Posted on 11/23/2007 3:43:25 AM PST by backhoe
Edited on 11/23/2007 1:22:32 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
|
****UPDATE****
More information has come up, here:
| Court Papers from Richard Warman [ 1, 2, 3 ] |
I read Mark Steyn's thoughtful discussion of some of the recent events he's been to, especially his book-signing at the Chapters-Indigo flagship store, hosted by Heather Reisman, and his appearance on CBC's The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos. Reisman can be fairly described as liberal (she was, in fact, once the VP of the federal Liberal Party) and Stroumboulopoulos is further left, especially on Steyn's issues of the war on terror and the role of the United States. Here are some of Steyn's key points:
Let's take Strombo first... I doubt anyone in the studio audience had a clue who I was before I walked out but they were a friendly crowd and, more to the point, they're part of that big uncommitted general population you need to reach if you're going to make a craven political class think the restoration of free speech is an issue worth picking up on. ...He certainly didn't have to have me as his guest, and I was very glad he did.
As for Heather Reisman, she's the president of Canada's biggest bookstore chain. There are gazillions of books released every week, and she selects a mere handful of the authors to be that month's selected interviewees...
Yes, back when the hardback of America Alone came out, her buyer bungled the initial order. But, as soon as Heather herself found out, she called me personally from overseas and then called my publisher. By then, of course, I was having too much fun mocking her in Maclean's, The National Post, SteynOnline and sundry other places, to the point where my own publisher told me I ought to ease up on her. She never took it personally, and the clearest evidence of that was her willingness to host Wednesday's event.
...as to the tone of the questions, get used to it. This is where mainstream influential Canadians are. Heather's beliefs are no different from those of most other corporate players. ...I didn't take Heather's questions as idiotic: I thought they were an understandable attempt by a mainstream figure to square my argument with liberal values. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Bottom line: She did me a good turn in hosting me. So did Strombo. To have someone making the case against the "human rights" enforcers and for freedom of speech in these venues helps "normalize" (Ezra Levant again) what to many Canadians are dissident ideas. On these issues, there are enough real enemies out there, not to mention innumerable hyperpartisan halfwits. Don't unnecessarily conscript others to the list.
Steyn's post is a good opportunity to ask: what will victory look like? How will we know when we've won?
There is a very concrete measurement that we can look to: the abolition of the section 13 thought crimes provision of the Canadan Human Rights Act, and its provincial analogs, such as the one I've been charged under in Alberta. Optimists might say that the true measure of success would be the abolition of human rights commissions altogether, to remove these rogue, kangaroo courts not just from political censorship, but all of their other mucking about, from McDonald's to the Mounties.
But you can't get from zero to a hundred miles an hour immediately. As I've said before (and as Steyn was kind enough to reference), to achieve an environment that is propitious for legislative reforms, one must first build a public demand for change. And that starts with introducing the mass of Canadian voters to human rights commissions, and introducing them in a manner that demonstrates the abnormalcy of these commissions -- how they fly in the face of our instinctive Canadian notions of justice, fair play, freedoms, pluralism, etc.
It's one thing to build "momentum" in the conservative blogosphere -- and I'm not for a moment minimizing that. It was the conservative blogosphere that did the spadework on this issue, and that kept the story alive for months until the mainstream media (and a few farsighted politicians) picked it up. And -- as Kathy, Kate, Connie & Mark and I can tell you, it's been the blogosphere that has paid our mounting legal bills as we fend off these human rights SLAPP suits.
But the conservative blogosphere, and even the blogosphere as a whole, is not yet politically large enough to move politicians to act. We are the people with our volume knobs turned up to ten on political matters, especially those relating to freedom of speech. Most "severely normal" people don't follow politics as closely as we do. Steyn is a hero to all of us, but even he is not known to the average Canadian. As I've noted before, more Canadians get their politics from Rick Mercer than from any newspaper in Canada.
Which goes to Steyn's main point. We can have quarrels with the Reismans and Stroumboulopouloses of the world (I still remember, with great frustration, how Chapter-Indigo pulled the Western Standard's cartoon issue off of their shelves -- and during Freedom to Read Week, no less.) But a 10% enemy is still a 90% friend. If that's being too generous, then: a 49% enemy is still a 51% friend, when it comes to building a coalition for reform. If we're ever going to persuade politicians that this is a worthwhile issue for them to spend their political capital on, we need to reach out to the folks who watch The Hour, not just the folks who watch Glenn Beck.
This is what coalition building is about. It's different than the business of writing opinion editorials. Op-Ed writers can afford to be purists, because they're not trying to win any votes. And we need purists, to keep pushing the boundaries, to move the goalposts. Free speech purists -- and I'm pretty close to one myself -- have an important role to play. Ideas matter.
