is a review of the book by Charles Johnson (not the LGF guy), a book which apparently has the leftist blogosphere going nuts. There were reviews up at Amazon.com trashing the book before it even was released. How was that possible asks Charles Johnson? Well, because if you are a member of the Gnostic elect, you don't have to read dull-headed conservatives to know that you are in every way superior to them.

In the podcast, Goldberg agues that many on the American left are in a hurry to prove Francis Fukuyama right that we have reached the end of history. For the American left-liberal mainstream, "The end of history is a giant college campus [where room, board and education is provided for all], or, increasingly, Europe." Nostalgia for college life, and a resistance to accept hard worldly realities (of scarcities and necessary conflicts) beyond the ivory tower, motivates the Democratic machine, argues Goldberg. I appreciated Goldberg's admonition that we take the time to actually read Hillary Clinton, the most likely next leader of the "free" world: "Take Hillary Clinton seriously; read her book - her vision of the village [that it takes to raise a child] is profoundly totalitarian... smash the sanctity of the family... if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem... we have to get past partisan differences".

Such slogans are the essence of totalitarianism, the dream of Unity, according to Jonah Goldberg. And people keep falling for them, because the dream sounds so nice in its unreality. Have you noticed the slogan for this year's Beijing Olympics? “One World One Dream”. Scary, eh? There's no doubt in my mind that all humans are descendants of a common origin. But history and freedom, human survival, depends on an ongoing expansion of different dreams out of this single origin.

We cannot really transcend conflicts if we don't recognize and engage conflicts for what they are - real differences. And to transcend a conflict, you need parties to share in a variously promising, but under-defined, sign in which different kinds of dreamers can hope to find something. The successful new sign becomes a compact which promises to work for all parties signing the peace treaty. A peace treaty is not a slogan about Unity and World Peace but a way of insuring greater freedom and differences for all. In other words, we defer violence by renewing conflict in more complex, "peaceful" but still competitive, terms.

In the podcast, there is a discussion of the feminization of the left, which Goldberg argues is the greatest difference between today's left fascism and the Nazi variety. Jonah notes that "an unwanted hug is still an oppressive thing..." But, Hillary is not the only Democract using Gnostic-fascism symbolism.

As Goldberg notes, Barack Obama is also very big on this cult of Unity. Checking out the above-linked review, I found this quotation on the Charles Johnson's blog, from Prof. John J. Pitney:

There is nothing Satanic about Obama’s tactics. He and his team are just playing tough, old-fashioned politics. What’s offensive is his insistence that he’s above it all. His supporters are swooning over a halo that isn’t there.

The idea that we should want a political leader who will overcome differences, create unity instead of productive debate in humble recognition of the necessity of conflict, is the essence of totalitarianism.

Well, I'm sure there is still more room for books on what our Dag, penning his own work, calls "Velvet Fascism". The Gnostic dream world in which the left believes that every conservative is a closet or open fascist, just chomping at the bit to gas some group, as soon as the left loses power over them, needs to be revealed for what it is: the projection of a battle between "left" socialists and "right" socialists within the totalitarian mind itself. It has little to do with the ways of appreciating a free society that characterizes many North American conservatives.

See also Daniel Pipes
H/T Four Mass'keteers

Proud to be a Canadian!

This is some of the most powerful video you are going to see in a long time.

Ezra Levant calls a government thug, a thug with the power to make him pay, a thug, to her face! He eloquently speaks for himself and rightly notes that we Canadians have allowed the banality of evil, as famously analyzed by Hannah Arendt, to creep into our society.

Ezra says he will be posting many excerpts from his government interrogation over the weekend. Here are his first four videos, now up at Youtube. Follow the links in the titles to go to Ezra's blog and read his introduction to the videos.

Opening statement


What was your intent?


Violence in Alberta


I don't answer to the state

Ashamed to be Canadian!

I have never been so ashamed to be a Canadian, but this is what happens when you first leave the dreamy stupor in which most of us live while ignoring the erosion of our fellow citizens' freedoms by Gnostic bureaucrats enrobed in the mantle of the Crown. I am talking about the widespread ignoring of the attack on a freedom - speech - that is fundamental to a free and humane society, by the so-called "Human Rights" Commissions of Canada. Due to my shame, I am going to leave aside for the moment my own critique of the ethical and moral stupidity of those who think human rights can be protected for anyone, even the most legitimate of victims, by silencing anyone, even the most hateful. Today was Ezra Levant's day in "court" and since the "court" in question is a Star Chamber that doesn't want anyone to know what it is up to, doesn't want you or me or anyone to simply sit and watch them erode Ezra's freedom, I am going to make this post a witness to Ezra's words. I'm pretty sure he won't mind me quoting his blog posts in their entirety. Follow the links to Ezra's blog for the originals.

First:

At today's "human rights" interrogation, I was not permitted to bring anyone other than my lawyer and my wife along -- the "human rights officer" barred others from attending as observers, even other officers of the magazine (such as our former editor). The news media who showed up congregated in the lobby of the law firm and waited until we were done.

But my lawyer and I insisted that we be permitted to record the interrogation, for use when we appeal the commission's decision to a real court. The officer allowed the video camera, but asked that we keep the recording confidential. But, over a year ago, our lawyer served notice on the commission that we reserved the right to publish any communications to or from the commission whatsoever, and that they should govern themselves accordingly. It's not surprising that a censor like the commission would want to do its censorship in the dark.

I'm currently downloading the 90-minute recording. It's too long to upload on YouTube (they limit uploads to ten minutes), and much of the interrogation was repetitive. I will endeavour to upload the most interesting exchanges over the next few days.

In the meantime, here is the first news report that I've seen on the subject, from CanWest News. An excerpt:

"A secular government bureaucracy has essentially been hijacked by a radical Muslim imam," [Levant] said. "It's being used to further his fatwa against these cartoons."

"We have a great tradition of free speech in Canada," he said.

"My freedom to publish a cartoon that some radical Muslim imam doesn't like, well that's the free west for ya."

UPDATE: Here is the local CBC clip on the subject -- fast forward to 30:35 (link is likely not permanent).

Second:

I have just returned home from my session at the kangaroo court, called the Alberta human rights commission. Here is my opening statement that I delivered at the interrogation. I will post more details about the interrogation soon.

Alberta Human Rights Commission Interrogation
Opening remarks by Ezra Levant, January 11, 2008 – Calgary

My name is Ezra Levant. Before this government interrogation begins, I will make a statement.

When the Western Standard magazine printed the Danish cartoons of Mohammed two years ago, I was the publisher. It was the proudest moment of my public life. I would do it again today. In fact, I did do it again today. Though the Western Standard, sadly, no longer publishes a print edition, I posted the cartoons this morning on my website, ezralevant.com.

