Intellectual freedom: David Warren’s take on the uprisings in the Muslim world

He’s somewhat pessimistic, and I would say, for the right reasons:

From what I can make out, in Egypt and elsewhere, the people on the streets are the "accredited" -- the bourgeoisie. They are the ones who could most benefit from western-style constitutional government and would suffer most if the government falls into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. They are, in terms of "class," the same people who have revolted in Iran -- haplessly against the Islamist regime of the ayatollahs.

[ ... ]

While I recognize that support for "democracy and freedom" is substantial, within each Arab national society - that the middle class is not a nothing; that each economy depends on it - I doubt this "faction" can prevail. Worse, I think we are watching its final, hopeless bid for power.

The key fact, in Egypt (paralleled in Yemen and elsewhere), is that the Muslim Brotherhood has not declared itself. The Islamists could put vastly more people on the street. They could subvert the loyalties of policemen and soldiers, who already resent the moneyed middle class. They could generate just enough heat to make large districts of Cairo and Alexandria, now simmering, boil over.

It’s a much darker and more dreadful version of what we find in Canada: The protest of people who remember a political order in which reason was a valid concept is easily swamped by angry affirmations of God or Government  from those who never, ever had a truly dissenting thought to begin with.

My mental picture of that last has always been yuppie moms who parade their tots in adorable little Che Guevara tees and drop cliche after cliche on the world about non-violence, appealing for “understanding” of other cultures’ mistreatment of women, while professing to be feminists themselves. They like to think of themselves as “transgressive,” but have actually never been good enough to be bad.

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Sensitive to the “offended” = indifferent to violence?

Blazing Cat Fur tells me about the unsettling connections of a Canadian Muslim magazine:

TheMuslim.ca Publishes a HIZB UT-TAHRIR Terrorist Screed calling for Islamist Rule in Tunisia.


[ ... ]


Jawed Anwar, publisher of TheMuslim served as a chair of the Thorncliffe Park Elementary school through 2010.

An ... elementary school?

Like many who have followed the show trials of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, I am most dismayed by the ease with which violent politics is now accepted in Canada, when initiated by disaffected groups professing Islam - yet, right as rain, the official promoters of anti-racism and diversity persecute prominent figures over trifles.

Of course, the reason is obvious: The “human rights” establishment can quite safely ruin a person’s life and reputation over nothing because everything thinks either “at least it’s not me they’re after”. Or “he must have done something bad to deserve it.” Or maybe, “I’m too smart for that.” Or “I’m too nice.” This is how a country quietly divest itself of democracy - it breeds citizens who don’t deserve freedom and cannot live up to the obligations of maintaining it.

This is not a question of the right to publish Islamist literature, but rather of the fact that there is no social accountability for doing so. That is, no one must retire voluntarily from public life as a result of displays of anti-Semitism or advocacy of legal systems that offer fewer rights for women. That has been the problem all along. Legal accountability alone will not save freedom, even if it were exercised.

Blazing also asks me to link to this Pro-Israel blog contest.

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Kafka's bureaucrats search between the lines

David Warren writes in "Free Hit for Free Speech" (Ottawa Citizen, January 23, 2011),

The issue here is, “freedom of speech.” Do we have it in Canada, or do we not? This would once have been a rhetorical question, but isn't today. The existence of numerous so-called “human rights” commissions, and other legal and administrative machinery for the prosecution of the “politically incorrect,” has brought the whole question back to life -- after centuries of freedom from formal state censorship, and star chambers.

It would be wrong to say that censorship has been re-imposed. But instead, perhaps something worse is happening. With formal censorship, a journalist or anyone with something to say, could know where he stood. I have witnessed at first hand journalism operating under censorship requirements, in Third World countries, and it struck me that both writer and reader knew what the rules were. It thus remained possible to put things “between the lines.”

Even in Soviet Russia, readers knew how to understand, for instance, an item in Pravda that declared, “There have been no riots in Gorki, and all rumours to that effect are false.” Translation: there have been riots in Gorki, and all the rumours are true.

The problem deepens when, as in Canada today, we have deeply committed ideological activists, embedded in our “human rights” bureaucracies, who are looking specifically for messages that have been planted “between the lines”; and who are armed with the power to mount show trials, in which the truth of an assertion is no defence (as it always was in legitimate courts, when charges were brought for libel or slander).

Intellectual freedom in Canada and elsewhere ...

As Americans cope with the recent assassination attempt (?) on an Arizona Congresswoman, there are predictable demands for “control”: Jonah Goldberg notes,

Misplaced panics like this have a momentum and logic all their own. Already, Rep. Bob Brady (D-Pa.) has drafted legislation to ban the use of symbols (crosshairs on a map, for instance) or language ("lock and load!") that could foster violence. "The rhetoric is just ramped up so negatively, so high, that we have got to shut this down," he told CNN.

That opens the bidding. The question is, where will it end?

If the alleged shooter had been inspired by a movie or TV show -- as any number of murderers have been over the years -- would those blaming the tea parties join with social conservatives in blaming Hollywood? Would they celebrate new laws to "shut down" such fare?

Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon, claimed to be in part inspired by "Catcher in the Rye." Should that be banned? Or if not banned, should we "dismiss" from public life anyone who doesn't denounce J.D. Salinger?

Funnily enough, I remember when J. D. Salinger was denounced by little old ladies in church hats who did not want his works available in school libraries. That seems like a golden age now, because we were free to just ignore them. No so with those who would bring about a near-utopia through legislation, who have a panicked public demanding that the government “do” something.

As I observed earlier, assassinations have declined markedly in the past three decades in the United States, due in no small part - in my view - to the rise of new media, including personal social media like the now much-blamed Facebook. People who can just say it, overwhelmingly, tend to just forget it after a while.