But translating ideas into political action is a different art. Conservatives may disagree with Stroumboulopoulos on almost everything he says or does -- I sure do. And I'm not quite sure that he's fully on side with the freedom of speech/human rights commission issues here (though, like most Canadians, I don't think he's even delved too deeply into them). But so what: he put Steyn, the turbo-conservative, in front of a huge audience of normal people, and let him have his say. As Steyn noted, Strouboulopoulos helped "normalize" what has been an outlying opinion for a long time.
Philosophical purists will always be disappointed with politicians. But we've already won the philosophical argument. Now let's do our best to build public demand for change -- as much change as we can muster.
That process started in the conservative blogosphere, God bless it. And it moved into mainstream political punditry. Now Steyn is starting to move it where it has never gone before -- into liberal and left-wing forums. That's amazing; it's a milestone of success in itself; and it's part of the journey on the road to legislative changes.
We need to make a coalition if we're going to win, especially in a country that tilts to the left, as Canada does. We need not agree with our new allies on every issue. But we'd be politically foolish to turn down the friendly access of Reisman and Stroumboulopoulos -- or the outright support of traditional liberals like PEN Canada or even EGALE.
The conduct of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal is absolutely appalling. I attended part of the March 25th Warman versus Lemire hearing and would have used a transcript to verify what I wrote about it and to further investigate things I wasn't able to cover at the time. Yet at the end of the hearing they claimed that as a "cost saving" measure no transcript would be produced. That hearing, being the one that focussed on the processes and investigative methods of the CHRC itself was the only one to date to have no transcript released.
Ezra Levant elaborates on the full, sordid story. And produces the transcript they didn't want released.
The closer you look at these kangaroo courts the more appalling they are.
May 9, 2008 01:56 PM by Michelle Malkin
The sharia creeps in Canada are making noise again. The Religion of Perpetual Outrage strikes anew. As usual, they’re up in arms over a truth-telling cartoon–which makes this a natural entry for our Stuff Muslims Don’t Like Series. Because if there’s one thing they really, really don’t like, it’s Western cartoons that force them to look at themselves in the mirror:93 Comments "How can a cartoon be a hate crime?
Don’t the police in Halifax have better things to do?"
For the record, I have little use for any individual, group, or organization who bases their identity on "things you cannot change"- race, sex, or point of national origin.
Whether it's the Ku Klux Klan or La Raza
( The "race?" We call ‘em "The Klan with a Tan... " )
basing "the wonderfulness of the group I belong to" on something you have no influence over is sloppy and dishonest.
I prefer merit, and honest effort.
What you actually do, and accomplish in life is far more indicative of character and honor than the color of your hide- or the "stuff" betwixt your legs...
Or any other arbitrary marker.
That said- once you allow minions of the government to silence one group- no matter how arbitrary, asinine, or foolish that group may seem to you- you open the door for everyone else to be silenced, also.
It is an "all or nothing" proposition.
Saw this movie last night night, take it to heart.
Rocky Balboa: You ain’t gonna believe this, but you used to fit right here.
[taps on the inside of his hand]
Rocky Balboa: I’d hold you up to say to your mother, “this kid’s gonna be the best kid in the world. This kid’s gonna be somebody better than anybody I ever knew.” And you grew up good and wonderful. It was great just watching you, every day was like a privilige.
Then the time come for you to be your own man and take on the world, and you did. But somewhere along the line, you changed. You stopped being you. You let people stick a finger in your face and tell you you’re no good. And when things got hard, you started looking for something to blame, like a big shadow. Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get it and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done! Now if you know what you’re worth then go out and get what you’re worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain’t you! You’re better than that! I’m always gonna love you no matter what. No matter what happens.
You’re my son and you’re my blood. You’re the best thing in my life. But until you start believing in yourself, ya ain’t gonna have a life. Don’t forget to visit your mother.
I'm delighted to report that another government MP has publicly declared himself for freedom of speech, and against section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act -- the thought crimes section.
Lee Richardson, the MP for Calgary Centre, has written a short but sweet letter on the subject, which you can see here. The key lines:
Freedom of speech is a fundamental right... I support removing section 13.1 of the Human Rights Act and will vote in favour of [Keith Martin's] motion when the opportunity arises.
Good for him!
Folks, take a moment to send Richardson your support and thanks. Click here to e-mail him. And while you're at it, click here to e-mail Rob Nicholson, the Justice Minister, to tell him to get off the pot. And send the same note to the Prime Minister, while you're at it.
Such notes are not in vain; while you are likely to get a standard-form reply, especially from the PM, each week the correspondence unit tallies up the number of letters on each topic. As I've written before, human rights commissions have been on their Top Ten list for months now -- sometimes in the top two. It's one way that politicians use to measure the size of an issue.
So here are those e-mail addresses again:
Thank Lee Richardson.
