Free speech follies, American edition

I don't know Joe Kaufman. The other day, however, I received an appeal from FrontPageMagazine's David Horowitz (no, I have no idea why I'm on his email list) to contribute funds to his legal defence. It seems he's being sued by "radical Muslims" for defamation, "to stop him from writing about Muslims in the future and to close down his web sites." He has also been served with a restraining order.

From the appeal letter:

Seven Muslim groups claim that Joe is a threat. They convinced a court that Joe "intends to threaten to take unlawful action...cause bodily injury...or threaten Plaintiffs or their members with immediate bodily injury."

Those Muslim rascals. How did they manage all that in the Land of the Free? In any case, this FrontPageMag writer somehow hasn't managed to get the lawsuit thrown out a year and a half later, and he's facing considerable legal fees. Back to David:

A victory by the Muslim groups would be the first step in silencing all of us. This is a free speech issue and nothing more: Joe has not lied about, threatened, or touched any of the Muslims who are suing him, or any other Muslims for that matter. He simply reported the truth, and for that these groups are doing their best to silence him - and to intimidate the rest of us.

The lawsuit against Joe Kaufman is part of a strategy by these Muslim groups to bully us into silence. That's why we cannot let them win. [emphasis in original]

"A free speech issue and nothing more." Well, I don't know the case at all. Maybe Kaufman is on the side of the angels. The way David tells it, anyway, this is one wronged fellow, being persecuted because he's been busy exposing Muslim charitable organizations who've allegedly been funneling money to Hamas and Hezbollah.

But, by the sheerest chance, I discovered that Joe Kaufman himself doesn't share Horowitz's passionate commitment to freedom of speech. It seems that Kaufman has recently been offended by a bus ad, not one promoting atheism this time, but Islam.

The ad campaign, in Broward County and Dade County, Florida, was sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The text in question is "ISLAM: The Way of Life of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad." A CAIR spokesman explains: "A Muslim is anyone who submits their will to God. By that definition Abraham and all the prophets are Muslim because they submitted their will to God."

Kaufman, who runs an outfit called Americans Against Hate, petitioned Broward County officials to remove the ad, calling it "offensive." They refused, so he organized a rally last month to "send a message."

According to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

Kaufman writes for the right-leaning Web publication Front Page Magazine, and once called for nuclear attacks on Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. Since founding Americans Against Hate as a terrorism watchdog group, he wrote that "pure merciless force" was the only way to deal with Muslims.

Gosh. "A free speech issue and nothing more," eh? Why do I get the feeling that there's maybe a little more to Kaufman's current travails than David Horowitz is letting on?

UPDATE: Seems my suspicions were correct. Reader "forgottobuytinfoil" directs us to considerably more information about the case in question. The restraining order was to keep this wingnut from disrupting a Muslim Family Day at an amusement park.

RCMP: who's in charge?

Yesterday RCMP Commissioner William Elliott announced that Taser use by his officers would be restricted. His announcement was not without equivocation--he wouldn't admit that Tasers actually kill people, it's just that people die after being Tasered--but he was relatively clear on one point: Tasers should only be used "where there is a threat, either to our officers or to members of the public."

What constitutes such a "threat" remains vague, as critics from the Liberals and the NDP were not slow to point out. But the Commissioner did appear to clarify, stating that Taser use is now to be restricted to situations in which the only alternative is to use a firearm.

Up to now, it could be, and frequently was, deployed when individuals were deemed to be "actively resistant." That notion has been extended to include an old man in a hospital bed, a young Inuk girl already handcuffed to her cell floor, a woman with kids on her lap, and a Native person refusing to remove his ceremonial necklace. As the National Post put it, Tasers have become "a convenient fallback for police seeking a quick end to unpleasant situations."

Will Elliott's new guidelines reverse the trend of steadily-increasing Taser use by his force? Will they rein in the lazy or sadistic officers who have been deploying Tasers as a hi-tech cattle prod?

One might find some cautious grounds for optimism in his announcement. But he evidently doesn't have the last word on the matter. From the Globe and Mail story, buried at the bottom:

Sergeant Scott Warren, chairman of the RCMP's officer safety committee, said the matter is more complicated in real-life situations.

"The commissioner, with all due respect, is incorrect to say we wouldn't use them again for actively resistant people," he told CTV News.

Here is more, from the CTV story:

[A]ccording to Sgt. Scott Warren, the chair of the RCMP's Officer Safety Committee, the so-called new regulations have been drawn up by officials who are out of touch with the realities of street-level policing.

In an interview with CTV's Power Play, Warren also said that the regulations don't adequately address the split-second decisions police must make everyday.

"Sometimes I think the commissioner is in over his head," said Warren, referring to Elliott, who is the first-ever civilian to head the national police force.

Business as usual, in other words. The line officers are prepared to do their own thing, never mind what the boss-man says. Be prepared for more shocking stories to come as this out-of-control organization continues to spiral downwards.

That Shaidle appearance

Yes, she's a frightful bigot. She's everything that my friends are saying she is, and they've got the quotations to prove it. But I'm finding myself conflicted on the flash campaign to get Kathy Shaidle off TVO tonight.

It's not that I'm buying into the Speech Warrior™ shtick. That's largely a bogus campaign to get social-conservative and anti-immigration agendas into the public arena without troublesome obstacles. But I can't help wondering if, on this occasion, we're setting ourselves up.

I'd have less difficulty with this effort if Shaidle were being asked for her views about Muslims, or the Chinese who (according to her) are constantly spitting, leaving cases of rotten vegetables in the streets, and ingesting illegal substances, or the Arabs, or...well, visit Warren Kinsella's site for a more substantial bill of indictment. Staggeringly awful, and utterly lacking in wit or intelligence.

But.

She's being asked for a religious take on the current "atheism on buses" campaign. Kathy kind of abandoned her orthodox Catholicism awhile ago, because it was getting in the way of her nuptials, but TVO seems not to have kept up, inviting her old "Relapsed Catholic" persona onto the show. So we have a possibly post-relapsed Catholic and certified Speech Warrior™ asked to comment on the struggle to place atheist messages on a public transit system.