Yes, better security played an important role.* But, in reality, a free world politician can’t just hide from the public. Elected representatives have logged how many minimal security public appearances across the United States, with how many assassination attempts? Let’s do the math: Very few

Probability thinking has its uses, and freakout avoidance is one. That is, if avoiding a freakout, rather than cultivating it, is what we want to do.

Here’s Jonah Goldberg on the smiley-face fascism of “let’s-just-ban-whatever” that poses a significant concern today.

*As a young teenager, I saw the Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald shot by local “hanger about the police station” Jack Ruby in Dallas while he was in custody. (It was accidentally captured on TV.) The consensus then - since acted on - is that security matters. But other things matter too.

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Toxic politics and control of the Internet

 Canadian free speech bloggers have been watching, with growing concern, the developments in the shooting of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and, as Glenn Reynolds puts it in The Wall Street Journal,

With only the barest outline of events available, pundits and reporters seemed to agree that the massacre had to be the fault of the tea party movement in general, and of Sarah Palin in particular. Why? Because they had created, in New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's words, a "climate of hate."

- “The Arizona Tragedy and the Politics of Blood Libel”, subhedded “Those who purport to care about the tenor of political discourse don't help civil debate when they seize on any pretext to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.” (January 10, 2011)

No, they don’t help civil debate, but they do help create the sort of climate that leads to demands for control of the Internet.

In Canada, that is no mean threat. Franklin Carter, at the Book and Periodical Council's Freedom of Expression Committee, sends me this helpful link to updated Internet-related court cases.

Anyway, I get ruddy tired of the whole business sometimes, and wrote to friends,

Stories like the one above frustrate me.

The problem is NOT what some GreenJet talk show host says, but the fact that so many listen to him uncritically or with approval.

Sure some political operative might be responsible. So could space aliens hiding in our DNA. Whoops! Don’t give the host ideas.

We should address his comments in no other terms than "Who is paying for this merde and why? Not me, I hope." Anything else is just scratching a rash and spreading the itch.

Responsible government is more often abandoned than overthrown. - d.

Today, the Toronto Star chimed in with “Could toxic politics have fuelled shooting rampage?”, with their Washington bureau’s Mitch Potter asking

Is Jared Lee Loughner a solo psychopath detached from the national reality, or the violent consequence of a rage-filled commentariat that spits a daily barrage of rhetorical bullets at the U.S. government?

Okay, at this point, a reasonable person over fifty years of age can dismiss the whole foofaraw about toxic politics in three words: Aw, get real!

I’m old enough to remember the assassination of John Kennedy, of Robert Kennedy, and of Martin Luther King, as well as the attempted assassinations of Gerald Ford and Pope John Paul II. One didn’t wonder whether, in those days, but when. Since the early 1980s, in North America we have enjoyed a long period of relative freedom from assassin politics. In no small part, that is precisely due to the proliferation of media that some want policed or controlled by government - cable TV, talk radio, and the Internet.

As Mark Steyn told the Ontario Legislature two years ago,

... free societies should not be in the business of criminalizing opinion. 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 print a newspaper and say what you think, so if you object to the House of Saud, the only thing you can do is blow stuff up. I think, actually, we don't need sensitivity training in this jurisdiction, we need insensitivity training. We need to learn to rub along in a much more agreeable, rough-and-tumble fashion.

So when people say, “The government has got to put a stop to this toxic politics ...”, say a little prayer of thanks that character assassination is all it is, only rarely the real thing.

(Note: I report on this growing intelectual freedom controversy mainly for non-Canadians checking notes between assaults on free speech vs. where they are. For breaking news, go to Five Feet of Fury, Blazing Cat Fur, Small Dead Animals, or Deborah Gyapong. )

Excerpt from Firewall, exposing social Darwinist eugenics in Canada

Recently, I advised readers of Jane Harris Szovan’s new book on the shameful secrets of social Darwinist eugenics in Canada. The Alberta-based author tells me,

People have been asking me what Eugenics and the Firewall is about. Basically, it is about the history of eugenics in the Western countries. But it looks specifically at what happened in Alberta, how our province's somewhat bizarre political culture allowed it to happen (and why the vulnerable are still at risk for disaster, not just here but worldwide.) Then it compares Alberta to British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Ontario. Then, we look at how Alberta's experience compared to the rest of the Commonwealth, specifically the U.K. where forced sterilization was judged contrary to our shared constitution.(How a province in a dominion was allowed to get away with violating the constitution just shows how far the federal gov. will go in not challenging 'provincial rights.'

Hmmm, it shows that for sure.* But it shows something else too.

Here is the gist of the book:

It’s a dirty little secret the heirs to Alberta’s populist legacy don’t want Canadians to talk about.

In 1928 the non-partisan United Farmers of Alberta passed the first Sexual Sterilization Act. The UFA’s successor, the Social Credit party, led by a radio-evangelist William Aberhart, and later by his protégé Ernest Manning, removed the need to obtain consent to sterilize “mental defectives” or Huntington’s Chorea patients with dementia.

Between 1928 and 1972 nearly three thousand citizens were sterilized, lied to, experimented on, and subjected to daily abuse at the hands of provincial staff in Alberta. Most Albertans have forgotten the victims whose names made headlines in the 1990s, and politicians and pundits have shown little empathy for the victims.

The Eugenics Board horror story has largely been buried in Canada’s mainstream national media. Conservative bloggers and columnists in Canada continue to blame the Liberals and CCF for Canada’s barbaric eugenics program. The tar sands, oil royalties, health care budgets, environmental policies, and making sure the province’s interests remain high on the federal agenda top the provincial headlines.