And pester Rob Nicholson and Stephen Harper!
h/t Don Sharpe
ADDENDUM: A few days ago I wrote a blog entry about Canadian Jews who dissent from the Canadian Jewish Congress's "official" position that section 13 and political censorship represent the will of the Jewish community. I asked for more examples of Jews for free speech. Fred Litwin, the author of the always provocative "Gay and Right" website, is on the list of freedom-loving Jews, too. So are the Post's Barbara Kay and Laura Rosen Cohen.
In fact, other than the Official Jews who make their living off human rights commissions, it's hard to find Canadian Jews who support censorship. I've been a Canadian Jew for, well, 36 years, and my views have never been canvassed by the CJC on this subject (or any other political issue, for that matter, including their inappropriate and ultimately humiliating support for the 1992 Charlottetown Accord). The next time the CJC, B'nai Brith or the Simon Wiesenthal Center claim in an affidavit that they speak for anyone but themselves, they should be cross-examined on that, and their bluff called. What evidence, other than their own hubris, do they have? Any surveys or plebiscites? We all know they have none, but it would be nice to get them to admit it under oath.
The Seattle Times weeps for their northern neighbours:
We do not envy the Canadians. They have entrusted to their government a power Americans never would, and they follow it into foolishness...
British Columbia now bans all words and images "likely to expose a person ... to hatred or contempt" because of race, religion, age, disability, sex, marital status or sexual orientation." This sounds like a libel law for groups, except that libel is a misstatement of fact that damages an individual reputation. In the United States, for a public figure to be libeled, the false statement has to be made maliciously or recklessly.
The Canadian idea of hate speech is less specific and more dangerous. Hate is like obscenity, about which Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said, "I know it when I see it." The difference is that a ban on obscenity does not touch political discourse, and a ban on hate does.
It also sets up government for open ridicule. Steyn is gleefully marketing his book as a "Canadian hate crime" and daring the tribunal to pronounce him bad.
Racial harmony in Canada would have been safer had the question never become official.
Marc Lemire has been on trial at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal since January, 2007. The original complaint against him by the Canadian Human Rights Commission was filed years before that. All that's left are final arguments.
But the CHRC only agreed to give full disclosure of its case against Lemire -- yesterday. I understand that approximately 400 pages were handed over, but more has still not arrived. (The CHRC, with an eight-figure budget, sends their disclosure by regular mail.)
In other words, now that the trial is done, Lemire is finally being shown the case that he has to answer. And that's if you believe that the CHRC has in fact decided to reveal all of their records. They've lied before -- lying, in fact, is at the core of their investigative techniques.
And then there's the CHRC's previous admission that their investigators don't even take notes of their work. That comes in handy, when they need to forget their conduct -- as complainant/investigator Richard Warman did, 157 times in the Lemire case alone.
In real courts, disclosure happens long before a trial. In civil cases, parties have to swear an affidavit of records, in which they list and hand over every relevant document that isn't protected by lawyer-client privilege. There is no such thing as confidentiality when it comes to disclosure. Confidentiality doesn't trump the other side's right to know relevant information.
In criminal trials, disclosure is even more important. Every scrap of paper that the police have is disclosed to the accused -- right on down to police officers' hand-written notebooks. There is a special duty for police to hand over exculpatory documents -- anything that favours the accused.
This is pretty basic stuff -- it's part of the right to know the case against you, and it's a core principle in what's called "natural justice".
It's insane that the CHRC is only now giving disclosure to Lemire -- after more than 26 days of hearings without it.
In a civil suit, this would be grounds for dramatic remedies, ranging from having the lawsuit struck out, to significant cost awards -- and it would result in serious sanctions to the lawyers involved if they were in on the cover-up. In a criminal case it would, at least, result in a mistrial if not an outright acquittal.
But it gets worse.
Read the letter written yesterday by the CHRC's lawyer, Margot Blight, describing their after-the-fact document disclosure. In it, she says:
The disclosure materials which were disclosed in a less-redacted form yesterday, were re-redacted taking into account the following principles:
1. Names of individuals employed by the Commission at an below the level of Manager are to be redacted...
2. With respect to individuals outside the Commission and as a general rule, information identifying an individual's name and coordinates is to be redacted...
The CHRC is deciding -- unilaterally -- that they simply won't give Lemire information that they don't want to give him. They won't give names of their investigators. And they won't give names of outside staff at all -- no matter how deeply involved they were in the case against Lemire.
Blight's first point would be like a bus company sued in a traffic accident simply choosing not to tell crash victims the identity of the bus driver. Her second point would be like the police department contracting out some of its crime lab work -- and using that as an excuse to hide the details of any contractual staff involved in the investigation.
That's just not how it works in a first world country like Canada. In real life, the courts determine what is or isn't relevant -- one party doesn't, and certainly not the prosecuting party, which the CHRC is here. For the CHRC to unilaterally decide that they're not going to disclose who did what is outrageous. Their clownish amateurism -- re-redacting what was un-redacted -- is laughable, but less important than the substance here: they're breaking the law.
