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The Law Is Cool nellies are all very excited because they think they've caught me out being inconsistent. Here's their "evidence":
Yo Steyn! The Canadian Right thinks you’re a hoity-toity! You stood on the side-lines when they came for Marc Lemire, and twiddled your thumbs when they went after Paul Fromm. Now that the CHRC is looking in your direction, you want this Brotherhood of Free Speech warriors to ride to your rescue! Such presumption!
But you know what? Here’s where you get a chance to redeem yourself. The CHRC is going after one of the little guys again, someone who hasn’t got the full weight of Macleans magazine’s vast legal team to fall back on. Now its your turn to wield that flaming sword of flowery rhetoric of yours and play the role of hero, rather than whining like an oppressed minority!
Arthur Topham runs The Radical Press, a Victoria B.C. website to go along with The Radical, a paper-based, monthly alternative tabloid that he produces himself. Arthur’s chief obsession is those darn Zionists. He has written any number of posts about them, with titles like:
“The Shell Game” Just Another Zionist Scam to Stop 9/11 Investigation of Israel
ARE THE GLOBALISTS [Zionists] OUT TO GET RON PAUL?
Curt Maynard’s blog The Politically Correct Apostate shut down hours after posting anti-Zionist article
Unfortunately for Mr. Topham, Harry Abrams and the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada got wind of his site (you’re basically fucked when that happens), and launched a CHRC complaint against it...
So here’s the deal, Mark: are you a Free Speech man, or a Free Speech girly-man? If the former, it behooves you to unleash your yellow crayon of fury and defend Mr. Topham from B’nai Brith Canada and their ilk.
What's the point here? That a Zionist neocon Bush shill like me is somehow silent when an anti-Zionist anti-neocon anti-Bush nut in BC gets picked on by the thought police? If that's the issue, let me put it this way:
Do I like anti-Semites and white supremacists?
No.
Do I like Bnai Brith or anybody else unleashing the Canadian thought police on anti-Semites and white supremacists?
No.
So what's the bigger danger to Canada? A white supremacist who sits in his basement posting to a website six people read? Or systemically biased government bodies increasingly comfortable with regulating public (and semi-private) discourse in Canada? No contest, it's the latter. Who are the real "supremacists" here? The loser boy ranting about Zionists? Or a guy like Richard Warman using the CHRC as his own private inquisition?
I've been consistent on this issue my entire adult life:
The aim of a large swathe of the left is not to win the debate but to get it cancelled before it starts. You can do that in any number of ways -- busting up campus appearances by conservatives, "hate crimes" laws, Canada's ghastly human-rights commissions...
One reason I've always opposed stupid vain moral-posturing laws criminalizing Holocaust denial is because it should have been clear to the foolish Jewish groups that embraced them where they would lead. As I wrote in The Western Standard on March 27th last year:
The free world is shuffling into a psychological bondage whose chains are mostly of our own making. The Saskatoon StarPhoenix, you'll recall, published an advertisement directing readers to Romans 1:26, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, and I Corinthians 6:9, and was fined $4,500, as was the advertiser, for "exposing homosexuals to hatred or ridicule." The British "historian" David Irving sits in an Austrian jail, having been convicted of Holocaust denial. It's not unreasonable for Muslims to conclude that, if gays and Jews are to be protected groups who can't be offended, why shouldn't they be also?
They have a point. How many roads of inquiry are we prepared to block off in order to be "sensitive"? And, once we've done so, will there be anything left to talk about other than showbiz gossip? Holocaust denial should be ridiculous and contemptible but not illegal.
If the objection is that it's a uniquely terrible stain on humanity, that's all the more reason to talk about it openly. How did we end up in a world where David Irving sits in a cell for querying the numbers of the last Holocaust while men march through London streets promising a new Holocaust and are given a bodyguard of police officers to help them do so? The more we hedge ourselves in with "hate speech" regulations, the less we're able to hold any genuinely inquiring discussion on the issues we face. And once that's the case, as the angry young men in the streets have figured out, you might as well just burn and kill to get your way. Canada and Europe need more free speech and less free incitement to murder. Instead, on the vital question of the age, we're retreating into darkness--one intimidated cartoonist, one browbeaten editor, one beleaguered publisher, one terrified Danish schoolgirl at a time.
I oppose the HRCs whether they're regulating my Islamophobia or Mr Topham's neoconphobia or Mohamad Elmasry's Judeophobia. Ideas thrive or perish in the market in the light of day. The HRCs shouldn't be in this game at all. This weekend a friend who's also been called up before one of these "human rights" star chambers mused in an e-mail about the difference between his lawyer's inclination - that he should be reasonable in order to "get off the hook" - and his own feeling that the hook itself needs to be done away with. Speaking for myself, I don't want to get off the hook. I want to take the hook and stick it up the collective butt of these thought police. Metaphorically speaking, I hasten to add.
As I say in Maclean's this week, freedom of speech only for inoffensive speech is no freedom at all. A nation free only to prance along to Barney the Dinosaur pabulum is living under a soft beguiling totalitarianism, even if it doesn't yet know it. Take Dean Steacy, the Canadian HRC's lead "anti-hate" investigator, and his delusion that "freedom of speech" is an "American concept". Golly, we'd all hate it if the ghastly Yanks had invented it. But isn't Canada a signatory to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Including Article 19?
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.
No Americans need be involved, folks. Why, the UN Declaration of Human Rights is so Canadian, it's on the back of Canada's $50 bill - and, if the HRC doesn't believe me, it can check the next time its doling out another cash settlement to Richard Warman. Mr Steacy and the HRCs are, in fact, abusers of the "human rights" laid out in the UN Declaration, so the only reason for me to string along with their game is to play my part in ending their regime.
As for the Law Is Cool nellies, it's a sad comment on Canada that Osgoode Hall students can be so decadent and self-absorbed as to believe they're "victims" of anything.
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