Lots of neat cultural intersections there. But overall this is a wee bit like asking Ernst Zündel to comment on global warming or the relevance of stamp collecting, isn't it? It reminds me, in fact, of the Monty Python skit in which Karl Marx, Mao, Lenin and Che Guevara take part in a quiz show where they are asked a series of questions about soccer. There's just so much waiting in the wings, never to be called on stage, that we are mesmerized.

Admit it--isn't there possibly some good theatre in all this? Today's Kathy channelling the culture-vulture Kathy that was? The sweating, edge-of-the-seat tension--will she find a way to drag Muslims into the discussion? How will the by-now-forewarned host keep things on track?

Convince me. Maybe I'm just being contrarian. As a taxpayer I don't want to subsidize bigots. But what if the bigots are made to talk about stamp collecting? Atheist advertising? Crocodiles?

It just might prove to be a genuine pulse-pounding pleasure to watch such people writhe in their restraints. For surely Hell is being forced to discuss everything except what matters most to you.

UPDATE: Good grief. I was almost embarrassed for her. She missed an opening to do the anti-Muslim thing, but she called Obama a "Marxist professor." Robert Buckman repeated the phrase, with a classic Brit combination of incredulity and scorn, and at that point people on the panel simply stopped taking her seriously. A bit of flotsam she was, on a sea of serious thought.

Battle scars

Looks like the Plains of Abraham battle re-enactment is not a go. I think that's a pity.

These re-enactments are seldom what they seem. I have mused on them before, getting tripped up, mind you, by not being aware at the time of the sheer scope of these historical re-plays.

One thing for sure: they are not merely pageantry. And for those directly involved, it's not just playing. There is an experiential aspect to it, but I wonder how one could ever compare the original with its copy in that respect. No one dies. The fear is absent. Try to imagine that fear, the fear of being wounded before the word "anaesthesia" was coined. The American Civil War combined pre-anaesthetic medicine with proto-modern weaponry, leading not only to the worst battlefield carnage in its history right to the present (618,000 dead), but also frightful pain and suffering. 112 Unionists and 150 Confederates per thousand were wounded.

The re-enactments don't get at any of this. But that may not be as important as it may seem at first. With respect to the US, I have said that their popularity indicates, at least to me, that the Civil War isn't over. What about the battle of the Plains of Abraham?

The re-enactment of this decisive battle--or was it really decisive?--is not an annual event. In fact, it's the 250th anniversary of the real thing, complete with defiant masked ball and the eventual rout of General Montcalm's forces.

The last one was held a decade ago, when the Parti Québécois was in power, and everything went off without a hitch. But to Quebec souverainistes today, this is an exercise in triumphalism, pure and simple, and they plan to protest the events should they go on.

Everyone seems to be backing away, from the Prime Minister to the premier of Quebec. It's all up to the National Battlefields Commission now. The result, I think, is a foregone conclusion.

Some thoughts: history isn't in the past, but the present. We construct histories, narratizing fragments and imbuing them with meaning thereby.

Memorials and re-enactments are deeply ironic. For example, during the tourist season, the fortress at Louisbourg does daily re-enactments of life as it was when the place belonged to the French. But these are performed by local Nova Scotian English-speakers. The very muteness of Louisbourg speaks volumes. The "living history" here remains a snapshot, life marooned in time, but the French are English. And as they re-enact their historical moment for us, the dramatic irony of that moment is almost palpable. The characters in their period costumes play their roles with gusto, seemingly unaware, as they cheerfully go about their daily business, that theirs is a tragedy as yet to unfold.

As a historical site Louisbourg is a triumphalist construction. The very absence of tension in its (re)presentation ironically underscores that fact, contrasting starkly with the vigorously contested cultural and political debates that are carried on today about the place of Quebec in Confederation. The distancing in time of what is portrayed keeps the "French fact" at a safe remove.

A re-enactment of the battle of the Plains of Abraham, however, has no such remove. I, for one, want it to go ahead. And I want the souverainistes out to protest it, and any federalists who want to support it, and the history buffs, and the media, and the cultural critics. Because all of that, too, is part of the spectacle, the history, the meaning: a battle that is not yet over, carried on by other means.

A din of inequity

The Cons are pressing ahead to make it illegal for federal public service unions to bring pay equity complaints to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. As reported in today's Globe, there is no indication this will save any money: rather, it's clear that this move is based upon ideological opposition to the very notion of pay equity.

The issue is, instead, supposed to be brought to the bargaining table. And therein lie several problems.

First, the notion of bargaining a right is, or should be, repugnant to Canadians. Pay equity means that women and men are rewarded equally for work of equal value. Wage discrimination against women in an affront: but Harper's crew want to dicker about it. That's a bit like putting women's right to vote on the table: what, every election? Why not every second one? After reaching the age of 30?

Secondly, current legislation does not permit classification grievances: classification is the prerogative of the employer. But that's precisely what's caused all the problems in the past: federal public service classification schemes have been laden with implicit sexist value-judgments. It took a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal and the courts to blast their way through that thicket. Currently, classification grievances only go through an administrative process in which the employer has the last word. There is no third-party adjudication.

Finally, this is placing federal public service unions in an impossible position. Unions are to be made equally responsible with employers in achieving pay equity at the bargaining table. But, as we all know, the two parties are not on a level playing field. One party can, if arduous conditions are met, go out on strike--assuming that pay equity is a strikeable issue among the membership. The other can bring far more pressure to bear, up to and including back-to-work legislation. Yet, if an individual decides to bring a successful complaint of her own outside the collective bargaining process--a complaint that unions are to be prevented from backing--the union could be held jointly liable.

To add insult to injury, Treasury Board chief Victor Toews is weeping crocodile tears at the moment about the costs and delays inherent in the current process. Those costs and delays, of course, have arisen precisely because Treasury Board, under both Conservative and Liberal administrations, has traditionally fought pay equity complaints every step of the way, spending millions of the taxpayers' money to do so.

On top of that little bit of hypocrisy, the Conservatives are extolling the efficacy of collective bargaining just as they are presently engaged in rolling back signed collective agreements.

No word as yet from Ignatieff's Liberals.