My favourite line in Blight's letter is:
It is anticipated that... more clues will remain which will indicate to the reader the nature of contact information which has been redacted.
Clues, eh? The CHRC is willing to give the accused some clues about the case against him? Well, that's mighty sporting of them! They'll give the poor chump some tantalizing clues -- maybe disclose the documents in invisible ink! I think I read about that procedure in law school -- Kangaroo Courts 101.
The ancient principle of natural justice applies to all courts -- and to quasi-judicial tribunals like the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, too. This latest CHRC gimmick clearly violates natural justice, and a few items in the Charter of Rights section on legal rights, too. But it also violates the CHRT's disclosure rules that require the CHRC to:
list of all documents in the party’s possession, for which no privilege is claimed, that relate to a fact, issue, or form of relief sought in the case, including those facts, issues and forms of relief identified by other parties under this rule...
and
Where a party has identified a document under 6(1)(d), it shall provide a copy of the document to all other parties.
Let's recap:
I can't say it any better than the headline in the Vancouver Province did: I'll take Mexican "justice" any day over human rights grillings in Canada
¡'Hola, Señor Nicholson! Time to call your office.
Finally, Rob Nicholson, the Conservative government's Justice Minister, has weighed in on section 13, the thought crimes provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
He's in favour of section 13.
Here's a 50-page legal brief (3 MB file) his department filed, against Marc Lemire's constitutional challenge to that section.
I would sum it up as follows:
1. The Conservative government believes that the constitutionality of section 13 has already been approved by the Supreme Court, and so it shouldn't be questioned again; and
2. In any event, section 13 is a reasonable limit on free speech.
My two general responses would be:
1. In the 18 years since the constitutionality of section 13 was examined in 1990, the Canadian Human Rights Commission has taken a more and more abusive approach to its application, exceeding the narrow permission granted by the Supreme Court eighteen years ago.
2. The government's arguments that hate speech is the precursor to violence -- and that laws banning speech are necessary to prevent violence -- are absurd. They're logically false and they're historically false.
Read some of the junk history in the brief. Like paragraph 56, in which the government argues:
The triumphs of Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany through audaciously false propaganda have shown us how fragile tolerant, liberal societies can be.
Take a moment to absorb that sentence, and then think for yourself.
Nazism in Germany was odious not because of its "audaciously false propaganda", but because it murdered people by the millions. It's not the propaganda that killed the Jews; it was the fact that their property rights, their rights to self-defence, their economic rights, their mobility rights, their rights to life and liberty were taken away.
But look at the second half of that sentence: tolerant, liberal societies can be fragile. First, the Weimar Republic had within it the legal and constitutional seeds of Nazism, that Hitler exploited -- anti-hate speech laws being amongst them, and weak constitutional protections of real rights, too. But more importantly, what is the government's implication here? That tolerant, liberal societies are not strong? That, instead, we need the stern hand of a state political censor? Isn't that exactly the opposite of the lessons of Nazism?
It gets even more muddled. Look at paragraph 58:
...history teems with examples of times when lies, distortions and propaganda empowered groups like the Nazis to repress speech...
Read that again. The government is arguing that we should limit speech because we've seen how the Nazis could limit speech. Huh?
It wasn't propaganda that repressed speech. It was laws against speech that repressed speech. And those laws were passed by the Weimar Republic. But putting that aside, what exactly is the argument here? That we'd better ban speech first, before the Nazis do?
Paragraph 60 takes the cake. It's a list of examples of "violence" that the government says was granted "social acceptance" because of free speech. Black slavery in America is included in that list.
But slavery existed not because of White propaganda, but because Blacks were not given their rights. To focus on the propaganda isn't just ridiculous, it ignores what the real problem was: a lack of civil rights for Blacks. All the propaganda in the world couldn't enslave Blacks; free Blacks in the northern states weren't spared hate speech, just as Blacks everywhere in America today aren't, either. But besides being an offensive nuisance, hate speech can't enslave Blacks. In fact, the opposite point is the lesson of slavery: abolition came about precisely because of free speech, first in the UK and then in America. As Abraham Lincoln supposedly said to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."
Read paragraph 61 of the government's brief:
black people would not have been the main victims of slavery in the antebellum American south without the support of extensive mass mythology about their alleged inferior qualities.
Really? Is that all it took to enslave Blacks -- "mass mythology"? And without that, they would have been free? The same crock is served up in paragraph 62: Hitler fomented "a mass delusion that Jews were responsible for bad times, and as a result, a Holocaust could be perpetrated against them without general opposition."
Is that what happened? Hitler hypnotized Germany -- put them in some trance, some "mass delusion"? Just like the U.S. South was all living in some "mass mythology"?
