The real crime is having an opinion not sponsored by a government-approved source of propaganda.

Excellent friend Franklin Carter at the Book and Periodical Council's Freedom of Expression Committee writes to tell me about this: In “Government crackdown on hatred goes a link too far” ( Kingston Whig-Standard, August 15, 2011), Alan Shanoff asks, “Is the federal government proposing to make hyperlinking a crime?”

That seems to be the case when you read Bill C-51, a federal bill called Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act.

The stated purpose of Bill C-51 is the modernization of certain criminal offences. One of the offences to be modernized is the offence of public promotion of hatred against an identifiable group. ...

The new and improved modernized definition makes it crystal clear that hyperlinking is a form of communication. After all, what better way to make something available than providing a link to it, a link you can access with the click of a mouse?

He asks, “ ... many of these sites contain hurtful language but should anybody linking to such sites for any reason be at risk of prosecution?”

Yes indeed, depending on what one means by “Investigative Powers for the 21st Century.” The real crime is having an opinion not sponsored by a government-approved source of propaganda.

If it passes, here is what can happen to the blogger:

1. Lillian Rose is a garden maven whose blog frequently features links to botanist John Turricle’s wonderful work on mildew-resistant blooms. Retirees, into gardening, love her blog.

Rose doesn’t know it, but Turricle is also an avowed racist, and features his eruptions on race in the “Other” section of his blog - stuff she has never so much as looked at, because she and her readers are totally focused on winning the flower show.

Sorry, Rose. Someone complained, and linkers like you were then eagerly sought, by armies of bureaucrats with nothing better to do. So, GAVEL!! Guilty! of spreading hate, with all the fines, adult reform school, and humiliation that implies. Gardening blog hobby, ... toast.

2. Honest John Deal runs a business catering to amputees. Some of his assisted living devices come from a site whose owner insists, from time to time, on featuring anti-Muslim editorials.

Honest John doesn’t agree with the site owners’s views, but that guy is the one distributor who ships to John’s area with no hassles, and amputees hobble by every single day to see if their life-assisting shipments are safely in.

Sorry, John. Someone complained, and linkers like you were then eagerly sought, by armies of bureaucrats with nothing better to do. So, GAVEL!! Guilty! of spreading hate, with all the fines, adult reform school, and humiliation that implies. Business helping others, ... toast.

3. Annie Sellfridge owns and operates an appliance store in a multicultural area. She puts her inventory on line, and also features a popular site section on Saving on Electricity Bills. She doesn’t know it, but one of the sites she linked to is run by “climate change deniers,” who provide their free opinion on that subject, along with advice about energy-efficient appliances. (All Sellfridge was interested in was the fact that they provide multinational numbers , so new immigrant customers can relate to the numbers they best understand.)

Sorry, Annie. Someone complained, and linkers like you were then eagerly sought, by armies of bureaucrats with nothing better to do. So, GAVEL!! Guilty! of spreading hate, with all the fines, adult reform school, and humiliation that implies. Business providing a needed service, ... toast.

4. Blogger O’Leary was interviewing the author of an anti-eugenics book, and - to clearly demo the fact that antique forms of racism survive to the present day - she links to one of them.

Sorry, O’Leary. Someone complained, and linkers like you were then eagerly sought, by armies of bureaucrats with nothing better to do. So, GAVEL!! Guilty! of ...

Spreading: yuh, whatever.

If government cannot do better than this, let’s just dispense with government. Okay? How much worse off would we be without it? Alternatively, write to your Member of Parliament. Tell them you think the Internet should be free, like the press.

And read Tyranny of Nice, Shakedown, and America Alone. And any book on civil liberties.

Toronto District School Board’s plan for peace re sharia-compliant schools

Re the Mosqueterias in sharia-compliant school districts, like the biggest school board in Canada: A proposed

Draft message from the Toronto District School Board to students:

To: students, parents, ratepayers

Date: [tbd]

Subject: Complaints received re sharia schools

--

We feel your pain.

Ever aiming at new levels of balance and diversity, we plan to address the complaints by shortly instituting "Spirituality for gay/lesbian/transgendered/queer/exploring/uncertain teens," proving them with appropriate worship and clergy counselling in previously public space.

[Politician: Good! Balance out the only lobbies that matter.]

We will, of course, continue to suppress observant Christian and Jewish teens who want access to spiritual counselling, lest their harmful culture is propagated. They could end up concluding that some lifestyles are bad for them and that they have the power to decide for themselves.

We want to take this opportunity to reassure our whole community that that goes against everything we believe here at the Board. Fact and rationality are “out the window” now, in favour of diversity studies, post-modernism, deconstruction, victimhood, and plunging IQs.

[Union head: Great! More shight, less fear of an “incompetence” evaluation. Bring it on.]

