SteynOnline

Deborah Gyapong has two good posts today, as she does most days. The first examines certain aspects of Joe Brean's front-page story in The National Post; the second confesses to "some discomfort" about "the whole cast of characters from the Ernst Zundel case suddenly converging on Ottawa this Tuesday".

I agree with that. Unlike Richard Warman and Dean Steacy, I don't spend my time hanging out on white-supremacist websites, and I get a little queasy at some of the e-mail correspondence I wake up to in the morning. Nonetheless, bad laws usually start out being applied to unsympathetic characters on the fringes of society, and then work their way inwards. That's why it's best to stop them at the outset. As Deborah says:

Yet Marc Lemire deserves a fair hearing. He deserves to be considered innocent until proven guilty. He deserves a legal system that does not engage in planting evidence or entrapment. He deserves a legal system where the rules are clear and not made up as we go along. 

She's right. The question for the defenders of this grotesque system is this: If Marc Lemire is such an obviously vile hateful man in breach of Canadian laws and "values", why is it necessary to set him up? And, if you let Warman and Steacy do it to Lemire, who else do you let 'em do it to? The Canadian Jewish Congress takes the position that the Levant and Steyn prosecutions are an overreach and not merited, but is otherwise cool with all the previous Section 13 convictions.

Terrific. I can imagine how that's playing on the wilder shores of the Internet: "Gee, what a surprise. The CJC is happy to have Section 13 applied to Aryan Nation of Moose Jaw and the Timmins Stormtroopers but thinks that Jewboy Levant and Jewboy Stein (Why don't you come clean about the spelling, eh?) should be the only ones given a 'Get Out Of Jail Free' card."

And they wonder why folks think there's an International Jewish Conspiracy?

Sorry, not good enough. Section 13 is poorly drafted and corruptly administered. What is the real threat to Canada? A shmuck who calls himself a "supremacist" but lives in a basement flat and can't afford a lawyer? Or the supple expansive soft totalitarianism of unaccountable stage agencies above the law who believe they're entitled to do anything in pursuit of phantom enemies?

I don't find that a difficult question to answer. And nor should the CJC.

Oh, and if the Canadian, British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario "human rights" apparatchiks don't like the unprecedented scrutiny they're getting, they should have figured that out before they accepted these cases. Ruth Selwyn, "former executive director, Canadian Human Rights Foundation", whines in the Montreal Gazette:

It is a pity that space is given to Mark Steyn's self-serving campaign to ridicule human rights. Steyn's representation of marginal cases as the be all and end all of the work of human-rights commissions shows a lack of understanding of the system or, worse, a deliberate attempt to distort it.

Oh that we could move on and focus on the real issues such as the discrimination that people do face every day in Canada.

Well, if you're so eager to "move on", why don't you take that up with Dean Steacy and the rest of your buddies? I'd love to move on, too. But I can't - because your pals started this. They came after me, not the other way round. For some reason, they thought Maclean's, Ezra and I would just roll over and take it the way all the losers in basements did. That assumption is itself very revealing about these bullies' belief in their own ominipotence.

Oh, and by the way, no case is "marginal" if it's you in the middle of it. If you're a restaurant owner looking at a six-figure legal bill because the Ontario Human Rights Commission decides to invent the human right to smoke pot on someone else's property, that's not "marginal": the fate of your business and your home and your family hinge on the outcome. Like so many human rights poseurs, Ruth Selwyn seems to have forgotten that the individual is the ultimate minority group.

Still, since she seems pretty plugged in to the "human rights" cocktail circuit, Ms Selwyn might as well pass this on to Steacy and the gang: "Moving on" is in their power, not mine. I want a repeal of Section 13, plus a Royal Commission, and I'm in this all the way to the Supreme Court. And, if that cuts into their ability to "focus on the real issues", they should have thought of that before they picked this fight.

I regret to say that, until I had the misfortune to catch the attention of the "human rights" racketeers myself, I was unfamiliar with the sterling work of Marc Lemire's lawyer, Barbara Kulaszka. But she's awful good. I like the way, apropos the CHRC crowd's zeal for posting on hate websites, she refers to them as "members of Stormfront". Which, of course, they are. Ms Kulaszka identifies Dean Steacy as a "member of Stormfront", and Richard Warman as a "member of Stormfront", and Sgt Stephen Camp as a "member of Stormfront". Perhaps somewhere there's a message thread wherein Richard Warman attempts to entrap Sgt Stephen Camp while he's simultaneously attempting to entrap Dean Steacy. It might be easier to buy these kinky "hate message" crusaders a group membership to some online dating service for the more specialized fetishes.