Send a note to Zoë Watson

As of this writing, Erik Millett, the principal of Belleisle Elementary School, is still away from his job, having been pitilessly hounded, vilified and threatened by what amounts to a national lynch-mob of true-blue patrioteers.

Bene Diction had a good post on this sordid affair yesterday. To my mind, the whole case simply reeks of Conservative politicking at its very worst. Millett was a Green Party candidate in the last election, and his victorious CPC opponent just happens to be the Minister of Veterans Affairs, Greg Thompson. Tory after Tory rose in the House of Commons to lie about what had actually transpired at the school. Shrieky far-right bloggers lost no opportunity to pile on. And I suspect that the mother who lit the fuse is not exactly a Green or NDP voter.

One of the saddest things about this has been the lack of institutional support for the beleaguered small-town principal. As a public employee, Millett had every right to expect that he would be given support and shielded from the howling bullies at his doorstep. After all, he had done nothing wrong.

Most schools in Canada do not feature a daily singing of O Canada. Once upon a time, I believe, they did. How did we get from there to here? As each school changed its policy, were there angry protests and physical threats? Obviously not. Over time we changed, not because we hold our country in less regard, but because rote patriotism fell out of fashion, as did rote religion--I'm thinking of the daily Lord's Prayer.

Moreover, and this is part of the ugly sub-text here, we became a more diverse community. Dropping the Lord's Prayer seemed reasonable, although some other accommodations have been self-conscious and clumsy, like calling Hallowe'en "Black and Orange Day." Some officials have run the risk, in fact, of promoting the very homogeneity they claim to oppose, by removing substance and replacing it with tapioca language that means everything and nothing at once. But some see the very end of life as we know it in every one of these changes, reasonable or not.

The Belleisle incident, many of these folks suspected, was just more immigrants pushing us around. In fact, it was nothing of the kind: while the principal has stayed professionally mum on the matter, it's not too hard to read between the lines. The people involved are Jehovah's Witnesses, who have traditionally asked schools to excuse their children from singing the anthem. Millett didn't like them being singled out in an elementary school, and decided that a good solution would be to sing O Canada at school assemblies instead, where their non-participation would be less noticeable. His decision was made in 2007. For more than a year, nobody even noticed the change.

When it finally did become a public issue, Millett must have felt that what followed simply dropped from the sky. Overnight, he was the target of nearly every screeching, flag-waving yahoo in the country. (As I've noted before, patriotism is not necessarily the last refuge of a scoundrel. Too often it's the first.) Instead of being defended by his school superintendent Zoë Watson, however, and the local school board, he was simply allowed to twist in the wind while his decision was hastily countermanded under considerable political pressure. They cut and ran, leaving him to his fate. I find this disgraceful.

I hope that my progressive friends might be prepared to send a note to Superintendant Watson, suggesting that she defend the integrity of this public employee against the on-going hate campaign against him, rather than turning tail and abandoning him to the mob.

Commenter "dizzy" has tracked down her coordinates:

Zoë Watson, Superintendent of Schools
New Brunswick School District 6
70B Hampton Road
Rothesay, N.B
Canada E2E 5Y2
Phone: (506) 847-6262
Fax: (506) 847-6211
Email:Zoe.Watson@gnb.ca

NB: We are progressives, so please send politely-worded messages expressing your concern about her handling of this matter. No abuse, no namecalling, no threats of death or violence: we're better than that. Just make a calm appeal to principle, duty and common humanity. And let me know if you receive any response.

UPDATE: Commenter janfromthebruce suggests writing to the School Council (Ms. Watson's boss):

One can send an email to the New Brunswick School District 6, District Education Council c/o of the Superintendent Watson. Send as a separate file "letter attachment" addressed to the chair of the council and councilors - list all their names. All correspondence must be acknowledged at their official board meetings.

Below are the names and info about their District Education Council. I could not find phone numbers or email addresses for them, although they are publicly duly elected. New Brunswick School District 6, District Education Council:

Sussex Corner / Poley Mountain: Gary Long
Sussex/Millstream: Pamela Goold
Apohaqui / Norton: Russell Hall
Belleisle / Norton: John Ness
Lower Norton / Bloomfield: Trudy Kelly-Forthsythe
Hampton / Darlings Island: Vacant
Quispamsis North: Roger Nesbitt (Chair)
Rothesay West: Charlotte Pierce
Quispamsis South: Tracy Friars
Rothesay East: Mark Henderson
Kingston West: Wanda Cosman

The DEC website may be found here.

Conservative civility

I have mentioned in earlier posts the conservative penchant, when the chips are down, for physical violence. Here's more (via Runesmith).

Watch the whole video to see how these people operate. Erik Millett, the NB principal who replaced the daily singing of O Canada with monthly singing of our national anthem at his school assemblies, has discovered what it's like to cross these deranged wingnuts.

Abusive emails? By the truckload. Lies and smears? Par for the course. Telephoned death threats? Physical, face-to-face threats of beatings? You bet.

On the video, as commentators on the saner side of the blogosphere have noted, the benighted hysteric who started the campaign against Millett also bemoaned the alleged loss of the Pledge of Allegiance (@4:12). Whoops, wrong country, but what the hell. The stiff-armed salute fell out of favour, too. Deal with it.

In any case, the bullies may have won. The daily anthem is back, and the NB government is considering legislation to make it mandatory. The principal is now off on stress leave, and may never return to his school. Score another hit for our jack-booted patrioteers and their allies in the blogosphere, so eager to help--when they aren't whining about human rights commissions, that is, and the threats they allegedly pose to Canadian freedom.

Change, I can believe in

...but so far not much of it in evidence. I never had stars in my eyes about Obama, but I had no idea he'd capitulate to the forces of evil quite so quickly. He's sounding more and more like a stealth Republican. In three weeks!

He has another three years and 49 weeks to complete the transformation, but that's far more time than he apparently needs. A national renewal and reconciliation ticket in 2012?

Free speech follies

The Speech Warriors™ have been having quite a week of it.