I am here at this government interrogation under protest. It is my position that the government has no legal or moral authority to interrogate me or anyone else for publishing these words and pictures. That is a violation of my ancient and inalienable freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and in this case, religious freedom and the separation of mosque and state. It is especially perverted that a bureaucracy calling itself the Alberta human rights commission would be the government agency violating my human rights. So I will now call those bureaucrats “the commission” or “the hrc”, since to call the commission a “human rights commission” is to destroy the meaning of those words.

I believe that this commission has no proper authority over me. The commission was meant as a low-level, quasi-judicial body to arbitrate squabbles about housing, employment and other matters, where a complainant felt that their race or sex was the reason they were discriminated against. The commission was meant to deal with deeds, not words or ideas. Now the commission, which is funded by a secular government, from the pockets of taxpayers of all backgrounds, is taking it upon itself to be an enforcer of the views of radical Islam. So much for the separation of mosque and state.

I have read the past few years’ worth of decisions from this commission, and it is clear that it has become a dump for the junk that gets rejected from the real legal system. I read one case where a male hair salon student complained that he was called a “loser” by the girls in the class. The commission actually had a hearing about this. Another case was a kitchen manager with Hepatitis-C, who complained that it was against her rights to be fired. The commission actually agreed with her, and forced the restaurant to pay her $4,900. In other words, the commission is a joke – it’s the Alberta equivalent of a U.S. television pseudo-court like Judge Judy – except that Judge Judy actually was a judge, whereas none of the commission’s panellists are judges, and some aren’t even lawyers. And, unlike the commission, Judge Judy believes in freedom of speech.

It’s bad enough that this sick joke is being wreaked on hair salons and restaurants. But it’s even worse now that the commissions are attacking free speech. That’s my first point: the commissions have leapt out of the small cage they were confined to, and are now attacking our fundamental freedoms. As Alan Borovoy, Canada’s leading civil libertarian, a man who helped form these commissions in the 60’s and 70’s, wrote, in specific reference to our magazine, being a censor is, quote, “hardly the role we had envisioned for human rights commissions. There should be no question of the right to publish the impugned cartoons.” Unquote. Since the commission is so obviously out of control, he said quote “It would be best, therefore, to change the provisions of the Human Rights Act to remove any such ambiguities of interpretation.” Unquote.

The commission has no legal authority to act as censor. It is not in their statutory authority. They’re just making it up – even Alan Borovoy says so.

But even if the commissions had some statutory fig leaf for their attempts at political and religious censorship, it would still be unlawful and unconstitutional.

We have a heritage of free speech that we inherited from Great Britain that goes back to the year 1215 and the Magna Carta. We have a heritage of eight hundred years of British common law protection for speech, augmented by 250 years of common law in Canada.

That common law has been restated in various fundamental documents, especially since the Second World War.
In 1948, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Canada is a party, declared that, quote:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

The 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights guaranteed, quote

1. “ human rights and fundamental freedoms, namely,

(c) freedom of religion; (d) freedom of speech; (e) freedom of assembly and association; and (f) freedom of the press.

In 1982, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteed, quote:

2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

a) freedom of conscience and religion;

b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;

Those were even called “fundamental freedoms” – to give them extra importance.

For a government bureaucrat to call any publisher or anyone else to an interrogation to be quizzed about his political or religious expression is a violation of 800 years of common law, a Universal Declaration of Rights, a Bill of Rights and a Charter of Rights. This commission is applying Saudi values, not Canadian values.

It is also deeply procedurally one-sided and unjust. The complainant – in this case, a radical Muslim imam, who was trained at an officially anti-Semitic university in Saudi Arabia, and who has called for sharia law to govern Canada – doesn’t have to pay a penny; Alberta taxpayers pay for the prosecution of the complaint against me. The victims of the complaints, like the Western Standard, have to pay for their own lawyers from their own pockets. Even if we win, we lose – the process has become the punishment. (At this point, I’d like to thank the magazine’s many donors who have given their own money to help us fight against the Saudi imam and his enablers in the Alberta government.)

It is procedurally unfair. Unlike real courts, there is no way to apply for a dismissal of nuisance lawsuits. Common law rules of evidence don’t apply. Rules of court don’t apply. It is a system that is part Kafka, and part Stalin. Even this interrogation today – at which I appear under duress – saw the commission tell me who I could or could not bring with me as my counsel and advisors.

I have no faith in this farcical commission. But I do have faith in the justice and good sense of my fellow Albertans and Canadians. I believe that the better they understand this case, the more shocked they will be. I am here under your compulsion to answer the commission’s questions. But it is not I who am on trial: it is the freedom of all Canadians.

You may start your interrogation.

Third: My visit to a kangaroo court - Ezra Levant

Today at 2 p.m. I will appear before an Alberta "human rights officer" for an interrogation. I am being interrogated for the political crime of publishing the Danish cartoons in the Western Standard nearly two years ago.

As a lawyer, I've been in different courts and tribunals, but I've never experienced a kangaroo court first-hand. I will have a more comprehensive report later today. In the meantime, I leave you with three documents:

1. The hand-scrawled complaint filed against the magazine by a radical, Saudi-trained imam who has publicly called for sharia law to be imposed in Canada;

2. My response to that complaint; and

3. A look at those cartoons again.

As they say in Virginia, sic semper tyrannis!

If any "court" in this country finds that Levant did not have the right to publish these cartoons, I will actively encourage every Canadian to engage in civil disobedience to the point where no town or city is not plastered in these images. It's not because I want to show disrespect for real human rights or freedoms, or for Muslims. It's because I know that a truly free person cannot be seriously offended by these cartoons (however ignorant, stupid, or uncharitable they may be); only those enslaved to primitive conceptions of the sacred and sacrificial can be seriously scandalized, which I admit includes an awful lot of Canadians today, since the left-liberal mainstream has become dependent for its understanding of the human (and even natural) world on the presence of victims, real or imagined, on every scene of its political and esthetic consciousness. In short, much of our society is practicing a death cult, a cult dependent on victims. If you find that hard to understand, keep reading this blog.

By the way, let's not forget that even the Danish imams who stirred up the cartoon controversy by sending these cartoons to Egypt, fabricated a couple more Mohammed cartoons of their own, to stoke the fire. They were not sincere about protesting the production of such cartoons, in and of themselves. Their hearts were not crushed by the simple presence of Mohammed cartoons, if these were created for the "right" Islamist reasons. What they were about was encouraging Moslems to be scandalized by the fact that Infidels were making fun of Islam. They were insisting on Islamic supremacism. And so too are those who are fronting the "human rights" campaigns against Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn today in Canada. That any official in Canada gives these supremacist hate mongers a moment's notice is the real scandal.

A free society lets anyone say pretty much anything without suffering a penalty, short of personal defamation or incitement to violence. And a free society knows how to ignore all manner of offensive abuse of freedom of speech, since free individuals know a duty, a covenant, to defend each other's freedom, so that no one need fear for their personal security. In any case, the idea that the state can act as the guarantor of our freedoms is ridiculous, since it is the state that is the only serious threat to freedom in a society where individuals are ready to stand up for each other. I reproduce the cartoons in this post, because I believe the only way to insure freedom for all Canadians, including Muslims, is that we become inured to scandal and group resentments. It would be a rather simple matter to argue that the Koran is hate speech against the non-believer who is cursed on almost every page of that book. But I don't think the Koran should be banned and if it were under attack in a Human Rights Commission, I would gladly reproduce it here.