If so, then why did Hitler have to pass the Nuremberg Laws? Why did he have to strip Jews of their real rights, if all it took to implement the Final Solution was some propaganda? Even medieval slave traders couldn't act without legal sanction -- the Vatican had to pass edicts in 1452 and 1455, etc., authorizing the enslavement of certain races. Even in the dark ages, men had natural rights that couldn't be taken away except for by government intervention. It's that government intervention that kills people, not the free speech of private citizens.
So who is this nut the government keeps quoting?
His name is Alexander Tsesis, a professor at a middling U.S. law school. Tsesis has two political clients: the Canadian Justice Department, and Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachussets, tied with Barack Obama as the most left-wing senator in America. Tsesis is a left wing kook -- but the Canadian government hangs on his every word.
When the government lawyers do their own reasoning, they're even fuzzier. Try to make sense of paragraph 109:
Propaganda against different religions and cultural groups encroaches on the freedom of Canada's diverse peoples to entertain their own beliefs, declare them openly without fear of "hindrance or reprisal" and to manifest them in practice.
What does that mean? That because someone says something mean about Scientologists, Scientologists are any less free to "entertain their own beliefs"? How exactly is one man's propaganda a "hindrance" to another person's faith? And how did the word "reprisal" sneak in there? We're talking about propaganda here -- mere words. We all agree that violence or other infringements on real rights should be illegal. So why is that in there, other than to scare people who don't know the difference between words and actions?
How about paragraph 113, where the government argues that censorship protects the "self-worth" of "the Jewish community". Really? Is that all it takes to give Jews self-esteem? And is giving Jews -- or anyone else -- self esteem the job of the government? And does that important goal trump someone else's freedom of speech?
Now let me state the obvious: the decision by the Justice Department to intervene was made before Rob Nicholson was the minister -- even before the Conservatives were the government. It was made when Irwin Cotler, the Liberal, was minister, if I'm not mistaken. Ever since then, federal lawyers have been beavering away in support of section 13, along with other tax-paid lawyers from the CHRC (and the gaggle of Jewish censors from the Canadian Jewish Congress, B'nai Brith and the Simon Wiesenthal Center).
Putting aside politics, if a previous Justice Minister instructed his lawyers to intervene in support of censorship, it's those lawyers' duty to do so until their instructions change. And, since the Conservatives have not yet changed course on section 13 -- or any other aspect of the Canadian Human Rights Commission -- it should not be surprising that Justice Department lawyers are still serving up the kind of junk history and psychobabble that is evident in this memorandum.
There are probably hundreds of cases in the bowels of the Justice Department that are ongoing from previous administrations. Most of them are likely non-partisan matters. But not this one -- this is intensely ideological.
It is the worst of politically correct, historically inaccurate, junk sociology, dressed up as a legal brief. It's the kind of stuff that radical law professors love. And it's precisely the kind of thing that Stephen Harper has been good at rooting out -- such as the awful Court Challenges Program.
I simply don't believe that a single member of the Conservative government, let alone the Justice Minister or the Prime Minister, would agree with, or even understand, the following passage (from paragraph 116):
"on a macro level, the general tone of society can affect the mind", and can lead to incivility and the "breakdown of community protection"
I don't even think the lawyers who drafted the brief even know what the hell that means. But they're just following old instructions, and they'll continue to do so until someone in the Conservative government yells "stop!"
I'd like to invite readers -- and fellow bloggers -- to go through the memo in detail. Give it a good fisking. Don't be intimidated by all the legalese; focus on the arguments, the logic, the history, the psychobabble, the plain old unintelligible political correctness of it.
And, if you happen to be a Conservative Member of Parliament, ask yourself: does this legal brief speak for the government? And, if you happen to be the Conservative Justice Minister, what are you going to do about it?
I'm a proud R.A.G.E Media affiliate -- they're the folks who give out free copies of Chesterton's classic book Orthodoxy, offer an Instant Catholic Library for a great price, and much more.
They're terrific to work with. Here's another reason why. I just got this via email:
We Americans take the free speech we (still) have for granted.
Take, for instance, Catholic Blogs like Five Feet of Fury which are being sued for speaking out.
If you want to help, a percentage of every purchase made through [this link] will go to Kathy at Five Feet of Fury to help her pay her legal fees.
After a long hard day of being monitored by government agents (while trying to concentrate on my own actual work) it's nice to know I've got friends too.
Thanks, Paul. I'm so moved. God bless.
RA.G.E. Media Steps up to the Plate:
We Americans take the free speech we (still) have for granted.
Take, for instance, Catholic Blogs like Five Feet of Fury which are being sued for speaking out.
If you want to help, a percentage of every purchase made through the link below will go to Kathy at Five Feet of Fury to help her pay her legal fees.
Dead Reckoning writes a letter to a zombie, er the near dead er I mean Rob Nicholson.
"...let’s rage and fight against the dying of the light, and make the maximum good mischief we can while opportunity affords."