Visiting Warrior Mark Steyn drew a rapt crowd of, well, two dozen, as he addressed an Ontario government legislative committee, calling the head of the Ontario Human Rights Commission a "commissar" and predicting terrorist violence if rights commissions persist:

When you go down that road, all you do is lead to the situation that you have in, say, Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, you can't start a newspaper and print what you think, so if you object to the House of Saud, the only thing you can do is blow stuff up.

Steyn's already-stated preference for physical violence over civility (and he's not alone) was reiterated:

If a guy uses the 'n-word' in a bar, I would rather somebody slugged him on the chin rather than him being dragged up before your tribunal.

And then, proving that he has been in New Hampshire self-exile for rather too long a period, he added this howler:

This is not a hateful province. This is not a jurisdiction where people openly insult and use racist epithets.

Naw, no racism in Ontario. But as the National Post's Joseph Brean noted, the dismal performance of this shopworn hack was eclipsed by the impassioned comments of a university professor, one Richard Moon.

Moon, as readers might remember, was the author of a recent report proposing the abolition of Sn. 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, or, failing that, some revisions to it. (I took a look at the contents of that report here.) He had been invited on that basis by Lisa MacLeod, the Tory MPP from Nepean-Carleton. She was in for a rude shock.

For Moon, it seems, has had quite enough guff from the Speech Warriors™, and he wasted no time seizing his opportunity to be heard. He delivered a strong defence of human rights commissions and of the integrity of their staff. Then he proceeded to an epic smackdown of Ezra Levant, who had attacked his report before it even appeared.

Levant had claimed that Moon's report had been "redacted by [Canadian Human Rights Commissioner] Jennifer Lynch." Moon corrected the record in no uncertain terms:

The claim was false. I was given complete independence, and when my report was released the following day and recommended the repeal of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the falsity of Levant's claim was obvious. He had just made it up. He thought he knew what I would say and he sought to discredit the report in advance by attacking me and the commission rather than the arguments I might make.

He wondered aloud why he had been invited, a question that the hapless Lisa MacLeod must have asked herself as well:

"Why invite me? It didn't make any sense," Prof. Moon said. He initially declined, but accepted after hearing Mr. Steyn, author of a controversial book excerpt that led to three human rights hate speech complaints against Maclean's magazine, would also appear. He said he also felt obliged to publicly rebut the claims of personal malfeasance by CHRC staff, of which he found no evidence in his own research, and which are often repeated by commentators who cite him admiringly as an authority.

The invitation "made me realize that there is serious interest, and maybe this smear campaign against the commissions generally has taken hold to some extent. Why else invite me?"

Bingo. And MacLeod got all grumpy: "I'm very disappointed. I didn't call you in to make accusations and call people liars." Nope, you called him in to be a pawn in your little game, and he wouldn't play along. Bummer.

The next "site of struggle," as we postmodernists like to call it, was the campus of St. Mary's University, where a troll wandered onto the campus to equate abortion to the Holocaust, and pro-choicers to Nazis. The knuckledragger was shouted down, as might have been predicted when you gravely insult a crowd to its face. "Mob rule," he complained, as did conservative blogger Damian Penny. Perhaps Mark Steyn's preferred solution should have been applied? I but ask.

The invariably annoying Speech Warrior™ enabler Margaret Wente wrote her column today about free speech on university campuses. She didn't mention the St. Mary's imbroglio, but brought up a lot of other cases, making errors of fact and setting up a bizarre strawman.

She claims, for example, that Carleton University "banned" a "pro-life" group from campus, which is being somewhat careless with the truth, to put it mildly. There was no ban: the Carleton University Students' Association simply decided not to give money to the group, although, after it re-did its charter to be in conformity with CUSA's human rights policy, it was funded after all. The group was always free to meet and to proselytize at Carleton, whether on the student body's dime or not.

And she states that "pro-lifers" are "occasionally compared" to Holocaust-deniers, then triumphantly shoots down her own invention, for invention it is, by noting that the right-to-lifers are presently doing the abortion = Holocaust thing. The implication is that pro-choicers are illogical. Sloppy, tendentious journamalism.

Meanwhile, the Usual Suspects™ are in heaven. Well, not entirely.

UPDATE: Moon's on fire! (via Warren Kinsella, here's a more comprehensive version of what the professor had to say)

Mr. Richard Moon:

Okay. I assume that I was asked to speak to you because I recently wrote a report for the Canadian Human Rights Commission dealing with section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, and that’s the section of the act that prohibits Internet hate speech, understood as communication that is likely to expose the members of an identifiable group to hatred or contempt. In a minute, I’ll say something about my report and its recommendations, but first I wanted to comment on the current debate in Canada concerning the regulation of hate speech in the Human Rights Code.Let me start by saying there is certainly a serious debate to be had about the legal regulation of hate speech: about whether it should be regulated, about the scope of regulation and about the legal mechanisms for regulation.

But the debate in Canada has been infected by a style of political comment that’s relatively new in Canada but better known in the US. There are a number of right-wing critics in Canada who, instead of offering serious and plausible criticism of the Human Rights Code regulations, engage in baseless personal attacks. Without compunction, they accuse the civil servants who are mandated to implement human rights legislation of corruption. They use the term “corruption” freely and very loosely, but always in a way that suggests a significant breach of public trust. The accusations have no substance; they are pieced together out of nothing. But what they achieve, what the commentators want them to achieve, is a general sense that there is a serious problem, even if the specifics of the problem are unknown.

I suspect that my invitation to speak to you today shows that these commentators have been successful in their smear campaign against human rights commissions. I urge the committee not to be taken in by these individuals. They don’t care about the truth; they make things up.

I want to give an example of this : The night before my report was released in November, Ezra Levant posted on his blog a comment about the report. The title of his posting was, “Richard Moon’s report was redacted by Jennifer Lynch.” Jennifer Lynch, as many of you may know, is the chief commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. The claim or suggestion was that the report was not my own work—that I was told by the commission what to say.

The claim was false—I was given complete independence—and when my report was released the following day and recommended the repeal of section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the falsity of Levant’s claim was obvious. Levant had just made it up.