A free society defends individual freedom, and does not make potential martyrs of hate mongers by requiring the state to punish them. Instead, free people freely shun hate mongers, in a very personal, decentralized manner. A free society does not engage in centralized scandal mongering. It is big enough to ignore the merely offensive because someone who is truly free cannot really be offended by scandalizing idiots. Uncharitable words wash off the free back like water on a duck. A free society does not go about trying to decide what religions, or religions/political ideologies, can and cannot be made fun of.

There can be no right in a free society to enforce the primitive sacred on your fellow citizens. If we can't make fun of sacrificial violence, we must engage in civil disobedience, perhaps one day even to the point of civil war if necessary to insure our freedom. But I think that's being hyperbolic. I remain confident that when Canadians step out of their ignorant stupor, and find out what these "Human Rights" commissions have gotten into, going far beyond their original mandate as Ezra Levant eloquently argues above, they will demand our duly elected governments take their share of responsibility for guaranteeing our individual freedoms and will reign in these death cult ideologues running the kangaroo courts. The very presence of these "commissions" is shamefully dehumanizing to anyone who knows what it is to be a free individual.

Hat tip: Mark Steyn who has more on the scandal of our kangaroo courts.

Cool Britannia: a failure to covenant

Just a reminder that the Covenant Zone bloggers meet every Thursday, 7-9 pm in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, in front of Blenz Coffee. Join us if you can - look for the blue scarves - and would like to discuss the state of our shared covenant, the guarantee we each must spiritually sign, that we will act to preserve individual freedom, for every one, in the face of those who want to return the world to a politics of group identities and group resentments. Here are some sundry thoughts on the erosion of freedom, mostly to do with Britain, that I have picked up reading the last few days.

Pajamas Media's David Rusin has a good snapshot of how the British arts scene has become dhimmified. It seems that today's "artist" must constantly self-censor and appease Muslims, lest they emit from their collective fold some members intent on violence.

And who dares speak out against the corruption of Britain, including its police forces? Phyllis Chesler interviews Lionheart, the blogger apparently in the sights of the British police for "racist" hate crimes, for blogging dramatically about the Jihadi gangsters running drugs and prostitutes on the streets of his home town. Lionheart, sounding so naively politically incorrect, may sound an exaggerated even hysterical tone to some readers; but if so, perhaps he is a reminder of how we have lost the ability to produce young people willing to bare hearts in condemning obvious evils in the crime-ridden streets of our cities, when that evil has anything to do with Islam. In any case, the defender of freedom must be willing to defend the freedom of any and every voice, short of calls to violence; so we are now all Lionhearts, or losers. Freedom of speech is indivisible. We either all have it, or none of us has it except on the conditional approval of the powers that be.

Lionheart, who has had to flee his home and country in fear for his life, is just one of many thousands of Brits who have quietly gotten up and left their increasingly dysfunctional country. Lionheart is bluntly saying what an Anglican Bishop was widely condemned by the British political and media elites for saying in more measured tones.

Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali:

"There has been a worldwide resurgence of the ideology of Islamic extremism. One of the results of this has been to further alienate the young from the nation in which they were growing up and also to turn already separate communities into "no-go" areas where adherence to this ideology has become a mark of acceptability.

"Those of a different faith or race may find it difficult to live or work there because of hostility to them. In many ways, this is but the other side of the coin to far-Right intimidation.

"Attempts have been made to impose an "Islamic" character on certain areas, for example, by insisting on artificial amplification for the Adhan, the call to prayer.

"Such amplification was, of course, unknown throughout most of history and its use raises all sorts of questions about noise levels and whether non-Muslims wish to be told the creed of a particular faith five times a day on the loudspeaker. This is happening here even though some Muslim-majority communities are trying to reduce noise levels from multiple mosques announcing this call, one after the other, over quite a small geographical area.

"There is pressure already to relate aspects of the sharia to civil law in Britain. To some extent this is already true of arrangements for sharia-compliant banking but have the far-reaching implications of this been fully considered?"

At least Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali does not seem to suffer from White Guilt and says he stands by his views, despite the angry dung storm in which his comments have been covered.

What's left of British conservatism, if we can take as a guide one of the few mainstream conservative columnists, Peter Hitchens, can only offer the vague hope that if Britain is to survive as anything like the culture it has been, it must rediscover its Christian roots (I would prefer he accented the covenantal, not the Christian per se):

Diplomacy, tolerance and good sense can - in the right conditions - almost certainly bring about integration in the divided cities of this country, given enough time and a breathing space in which mass immigration is halted.

A strong Muslim minority in this country could have many good effects (I'll come to that later). But it is important that Islam does not gain the status of Christianity, for that will mean a moral and cultural revolution of enormous force.

One of the great puzzles of modern Britain is the political left's attitude to Islam.

Why should an atheist, sexual liberationist, morally relaxed liberal attack people such as me (as they do) for criticising Islam? They have nothing in common.

It is in fact quite simple.

The left will deal with any ally against conservative Britain. It thinks it can use Islam to further its ends, just as in the past it has allied itself with any anti-conservative, anti-patriotic cause that was going. But the alliance lasts only long enough to allow the Left to destroy what it doesn't like.

The trouble is, Islam is more serious and determined than any of the other people whom the left have sought to use for such purposes.

And so, while intending to dethrone Christianity and make this a secular society, the left now risks helping make this an Islamic society, which - if it comes to pass - will be profoundly hostile to everything the left wants.

These are the fruits of cynicism.

As the bishop notes, and as hospital chaplaincies so clearly show, the disestablishment of Christianity has not led to the opening of Richard Dawkins reading rooms in our hospitals, but in the increasing creation of multi-faith rooms which have an increasingly Islamic character, thanks to the fervour and devotion of Muslims, and the fading faith of the Christian churches.

Likewise the removal of Christianity from the state schools may well end in the existence if an increasing number of state schools which are in effect Islamic, while the official national religion, Christianity, goes neglected and untaught.

A Christian country would have kept the chapels, and allowed and encouraged the opening of separate rooms for other faiths.
[...]
There is no doubt that the laws, institutions, customs, language, marital arrangements, relaxations, family structure, even the diet of this country are the result of centuries of Christianity.

If it became a Muslim country, all these things would change, some beyond recognition.

If we want that to happen, and deliberately choose it, then all well and good.

Islam, as I stated earlier, has many admirable characteristics and would surely be better than total Godlessness, but how foolish to let it happen by mistake, and then regret it when it was too late.

The militant 'war on terror' sorts who inveigh against Islam still seem to think that the Maxim gun, or the CIA, or MI5, or airstrikes on Afghanistan, or invasions of Iraq and Iran, will defeat this powerful ideology.