But the questions must be answered: How did a province that claims “strong and free” as its motto deny basic freedoms to so many of its own citizens? Why does the extent of Alberta’s eugenics past and its link to the UFA/Social Credit legacy remain the unacknowledged moral blind spots in Canadian politics?

It’s time to set the record straight.

It is past time, and many people here have probably guessed that.

Jane has quite reasonably been thinking/hoping that people won’t go after her, but ... A straight record can mean crooked bunch. If you care about setting the record straight, spare a thought for her, and buy the book for a library and/or for yourself.

* They say this about us: If a Canadian species were in danger of extinction, the British would come up with matchless essays on the problem, the French would fly Brigitte Bardot to scream up a storm on the ice pack, the Germans would write an encyclopedia, on the problem, the Americans would set up a plan to save the species that cost three trillion dollars and employed one hundred thousand people ... And the Canadians? Oh, we’d be arguing about whether the species and its woes are a federal or a provincial responsibility. That’s part of how big problems get started here, when they do.

Intellectual freedom in Canada: SLAPP lawsuit?

I have been meaning to put up a longer post on this tense, current intellectual freedom topic, but just this for now:

A fellow Canadian blogger has been hit with a lawsuit for linking to something the suing party disapproves of. It sounds pretty bizarre, but it is real. The Internet is the wildest West ever. Go here and here for more, and if you can offer support, please do.

Intellectual freedom in Canada: News roundup

Recently, Blazing Cat Fur scored a huge victory: He got the Canadian Islamic Congress disinvited from the speech their executive director was going to give at a Department of National Defence celebration of Islamic Heritage Month:

MacKay pulls plug on imam's speech at defence HQ

OTTAWA — A speech at National Defence headquarters by the outspoken executive director of the Canadian Islamic Congress has been cancelled due to his organization's "extremist views."

A spokesman for Defence Minister Peter MacKay said Imam Zijad Delic was scheduled to make an address as part of Islamic Heritage Month on Oct. 4 but that MacKay decided to cancel the event.

"The Canadian Islamic Congress has declared that Israelis over the age of 18 are legitimate targets of suicide bombers," spokesman Jay Paxton said in an email to Global National.

"These types of comments don't support Islamic Heritage, they simply divide Canadians, promulgate hate and they have no place in Monday's celebrations." An expanded version of the article appears here in which Imam Delic lies through his teeth.

Good for MacKay, spelling it out like that. It may help that so few Canadian Muslims want any part of the Islamists’ long slow march through the piles of marshmallows here, which many visitors mistake for snow ... Joseph Brean explains in the National Post that imam Delic’s speech was actually quite reasonable. Well, then Delic should not feel badly about apologizing for what he said about Israelis.

More generally, the whole business raises a point developed by Barbara Kay in the National Post:

The cancellation of the speech by Defence Minister MacKay raises the question of why any government ministry would fund any religious consulting group. Why is there a paid “Muslim Working Group” permanently embedded at Foreign Affairs, whose job it is to advise the government on their foreign policy wherever it touches on areas of Muslim density? Why not a “Christian Working Group” or a “Sikh Working Group”? Can you imagine if there were a “Jewish Working Group” to advise on the Middle East? Don’t make me laugh. To me this is a scandal, and I don’t understand why it has not been addressed. Some of the people in this group hold very insalubrious views or are attached to groups with discomfiting agendas.

Read more.

If it’s just because the rest of us citizens are not particularly violent, why don’t we just advise those not like-minded to get with the program?

Hat tip: Five Feet of Fury

Meanwhile, Franklin Carter at the Book and Periodical Council's Freedom of Expression Committee writes to say that Kathryn O’Hara, president of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association, has accused the federal government of manipulating science news. Gosh, to compete with that, some day I must get round to accusing the party in power of making election promises they didn’t keep or something else that’s really novel.

No, but O’Hara has a serious point, and she did get attention:

"Openness is being held ransom to media messages that serve the government's political agenda," wrote Kathryn O'Hara, president of the Canadian Science Writers' Association, in an opinion published online Wednesday in the international scientific journal Nature.

The article comes during Right to Know Week in Canada, a celebration of open information that "ironically … comes on the back of new evidence of unacceptable political interference in the public statements of federal government researchers," said O'Hara, who is also the CTV chair in science broadcast journalism at Carleton University.

Read more.

The skinny is that scientists must get bureaucrats’ permission to talk to media about their findings, even when published in a journal like Nature That happened recently, she notes, to Natural Resources Canada geoscientist Scott Dallimore, and certainly to many others, who doubtless just kept quiet.

It used to be, O'Hara said in an interview, that journalists could simply phone a federal scientist and talk to him or her.

Yes, I well remember those days. One learned so much more that way. Too often, today, what one mainly learns is how a bureaucracy can render the find that clarifies into the fog that chokes.

Franklin Carter also offers a link to the Banned Books quiz, sponsored by Britain’s Guardian. How much do we know about how books get banned and why? We’d be surprised, as it happens.

While we are here, two columnist firings came to public notice last week, that of conservative Rory Leishman from the London Free Press (well, he wasn’t actually fired; he resigned when his column, shown here was pulled) and Rick Salutin, a man of the left, from the Globe & Mail. I hope that the underlying trend isn’t simply to rid media of outspoken people. As I have pointed out elsewhere, I have nice neighbours who seldom say anything I can’t at least see the point of, so I crave the novelty of non-violence-directed opinions that are beyond the pale for me. So, I expect, do many other people, which is why increasing numbers turn to the Internet to get their fix of stuff they just don’t agree with. Well, the Globe replaced Salutin with Irsad Manji, who can stir the pot a bit when she chooses, so all is not lost. And literary lion Robert Fulford wrote a classy response to Salutin’s departure:

This lefty was often wrong, but I’m going to miss him

I disagreed with whatever Rick Salutin wrote in his Globe and Mail column - on capitalism, socialism, U.S. foreign policy, free trade, Israel or anything else.