He thought he knew what I would say and he sought to discredit the report in advance by attacking me and the commission rather than the arguments I might make. Had I recommended something different, that section 13 be retained with certain amendments—a perfectly reasonable position—then Levant’s false claim and the commission rather than the arguments I might make. Had I recommended something different, that section 13 be retained with certain amendments—a perfectly reasonable position—then Levant’s false claim about the report might have seemed plausible to some people and would have been difficult for me to refute decisively.

This is his general style and that of others. Over the last few years, these commentators have made a series of baseless accusations against the members and staff or the Canadian Human Rights Commission, and these claims have leaked into the mainstream media, into the National Post, and into the columns of the Globe and Mail. Believe none of it. As I said at the outset, there are some serious questions to be addressed, but I have come to the conclusion that certain individuals who have played a large role in the campaign against human rights laws and human rights commissions, particularly in the context of hate speech, have no interest in serious debate or in the truth.

...Now another issue, I suppose—and I will say I had not actually originally intended to make an opening statement of sorts and certainly not with the content that this one had until I realized that Mark Steyn was also to be speaking to you today. So another issue, it seems to me, has to do with the role of the commission in monitoring and commenting on patterns and instance of hateful or discriminatory speech in the province. The comments made by Barbara Hall regarding the Mark Steyn article were criticized by some.

The commission decided that it did not have jurisdiction, but nevertheless observed that the article was discriminatory.

In my report I argued that the law—and I’m speaking of course about the and my focus was on the federal act—should not prohibit expression that defames the members of an identifiable group; that we should instead consider other ways to respond to such speech.

The Mark Steyn article, in my view, should not be censored but nor should it go unanswered. It was an unfair and deceptive in its content and glib and sometimes juvenile in its style. How are the members of the Muslim community to respond to the suggestion in Canada’s national news magazine that they are violent or sympathetic to violence? They do not have Mark Steyn’s platform.

There may be a role for the commission to play in response to defamatory, discriminatory speech in the community. Its mandate is to educate and advocate. As an institution, as it’s currently designed, I am not sure how well-suited the commission is to such a role. In my report I advocated a strengthening of the voluntary press council system, but I certainly would not want to rule out the possibility that the commission may also have a role to play. Those are my opening remarks.

The status of women, Vatican-style

Well, now it's official: women are simply baby-making machines, fleshly containers at the disposal of the patriarchy. The far-right Premier of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, has overruled the Italian Court of Cassation (Supreme Court) by decree, after consulting with the Vatican, and ordered the continued life support of a woman who has been in a vegetative state (read: brain-dead) for seventeen years.

Because she is "in a condition to have babies."

Visions of factory-farming come unbidden to my mind. Why? Because I used to have a repellent fantasy about those places. An image of headless hens, forever producing eggs, calmly, in an orderly fashion, no unseemly pecking and buk-buk-bakawing. Nutrients delivered by tubes down the neck. Eggs collected by conveyor belt.

O brave new world. No wonder so many "right-to-life" articles omit all mention of women. Because for such people women as persons either exist as distractions from their bodily purpose--or needn't exist at all.

[H/t Pharyngula via CC]

UPDATE: Commenter Eamon Knight wants context. Here it is--and it's worse than I thought. Il signor Berlusconi dice:

Secondo la mia personale coscienza, dovevamo produrre ogni sforzo nelle nostre possibilita' per evitare la morte di una persona che e' in pericolo di vita e che non e' in morte cerebrale ma che e' una persona che respira in modo autonomo, una persona viva, le cui cellule cerebrali sono vive e mandano anche segnali elettrici, una persona che potrebbe anche in ipotesi generare un figlio in uno stato vegetativo che potrebbe variare, come diverse volte si e' visto.

[According to my personal conscience, we should make every possible effort to avoid the death of a person whose life is endangered and who is not brain-dead but a person who is breathing independently, a person who is alive, for whom the brain cells are alive and sending electric signals as well, a person who could also hypothetically have a son while in a vegetative state that could change, as we have seen many times.] (emphasis added)

Video here.

UPPERDATE: And this dreadful travesty comes to an end.

[H/t CC]

Why I read Flying Rodent

Sound like anyone you know?

[Warning: this link contains strong language. Viewer discretion is advised.]

Off the wall

Getting a little huffy, Duffy?

Meanwhile Danny Williams, Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, reveals his perspicacity:

Williams says the comments were unbecoming of a senator and that Duffy is only confirming his partisanship, which Williams says he suspected during the last federal election campaign. [emphasis added]

Duffy says his journalistic record "speaks for itself." And indeed it does.

The Iranian Facebook plot

Meir Weinstein, leader of the Canadian branch of the extremist Jewish Defence League, isn't happy.

A recent post of mine revealed a Facebook friendship between our new junior foreign minister, Peter Kent, and Meir Weinstein, the leader of the Canadian branch of the extremist Jewish Defence League. Weinstein's Facebook site indicated that he was a member of a Facebook group charmingly called מוות לערבים--Death to Arabs (screenshot here). The story was picked up by Rabble and then, without attribution, by NOW Magazine (scroll down).

Almost immediately, Kent de-friended Weinstein. And now Weinstein is trying to de-friend Death to Arabs.

It's quite a tale, so listen up, but keep your tinfoil handy. And hold your nose: we're going to visit the public forum section of the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, another extremist organization upon whose executive board Peter Kent sits--or sat. (We can't say for sure whether Kent stepped down after his recent election, because CCD has disabled its "who we are" page.)

Weinstein has just caught wind of all this. Here's what he's posted over at CCD:

I am in Israel right now. I arrived on Friday. I just learned about the different write up concerning Peter Kent. Let me state the facts. I live in his riding and I voted for him. It seems Haters of Jews do not think I have the right to vote or have access to my MP. I do have that right.

Collecting himself, he posted a second message:

I just sent an complaint to the editor of Rabble and I will speak to my lawyers. It has just come to my attention that facebook allows heads of groups on facebook to change the name of their group at will with out your knowledge. This was done in my case with a specific intention. And that intention is to plant 'evidence' that I somehow just hate Arabs. This is a LIE most likely fabricated by those that serve the interest of Radical Iran as proxie [sic] agents. I have never ever uttered a racist comment about anyone. I will find the source of this fabrication.

