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THE TYRANNY OF NICE
Out now! Kathy Shaidle and Pete Vere's must-read book on the Steyn case, the Canadian state's war on free speech, and what it means for America, too. This trenchant exposé comes with a rollicking introduction by Mark on his year in Canada's "human rights" hell. Order your personally autographed copy today - or double your fun with Steyn, Hewitt and The War Against The West in our War & Tyranny bumper bundle!
Exclusively from
the Steyn Store
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Steynposts
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Sunday, 17 May 2009 |
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[UPDATE: Scaramouche has a very good precis of the CJC's tortuous journey:
Upset over the final solution and their embrace of “sha shtil,” Canadian Jews in the ‘60s whipped themselves up into a frenzy over a bogus “threat” and then insisted the government step in to defend them from the phantom menace they themselves had concoted (“reasoning” that Hitler started out small, too, and it’s a well-known fact that “hate speech” invariably leads to genocide.)
And that, my friends, is how we got from there to here, and why official Jewry clings e’er tightly to its fraying security blankie—state censorship—even as mobs of angry Jew-haters are given free reign to rage in downtown Toronto, and police tell counter-protesters to flee for their lives because there’s no way to protect them.]
If you've been following the back-and-forth between Ezra Levant and the Canadian Jewish Congress re the latter's role in organizing and funding the "Canadian Nazi Party", you may be wondering about something. Not why liberal Jews are bankrolling dress-up Nazis - that's just par for the course in the wacky world of Canadian "human rights", where the likes of Richard Warman and Dean Steacy like nothing better than whiling away a quiet afternoon by climbing into the cyber-jackboots and virtual brownshirts and posting on "right-wing" "neo-Nazi" sites. The very book that the CJC's spokespersons cite to defend their role accurately conveys the scale of the Nazi threat to Canada:
On page 133 he tells the hilarious story of how John Beattie, the unemployed, 24-year-old Nazi 'leader,' was acquitted of the charge of unlawful assembly because he was the only person at his own rally.
Good to know that even in Canada it's not unlawful to assemble all by yourself.
No, what you may be wondering is not why the CJC was the principal backer of an otherwise all but fictional "Canadian Nazi Party", but why they're so frantically defensive about their long forgotten acts of 40 years ago. Ezra hardly mentions it and then only en passant, yet the CJC send out its president and other eminences in full attack mode. Ezra suggests that they needed to over-inflate the "Canadian Nazi" threat in order to justify the erection of a "human rights" regime at odds with Canada's legal inheritance. In the wake of the CJC's "Nazi scare", Mark McGuigan, a protean liberal censor of the day, wrote:
Group defamation was unknown to the traditional common law because that law had no awareness of groups themselves. But in the twentieth century we have come to recognize that a man's personality is formed by his primary group membership...
Really? Good thing Professor McGuigan became a Liberal MP. If a British National Party candidate said that sort of thing, he'd get a much worse press. As it happens, one of the things I like about Common Law is its lack of interest in "group rights", especially "group defamation". That's why I brought it up in my testimony at Queen's Park a few weeks ago: The ultimate minority group is the individual, and English Common Law affords him more protections than most other systems. But, of course, once you accept the principle of "group rights", you need someone to speak for the group. The Canadian Jewish Congress claim to speak for Jews. But they don't speak for Ezra Levant. The Canadian Islamic Congress claim to speak for Muslims. But they don't speak for Tarek Fatah. The concept of "group rights" is vital to these groups' status and the deference it brings.
But the CJC's defense of its actions in the Sixties goes beyond that and speaks to a kind of peculiar psychological displacement. The more the new judenhass metastasizes across the western world through a malign Islamo-leftist alliance, the more feverishly the CJC insists that the real enemies are "Nazis": No, no, you silly Jews, pay no attention to those government-funded imams or corduroyed college professors, Ontario union leaders or Guardian columnists. We need to redouble the fight against rightwing aryans in uniform before they sweep the prairies! As Kathy Shaidle says, there are more Nazis in the average "Hogan's Heroes" episode than the whole of Canada. If you're interested in pursuing phantoms in an alternative universe, cardboard heroes like Warman and Bernie Farber are your go-to guys. If you want to do anything about the rampant anti-Semitism in the real actual western world today, you need to look elsewhere.
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Steynposts
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Friday, 15 May 2009 |
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A newborn lamb has wandered into this barren pasture.
Salman wisely observes that "Muslim activists need to pick their battles". Unfortunately, he then says:
So, I got curious about this "blue book" that Steyn mentioned.
This is what I have found so far.
There is no Blue Book it's The Little Green Book.
Oh, dear. Not again. I'm afraid there is a Blue Book, and, for the slow of comprehension and for the other practitioners of three-second Google scholarship, you can see pictures of it here. And even Salman's cited source - Professor John Miller, Canada's most comprehensively shagged sheep - has conceded the point.
There is a rather pitiful psychosis in the Internet Age. It is not enough for the likes of Professor Miller or M J Murphy to disagree with someone, to have a difference of opinion, to accept that persons can draw different conclusions about a particular situation. No, it has to be more than that: Steyn has made up a quote! Fallen for a hoax! Invented an entirely fictional book by the Ayatollah Khomeini!
Eventually, they briefly understand that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your perfunctory unilingual Google search, and issue grudging apologies accepting the facts but huffily protesting about Steyn's general disposition and broad interpretation. They don't realise that's the post they should have written in the first place.
Salman makes some interesting points before he falls for the Muphy-Miller hoax. If he sends me a street address, I'll be happy to mail him a complimentary copy of Lights Out, in which among many other delights he will find my analysis of Dr Miller's "scholarship" preserved within hard covers.