"I guess that's why the new totalitarians equate Oriana Fallaci a journalist who told the truth, with Ernst Zundel an anti-Semite who lied because truth does not matter.
"I feel like a coup d'etat has taken place and I have awakened to the aftermath. And this egregious affront to civil rights and to the freedom to speak the truth in Canada is being perpetuated now by the Conservative government.
"Woe is us. I have this awful, awful feeling that we're too late."
Indeed.
Ernst Zundel was convicted of "spreading false news."
On June 2, Mark Steyn will be convicted of "spreading true news."
What a difference twenty years makes. And we have liberal self-aggrandizing bathroom Nazi hunters and cowardly, careerist Conservative hacks to thank for this, not just arrogant, ignorant Muslim beligerents.
Those of you who've been placing your trust and hope in electoral party politics -- and not just on this issue -- are deluded. By all means continue to write letters and sign petitions, but bear in mind that they will mostly be either ignored or will not be able to change the minds of a sufficient number of time serving cowards.
However, you can always live as we've already won:
Write and draw what you will. Step out in faith. Don't ask for permission first or apologize later.
Change the culture -- the Law will catch up later. Or not. But we can't afford to wait.
You can always get another job. But you only have one conscience.
"...let’s rage and fight against the dying of the light, and make the maximum good mischief we can while opportunity affords."
Besides showing Mark Steyn talking to me (or rather, to my Porky Pig's Girlfwend-like hand), as well as the back of Rick McGinnis's head, this photo shows those amazing red "INFIDEL" ball caps that Richard (pictured in the middle) brought to the Mark Steyn Indigo event.
These hats are very good quality, and sure to annoy everyone you meet!
Here's Richard's info:
richard@proformacanada.com
or call Richard at 416 798 4499 ext34Hats will be $20.00 each plus shipping.
There will be at least $10.00 of profit to go to the defense fund at that price.
"I guess that's why the new totalitarians equate Oriana Fallaci a journalist who told the truth, with Ernst Zundel an anti-Semite who lied because truth does not matter.
"I feel like a coup d'etat has taken place and I have awakened to the aftermath. And this egregious affront to civil rights and to the freedom to speak the truth in Canada is being perpetuated now by the Conservative government.
"Woe is us. I have this awful, awful feeling that we're too late."
Indeed.
Ernst Zundel was convicted of "spreading false news."
On June 2, Mark Steyn will be convicted of "spreading true news."
What a difference twenty years makes. And we have liberal self-aggrandizing bathroom Nazi hunters and cowardly, careerist Conservative hacks to thank for this, not just arrogant, ignorant Muslim beligerents.
Those of you who've been placing your trust and hope in electoral party politics -- and not just on this issue -- are deluded. By all means continue to write letters and sign petitions, but bear in mind that they will mostly be either ignored or will not be able to change the minds of a sufficient number of time serving cowards.
However, you can always live as we've already won:
Write and draw what you will. Step out in faith. Don't ask for permission first or apologize later.
Change the culture -- the Law will catch up later. Or not. But we can't afford to wait.
You can always get another job. But you only have one conscience.
Bump... in the "silence of the soul" night...
Click on the Picture to Donate
( Channeling best John Wayne voice ):
"Ya wouldn't want Free Dominion to become a silent key, now, wouldya, podner?"
Just got a call from John Moore's producer. They want me to talk for a few minutes after 4PM EST, about that dumb Department of Justice document.
Ugh. Oh well, you can't really say no to this XXX. Hope I don't act too stupid. Moore gets on my nerves but I have a feeling he may be semi-ok on this issue. [UPDATE: I was right, he gets it. That wasn't entirely horrible. And the two callers were properly outraged.]
As regular readers of this blog will know, I have been sued by Canada's most litigious human rights complainant, Richard Warman. Warman has sued me and some of Canada's other leading bloggers -- Kathy Shaidle, Kate McMillan and Connie and Mark Fournier of Free Dominion -- for criticizing his conduct as Canada's chief user of Canada's section 13 thought crimes provision. In particular, we've been sued for discussing his habit of going online under a pseudonym, and posting bigoted remarks -- strange conduct for a human rights investigator indeed.
Here's a copy of Warman's suit, and my comments on it at the time.
Besides suing me and my fellow bloggers, Warman sued the National Post and its comment editor, Jonathan Kay. Kay had written a short blog item about one of Warman's online rants in which Warman called Sen. Anne Cools some outrageously racist and sexist epithets. Warman claimed he didn't write that particular screed -- though he's lied under oath about similar misdeeds before. Kay and the Post took Warman's denial at face value, and immediately pulled the blog entry. In addition, they published an apology both online and in the newspaper's print edition -- though the article only appeared on their blog.
In other words, the Post and Kay did just about everything possible to mitigate any damages alleged by Warman -- they even contacted other bloggers who had copied their original blog entry, and asked them to take it down. I've never heard of anyone going that far before.