The anti-British left seem to think, by contrast, that Islam is a pet pussycat which they can toy with, set on their enemies for while, and lay aside.

Both are wrong.

If you prefer our sort of society to an Islamic one, then you have to recognise that the good things about our society come from Christianity - and the more we throw those good things aside and the more we dismantle Christianity in our state, our schools, our culture in general, the weaker our society will become and the more likely it will be to embrace Islam - which suffers from no doubts about its rightness and is not in the least bit afraid of Professor Dawkins.

I think Hitchens underplays White Guilt - which can be understood as the Western fear of the privileged, whether white skinned or not, doing anything - in characterizing the left-liberal consensus. Our "elites" today fear taking any non-risk-management lead in society, lest taking the lead in any endeavour, other than risk management, creates some new inequality, some material or intellectual distinction between leader and led, winner and loser, for which one will only become yet more guilty in the postmodern victimary theatre where any inequality is today a justification to invoke the Nazis gassing helpless innocents. Yet, as Hitchens shows, the fear of doing anything, other than controlling people, the fear and guilt that motivates the left-liberal elites, only demonstrates that their dream of a neutral "multicultural" state is a fantasy. Human society abhors a vacuum. Multiculturalism is not in fact neutral; it is only a temporary deferral of the inevitable choice that any society must make about what it holds sacred. And a society that does not defend the sacrality of the free individual will likely end up with some more brute form of politics in which groups, not individuals, are what is sacralized; and people will be limited by the boundaries appropriate to their group. Indeed, the idea of a neutral "multicultural" state cannot exist without a state that becomes ever more controlling of individual speech and freedom, of "risk", as Lionheart can testify.

What we see in Britain is the failure to covenant, an unwillingness of the elites to champion their society as the defender of the individual and his or her freedoms, choosing instead to defer to the group resentments of victimary politics. When this attitude takes over a political party, it leads to the kind of madness where we see contenders for the President of the United States, the supposed leader of the free world, competing over who can woo voters with some well-timed crying, or some subtle blackmail claiming America won't heal its unspeakable guilt until a black man is in the White House. No sense that America and freedom are under attack from a global Jihad in tandem with the Gnostic forces of Western self-hatred is able to enter the stage of the Democratic party politics. In giving an overview of the antisemitic, black supremacist church in which Barack Obama supposedly found his way to become a "Christian", leaving behind the Islamic faith in which he was vaguely raised, Melanie Phillips asks "And how have the Democrats got themselves into a position where the choice they offer voters for the American presidency is between Hillary Clinton and this man?". Camille Paglia explains something of what many of us find so unsettling about Ms. Clinton:

Hillary's willingness to tolerate Bill's compulsive philandering is a function of her general contempt for men. She distrusts them and feels morally superior to them. Following the pattern of her long-suffering mother, she thinks it is her mission to endure every insult and personal degradation for a higher cause -- which, unlike her self-sacrificing mother, she identifies with her near-messianic personal ambition.

It's no coincidence that Hillary's staff has always consisted mostly of adoring women, with nerdy or geeky guys forming an adjunct brain trust. Hillary's rumored hostility to uniformed military men and some Secret Service agents early in the first Clinton presidency probably belongs to this pattern. And let's not forget Hillary, the governor's wife, pulling out a book and rudely reading in the bleachers during University of Arkansas football games back in Little Rock.

Hillary's disdain for masculinity fits right into the classic feminazi package, which is why Hillary acts on Gloria Steinem like catnip. Steinem's fawning, gaseous New York Times op-ed about her pal Hillary this week speaks volumes about the snobby clubbiness and reactionary sentimentality of the fossilized feminist establishment, which has blessedly fallen off the cultural map in the 21st century. History will judge Steinem and company very severely for their ethically obtuse indifference to the stream of working-class women and female subordinates whom Bill Clinton sexually harassed and abused, enabled by look-the-other-way and trash-the-victims Hillary.

A preference for victimology over an imperative to covenant for true individuality and freedom gets us this hopeless choice between prospective "leaders". It also gets us a denial of historical realities.

When I read the latest stunning article Charles sent me, it reminded me of a history graduate student I once knew who was shocked to find that when she merely mentioned the role of aboriginal women as prostitutes in the mill towns and ports of Washington State, a hundred or more years ago, she was widely condemned in front of her fellow conference participants for bringing to light such unsavory facts. A British writer who made his name with a politically-incorrect, avant la lettre, action hero who was widely enjoyed by the British public in the 1970s and 80s, found that a new "reality" had come on scene when he tried his hand at Hollywood screenwriting in the 1990s. In his last testament to the British public before his recent death, George Macdonald Fraser writes:

As a screenwriter [at which Fraser was almost as successful as he was with the 12 Flashman novels; his best-known work was scripting the Three Musketeers films] I once put forward a script for a film called The Lone Ranger, in which I used a piece of Western history which had never been shown on screen and was as spectacular as it was shocking - and true.

The whisky traders of the American plains used to build little stockades, from which they passed out their ghastly rot-gut liquor through a small hatch to the Indians, who paid by shoving furs back though the hatch.

The result was that frenzied, drunken Indians who had run out of furs were besieging the stockade, while the traders sat snug inside and did not emerge until the Indians had either gone away or passed out.

Political correctness stormed onto the scene, red in tooth and claw. The word came down from on high that the scene would offend "Native Americans".

Their ancestors may have got pieeyed on moonshine but they didn't want to know it, and it must not be shown on screen. Damn history. Let's pretend it didn't happen because we don't like the look of it.

I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn't present the picture they would like.

My forebears from the Highlands of Scotland were a fairly primitive, treacherous, blood-thirsty bunch and, as Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, would have been none the worse for washing. Fine, let them be so depicted, if any film maker feels like it; better that than insulting, inaccurate drivel like Braveheart.

The philosophy of political correctness is now firmly entrenched over here, too, and at its core is a refusal to look the truth squarely in the face, unpalatable as it may be.

Political correctness is about denial, usually in the weasel circumlocutory jargon which distorts and evades and seldom stands up to honest analysis.

It comes in many guises, some of them so effective that the PC can be difficult to detect. The silly euphemisms, apparently harmless, but forever dripping to wear away common sense - the naivete of the phrase "a caring force for the future" on Remembrance poppy trays, which suggests that the army is some kind of peace corps, when in fact its true function is killing.

The continual attempt to soften and sanitise the harsh realities of life in the name of liberalism, in an effort to suppress truths unwelcome to the PC mind; the social engineering which plays down Christianity, demanding equal status for alien religions.

The selective distortions of history, so beloved by New Labour, denigrating Britain's past with such propaganda as hopelessly unbalanced accounts of the slave trade, laying all the blame on the white races, but carefully censoring the truth that not a slave could have come out of Africa without the active assistance of black slavers, and that the trade was only finally suppressed by the Royal Navy virtually single-handed.