But, given the minimal traffic at Stormfront, one has to wonder how many of their neo-Nazi white-supremacist members are servants of the Crown's "human rights" apparatus idling away the office hours on a rainy afternoon. Still, unlike "Canadian human rights crusader Richard Warman", "Stormfront member Richard Warman" at least has the merits of being indisputable.

[PS Yes, yes, I know Ms Kulaszka has unsavoury associations - Ernst Zundel et al. But I'm not looking for a date, I'm admiring her pushback against an out-of-control state agency. Almost all previous federal Section 13 defendants were too poor to afford legal counsel. Think about that, by the way. In most civilized legal systems, an accused person unable to hire a lawyer is at least entitled to a public defender. In Canada's "human rights" system, the Crown pays for the prosecution and the defendant has to fend for himself. Which means that most federal Section 13 defendants, being a bunch of losers, were convicted without any proper legal representation. Shame on Canada.

Then Marc Lemire caught their fancy, and, unlike his predecessors, he got a lawyer and an effective one, and they pushed back. If not for their doggedness, we wouldn't know that the CHRC's all but sole plaintiff Richard Warman is a member of Stormfront, and CHRC lead investigator Dean Steacy is a member of Stormfront, and Sgt Stephen Camp is a member of Stormfront. Most of the revelations about the systemic corruption and abuse of process at the CHRC have arisen since the Lemire defence went to work: That's effective lawyering.

Oh, and by the way, justice is supposed to be, like Dean Steacy, blind. If you run a red light and you hit a pedestrian, it makes no difference in law whether the pedestrian's Marc Lemire or Nelson Mandela. Or at least it shouldn't. It's foolish to assume the abuses of the CHRC will always be confined to folks you dislike. "First, they came for the neo-Nazi losers in basements and I did nothing. Then they came for the fundamentalist Christians and homophobes and I did nothing. Then they came for the blowhards like Levant and Steyn and I did nothing..." You really think everything you say about everything you care about can be kept sufficiently bland and innocuous that you'll never attract their attention?]  

I get a lot of letters along these lines:

What I don't understand is why you are even bothering to acknowledge Canada's human rights commission. You live in New Hampshire, right? So why don't you just ignore them? No court in America is going to extradite you over this stupid Islamic Congress case.

Well, maybe - although that Saudi sheik has now been given the go-ahead to enforce his English legal judgment against Rachel Ehrenfeld in a US court. But you're right in a broader sense: I live in the country, I have an inexpensive lifestyle, I could afford to write off my Canadian business interests - and my British ones, or European ones, or Australian ones, or wherever the next of these legal assaults arises. But I don't think it's in America's interest for the lights to go out on free speech in Canada or Britain, Europe, Australia and the rest of the western world. So I'm not prepared to give up on free expression in one of the oldest settled democracies on the planet, simply because defending it is a pain in the neck and consumes way too much time and money.

But there's another reason. In their fraudulent dossier on Maclean's "Islamophobia", the Sock Puppet Four - now the Sock Puppet Three (if, indeed, they're still in showbusiness at all) - made innumerable misrepresentations subsequently recycled throughout the rest of the Canadian media, the most notorious of which was that I had said Muslims were "breeding like mosquitoes". As I was obliged to point out time and again, those are not my words, but those of a prominent European Muslim, Mullah Krekar, in an interview with a Norwegian newspaper.

The man who interviewed Mullah Krekar was a journalist called Carsten Thomassen. On January 14th, he was in Kabul covering the Norwegian Foreign Minister's tour of Afghanistan. That day, he was in the lobby of the Serena Hotel waiting to meet with the minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, when two members of the Taliban killed the exterior guards, forced their way inside and opened fire. Carsten Thomassen died of his injuries at a Nato field hospital. The Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg called the terrorist murders an attack not only on Norway but on freedom of speech.

I didn't know Carsten Thomassen, except as a skilled reporter who extracted devastating quotes from Mullah Krekar and others. But we owe it to his memory to insist on the truth about that mosquito line, not just because his murder reminds us of the difference between real "hate" and the pseudo-victims of the Canadian "human rights" circus, but because to allow Elmo and the Sock Puppet Three to bully the media into going along with their misrepresentations is to collude in a lie. And no society that does that is truly free.

Breaking News! The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has rescinded its "secret trial" order and proceedings will now be open to the media and the public. I'll be live in Ottawa on Tuesday for gavel-to-gavel* action. More here and here.

(*Okay, I don't think there are any actual gavels, but you get the cut of my jib.)