Warman sued them nonetheless.
I didn't understand it then, and I don't understand it now. What did he think he'd get from them? Another apology? He's already got two. Or did he think that, because the Post settled so quickly once before, they'd settle again quickly, but this time with money? It just doesn't make sense to sue one of the biggest media companies in the country over such a trifle -- especially since they made Warman whole so quickly. Warman's speciality has been suing poor defendants without lawyers, or getting the Canadian Human Rights Commission to do so for him. It's just not his modus operandi to take on someone his own size -- or 1,000 times bigger.
Well, now the National Post and Jonathan Kay have filed their Statement of Defence. You can see it here. (The other defendants, including me, will be filing our defences shortly.)
The Post/Kay defence naturally is different than mine and the other defendants' will be. The Post and Kay are not standing by the substance of their blog post -- they already conceded that without a fight. Now they're fighting Warman on his decision to sue them nonetheless.
Their defence claims that Warman's reputation hasn't suffered at all, and if it did, their apologies have made up for that -- apologies that the Post notes were approved by Warman's lawyer. The Post takes on Warman in his essence: a hyper-litigious, thin-skinned complainer-of-fortune. Look at paragraph 22 of their defence:
the damages or loss claimed are excessive, exaggerated, remote, unrecognized at law, unmitigated by the Plaintiff, and unconnected with any alleged act or omission on its part, and puts the Plaintiff to strict proof thereof.
In other words, the Post is calling Warman's bluff. Normally, damages are presumed, but not when an Ontario newspaper makes an apology immediately, as the Post did. Warman will now have to demonstrate, specifically, how he was damaged by the Post, and how he's owed big bucks for it. And, if he doesn't, the Post demands "costs on a solicitor-client basis" -- in other words, every single cent of their legal bills back.
It's an elegant defence -- short and sweet. I'm pleased. Sometimes big companies find it easier and simpler to just cut a four- or five-figure cheque to get rid of a nuisance suit like this. But it's clear Warman pushed them too far; he already negotiated for two apologies and got them. The Post can sense that paying more danegeld to Warman doesn't make sense.
They're done apologizing. They didn't want a fight; they did everything reasonable to avoid one, even swallowing their pride and accepting Warman's incredible denials at face value. But now that Warman's suing, they're fighting back.
Warman added the Post to his suit because he thought they'd be a soft touch with deep pockets. But now they're coming at him for full costs. I think they'll get it, too,
Here is professor Alexander Tsesis.
He is the American professor on whom Canada's Conservative government relied so heavily in their 50-page legal brief in support of censorship.
You'd think that the Canadian government would be able to find a Canadian to make the arguments that Tsesis made, but it's hard to find someone who will shovel so much complete drivel with a straight face. I mean, how often do you come across this, written stone-cold sober:
black people would not have been the main victims of slavery in the antebellum American south without the support of extensive mass mythology about their alleged inferior qualities.
and:
[Hitler fomented] a mass delusion that Jews were responsible for bad times, and as a result, a Holocaust could be perpetrated against them without general opposition.
So Blacks were enslaved and Jews were murdered not because their real rights were destroyed by governments, but because of "mythology" and "delusion".
As I noted in my earlier post on this subject, it's no surprise that the only other political client that this moonbat has is Sen. Ted Kennedy. I wonder if Tsesis got that gig by writing a scholarly article that Mary Jo Kopechne died because those murderers at Oldsmobile didn't equip their cars with SCUBA gear.
It's not weird for Kennedy to hire an obscure leftist American professor -- birds of a feather, etc. But it's weird for the Canadian government to do so. They even repeatedly call him "Dr." Tsesis, though his c.v. reveals no basis for such a title. Maybe the team at the Department of Justice just wanted to hire someone who got his law degree at the Illinois Institute of Technology, just for the novelty of it.
So that's the Conservative government's expert.
By contrast, here is professor Anuj Desai.
Take a look at Desai's biography.
Desai doesn't have a contract with Sen. Kennedy to recommend him. But he does have a math degree from Harvard, an International Affairs degree from Columbia and a law degree from UC-Berkeley, where he was editor of the California Law Review. He clerked for two courts in Washington, D.C., and has worked or lectured in Taiwan, South Africa and Holland -- not to mention at the U.S. State Department.
For some reason, he couldn't find time to do what Tsesis brags about in his resume: writing the memorable A Snapshot into the life of a hobo, published in Xpressions. But not all of us are destined to soar with the eagles.
Why do I mention all of this? Because Blazing Catfur actually did some digging into Tsesis' scholarly reputation in America, and found it to be, uh, mixed.
The man the Conservative government loves so much that they gave him an honourary doctorate is considered to be a buffoon in his home country.