We pledge to promote any weirdness or hatred whatever, as long as you think you can’t help yourself or your family is forcing you to. We are especially supportive if someone will kill you if you don't go along with the [shight]. We’ll help you adjust to the terror.

[Editor: How did “shight” get in here? We certainly need a better word than that. How about “life affirmation”? Too woo-woo? Wait! Try “peace amid diversity”? Yes, that’s it! Put it in!]

Finally, we promise to continue to shake down the public to support your oppression. Human Rights Commissions have the authority to persecute anyone who thinks you should have a second look before you jump. They've gone after very prominent Canadians, so there is no fear that you will ever get out from under Trudeaupia.

[Recommendation from equity reviewer O’Leary, just before slitting her throat: To drive the point home, make the little serfs study Canadian Icon Margaret Atwood’s horror novel about “Gilead,” a mythical theocracy in the southern United States. We can’t permit the young swine to realize that theocracy is happening here, and not there. For effect, throw in another compulsory Atwood three-loon special, will you? Just to teach them to ALWAYS point the finger abroad, to distract attention from what's happening at home.]

Note: Everything above is fiction except for the facts.

To my school board trustee: On the tax-funded sharia “public” school, in Toronto

On the tax-funded sharia “public” school, featuring compulsory attendance for those who can’t afford private or home schooling:

I used to work with the Toronto District School Board as an equity reviewer. Seeing this, and reading background information, I must ask, Is there some reason that the Board should continue to exist? Couldn’t we have female "uncleanness" and exclusion of those who don’t adhere to the correct religion without a school board?

There are lots of places where nobody goes to school and everybody behaves that way and thinks it is right. What are you trustees adding besides my tax dollars at work?

You, at least, I trust to help put a stop to this.

sincerely,
Denyse O’Leary
(a taxpayer compelled to fund exalting one religion over others and female uncleanness over equality - just think, the City could seize my property if I refused to fund what we all fought all our lives against ... what I was paid by the Board to work against! When did the war that we lost even happen? Where? Memory loss on my part?)

Note: Here are the trustees.

Note 2: Yes,the blog is still on hold, as I got a much-needed extension for the book till November 1, 2012.

Intellectual freedom: New Media and Suicide Accusation

Recently, “Karajou” from Conservapedia contacted me regarding a claim that their site caused a suicide.

Imagine, if you will, that this is real, that the suicide had actually happened. It would be in the newspapers. It would be on TV. The news about it would be viral, and it would be nation-wide. How do I figure that? "CONSERVATIVE WEBSITE CAUSES MAN TO KILL HIMSELF" would be the screaming headline in big block letters; the mainstream media would have a field day from New York to Los Angeles; and Keith Olbermann would be in such a lather about it on his PMSNBC show that you could see the foam dribbling down the left side of his mouth. If there's anything to make conservatives look bad, this would be it. I can see Stephan Colbert staring down Andy again, with that goofy eyebrow of his lifted above those horn rim glasses.

Yes, I can imagine. We live in the age of truthing, birthing, grassy knolls, tinfoils, and people who think the government should run the media because US vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin (2008) is supposedly responsible for a far-off madman’s murders. There appears to be no substance to the claim, but why would that matter these days?

As I have said elsewhere, free media actually reduce political violence, at least in North America:

... 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 attempts.

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.

But, as I told Karajou, suppose there was even a possibility that reading something that upset him tipped a high-risk suicide over the edge? Some thoughts:

- People often act irrationally in the aftermath of a loved one’s suicide. Blaming a third party is common. It’s almost as common as pretending it wasn't really suicide.

In a way, one can see why people do it. It's almost like transferring suicide to the "murder" category. And what better way than pinning the "murder" on someone you don't like anyway?

It amounts to: "I can't cope with this terrible loss but I can link it to one of my existing hatreds."

Emotionally, it doubtless feels great for a while; as a way of coping, it's terrible.

- Of course a Web site was not to blame. If the posts depressed the man, he should have avoided them in principle, the way an alcoholic should avoid bars: Not bad for everybody, but bad for him.

News.gov is most certainly not the answer. Government-friendly media are lazy media, and they certainly won’t represent you.

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: The reformed Huckleberry Finn - all whine all the time, I guess

Ruben Bolling - the cartoonist who draws Tom the Dancing Bug - gives the new revised [politically correct] edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn comic book treatment. Political correctness is easier mocked than blocked, and mockery is the best strategy in the long run.

Hey, it works. People of my 60-ish generation retired the chronic “I cam from a broken home” whine, not so much because many of us also came from broken homes, but because it was a sacrosanct whine. Getting whining out of earshot was easier than getting whinemeisters out of their jobs.

Curiously: Where I grew up, the N-word was treated as a sign of low class upbringing. An "in" person knew that other people could come from different places and look different.