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Wednesday, 13 May 2009 |
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Ezra Levant and I had a grand time in Ottawa last week. It was a joint appearance to promote his book Shakedown, and Maclean's has posted some photographs of the event, including a rather odd one of me in mid-speech. It looks like I'm demonstrating the Birdie Song*, which unless I was drunker than I remember I don't think I did.
As you can see, half the Canadian cabinet showed up, including my favorite federal hottie Rona Ambrose. The massed ranks of ministers of the Crown have prompted some snippy type in the comments section to sneer, "Gee, wall-to-wall conservatives. How surprising." In fact, the event was co-sponsored by Rick Dykstra (Con) and Keith Martin (Liberal), and the first speaker was Senator Jerry Grafstein (Liberal), who happens to be in the very first picture, just to make it easy for Mister Snippy. Also in attendance were at least two Bloc Québecois MPs. All very tripartisan.
Afterwards, it was late-night pizza with Laureen Harper at 24 Sussex Drive.
More from Deborah Gyapong.
[UPDATE: M J Murphy has an alternative explanation, as befits Canada's second most comprehensively shagged sheep]
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Steynposts
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Thursday, 30 April 2009 |
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So soi-disant right-wing racist hatemonger Kathy Shaidle turns out to be an open-borders gay leftist. I should have known. Just like self-proclaimed "human rights" activist Richard Warman is Canada's most energetic Internet Nazi when the shades are drawn, so Shaidle, after a hard day posting at far-right hate sites like Five Feet Of Fury, and linking to far-right hate sites like, er, this one, apparently spends her evenings with her fellow Marxist lesbians from the Tamil Tigers laughing at how gullible we right-wing saps are.
It wouldn't surprise me if "Kathy Shaidle" turned out to be just another "pogue mahone"-esque pseudonym for Richard Warman. Or vice-versa. Has anyone ever seen the two of them together?
PS Kate McMillan is Warren Kinsella. And Ezra Levant is Antonia Zerbisias.
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Steynposts
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Thursday, 30 April 2009 |
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Is this the all-time lamest defense ever of Canada's "human rights" regime? The Tri-City News of British Columbia, home of the Steyn/Maclean's show trial, has one of those Count/Pointercount features where they pit opposing columnists on the same subject. On the publication of Ezra's Shakedown, they've put Terry O'Neill, who actually attended the Maclean's trial, up against Mary-Woo Sims, the province's former chief commissar of "human rights". Mr O'Neill stands on a basic principle:
Let people with real conflicts use real courts to settle them.
Ms Sims, on the other hand, says:
Of course I don’t agree. My opinion? Levant is mad as hell that he has been the target of complaints about what he has written and has had to defend himself before the very commissions about which he has written. But he shouldn’t complain — the system worked as the complaints against him have been dismissed.
What makes me doubt his motives more is that he’s only concerned about “hate speech” and not at all about all the other ways in which human rights commissions operate and the concerns they address: sexual harassment, use of racial epithets, unfair workplace practices, etc.
Clearly, Ms Sims hasn't read Ezra's book - which is odd in itself: Here's a bestselling book on the "human rights" racket, and a lifelong "human rights" apparatchik isn't curious enough to want to know what it says.
But you don't need to have read it. If you'd glanced over any 500-word review of it or heard a five-minute radio interview, you'd know that Ezra isn't "only" concerned about "hate speech" but writes extensively about "all the other ways in which human rights commissions operate": He devotes considerable space to the "human right" of disaffected McDonald's employees not to wash their hands after using the toilet, and the "human right" of transsexuals to counsel female rape victims. Like me, Ezra started off principally worked up about the corner of the "human rights" machinery we happened to be ensnared in - its prohibitions on free speech. But he came to see that, in fact, the whole racket is one big stinking heap of ordure - and that the systemic abuses of traditional Common Law protections and its betrayal of the principles of Canada's legal inheritance make it, as his book title suggests, a "shakedown" for creeps, misfits and professional nuisance plaintiffs like Richard Warman.
As for Ms Sims' assertion that "the system worked", yes, it did: By ensnaring Ezra in years of litigation and running up a six-figure legal tab, it ensured that "the process is the punishment", regardless of whether you're eventually vindicated. In the entire Danish cartoons controversy, Alberta remains the only jurisdiction in the western world in which the state has investigated a citizen for the crime of publishing them. That fact shames Canada, and makes a mockery of its worthless Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Tyranny is always whimsical. I see Ms Sims' bio says that she now "primarily looks after her father, who has Parkinson's disease and dementia". Suppose, in some unsought, entirely arbitrary fashion, she were to wind up suffering the attentions of the "human rights" shakedown. Not in a right-wing blowhard freespeechy way, but in the way that the hapless bar owner in the medical marijuana case was, or the health club owner in the pre-op-transsexual-in-the-ladies'-shower-case - ie, you're just getting on with your life when one day the "human rights" commissars knock on the door and destroy it. A half-decade investigation would certainly cut into the time Ms Sims has to care for her father, and eat into the cash reserves. Would she say then that "the system worked"?
As Ezra points out, the "human rights" regime has no defenders other than those currently or formerly living high on the "human rights" hog But, even so, Ms Sims' apologia is worthless. Where's that vicious old bruiser Pearl Eliadis when you need her?
More on this, of course, in Shakedown and Lights Out.
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ONE HARDBACK!
TWO HATEMONGERS!
The new book by Ezra Levant with a special introduction by Steyn
Shakedown
Ezra takes you behind the scenes in the Danish cartoons case, the Steyn/Maclean's case, and the Canadian state's war on free speech and real human rights.
Order your copy personally autographed by Mark exclusively from
The Steyn Store
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