Now, I am frankly impressed that Iran has the capacity to micromanage on a global scale to the point that its "proxie agents" have been assigned to smear a fairly obscure Canadian JDL leader by suggesting that he is anti-Arab--the nerve!--but I am even more impressed by its abilities to manipulate Facebook to its ends.

What Weinstein is suggesting happened is this:

First, some Iranian agents cleverly set a trap for him, by creating a fake Facebook group, called Never Again! or something similar, and sending him an invitation to join. The fly ventured into the spider's parlour, and signed up.

Snap! The trap was sprung. The "proxie agents" immediately re-named the group "Death to Arabs," in Hebrew, to make Weinstein look bad. And Weinstein's own Facebook page was altered as well, somehow without his noticing.

Then a Jewish peace activist, who has made no secret of his dislike for Weinstein and the JDL, was alerted, no doubt by the "proxie agents." He got in touch with me--or maybe it was those "proxie agents" all along--and I was duped into putting up a post (or possibly I'm a "proxie agent" too). The rest is history. With possible litigation to follow.

Now there are, as it happens, several Facebook groups with the Death to Arabs theme. Perhaps they're all snares set by the Iranians; perhaps they all had different, innocuous names to begin with. The one at the top of the list, by the way, uses the JDL logo. It's a closed group--no public access. (It may not be the one that showed up on Weinstein's page, though, because its name is in English, not Hebrew. Who knows?*)

So how about that Facebook group name-change trick, which alters the name on your own Facebook page too, without you even being aware of it! Just think of the possibilities. "Kathy Shaidle Fan Club" becomes, overnight, a fetish group called "Nazis in Naugahyde." "Stephen Harper Is My Leader" is transmogrified into "Hitler Was Way Cool." Not that I would for a moment suggest such Internet abuse, even in fun.

The endless possibilities for net-japery suggested here, however, may be a mere pipedream. A commenter named David posts at CCD:

How exactly do you change the name of a facebook group Meir? I've looked and there's no function that allows you to do that. You actually cannot change the name of a facebook group. I know because I tried to do it a few months ago for a group whose real world name had changed. I even messaged Facebook administration and you know what they said back in December?

"Facebook no longer accepts requests for group name changes. The name changes were confusing to people and sometimes caused individuals to be in groups that they would have never signed up for. If you would like to have a different name for your group, you can create a new group from the Groups page. Before you do this, please be sure to delete the original group so we don't have duplicates. To do that, remove all members of the group and then remove yourself. Let me know if you have any further questions.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Amit
User Operations
Facebook"

Sorry Meir, but you'll have to come up with a better lie.

Darn. All I have to look forward to now is Weinstein's Statement of Claim.

*UPDATE: I am now informed that this is the Facebook group in question, which Weinstein joined on January 18.

CFRA's Lowell Green guilty of bigotry

...and in other news, the Pope was recently discovered to be of the Catholic persuasion, and bears have been found to relieve themselves in forested areas.

The Canadian Broadcasting Standards Council has ruled that a series of remarks made by Green about Muslims early last December, and his treatment of callers who disagreed with him, constituted "a sweeping, abusive and unduly discriminatory criticism of Islam. He conceded none of the diversity that exists in Islam or among its adherents...and brooked no contradictory observations of persons who were admittedly Muslim, informed about the religion, or of a different standpoint."

More recently Green was at it again, threatening and encouraging violence against striking OC Transpo workers.

Q. How long will CFRA continue to keep this bigot on the air?
A. As long as it's profitable. Hate sells--particularly in hard times.

University gadfly zapped

I'd love to audit a course given by University of Ottawa physics professor Denis Rancourt, who's in a spot of bother at the moment. He's wildly popular among his students because of his teaching style. He likes his students to think for themselves, explore and shatter boundaries, ask questions and look for answers, no matter how unorthodox. He has been focusing recently on what these days are called Science Studies--an interdicipinary critique of science, its uses, its value-laden underpinnings, its relation to power and so on.

The last course he delivered, before being shut down and ultimately led away from the campus in handcuffs by the Ottawa police, was called Science in Society. This prompted a memory: my late father was once involved in a small group in Ottawa with that very name, although there the resemblance ends. Dad wanted to promote a deeper understanding of science by the lay public, not to deconstruct it. (I am still kicking myself, thirty years or so after the fact, for missing his lecture on Arthur Koestler.)

Rancourt might have been loved by many, even most, of his students, but he did not endear himself to his colleagues, nor to the university administration. With student input, he changed curriculum material without university approval (calling his approach "academic squatting"). In 2007, one-third of his colleagues signed a complaint against him, after he sent around some emails criticizing their teaching methods. He allowed two 10-year-olds to register in his Science in Society course, and he supported a human rights complaint against the university for ageism when the kids got the boot.

The final straw seems to have been when he announced, on the first day of a fourth-year physics course, that all of his students would get an A+. Last December he was suspended, locked out of his lab, banned from campus, and told that the university is seeking his dismissal. A few days ago he ventured onto the campus to run a meeting of an alternative film society that he hosts, and was arrested and charged with trespassing.

That, of course, was needlessly, stupidly heavy-handed. The Canadian Association of University Teachers is on the case, seeing the bid to fire Professor Rancourt as an issue of academic freedom. At present he's meeting unofficially with his students in off-campus coffee shops.

Rancourt sums up his critique of the academic establishment thus: "Grades poison the educational environment. We're training students to be obedient, and to try to read our minds, rather than being a catalyst for learning."

He's right. But I'm with the university on this one.

Institutions are no place for frolicking, and I mean that not in a stern schoolmasterish way, but rather as a fairly pedestrian observation about how institutions work. So why do mavericks join them, then? For a number of reasons, assuming that they are not simply selling out: to change the institution from within, or to engage in a little jiu-jitsu, employing the gravity of that institution to his or her own advantage. I don't mean to imply self-indulgence or selfishness by the latter, necessarily: such a person might wish to advance aims that are arguably within an institution's potential if not actual mandate, adroitly using an institutional position to assist in that endeavour. There is nothing inherently wrong in that.

But this is a strategic question, and I write as a dissident who once made a conscious decision to become a union leader in the very organization that I continually confronted and challenged as a rank-and-filer. I wanted change, and thought I could help from inside. And, over time, I watched my organization move in a progressive direction, and assisted in establishing forward-looking policies and structures within it.