Hat tip: Franklin Carter at the Book and Periodical Council's Freedom of Expression Committee

Intellectual freedom: Friends have been asking if this is the most asinine newspaper column ever written

Can you offer me a better one?

A Brit graces the world by emitting:

Free speech can't exist unchained. US politics needs the tonic of order

If America is to speak in a way that heals, as Obama wishes, it needs the curbs and regulations that make freedom of expression real.

The scary thing is that journo Simon Jenkins probably even knows who George Orwell is and what Newspeak is.

And in the new muffle-topia, he’d have which big job, I wonder?

Foreign papers please copy: Since Obama properly put an end to the blame circus, rare moments of sanity on the subject have become general.

Better  still,  It’s now apparent just who supports thought control for abetter world, precisely because they were free to say it.

Intellectual freedom: When “silent no more” morphed swiftly into “silent, no kidding!”

On recent legacy media demands for more government control of new media, on the undemonstrated (and undemonstrable) ground that new media spurred the Tucson assassin, Ottawa Citizen columnist David Warren writes,

We stand against the politics of the guillotine, or The Politics of Procrustes, as the British analytic philosopher Antony Flew explained, in a wonderfully clear book (1981). His title referred to the Greek myth of Procrustes, who assigned himself the task of making all who came his way “equal” -- either by stretching them on his metal bed, or by chopping down their limbs.

And words, too, have come to be tortured, so that in current radical parlance, “diversity” means everyone must have the same opinions, or be subject to stretching or chopping by the machinery of the “human rights” industry.

And, “paranoia” means, unwillingness to be so stretched, or chopped.

- “Unwilling to be chopped”, January 16, 2011

It amounts to making government our zookeeper. He adds,
Read more »

Intellectual freedom: Truly dangerous media ignored while meddlesome government fusses about trifles, until ...

Until the truly dangerous stuff becomes required reading, of course.

Media watchdog Brent Bozell thinks the storm of hogwash that social media inspired Tucson mass murderer Jared Loughner is dissipating.

None too soon. Bozell also raises the fact that Loughner was a heavy consumer of violence-themed music, and “troother” films

The wire services added that Loughner liked government-conspiracy documentaries like the 9/11-truther films "Loose Change" and "Zeitgeist," and bizarre cult films like "Donnie Darko," a 2001 movie summarized as "A troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a large bunny rabbit that manipulates him to commit a series of crimes."

Bozell does not advocate banning troothers and nutters; his message is “News media, shape up and do your homework!” For example, “It took 72 hours for Loughner's entertainment appetites to enter the media mainstream,” - sure, because the media mainstream was awash in junk rather than story research, so too busy to notice.

And those are the people who would control other media for everyone’s good?

On that last point, I’d also like to observe that truly dangerous media usually do not rate the attention of government before they emerge in calls to mass murder numbering in the millions.
Read more »

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. )

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 the United States: Commentator fired due to willies about “Muslim” dress

US National Public Radio’s recent dump of Fox News’s well-regarded liberal commentator Juan Williams is yet another “political correctness gone bad” story. Williams’s sin, it seems, was to confess to Bill O’Reilly that he felt ”nervous“ when boarding a plane with people in Muslim dress. He added that a general prejudice against Muslims as extremists is wrong.

This story reveals the difference between the pursuit of political correctness, NPR-style, and the pursuit of fact-based reporting. Political correctness is organized lying, with this result: If a man cannot safely admit how he feels, we don’t have key relevant facts to report.

On the one hand, “Muslim” garb (really, Middle Eastern garb) is surely a personal choice. On the other hand, we all make statements by how we dress, whether we recognize it or not. If I went to the Middle East and ran around in tight jeans and a skimpy top - or a nun’s habit, a nurse’s uniform, or battledress, I’d be making a statement too. Whether I am legit - or whether other people’s assumptions about me - are is what we should explore, not suppress.

(Note:
Here's retired psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple on political correctness, nd here is his take on the ensuing epidemic of false apologies.)

Some see in this episode the death rattle of liberalism:

Lots and lots and lots of Americans feel the same way as Juan Williams. And that includes lots and lots of liberals. And probably a lot of liberals who work at NPR. Juan's "crime" wasn't that he said something bigoted. His crime is that he said something that liberals find politically incorrect. And that he said it out loud. And worst of all, that he said it on the Fox News Channel.

Once proud defenders of freedom, now zealous social engineers. (Think Canadian Broadcasting Corporation here, currently said to be doing an internal bias review, as if an internal review could reveal bias!) Here’s William’s view: “I Was Fired for Telling the Truth” (October 21, 2010):

Yesterday NPR fired me for telling the truth. The truth is that I worry when I am getting on an airplane and see people dressed in garb that identifies them first and foremost as Muslims.