Nevertheless, for two decades I never failed to read him, every Friday. Sadly, the Globe has eliminated his column, considering it unsuitable for the refurbished format that appeared yesterday.

What made me Rick Salutin’s loyal reader? Experience demonstrates that I can learn a great deal from writers I disagree with. More important, his style has always attracted me. His prose has a sense of life, not a quality universally found in Globe columnists. He has his own voice, whether the song he sings is satirical, hysterical or as glum as Eeyore’s. And he writes as if something is at stake.

Read more.

I love it, except it sounds too much like an obit. Neither Leishman nor Salutin are dead, just freelancing somewhere. Though in this market, it can be hard to tell the difference.

As so often, I remind readers, I only scratch the surface here re intellectual freedom issues in Canada. For more recently updated information, go to Five Feet of Fury, Blazing Cat Fur, MarkSteyn, and Ezra Levant, among others. It’s a sign of the times we live in that I must point out that no one need agree with everything these folk think in order to see that their concern about a growing illiberal atmosphere is legitimate.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Intellectual freedom in Canada: News roundup

- Rev. Sean Binks in Nova Scotia makes an appeal for help for Kathy Shaidle for her legal expenses in a SLAPP suit against her by "human rights" advocate Richard Warman, now that there has been a promising development in her case, explained here:

Warman must hand over his neo-Nazi records

The Post story is headlined "Lawyer who launched libel suit against Ezra Levant ordered to hand over computer", and that's a pretty accurate summary of what happened this week. In brief, an Ontario judge has ordered Richard Warman, a former Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) staffer and Canada's most prolific censor, to hand over a copy of his laptop computer to an independent forensic expert, who will search it for evidence relevant to Warman's Nazi activities.

Warman's neo-Nazi activities already condemned by Canadian Human Rights Tribunal

Those activities are at the center of Warman's two nuisance lawsuits against me. Warman is a member of several neo-Nazi organizations, including Stormfront and Vanguard, and he posted hundreds of anti-Semitic, anti-black and anti-gay comments online, including my personal favourite, when he called Jews "scum". That last comment was particularly offensive to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, which issued a ruling last year calling Warman's racist conduct "disappointing and disturbing". No kidding.

Writing hundreds of bigoted messages is bizarre and un-Canadian to begin with. But even weirder is that Warman published much of this bigotry while he was working at the CHRC [Canadian Human Rights Commission], and then later when Warman went on to work at the Department of National Defence's own internal human rights commission, called the Directorate of Special Grievances. Seriously, that's what it's called.

So here was someone claiming to be fighting against "hate speech" by day, but pumping out hundreds of hateful comments by night.

This is what happens when a society chooses government by bureaucrats, grievance lobbies, and self-appointed censors over government by elected officials. Anyway, a computer expert is required, and if anyone can help Kathy Shaidle and civil rights lawyer Ezra Levant with the cause, they both have PayPal buttons.

They and Blazing Cat Fur are excellent sources of material on the battle for intellectual freedom in Canada, as is Binks's Free Canuckistan.

- Blazing Cat Fur, regarding Toronto mayor candidate for the fall elections, Rob Ford,advises that, of all things,

Sharp eyed Rob Ford supporter ES has caught someone from an IP address traced to the Toronto Star "editing" Rob Ford's wikipedia page to include reference to a parody web site robfordmayor.com. Legal steps were taken against the parody site and its author elected to remove it. Check out comment no. 7 for ES's revelation of the wikipedia editor's identity.

I thought the Star had reached a new low when they hired Heather Mallick however this escapade shows a determined effort to plumb ever greater depths of left wing derangement. Papers are supposed to report the news, they should not be engaging in election hijinks.

Here's the National Post on the story. The Star is an old and large newspaper. If Staristas are indeed acting like Wikimorons, it is bad news indeed. Fortunately, the Star redeemed itself to some extent by an investigation that discovered some potentially damaging information about Ford and substance abuse. It doesn't appear to have damaged Ford's chances. But in any event, that is what a newspaper should be doing. Otherwise, let us bloggers handle it. We will do it for PayPal donations.

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Census panic

There has been a local left panic in Canada, on account of our prime minister Stephen Harper's attempt to abolish the dreaded mandatory B-form of the Canada census.

Allegedly, Harper is chummy with the ghost of Hitler because he doesn't believe people should be forced to answer intimate questions ... Harper wants to make it voluntary.

As a census rep, I once had to deliver these dreaded long forms. One of five, at least in those days. Basically, a bunch of intrusive questions.

I once had to explain to a woman who was living with her boyfriend, "No, I am not the Censor, I am just a census rep." But how do I know that that data wouldn't become public, as opposed to private, some day, if the government has the data?

For the record, I do not object to the mandatory nature of the short form census. It promotes wise use of tax funds. Knowing how many children live in a household is critical to determining where elementary schools should be built, as opposed to just hiring a school bus. Knowing how many seniors live there is critical to determining whether proposed old age home projects should receive tax funds. Knowing how many people are recent immigrants is critical because they may be handicapped by poor English language skills. That may help determine whether an English as a Second Language (ESL) program is needed in a given area. So - to me, at least - these are reasonable mandatory questions in an advanced society that provides a proper infrastructure. This critical data could not easily be obtained from a source other than the householder.

But the rest is just intrusive.