If I'd behaved like Denis Rancourt, though, I'd have been dead in the water from day one. I would have had no allies, no access to institutional resources, and no credibility except with a few activists. If you choose to work within the system, you need all of the above, and more. You get nowhere joining an institution but remaining resolutely, antagonistically anti-institution, and trying to go it alone.

Universities should, ideally, be just the sorts of places that Rancourt wants--engaging, unorthodox, stimulating. But, because they issue credentials, universities must also ensure that students have actually learned something. Curriculum is decided, not on the basis of student input (although that input can be well worth having), but on what the discipline requires and what people in the outside world expect. I want my bridges designed and constructed by qualified civil engineers and tradespersons, not by critics of the regimentation that such qualification inevitably entails, whose expertise is in sociology.

Yet we need just such critics, unmannerly or annoying as they might be. They're part of the whole picture, in which institutions are another part. In fact, being unmannerly or annoying is an essential part of the package. They're gadflies on the lazy horse, an image that comes to us courtesy of Socrates, who was mild-mannered enough but insisted upon asking annoying questions.

Disciplines require the undisciplined, or they would never change. Institutions need to be challenged. People like Rancourt are invaluable assets to the wider community, walking question-marks, who, through a mixture of charisma and skill, are able to persuade others to engage actively in their society. They make us look at received wisdom, and problematize the "natural order." They can make us better citizens if we learn their lessons well.

But unfortunately that's not all there is to it. They also need to be strategic enough not to frustrate their own ends. Rancourt clearly is not. I'm sure that he considers strategy a compromise: I'm familiar enough with anarchists who have no patience with patience. But his personal project was doomed for the lack of it.

Inside an institution, one has limited options: profound irritants will inevitably be expelled by the host. Even the court jesters of old, who spoke truth to power because power, on occasion, likes to listen, lived precariously. People like Rancourt who are unwilling to bend are far more effective from the outside, where he now finds himself. I, for one, hope he does well, and I'll be looking for him in Ottawa cafés or at public lectures, delivering well-placed stings to the academic nag.

UPDATE: (February 10) Stanley Fish and blogger Blind Man With A Pistol weigh in.

Shameless in the Great White North

Blogging Tory Steve Janke's penchant for innuendo sank to another low this past Monday, as he went lumbering after a Liberal friend of mine. I don't have too many of those, so his antics struck a personal chord.

Poring over Elections Canada records, he came upon three returned donations to the Liberal Party of Canada. Two of these were from donors who had contributed over the legal limit. One was for the vast sum of $100, returned to my friend by the LPC on October 31.

According to Steve, she was one of those who had her car vandalized during the last campaign. And--oh, scary!--on that very day she donated $100 to the Liberal Party! What could this mean? And then they sent the money back! And this former federal public employee (see, it all fits) had never donated to the Liberals before! Fishy, very fishy indeed.

But Steve gets a lot of facts wrong, as it turns out. There's a response over there by the person in question, setting the record straight.

• Her car had never been vandalized;
  
• She has been contributing to the Liberal Party since 2005;
• She had sent the cheque, in error, to the National LPC rather than to her riding association: it was returned and re-routed.
  

But hey! Why let the facts get in the way of a wet, sloppy smear? So far, Janke has not had the grace to apologize. But Tories don't do that--they think it's a sign of weakness.

Peter Kent's Facebook friend

As noted in an earlier post, our new junior foreign minister Peter Kent was in the news again recently, shrilly demanding that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez do something, pronto, about a vicious attack on a Caracas synagogue.

Just who is Peter Kent, again? I have noted before that he's got some rather questionable associations. And now a Jewish peace activist informs me b/c that Kent has been palling around with at least one other known extremist. He's got the screenshots to prove it, too.

Meet Meir Weinstein, aka Meir Halevi, the Canadian Director of the Jewish Defense League. The JDL was founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane.

Weinstein and our junior foreign minister are Facebook friends.

Weinstein is also a member of a Facebook group called מוות לערבים (Death To Arabs).

Lovely.

My source writes:

The JDL merited mention in the FBI's Terrorism 2000/2001 report after leader Irv Rubin and his aide, Earl Krugel "were arrested as they were in the final stages of planning attacks against the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, California, and the local office of U.S. Congressman Darrell Issa." They were both convicted and died in prison - Rubin committed suicide; Krugel was murdered.

The Global Terrorism Database lists 51 incidents associated with the JDL (go to http://209.232.239.37/gtd1/Default.aspx and enter "Jewish Defense League" - with an s in defense- in the search engine). See also the JDL's profile in the National Consortium for the Study of Terror and Responses to Terrorism's database (Weinstein/Halevi was an associate of Irv Rubin's - they were arrested together inspecting the post-arson damage to Ernst Zundel's bunker in Toronto a decade or so ago). Weinstein/Halevi was also a spokesperson for the banned Kach movement (which is on Canada's list of terrorist organizations) and defended the organization in the North American press following the Baruch Goldstein massacre.

ADL's backgrounder on the JDL is here.

Politics make strange bedfellows, so the old saw runs. In this case, though, it seems that bedfellows are making increasingly strange politics.

And, in the editorial rooms of the corporate media, you can still hear a pin drop.

UPDATE: (February 6) Kent appears to have de-friended Weinstein.

Don't bogart that bong

At home, Obama is becoming laughable and laying the groundwork for the greatest conservative populist reaction since the Reagan Revolution.

Whew!

[H/t]

Smoke, mirrors, charades, illusions...

...what passes for politics on Parliament Hill.

The spin: The Liberals will "hold the government accountable" by making it deliver regular reports to Parliament. Newfoundland and Labrador MPs are graciously permitted a one-time dispensation to vote against the budget. It's a stimulus budget: doesn't go far enough...but we reluctantly support it...the Canadian people don't want another election.... Mesmerizing stuff.