In schools, the waging of war against examinations as "elitist" exercises which will undermine the confidence of those who fail - what an intelligent way to prepare children for real life in which competition and failure are inevitable, since both are what life, if not liberal lunacy, is about.

PC also demands that "stress", which used to be coped with by less sensitive generations, should now be compensated by huge cash payments lavished on griping incompetents who can't do their jobs, and on policemen and firemen "traumatised" by the normal hazards of work which their predecessors took for granted.

Furthermore, it makes grieving part of the national culture, as it was on such a nauseating scale when large areas were carpeted in rotting vegetation in "mourning" for the Princess of Wales; and it insists that anyone suffering ordinary hardship should be regarded as a "victim" - and, of course, be paid for it.

That PC should have become acceptable in Britain is a glaring symptom of the country's decline.

No generation has seen their country so altered, so turned upside down, as children like me born in the 20 years between the two world wars. In our adult lives Britain's entire national spirit, its philosophy, values and standards, have changed beyond belief.

Probably no country on earth has experienced such a revolution in thought and outlook and behaviour in so short a space.

Other lands have known what seem to be greater upheavals, the result of wars and revolutions, but these do not compare with the experience of a country which passed in less than a lifetime from being the mightiest empire in history, governing a quarter of mankind, to being a feeble little offshore island whose so-called leaders have lost the will and the courage, indeed the ability, to govern at all.
[...]
We were freer by far 50 years ago - yes, even with conscription, censorship, direction of labour, rationing, and shortages of everything that nowadays is regarded as essential to enjoyment.

We still had liberty beyond modern understanding because we had other freedoms, the really important ones, that are denied to the youth of today.

We could say what we liked; they can't. We were not subject to the aggressive pressure of special interest minority groups; they are. We had no worries about race or sexual orientation; they have. We could, and did, differ from fashionable opinion with impunity, and would have laughed PC to scorn, had our society been weak and stupid enough to let it exist.

The same is true in British Columbia, my friends. And the only thing that can change it is if a new conversation gets started, one in which people, including the highest leaders of state, are no longer pandering to victimology, but decide that free individuals actually own their government and must take on the responsibility of self-rule and freedom, instead of asking how much is owed by the system to us, we poor suffering humans that don't deserve reality as it nastily is. No, reality must be remade according to the fantasies of the latest Utopian dream, and the academic piety that reality is always only a social construction that we can change at will. Those who think otherwise, may be dieing off like Fraser, but as he notes there may be some youngsters with a will to love the hard reality of an unspeakably vast and seemingly indifferent universe. Let us get together and covenant.

We are yesterday's people, the over-the-hill gang. (Yes, the old people - not the senior citizens or the time-challenged, but the old people.) Those of ultra-liberal views may take consolation from this - that my kind won't be around much longer, and then they can get on with wrecking civilisation in peace.

But they should beware. There may well be more who think like me than the liberal Left establishment likes to think. When my views were first published in book form in 2002, I was not surprised that almost all the reviewers were unfavourable. I had expected that my old-fashioned views would get a fairly hostile reception, but the bitterness did astonish me.

I had not realised how offensive the plain truth can be to the politically correct, how enraged they can be by its mere expression, and how deeply they detest the values and standards respected 50 years ago and which dinosaurs like me still believe in, God help us.

But the readers' reactions to the book were the exact opposite of critical opinion. I have never received such wholehearted and generous support.

For the first time in 30 years as a professional writer I had to fall back on a printed card thanking readers for writing, apologising because I could not reply personally to them all.

Most of the letters came from the older generation, but by no means all. I was made aware that among the middle-aged and people in their 20s and 30s there is a groundswell of anger and frustration at the damage done to Britain by so-called reformers and dishonest politicians who hardly bother to conceal their contempt for the public's wishes.

Plainly many thought they were alone in some reactionary minority. They had been led to think that they were voices muttering to themselves in the wilderness.

Well, you are not. There are more of you out there than you realise - very many more, perhaps even a majority.

Time to covenant, to act as guarantors of each other's freedom.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Lee Harris

You can't say the forces of freedom are making no progress when, of all places, the New York Times allows Ayaan Hirsi Ali to review Lee Harris' new book, The Suicide of Reason. Here's a bit of her review:

Harris extols American exceptionalism together with Hegel as if there were no contradiction between the two. But what makes America unique, especially in contrast to Europe, is its resistance to the philosophy of Hegel with its concept of a unifying world spirit. It is the individual that matters most in the United States. And more generally, it is individuals who make cultures and who break them. Social and cultural evolution has always relied on individuals — to reform, persuade, cajole or force. Culture is formed by the collective agreement of individuals. At the same time, it is crucial that we not fall into the trap of assuming that the survival tactics of individuals living in tribal societies — like lying, hypocrisy, secrecy, violence, intimidation, and so forth — are in the interest of the modern individual or his culture.

I was not born in the West. I was raised with the code of Islam, and from birth I was indoctrinated into a tribal mind-set. Yet I have changed, I have adopted the values of the Enlightenment, and as a result I have to live with the rejection of my native clan as well as the Islamic tribe. Why have I done so? Because in a tribal society, life is cruel and terrible. And I am not alone. Muslims have been migrating to the West in droves for decades now. They are in search of a better life. Yet their tribal and cultural constraints have traveled with them. And the multiculturalism and moral relativism that reign in the West have accommodated this.

Harris is correct, I believe, that many Western leaders are terribly confused about the Islamic world. They are woefully uninformed and often unwilling to confront the tribal nature of Islam. The problem, however, is not too much reason but too little. Harris also fails to address the enemies of reason within the West: religion and the Romantic movement. It is out of rejection of religion that the Enlightenment emerged; Romanticism was a revolt against reason.

Both the Romantic movement and organized religion have contributed a great deal to the arts and to the spirituality of the Western mind, but they share a hostility to modernity. Moral and cultural relativism (and their popular manifestation, multiculturalism) are the hallmarks of the Romantics. To argue that reason is the mother of the current mess the West is in is to miss the major impact this movement has had, first in the West and perhaps even more profoundly outside the West, particularly in Muslim lands.

Thus, it is not reason that accommodates and encourages the persistent segregation and tribalism of immigrant Muslim populations in the West. It is Romanticism. Multiculturalism and moral relativism promote an idealization of tribal life and have shown themselves to be impervious to empirical criticism. My reasons for reproaching today’s Western leaders are different from Harris’s. I see them squandering a great and vital opportunity to compete with the agents of radical Islam for the minds of Muslims, especially those within their borders. But to do so, they must allow reason to prevail over sentiment.

I think Ali is right that we have to engage in a war for the minds of Muslims (but also for those in the West trapped in the irrationalities of White Guilt) and that over time we will find that more and more of them will want to be free like Ali, and not slaves to traditional forms of society, especially when they see that is not tribalism that can hope to feed them and keep them comfortable and healthy, but only our global modernity, without which the human population must greatly diminish.