Anyway, I wrote back to a journalist friend, summarizing my views on the long form:

As I said, I share your concerns, and feel that the Toronto Star [a highly leftwing major circ paper] is on the wrong side of the issue on this, entirely, even for itself!.

Here are the sorts of questions I object to, that can appear on such a form, along with answers I would be inclined to provide, if permitted. Usually, I will not be.

What is your religion? I am a fruitarian space alien, but would rather not admit that just now. I need a job. I need funds to get my antennae fixed. (Okay, okay, I am really a traditional Roman Catholic, but I don't see whose business it is, except the Church's. The information should not be forced from me by the government. Whatever happened to separation of church and state.)

Who does the housework at your house? No one. We just let the mess pile up. Public Health has not visited yet, so why are you compelling us to tell you about it?

Who disciplines the children? Well, if no one is alleging child abuse, what business is it of yours?

Are you divorced? Again, whose business is that? Given that I am not trying to get married again at a Catholic Church, it is no one's business at all, really.

What kind of house do you live in? That IS a justifiable question. Housing is a legitimate public concern. But the City can tell the census takers that. They know, because I pay taxes for the property, registered with them. Why not work with their accurate data, instead of bothering or threatening me?

What is your ethnicity? Oh. Are you suggesting that that guy is not my father? Why shouldn't I go over to your office and whack you in the face with a banana cream pie? Just get out of my life. Now. Granted, that may not be flagged as a mandatory question, even on the long form, but why are you even asking?

The mandatory long form as a whole is just creeping totalitarianism, and I am glad that the Prime Minister opposes it.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Intellectual freedom in Canada: News roundup

Here, Blazing Cat Fur makes known his indignation that the Campbell’s soup company advertises in a paper in which a Holocaust denier also publishes. The thread below it is lively, to say the least.

Here’s what I say about all that:

Some opinions are just so wrong that they remain branded on the brain as exemplars. One of the dumbest I ever heard was that North American media do not have a left-wing bias because they are owned by corporations. The idea was that corporations automatically have a right-wing bias.

Who knew?

In reality, corporations exist to make money for their shareholders. They will make it how they can. They can make money promoting gangsta rap to teens or sanitary aids to old folks. The corporate suits are looking at the balance sheet alone.

I don’t see any problem in principle with Campbell’s selling halal soup. Of their current dozens of varieties, I have personally only ever bothered with about five in my entire life, and have not yet got around to trying two of the ones in my cupboard. I must eventually become a martyr to some dam soup, but will wait till I have dental surgery or something.

Now, as for the corporation: They get a return on their investment? Well, they get a return on their investment. Corporations are amoral by nature. People are not.

Blazing also advises me, that 54% of Canadians in a online Leger poll backed a ban on women wearing burkas in public, surprising the pollsters. I am not sure how to think this one out because anyone who travels on the Toronto subway will soon discover a motley array of female dress/undress.

If someone boarded the subway in a gorilla suit or a space suit, I would probably be too tired to notice or care. If he said that his religion required that, I would think it was a pretty stupid religion, but would hardly provoke a public uproar by telling him so.

The key question is, is she doing it because she wants to or because she fears family violence if she doesn’t? For a Canadian, that should be the heart of the matter, not rules against religious dress.

I completely agree with Blazing Cat Fur that we must confront anti-Semitism among new immigrants, in an appropriate way. My father likes to say that anti-Semitism is the surest sign of a low-class upbringing, so the best way to confront it is public shame, not a big government bureaucracy, as happens now.

And where are we? There are “death to the Jews” marches in Canada, while the government raised heck with a retired (now deceased) Indian chief ranting against Jews somewhere on the Prairies, to no particular effect.

That is the trouble with government. It enforces what is easy to enforce. The trick is to force government to confront what matters.

Intellectual freedom in Canada: News roundup

My friend, Blazing Cat Fur, writes to say, regarding a recent child abuse case where the government is fronting the abuser,

Social Services have abandoned common sense and given primacy to "cultural sensitivity". The hospital staff involved can raise concerns and are doing their best to extend the girl's hospital stay under any pretext they can find, however the decision of Social Services will likely trump any objections they raise.

One thing we need beware is “multicultural inclusiveness”, which can lead to toleration of backward, violent value systems - whether driven by drug and alcohol abuse or religious nuts funded from abroad. Different causes, but same effect.

The second thing we need to beware is social workers. Social workers have been monstrous pests throughout the twentieth century, because their profession tends to be guided by fads, not science - whether the fad is eugenics or recovered memories or cultural inclusiveness (of abuse of women and girls). All I can say, as someone who has been through some tough times, is - just keep them out of your life.

Blazing also informs me, re yet another kowtow to criminal bands:

This farce proves that hate crime laws are nothing more than political tools in the hands of our political fools. Ontario was able to arrest, charge, try and convict an 83 year old Nazi in a period of 6 months. They had 3 years and 2 attempts to lay charges against Slammin Salman Hossain. They thew the Jewish Community an 83 year old bone and spat in their face by giving Hossain plenty of time and warning to flee.

The Salman Hossain charges are a deceitful pantomine performed to cause the least offense to the Muslim community. Cowards.

“Cowards?” Oh, that is too kindly. They are tax mooches. The average coward just wants to avoid military service or the need to protect his family. The tax mooch is getting rich off it all, at your and my expense. I am glad to think that people are waking up to all this.

PS: I have been less active recently, due to family issues. Wait till you are my age and live in a four generation family, and you will understand.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Intellectual freedom in Canada: The Toronto riots

My own experience of the recent Toronto riots about G8/G20?

I had been warned by two different people I had never met before, in an outlying town, about the risks of returning to Toronto from a family errand that night, even though I had no choice. And Greyhound posted notices saying that it intended to provide service to the downtown terminal, but could give no guarantees.