The reality: the Liberals have teamed up with the Conservatives to pass an all-things-to-everyone budget that hurts Newfoundland and Labrador, threatens to gut pay equity, keeps most unemployed people off EI, starves research and development, ensures our solid last-place standing among industrialized nations with respect to childcare, and substantially erodes the revenue base with ginormous tax cuts. The price of this monstrous cave is regular reports to Parliament, which, with the addition of five dollars or so, might allow Count Michael to purchase a latte.

Ignatieff "allowed" Newfoundland and Labrador MPs to vote against the budget (i.e., for their constituents), which is somewhat like allowing Cape Spear to be windy. Would he have made this emptiest of public gestures, though, had their votes actually mattered?

The new Liberal leader is even being coached by Tom Flanagan. Good grief. With a little training, it seems, Iggy will prove to be every bit as good a Conservative backbencher as his predecessor.

Butt out, Sarko!

Ugh. Once more Sarkozy has stuck his oar where he has no business.

Worse, by doing so he has attracted a disturbing expression of man-love from Jonathan Kay - no less.

While I am neither Québecoise nor souverainiste, I was greatly irritated by Sarkozy's ignorant remarks then infuriated by the spin provided by some of the Rest of Canada media, the most inane being Kay's.

The president of France launched into his spiel of ill-advised notions after a ceremony which bestowed upon Quebec Premier Jean Charest a commander of the Legion of Honour medal.

Today J.K. Rowling was awarded a chevalier de la Légion; the president of France wisely refrained from providing her with new story lines to extend Harry Potter's adventures. After all, why take the risk that Carla might find a véritable horny toad in her bedsheets tomorrow morning?

¡Hola, Canada!

Picture this. A Jewish cemetery in Ottawa is vandalized. And a synagogue in Montreal. And another in Richmond. And another in Moncton. And now one in Edmonton.

The President of, say, Chile, issues a condemnation, and demands that the Canadian government do something immediately to stop this rash of attacks. And Israel denounces Canada, claiming that such incidents could only happen with "the approval of authorities at the highest level of the state."

It's an interesting little thought-experiment. Our first reaction might be to wonder why far-off Chile is even involving itself in these domestic incidents. Our second might to be speculate about possible shortages of tinfoil in Israel.

But somehow the same bizarre scenario makes perfect sense in reverse, as we continue to be conditioned by media commentators and right-wing politicians.

A synagogue is vandalized in Caracas. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez denounces the act in no uncertain terms, while mischievously suggesting that his opposition might be to blame. He has recently sent the Israeli Ambassador packing because of Israel's recent assault on Gaza. Now Israel says that the Venezuelan state is behind the attack on the synagogue.

Those inclined to disapprove of Chávez put their usual two and two together: opposition to Israeli policies = anti-Semitism. Therefore the vandals (who clearly are anti-Semitic) acted with Chávez' personal approval. Something like that.

Our new junior foreign minister Peter "all Israel, all the time" Kent swings into action. (Recall his involvement with the shady Canadian Coalition for Democracies.) An occurrence of vandalism in another country, which that country is quite well equipped to handle, warrants an obviously politically-motivated outburst on the international stage from a Canadian minister.

I do hope that President Chávez, known for his sense of humour, takes a moment from celebrating his tenth year in power to hold our Prime Minister publicly accountable for the rash of anti-Semitic acts that have been taking place across Canada under his watch. Does anti-Semitism pervade the highest levels of our state? Do Peter Kent and Stephen Harper protest maybe a tad too much?

As Kent so succinctly puts it, "The scourge of hate-filled bigotry must be confronted and rejected whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head." Best start in our own backyard, perhaps?

UPDATE: (February 9) Commenter greenmamba notes that arrests have been made. Eleven suspects have been rounded up--including seven police officers, and a person reportedly working security at the synagogue. Stay tuned.

The not-so-hidden agenda of the anthemites

Never mind dissing Jehovah's Witnesses, peaceful and law-abiding citizens of our country, in the crudest possible manner--let's make our national anthem compulsory.

Now, that's political correctness. But supporters call it "patriotism," or use some other mass-friendly label to disguise the frankly totalitarian objectives of the professional flag-wavers and anthem-singers. Let's just force people to see things our way, and do as we do.

And the Speech Warriors™, who were up in arms about a school principal who saw things differently, have vacated the field. What a surprise.

Some brave Japanese teachers resisted this kind of thing not too long ago. Will Canadian teachers and principals have the courage to do the same? And will they be alone?

Scales of justice

A hat-tip here to Terry Glavin...and the weather in Hell is getting a mite chilly about now. I'm not overly fond of his brand of politicking, as some of my readers know, but he put up an excellent post yesterday on America's two-tiered justice system. Read it and weep.

A hungry and homeless Black man in Shreveport, Louisiana, walks into a bank, announces to a teller that it's a stickup (and pretends to be armed). She puts three stacks of bills in front of him. He peels off one $100 bill, to pay for his continuing stay at a detox centre. A short time later, his conscience gets the better of him, and he turns himself in to police.

His sentence? 15 years.

More on the wider issue from Glenn Greenwald. One fact plucked at random from his piece: the USA, with 5% of the world's population, houses 25% of the world's prisoners in its jails.

Too bad poor Roy Brown didn't set his sights a little higher. Skin colour aside (we are talking Louisiana here, folks) he might have been Bernie Madoff, sitting warm and happy in his mansion after defrauding clients of $50 billion or so.

In America, size matters.

The thread of global warming

I aim to please.

Sunday bits and pieces

Work has caught up with me today, so just a few over-the-top-and-off-the-wall items, if I may:

Tinfoil shortage expected. Now that the Privacy Commissioner has exonerated the Canadian Human Rights Commission and its staff from any wrongdoing in the matter of alleged misuse of WiFi communications, some of the Speech Warriors™ have begun to flail, because that's really all that's left to them at this point. Clearly the Privacy Commissioner is now part of the plot against free speech. But only stunned silence so far from Warrior Chief Ezra Levant, who seems more interested in Chinese food at the moment. Go figure.

Israel mans up. No more pussyfooting around--"disproportionate" is no longer an accusation, but a boast. Expect more of this, and no steenkin' apologies, either.

No littering. And that means you. [H/t]

Understatement of 2009. Confident prediction: this one will not be beat. No, wait...

Now, duty calls.