I'm not going to duplicate the excellent work that Blazing has done, which you can read here. Blazing wrote to Desai, who has torn Tsesis' work to shreds (or, as Blazing put it, New York Post style, "Tsesis' thesis torn to pieces"). I'll let you read it from Blazing directly. Maybe the first, very polite sentence from Desai's reply will tempt you to read the rest:
Go read the rest!
By the way, despite (actually, because of) the appropriately negative reception the Department of Justice's memo has received, I believe that we're winning this battle. In fact, the timing of the 50-page obscenity was perfect -- they had been working on it for more than a year; their filing of it now only serves to raise the temperature on the issue. In effect, it's a challenge to Rob Nicholson and the Conservatives by their bureaucrats: Who's the boss? I hear that's the Prime Minister's favourite thing to hear from leftist 'crats. We'll see.
Look, I know the concept of "the worse, the better" is dark. But that legal brief was the lawyerly equivalent of Barbara Hall's outburst -- a provocative, embarrassing, self-destrutive act from the other side of this debate. Legal briefs like that were going to be filed anyways; a hundred examples of this sort of thing has been happening for decades without anyone paying attention. Now we're paying attention.
Look at the reaction to it: I've received over 100 comments in a day to my post on the subject, precisely because it's so outrageous. And I imagine that the Conservative caucus -- and Nicholson and Harper -- have heard from 100 people, too.
The public pressure is building. I can't even keep up with all of the Op-Eds, news stories and radio interviews on the subject these days -- you've got to go to Free Mark Steyn to read it all. This is part of the denormalization.
The legislative reform will follow, as surely as politicians love votes.
I'll repeat my earlier prediction: I believe we'll see the first concrete steps towards reform before the end of 2008.
And, if I may daydream a bit, I predict that, in the future, it won't be the guilty white liberal Marxist "Dr." Tsesis who is hired by Canadian DoJ lawyers. It will be Professor Desai, a man of high scholarly achievement who, like Keith Martin, just happens to be more of a minority than Richard Warman, Dean Steacy, Barbara Hall, Alexander Tsesis or any of the other human rights hucksters out there who claim to speak for minorities.
On February 13, 2006, the Western Standard magazine, of which I was the publisher, printed eight of the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, to illustrate a news story on the subject.
On February 15, 2006, an anti-Semitic imam named Syed Soharwardy filed a "human rights" complaint against the magazine and me, with the government of Alberta's human rights commission. You can see that semi-literate, hand-scrawled fatwa here.
On March 30, 2006, I filed a written response to the complaint, assuming there was someone with enough sense at the HRC to throw out Soharwardy's complaint as a nuisance suit. I was wrong.
On January 11, 2008, some 600 days later, the HRC summoned me to an interrogation at the hands of their "human rights officer", Shirlene McGovern.
That was four months ago.
So we're at more than 800 days since the HRC first received Soharwardy's complaint.
So you can imagine my amusement today when my lawyer told me that the HRC asked him for a copy of my videotape of that interrogation.
Uh, what have they been doing these past four months? Did Officer McGovern not take notes?
Have they not seen the YouTube clips I uploaded to the Internet? 565,000 other people did. But not our intrepid bureaucrats. They're no so good with this Inter-nets thing. So I'll send it to them on a CD. Though a VHS would probably be better for them. Or maybe a Betamax.
As the Alberta HRC boasts in its annual report, its case load of complaints has actually fallen by 15% in the past year. Albertans just aren't bigoted enough for them, it seems. But it takes the HRC 7% longer to dispose of complaints -- up from 382 days to 410 days. That's a net productivity decline of 22% in a year. And their goal for next year: 435 days. Yes, the Alberta HRC actually wants to be less "efficient".
(Imagine if the HRC was actually being used for its original purposes of helping people, say, kicked out of an apartment in wintertime because of their race. What good would "help" a year later do? But the HRCs long ago stopped pretending to be shields to protect people -- now they're swords to attack people for the crime of political correctness.)
So the average case takes 410 days. I'm at 800 days and running -- and my formal hearing hasn't even been scheduled. The only way I know my interrogators are still alive is that they called my lawyers to get a copy of my videos.
(Could you imagine if a real police officer grilled a criminal suspect for 90 minutes, and then four months later sheepishly called up the suspect and asked sweetly for a copy of that suspect's notes on the interrogation? Imagine the peals of laughter!)
OK, you lazy, unprofessional, incompetent, corrupt, anti-Semitic slackers. I'll send you a video of my own interrogation -- and a bill for it. And I won't even take 800 days to do it.
Just got a call from John Moore's producer. They want me to talk for a few minutes after 4PM EST, about that dumb Department of Justice document.
Ugh. Oh well, you can't really say no to this XXX. Hope I don't act too stupid. Moore gets on my nerves but I have a feeling he may be semi-ok on this issue. [UPDATE: I was right, he gets it. That wasn't entirely horrible. And the two callers were properly outraged.]
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