I am not surprised that the police overreacted.

My experience with police, in general, suggests keeping this in mind: If a drug-addled perp is trying to crash in my door (that actually happened to one of my neighbours years ago), who will I call?

Professor Fancypantsie? Doctor Addled Theory? Reverend Nuance? Joe Mike? Or the local cops? My advice is, be cautious around police doing their duty (whether they are doing it or not must be determined after the crisis). Here's Mark Steyn on the whole business, mediating between Five Feet of Fury and Small Dead Animals re police overreaction.

Hmmm. Here's journalist Steve Paikin:

PAIKIN: I've been watching protests in this city for 30 years. I've been covering events in the city for 30 years. This was not a great day for democracy in Toronto. I saw things I'd never seen before. I saw things that frankly should not have happened. And people will come to their own conclusions about what they believe the state of democracy to be in Toronto and in Canada as a result of what happened. It was a sad bloody day, I'll tell you that much.

Well, if you want to know about the lack of democracy, Steve, try Canada's "human rights" commissions.

But, Steve, there was lots of actual provocation, if you count setting fire to police cruisers, which was bound to annoy the police, as they might be in one at the time. Also, I pay taxes to keep cruisers on the road. If I want fireworks, I'll buy some and set them off in my back yard on Canada Day, not wreck expensive public property and endanger lives.

See, what goes around comes around. The leftists who yap happily in favour when others' rights are violated in "human rights" actions against media - and support dangerous and bloody Middle East causes - are now feeling the blowback themselves.

In other news:

- Franklin Carter, of the Book and Periodical Council of Canada advises

Last month, in Montreal, Jennifer Lynch delivered a speech about the reputation of the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC). Lynch, who is the chief commissioner of the CHRC, expressed concerns about the criticism that the CHRC and other human rights commissions have attracted in recent years over their handling of free speech cases. She also described the CHRC's strategy to counter criticism.

Her speaking notes appear on the CHRC's Web site.

I wouldn't doubt it. Welcome to Nineteen Eighty Four, where bureaucrats decide what you can think, and social workers bark happily in support. Remember, the big thing is to love Big Brother and to agree that no matter how many fingers you see held up, you must actually believe that it is another number. Look, as Winston discovered, it's not enough to just lie to them to avoid torture. You must really believe it.

- Carter also tells me that a book called The Shepherd's Daughter is still advocated in schools, despite a controversial dialogue about suicide bombing. I am very uneasy about the decision because, to the extent that it is recommended for grades 7 and 8, I think that people in that age group are not usually in a position to make reasonable decisions, and may well be recruited for disastrous causes.

He quotes,

Challenges to intellectual freedom are never very far from our doorstep. There’s always someone who wants to tell you what to think, believe, or read, because she or he knows better than you do. It’s when that someone seeks to prevent other people’s access to such expressions that we have to be particularly vigilant.

Peter Carver, Freedom of Expression and Freedom to Read (2009)

Fair enough, but when it comes to life and death decisions, I think that older people often do know better. Teenagers are more likely to attempt suicide over a failed romance than elderly widows.

To me, the question is not whether all underage teens should be forbidden access to such materials so much as how their access can be handled with discretion.

- Also, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression are protesting over-policing at the recent G8/G20 summit in Toronto:

CJFE is also disturbed by the treatment of news media workers covering the protests. According to several reports many were detained, charged and in a few cases attacked by police. Among them:

Two National Post photographers Brett Gundlock and Colin O'Connor were arrested and charged;

CTV News Channel producer Farzad Fatholahzadeh was detained;
Freelance journalist Jesse Rosenfeld was beaten and arrested by police;

Liem Vu, an intern with the National Post, and Lisan Jutras, a Globe and Mail journalist, were among those detained for four hours at Queen and Spadina;

Real News journalist Jesse Freeston was punched in the face by a police officer;

Torontoist journalist Wyndham Bettencourt-McCarthy was struck by a police officer with a baton;

Video journalist Brandon Jourdan was thrown to the ground and beaten by police.

CJFE will be monitoring these cases and will update its list if more come to light. To our knowledge, all journalists have now been released.

Coffee!!: Caught up in the conspirazoid ramblings of the anti-Christian lobby?

A fellow hack phoned me the other night to advise that I am a minor feature in a Canadian book called Armageddon by one Marci McDonald. The book makes me out to be vastly more important than I am, in the intelligent design controversy. This is, of course, in the cause of insisting that traditional Christians pose a major threat to Canada.

Apparently, if you go to church, you have no business voting or running for office.

I was called in from weeding the garden by my mom, due to my friend's call, and later listened, bewildered, at the prose written about me, portraying me as a much more important figure than I am - all in the cause of tales of a conspiracy.

Briefly, I am a hack journalist who follows the intelligent design controversy as my major beat. I started to do so because no one else was following it, and I noted an inverted news funnel. People were proclaiming ID dead every day, but the number of news stories about it was growing.

I broke some key stories, but only because no one else was interested. Go here and here.

Now, I realize that if you were born and raised on political correctness and rote Darwinism, you will not get this, but - essentially - this situation means that the claims about me cannot be true, and are only made in order to influence you in a politically (not factually) correct direction..

The book is from Random House Canada. I am not linking to it, because - according to reliable sources - it features basic factual errors that I would not want propagated.

In these times, when so many people are looking for someone to blame for problems we created for ourselves, these conspirazoid growths are inevitable. But we need not encourage them.

Go here if you want to know the real reasons why there is an intelligent design controversy.

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Clearing out the inbox - Civil rights roundup

The reason I haven’t been blogging much recently is that I have been proofreading a rather large but very interesting book, The Nature of Nature, the papers from the conference of that name in 2000. In it, all sides weigh in on the intelligent design controversy, from many angles. I hope to get back to regular blogging shortly.