However, Ali, and perhaps also Harris, though I haven't yet read his book, continues to pit reason against faith in objectionable ways. Of course there is a lot in the Western tradition of unreason to oppose. This blog never tires of berating the Gnostic left and its incoherent preaching on multiculturalism, for example. However, Ali seems to be largely unaware of how Western individualism has been in good part an outgrowth of Judeo-Christian religion, and Romanticism, and not simply of the "Enlightenment" which is best understood as a secularization or codification of what has always been a potential of a Western religious tradition that separates the moral and (the tribal) ethical, emphasizes individual moral conscience and conversation with God, as well as a history of progressive, unfolding revelations into our humanity to be discovered in human time. Furthermore, ours is a religion that, especially in the case of Christianity, calls on us to maximize human reciprocity, to see individuals as sacred centres/traders in their own right, freed of any particular social hierarchy or periphery, in a way that has led us to the free global market of secular modernity.

Similarly, the Romantic movement cannot be seriously summed up with a one-sided, good or bad, polemic, however much violence has arisen from it, both in the form of leftist political movements and resentful individuals defining their humanity against "the system" or the establishment. The modern individual, who uses the arts of consumer society, and also some reason, to endlessly differentiate individual sacred centres within a larger free market modernity, is as much a Romantic figure as is the anti-modern philobarbarist or supporter of one or another totalitarian fantasy. Furthermore, Romantic interest in the primitive can be a form of anthropology, a mix of reasoning and art that attempts a better understanding of our human origins, an improved understanding that can have liberating potential in our modernity. It is all too simple to see Romanticism across the board as an unquestioning embrace of the primitive.

It is incumbent on us to work through such contradictory possibilities in the major intellectual and artistic currents of the modern West, to foster the positive forces therein, so as to defend our modernity. This defense cannot be seriously achieved by those who would simply write off large parts of our cultural heritage as unreasonable. The Enlightenment's caricature of Reason is not alone the salvation of anything. It leads to forms of positivism which become crude Gnostic religions in their own right: see Marxism, or the French Revolution, for example, where reason and romanticism embraced in ways I don't think Ali yet knows how to separate.

I greatly admire Ayaan Hirsi Ali for showing the West what Islam is, for being a whistle blower, an informer, for insisting we hear the kind of stories that can only come from those who have lived under the oppressive tribal codes of the Islamic world. And while she seems to be someone whose escape from Islam has left her faithless and unsure how to deal with the human need for good faith, as the guarantee of our freedom, of our ability to perform for others an act of good faith, an acting that "reason" alone will never conquer, she may at least give us the courage to fight harder against those, like Mohamed Elmasry, who are actively targeting the forces of freedom in the West, as in Elmasry's recent campaign to silence Mark Steyn, or to make him unpublishable in Canada. Elmasry is the man who was widely quoted in the media for claiming that the murder of Aqsa Parvez was just a "teenager issue":

"I don't want the public to think that this is really an Islamic issue or an immigrant issue," said Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress. "It is a teenager issue."

Thanks to voices like Hirsi Ali's, fewer and fewer Canadians are falling for such rhetorical sleights of hand. Islam is an inherent part of certain tribal societies and tribal society is arguably an inherent part of Islam, though whether there can be some kind of accommodation of Islam and modernity remains to be seen. We will only begin the serious work of finding out what can and cannot be made of Islam and modernity when we stop listening to and appeasing the anti-freedom Islamists like Elmasry, who is invited to all kinds of conferences by leftist Canadian elites, and champion those Muslims who so desperately want greater freedom for their people. Ali has rejected Islam, others are trying to reform it. Let that debate play out, let's give our attention to those Muslims interested in change and progress, and not in a defense of tribalism masked as a denial that Islam is profoundly allied with tribalism.

The debate we need will be well served if we renew our interest in Western culture and history so that it does not become a sources of easy polemics and caricatures for those fighting for freedom and modernity. We only really defend freedom and modernity when we are not unnecessarily casting out parts of it, but grasping the greater mystery by which so much has and can be held together as a network of free individuals making their lives sacred in any number of ways.

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More attacks on free speech

The latest from Baron Bodissey: Defaming Islam is proposed as a new crime by the huddled masses at the UN.

The UN pumps out propaganda to suggest that it is out to protect Universal Human Rights. But when it comes to doing anything to enforce those rights, the oppressed masses of the world generally wait in vain, under the thumb of tyrannical governments that sit in council at the UN. The Gays of Iran, for example. A short answer for why this is so is that the UN, being ruled by the ideology of White Guilt, actually works to erode the power of sovereign and free nation states which might actually do something to advance their self-interest, not to forget the larger human interest, by insuring other nations become more free and democratically transparent so as to be more trustworthy as a negotiating parties, than is your average tyranny.

In the UN, the US and Israel are the perennial bad guys. A UN in which a quarter of the members are Islamic states, and many more are sympathizers with the Islamic claims to act as the head of the anti-American, anti-Jew forces, in opposition to the Yankee-Zionist conspiracy that supposedly controls the global economy and politics, is quick to pass motions trying to outlaw the "defamation of Islam". But the tyrannies that get together to pass such motions are places where Muslims and others are daily oppressed. Thus we get a lot of talk about human rights, while the only large political forces that might plausibly defend them in a sustained way - the free, Western-oriented, nations - are the perennial target of scapegoating from the world's disenfranchised, and the source of much guilt from their own citizens.

The UN needs to be replaced by a council of free nations as the leading forum for international affairs. When freedom is insured for all, few will pay Islam much attention in order to defame it. But until that happens, free bloggers and others will feel an obligation to keep putting up stories to suggest that Islam, and the tribal culture of which it is presently an integral part, can kill, and can threaten the freedom of those who want to talk about why.

Freedom of Speech, continued

We are planning to blog in the coming year on the freedom of speech issue, and the various attempts of the left-Islamist alliance to erode the one freedom without which one cannot seriously expect to build the only kind of society - an unapologetically free society - that can hope to keep itself from ripping apart under the pressure of immigration bringing together people with widely different understandings of the sacred, and the loves and resentments that come therewith. For now, here is simply a link to the latest story detailing an apparent attempt to silence a hyperbolic blogger, Lionheart, and the insane British law that makes it possible.

I am Lionheart, too!

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Freak out your prof?

Well, aside from being seemingly oblivious to the fact that much of the professoriate is permanently freaked out (postmodern thought is the belief that any and all signs of the normal betray violence towards the Other and, since the normal, or myths defending it, will inevitably always come to the fore, it/they must be forever opposed in an institutionalized, never-ending, freak out) you've got to get a chuckle over the latest ad from the Young Tories.