This is not a bigoted statement. It is a statement of my feelings, my fears after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 by radical Muslims. In a debate with Bill O’Reilly I revealed my fears to set up the case for not making rash judgments about people of any faith. I pointed out that the Atlanta Olympic bomber -- as well as Timothy McVeigh and the people who protest against gay rights at military funerals -- are Christians but we journalists don’t identify them by their religion.

[ ... ]

Two days later, Ellen Weiss, my boss at NPR called to say I had crossed the line, essentially accusing me of bigotry. She took the admission of my visceral fear of people dressed in Muslim garb at the airport as evidence that I am a bigot. She said there are people who wear Muslim garb to work at NPR and they are offended by my comments. She never suggested that I had discriminated against anyone. Instead she continued to ask me what did I mean and I told her I said what I meant. Then she said she did not sense remorse from me. I said I made an honest statement. She informed me that I had violated NPR’s values for editorial commentary and she was terminating my contract as a news analyst.

[ ... ]

This self-reverential attitude was on display several years ago when NPR asked me to help them get an interview with President George W. Bush. I have longstanding relationships with some of the key players in his White House due to my years as a political writer at The Washington Post. When I got the interview some in management expressed anger that in the course of the interview I said to the president that Americans pray for him but don’t understand some of his actions. They said it was wrong to say Americans pray for him.

Later on the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock crisis President Bush offered to do an NPR interview with me about race relations in America. NPR management refused to take the interview on the grounds that the White House offered it to me and not their other correspondents and hosts. One NPR executive implied I was in the administration’s pocket, which is a joke, and there was no other reason to offer me the interview. Gee, I guess NPR news executives never read my bestselling history of the civil rights movement “Eyes on the Prize – America’s Civil Rights Years,” or my highly acclaimed biography “Thurgood Marshall –American Revolutionary.” I guess they never noticed that "ENOUGH," my last book on the state of black leadership in America, found a place on the New York Times bestseller list.

[ ... ]

Daniel Schorr, my fellow NPR commentator who died earlier this year, used to talk about the initial shock of finding himself on President Nixon’s enemies list. I can only imagine Dan’s revulsion to realize that today NPR treats a journalist who has worked for them for ten years with less regard, less respect for the value of independence of thought and embrace of real debate across political lines, than Nixon ever displayed.

No doubt, Williams feels comforted by the recent $2 million cable deal Fox has offered him:

Fox News Chief Executive Roger Ailes handed Williams a new three-year contract Thursday morning, in a deal that amounts to nearly $2 million, a considerable bump up from his previous salary, the Tribune Washington Bureau has learned. The Fox News contributor will now appear exclusively and more frequently on the cable news network and have a regular column on FoxNews.com.

"Juan has been a staunch defender of liberal viewpoints since his tenure began at Fox News in 1997," Ailes said in a statement, adding a jab at NPR: “He’s an honest man whose freedom of speech is protected by Fox News on a daily basis.”

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 news roundup

Apparently, according to a friend, S. T. Harnick, an adjunct prof at the University of Illinois got fired

What bit of pedagogy was so verboten that the University of Illinois could no longer abide Prof. Howell’s presence on campus? That would be nothing less than the Church’s teaching concerning homosexual behavior:

“Natural Moral Law says that Morality must be a response to REALITY…. In other words, sexual acts are only appropriate for people who are complementary, not the same.”

This bit of Catholic doctrine so offended one student that it resulted in an anonymous message being sent to religion department head Robert McKim complaining of, you guessed it, “hate speech.” The complaining student, however, isn’t even in Prof. Howell’s class:

An unidentified . . . student claimed to be a friend of the offended student. The writer said in the e-mail that his friend wanted to remain anonymous.

Why do I report on this stuff? A key doctrine of Darwinism is that the mind is not real, the brain is merely evolved tissue. So anything can be done to anyone.

Not so fast, Darwinist, not so fast.

You can read another article of interest here:

As the hostilities between the current government and the Tea Party movement have become increasingly rancorous, the division of American society into two cultures holding thoroughly incompatible worldviews has become obvious. In fact, the two forces are clearly on an unavoidable collision course. Although many people may understandably be most interested in knowing which side will prevail, I think an equally important and troubling question is precisely by what means the matter will be resolved. Will reason prevail and the people in power either have their agenda confirmed or step aside gracefully? Or will there be intransigence, increasing conflict, and even violence?

My guess is the latter, as more people will guess that the new aristocracy is, well, a new aristocracy. They want to live good at others’ expense.

I was once in the Toronto transit system, and wanted to dispose of some wrapper, which I supposed was non-recyclable. The employees who happened to be collecting the trash informed me that it did not matter which recycle bin I put it in, because all were just bundled together anyway. That was clearly true, based on the contents of their sacks of trash on the trolley. So it was all just a big fraud, aimed at taking in Toronto people. Useless tax mooches, pretending to do more about the environment.


Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:


Intellectual freedom news roundup