Regular readers of this space will know that I take a keen interest in the assault on civil rights in Canada by “human rights” bodies, of which Canada has 14. These bodies essentially manufacture “rights” out of thin air, blundering into media, religion, entertainment, and just about anything else they think needs regulating (think: everything). For more, read Shakedown, Lights Out, or Tyranny of Nice.

Brave Canadians are beginning to fight back, but, sadly, too many wait until “human rights” strikes someone close to them. Then they run around shrieking “What’s happening?!”

Only what happened to all the people whose plight you ignored, fella. And now that it has happened to you, others will say, “Oh well, he must have done something wrong.”

Here is a roundup of recent events (not exhaustive), with comments interspersed. For regular coverage, go to MarkSteyn, Ezra Levant, Five Feet of Fury, Blazing Cat Fur, or Deborah Gyapong.

Next: Intellectual freedom in Canada: Court okay with government-dictated hiring practices for Christian groups

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Court okays government-dictated hiring practices for Christian groups

Christian Horizons is reported to have won in the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. Horizons provides homes for seriously handicapped people in a Christian setting. The issue centred on an employee who - in contravention of a lifestyle code - was living a gay lifestyle. The Ontario “human rights” Commission came down very hard on Christian groups insisting on lifestyles in accord with Christian teachings. Horizons was exonerated by the Ontario Divisional Court, but only on such terms as no one would want to be exonerated - it is okay to be a Christian as long as you don’;t really mean it.

Of course, it wasn’t really a victory at all, despite crowing by groups such as the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.

As Don Hutchinson observed (May 20, 2010) in The National Post,

The Ontario Divisional Court concluded that the job Ms. Heintz was doing was not impacted by her being involved in a same-sex relationship, contrary to the accepted practices of the faith community with which she was serving and contrary to her own signed acceptance of those practices before she started working there. Accordingly, they struck the “same sex relationship” provision from the lifestyle and morality policy of Christian Horizons, concluding Ms. Heintz had every right to work there.

... They have just issued a remedy that violates the very concepts they supported earlier in the decision when they approved of religious communities deciding what they believe and the practices that line up with those beliefs. They have also decided to ignore decisions issued by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2001 (Trinity Western University), 2002 (Syndicat Northcrest v Amselem) and 2009 (Alberta v Hutterian Brethren of Wilson Colony) which clearly state that once the court establishes that a practice has a nexus with a sincerely held religious belief it’s time to stop.

But it is never time to stop, once the principle is established that government is judge over Christian lifestyle teachings that go back two thousand years to the New Testament, teachings to which the charities’ employees have actually assented.

Columnist Charles Lewis notes (May 20, 2010) that Christian charities are now unclear about what’s allowed and what’s not. I can clear that matter up for them, pronto: What’s allowed is whatever the government happens to allow for now, as secular lobbies systematically dismantle the norms of traditional Christian communities.

The secular lobbies will be back for something else next.

Can anything change this situation? I doubt it. Few Christians, and especially not the Christian elite, have the stomach for it, and they would rather bash the working class brethren who embarrass them. Also, a person close to the Harper regime in Ottawa assures me that, despite window dressing, the regime has no intention whatever of reining in the “human rights” industry.

Harper knows full well that the secular lobbies will gain the ear of sympathetic media and Christians will continue to sneer at their brethren instead of rallying for the separation of church and state. A wise man once pointed out to me that the benefit of this approach is that the wolf is usually devouring someone else just now. If all serious Christians directed their resources against the wolf, it might be driven off, but all would need to take risks.

Next: Intellectual freedom in Canada: Will you have ice in that think?

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Libel chill: “Will you have ice in that think?”

Franklin Carter, at the Book and Periodical Council's Freedom of Expression Committee, writes me news re public and private censorship of books and periodicals. Today’s topic is libel chill.

Franklin notes that

The threat of legal action from mining giant Barrick Gold has forced Vancouver-based Talonbooks to postpone publication of a book about the Canadian mining industry.

Publisher Karl Siegler calls it a clear case of "libel chill" by one of Canada's largest mining companies.

CBC News reports, “[Publisher] Siegler described Imperial Canada as an examination of the political, legal and banking environment that has led 70 per cent of the world's mining companies to register in Canada.

... The letter gave Talonbooks seven days to hand over the manuscript of the book, which was in the process of being translated from French to English.

"We ignored it initially," Siegler said in an interview Wednesday with CBC Radio's Q cultural affairs show.

"As far as we were concerned, they had no right to demand or see copies of manuscripts that were in development prior to their public release. Anyone working on a book has a right to privacy and should not be subject to this kind of supervision."

But after receiving a legal letter, the translators immediately stopped work on the book. Siegler consulted a lawyer, who told him if he proceeded with the book, he could face years in court fighting an opponent with very deep pockets.

"Everyone involved stood to lose millions of dollars," Siegler said. "In the publisher's case, we stood to lose not just the company but all of the titles we have in print, roughly 500 titles dating back to the 1960s, many of which are Canadian classics."

In Quill & Quire, Stuart Woods updates: “Talonbooks president Kevin Williams has told Q&Q that the company is receiving pro bono legal representation from the B.C. Civil Liberties Association and hopes to resume work on the manuscript for Imperial Canada soon.”

The safest conclusion to draw, in my view, is that those who engage in libel chill have a bad case. I wouldn’t normally pay much attention to Imperial Canada, but now I really must have one.

Just think! If everyone did as I plan to do, libel chill would become a much costlier strategy. Anticipated sales would both stiffen the publisher’s backbone and give the chiller pause.