But as I say, many academics can't take a politically-incorrect (if any) joke, especially not one that cuts close to the truth: they consider it their sacred duty to be permanently freaked out, reading every myth of the normal as a demonization of some victim, a process of victimization put beyond doubt for all time by the unmistakable model of the unquestionable vicimization, the Nazi and the Jew. Nothing the Jews ever did could justify their massacre.... (But the professoriate, that has been preaching one conspiratorial/Gnostic view of history after another for several generations now?) A good prof. can't miss up a chance to feed on this theme, least of all when he doesn't simply get to play the role of the victim advocate but can be, oh it's so glorious, the victim himself:

A 2004 study by Stanley Rothman of Smith College in Northampton, Mass., found that academics are five times more likely to identify as liberals than as conservatives. The study polled over 1,600 undergraduate faculty members from 183 schools.

But academic administrators say most professors encourage a diversity of viewpoints.

Bruce Feldthusen, vice-president of university relations at the University of Ottawa, said he hasn't seen any evidence of political bias among faculty members. He called the Conservative ad campaign an attempt to "demonize" academia.

"This demonizing of institutions is all too common in American politics, and not very helpful here. We've seen the demonizing of the courts here in the last few years. Are we going to do the universities next?"

Oh the poor man, the next thing we'll be asking him to do is to think through his very dependence on the theme of "demonization" and victimization and to question whether continually invoking the mad mob that wants to turn Stephen Harper into the neocon fuhrer (or is it Bush's Goebbels?) in the name of the normal, oil, and the American lie of freedom, is actually not an intellectually or professionally respectable way to make a constructive contribution to the debate on maintaining a free society. The victimary elites fear, most of all, being pressured to seriously study the conservative truth claim: that the academic victim mongers are parasitic on a free society and are working to erode our capacity to renew our freedom, as they use emotional blackmail (see above) and demand appeasement from defenders of the sacred bases of freedom, all in the name of the victim, a figure they put beyond debate whatever minor nods they make to entertaining various points of view.

But the good news is:

Once considered redoubts for political pariahs, Conservative campus clubs are enjoying a resurgence at Canadian universities and colleges, emboldened by a cheeky ad campaign that encourages students to "freak out their profs" and join the federal party.

Campus-club presidents say membership has increased since Prime Minister Stephen Harper took office nearly two years ago. The Conservatives' ascent to power in Ottawa, they say, has had a multiplier effect on campus, enabling clubs to attract centre-leaning students.

The surge is evident at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. Despite the university's strong Tory roots, membership in the campus club sank to the low double digits at the start of the decade, when the country's two main conservative parties were still divided.

But more than 200 members now subscribe to the club's e-mail list, said Alex Bednar, president of the Queen's Campus Conservatives.

"People are now seeing us as a more viable option. The more politically ambitious kids are joining, because they see what's happening in Ottawa," said Bednar, a 21-year-old history major.

I am Bill Simpson!

UPDATED, Below

Covenant Zone bloggers meet every Thursday in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, 7-9 pm, in front of Blenz Coffee. Look for the blue scarves. This week, I'm sure we will be discussing the following (I've got a cold and might not make it, but I'll try to and I'm sure by fellow bloggers will be there) and other issues relevant to the eroding freedom of Canadians:

Here's an audio file to this morning's CBC interview of Ethel Whitty, Executive Director of the Carnegie Community Centre: Ethel Whitty Says Simpson Out Because Of Worksafe Complaint.

For those readers not familiar with Vancouver, the Carnegie Centre is a city-run Community Centre at the heart of Vancouver's most drug-ridden and impoverished neighbourhood. A political storm has been brewing in that district for several months now, stirred up by a daring blog that reports, among other things, on various failures of the staff at the Carnegie Centre, who are variously alleged to fall down on their jobs and to have a penchant for banning, from the Centre and its programs, anyone who speaks against them.

Yet, without providing evidence, Whitty tells the CBC:

"We're accepting of negative feedback".

She also says that the banning from the Carnegie Centre of homeless Bill Simpson, elected a Carnegie Board member by his fellow users of the community centre (a board whose meetings he cannot attend due to his banning) "arose because of a BC Worksafe Complaint... not able to say more [because of the legal process underway], would really like to hear from Mr. Simpson".

I have (thanks to Bill Simpson) a copy of the letter that the City of Vancouver, under the signature of Jacquie Forbes-Roberts, General Manager, Community Services Group, sent to Mr. Simpson on June 21, 2007, telling him he was banned from the Carnegie Centre. It makes no mention of a Work Safe claim. The letter notes that a website registered by Mr. Simpson has committed the sin of merely linking to the infamous Downtown Eastside Enquirer Blog, which the City alleges "make very serious allegations of misconduct against Carnegie Centre patrons and staff, and unreasonably invade people's privacy rights."

The letter continues:

Several Points are clear:
- you are the author of material on the DowntownEastsideEnquirer.ca site [note: Simpson's site has almost the same name as the blog in question, but is not in fact the same site]
-you are responsible for, and have control over, the content of the website as the site administrator,
-you have used the Centre's address and a Centre phone number as your own for Internet purposes and as the Contact Us address for the site, and
-your site links to a blog with numerous inaccuracies and allegations of misconduct, and unwarranted invasions of privacy of other patrons and staff at the Centre.

These actions are deeply disturbing to Centre administration and staff, because they are so clearly at odds with the Centre's goals and objectives. For example, as you are aware, the Centre's written, published guidelines require patrons and staff to treat one another with respect, settle differences and misunderstandings through patience and goodwill, and respect personal and private space of one another. Your website and blog respect none of these qualities.

While you have a right to free speech, that right is not boundless. Your right to free speech does not entitle you to damage people's reputations and invade their privacy by publishing or linking to inflammatory stories based on half-truths, rumor, innuendo, and hearsay, nor does it entitle you to use the Centre's facilities to pursue these objectives

We are continuing to investigate this matter.

Now, whether what has been alleged by the Downtown Eastside Enquirer blog is half-truth or not, the present blogger does not know, beyond the fact that certain accusations have the ring of truth since they entail revelations that must have happened somehow to someone. In any case, the bloggers at Downtown Eastside Enquirer are standing by (for many months now) the claims they have made about Carnegie staff, one of which, concerning the personal amorous affairs of one staff member with several Centre users that allegedly led to various successful and failed suicide attempts by upset lovers, was apparently the source of a Worker's Compensation Board Work Safe complaint, instigated by the alleged (though never named by the bloggers, as I understand it) Carnegie staff member/lover who felt that her personal safety had been compromised by the blogging that, while nameless, was apparently sufficiently detailed to identify its target to those familiar with the scene.

Now while this Work Safe complaint is not mentioned in the City's letter to Simpson, banning him from the Carnegie Centre, it may be the case that Ethel Whitty's later claims that the banning arose out of a Work Safe complaint are factual, and not a "make it up as we go along" attempt to strengthen a weak case.

In any case, what should concern the larger blogging community, not to mention every Canadian citizen, is the Carnegie and City's ridiculous, to my mind, claim to have the right to ban someone for merely linking to a blog that the City simply alleges, with no attempt to prove the case, is home to "half truths and rumour", a blog that sticks to its guns amidst the heat.