Thanks to Franklin Carter at the Book and Periodical Council's Freedom of Expression Committee.

Next: Intellectual freedom in Canada: “No Bad Bunnies for YOU, kid! Just “How Good Little Girls Learn to Say Correct Things”

Intellectual freedom in Canada: “No Bad Bunnies for YOU, kid! Just “How Good Little Girls Learn to Say Correct Things”

Franklin Carter offers a link to an interesting article on people trying to get books banned from libraries, usually on the theory that children will be corrupted by them.

These people give me a pain in the ear because, if they are the parents, why don’t they choose their own child’s reading material? If not, how do they know that other people’s children will be offended? And why should they make the decision, rather than those children’s own parents?

The reality is that if no one takes the book out, after a while, it will be withdrawn from circulation without comment. If we think that a book teaches kids really bad values, we should advise others discreetly, not create a big public uproar that provides free advertising and enables both author and publisher to parade as martyrs.

Thanks to Franklin Carter at the Book and Periodical Council's Freedom of Expression Committee.

Next: Intellectual freedom in Canada: Go to jail to protect your sources? Maybe you will have to.

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Go to jail to protect your sources? Maybe you will have to.

Journalists have no constitutional right to protect confidential sources at all costs, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled last Friday.

The court ruled 8-1 against the National Post and reporter Andrew McIntosh who sought to quash a search warrant issued in the Shawinigate affair almost a decade ago.

The news is not all bad. Here’s Canadian Journalists for Free Expression on the case:

The court case involved the National Post and former Post reporter Andrew McIntosh and revolved around a search warrant issued almost ten years ago to McIntosh demanding that he turn over to the police an envelope he received from a confidential source. McIntosh refused, believing that he would not be able to protect the confidentiality of his source in doing so, and so the case went to court. The document contained in the envelope is now believed to have been a forgery and is considered to be of some significance as it appeared to implicate former Prime Minister Jean Chretien in a financial conflict of interest.

The first ruling was a victory for the Post and McIntosh, but was later reversed by the Court of Appeal. The Supreme Court's decision today gave some new protection to the journalists/source relationship, but still maintains that the onus remains on the media to prove that the injury would be greater than the benefit involved in disclosure. CJFE along with 10 other free expression and media organizations had intervened in the case, and we had hoped that this onus would be reversed.

"Although not a win for the National Post on the facts of the case, this decision is the strongest statement yet by our courts as to the basis on which the law protects journalists' confidential sources," said Phil Tunley, lawyer and member of CJFE's board. "It establishes the analytical balance that must now be applied by all our courts in any legal proceedings to set that protection aside."

However, the Canadian Association of Journalists is profoundly disappointed:

The Supreme Court ruled this morning that former National Post reporter Andrew McIntosh must give police documents leaked to him while he was investigating the Shawinigate affair. RCMP intend to conduct forensic tests on the documents and the envelope they came in to determine who McIntosh's source is and whether the source leaked forged documents intended to discredit former Prime Minister Jean Chretien.

"This is a significant blow to every journalist's ability to protect whistleblowers who come forward with information that's in the public interest," said CAJ President Mary Agnes Welch. "We fear this will have a profound chilling effect."

The CAJ was part of a coalition of media organizations including the Canadian Newspaper Association, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, Ad IDEM/Canadian Media Lawyers Association and many others that had intervenor status in the case.

One benefit is clarification of what the Supreme Court thinks the law should say. A great difficulty in Canada and a number of other countries has been lack of clarity. Every judge her own Solomon is not the solution either. One problem for media is that, like serious Christians and Jews, they are a minority, and often one that is disliked, so even if this ruling silences whistle-blowers, no outrage will follow. Too many people will just decide to keep their mouths shut about whatever happened.

A number of media weighed in, of course: CBC News, CTV News, Kirk Makin of The Globe and Mail, Shannon Kari of the National Post (also timeline of the Shawinigate affair), Canadian Press,
Tonda MacCharles of the Toronto Star, Janice Tibbetts of the CanWest News Service

Thanks to Franklin Carter at the Book and Periodical Council's Freedom of Expression Committee.

For more intellectual freedom in Canada news, jump to Intellectual freedom in Canada: Everybody saw Mohammed, it seems

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Everybody saw Mohammed, it seems

Blogger Blazing Cat Fur did something really edgy recently: He sponsored an Everybody Draw Mohammed contest, commemorating the Danish cartoon riots. Mark Steyn reflects on the contest:

Veronique, I initially had mixed feelings about Everybody Draws Mohammed Day. Provocation for its own sake is one of the dreariest features of contemporary culture, but that's not what this is about. Nick Gillespie's post reminds us that the three most offensive of the "Danish cartoons" — including the one showing Mohammed as a pig —were not by any Jyllands-Posten cartoonists but were actually faked by Scandinavian imams for the purposes of stirring up outrage among Muslims. As Mr Gillespie says:

It is nothing less than amazing that holy men decrying the desecration of their religion would create such foul images, but there you have it. It is as if the pope created “Piss Christ” and then passed it off as the work of critics of Catholicism.

So, if it really is a sin to depict Mohammed, then these imams will be roasting in hell.

Steyn goes on to point out that what Blazing is really doing is urging everyone to spread the risk.

Some might ask, well, how would I feel if people made fun of my religion? Actually, they do all the time. I prefer to live in a country where they can, and I am free to ignore them, and the civil service and freelance shakedown artists who want to interfere must seek other employment. Ah, if only, ...

And anyway, the extremist imams brought the battle to us. We did not bring it to them.

Intellectual freedom in Canada: At Erosion of Freedom hearings, senator grants immortality to freedom blogger Kathy Shaidle