Now, I showed this letter to a lawyer experienced in civil litigation, including defamation suits, and he was slightly amused at the devious legal tactics of his civic colleagues, as demonstrated by the letter. My lawyer suggested it was the kind of thing they might get away with; it was not a legally obvious point; it would require (highly paid) lawyers thrashing out the claims in court, to come to some resolution of the question of whether the City can do this to Simpson. And, as I understand it, homeless Bill Simpson could probably afford no more than a minute or two of your average lawyer's time. And it's not obvious that this is a case that will attract the pro bono charity of local lawyers.

The only other way this case might be resolved is if there is sufficient public outcry at the City's stupidity, and cavalier attitude towards free speech and linking on the internet, and its apparent unwillingness to address seriously the now widespread complaints being made about the Carnegie Centre.

I was not greatly impressed by the CBC's interview of Bill Simpson. The interviewer seemed unable to focus on or grasp the key points at issue, and Simpson comes across as a man somewhat stymied by the world who does not have an easy time conveying his thoughts, at least not under the pressure of a radio interview. That such a person would be deemed a verbal threat to those charged with serving that part of our city that is home to our most impoverished people, many of whom must demonstrate far more challenging mental traits than does Mr. Simpson, suggests that the Carnegie Centre may well not be up to the task of dealing with the tough realities of its neighbourhood. I rather suspect the alleged "half truths" of the Downtown Eastside Enquirer blog are rather more full.

In her CBC interview, Ethel Whitty suggests that she will let Simpson back into the Carnegie Centre if he arranges to meet with her, and come to some shared understanding of proper conduct. Whitty wants to save face, because she knows that banning someone for linking to a blog that led to an unresolved, perhaps not compelling, Work Safe complaint, is hardly face-making conduct.

I just hope the bloggers of Vancouver don't forget this attack on our free speech. Bureaucrats who don't want to be held accountable by bloggers need to learn that they have to become more transparent and capable of facing a wide range of complaints with more than a narrow legalistic argument that one can't comment on matters pertaining to an ongoing legal (Work Safe) matter.

Ethel Whitty takes on the tone of the victim, in her interview, the victim of irrational accusations that she need not seriously address. She is posing for a popularity contest, assuming her fellow bureaucrats in the CBC and the nicely-groomed professional classes will take her side. She is not facing up to the thrust of the Downtown Eastside Enquirer's many complaints about a long history of Carnegie banning those who speak out against it.

When a culture becomes addicted to victimary thinking, when the victim position is what is desired by all sides, we inevitably begin to erode free speech. The victim baiters at the BC Human Rights Commission will soon be forcing Maclean's magazine and Mark Steyn to appear before them on charges of "Islamophobia".

This kind of thing is not just a threat to one person or another. Free speech is indivisible. If they can take it away from one person, they can take it away from anyone, including presumably Muslims whose holy book is replete, on almost every page, with curses towards the unbeliever. They can at least make it too expensive for any publication to employ a crusader like Mark Steyn.

Covenant Zone exists to remind our fellow citizens that we each of us has a responsibility to defend and guarantee each other's freedom - our freedom as individuals, and not as members of officially valorized victim categories/groups - even if we don't like what the other guy does with it. Otherwise we can forget about living in a free society. The law certainly provides remedies where defamatory speech or publication is untrue. But if we start to allow bureaucrats in kangaroo courts, with little or no respect for due legal process, where accusers have legal costs covered, while the accused have to go to expense to defend themselves, to pronounce on defamation and to impose penalties on those who supposedly overstep the bounds of free speech, as defined by the kangaroo courts like our Human Rights Commissions, then we have taken a step towards a totalitarian state. And one thing that can be said about that is that if you think you're being victimized by the give and take of free speech in a free society, just wait for the real victimary horrors that must come with any reversal of our history back to a more sacrificially-bound culture and state.

I am Bill Simpson! So are you! Join us in the covenant zone, defend my freedom, before they come for you.

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

UPDATE, Jan 4:

I think the Downtown Eastside Enquirer makes a good point about how Whitty's use of the "WorkSafe" excuse may be a way to libel William Simpson with just the kind of innuendo the City of Vancouver claims, with yet no proof or justification, the DEE blog uses:

A further indication that WorkSafe is a damage control strategy is that Carnegie management and staff had been barring Simpson for political reasons long before the WorkSafe complaint had been lodged. The WorkSafe complaint was lodged in response to a Feb./07 article about sexual misconduct on the DTES Enquirer. That article was published after Simpson had already been barred from the Carnegie Learning Center (not yet the entire Carnegie Center) in Jan./07. He was taken by Learning Center Co-ordinator, Lucy Alderson, to the office of Carnegie Head of Security, Skip, and told that was barred from the Learning Center (situated on the third floor of Carnegie Center) for blogging on the Downtown Eastside Enquirer.

Two years before that, in 2005, Simpson was barred from Carnegie for handing out election literature in the building. The literature criticized management. After being barred, Simpson stood outside Carnegie handing out his election literature. Assistant Manager,Dan Tetrault, then allowed him back into the building on the condition that he not hand it out inside the building.

Whitty has a record – caught on tape – of smearing both Bill Simpson and the DTES Enquirer. At both a public Carnegie Board meeting and a Community Relations meeting last summer, she made defamatory statements about the blog and Simpson, providing no examples to support her claims. Even when Simpson specifically asked her for such an example, after he read the letter she delivered to him in June 2007 barring him from Carnegie, she offered none.

"They have nothing," said Board member Grant Chancy at a Board meeting last summer.

Chancy, a former unionized worker who has the WorkSafe manual at home, announced at a Carnegie Community Relations meeting last summer that he saw nothing in Simpson’s conduct that would justify a WorkSafe complaint. Chancy said he had found “no threats” on the DTES Enquirer blog and “I’ve looked and I’ve looked and I’ve looked.”

A number of Carnegie members feel the same way,leading to grumbling that there should be a fraud investigation into this WCB claim. The claim, which presumably resulted in a payout, was based on a non-libelous blog that, as Board member Sophie Friegang stated before her resignation, is well within the boundaries of "free speech".

When Whitty first floated the WorkSafe reason for barring Simpson in the summer of 2006, Board member Rachel Davis called Gordon Harkness at WorkSafe to find out what was going on. What Harkness told her was surprising. Davis included it in a statement she left on CBC's Talkback line in response to Whitty's claims: "Mr.Harkness told me that there has been no assessment by WorkSafe of William Simpson whatsoever."

Davis pointed in her Talkback statement to the defamation involved in Whitty's suggestion that Simpson posed a safety risk:

"I think people are aware that WorkSafe only deals with cases of violence or extreme verbal abuse, and nothing like that has happened. So for [Whitty] to use the Worksafe name in an attempt to legitimize this barring is really just a heartless blackening of William’s reputation and that makes me really sad, because if they will do this to him, a democratically elected board member, what would they do to your average member who disagrees with their policy? I find it frightening. And I know other members do too. I stand by my statement:The Barring of William Simpson was a political act against a whistleblower perpetrated by the City."