Let Us Do Nothing While Yet There Is Time.

As a great French philosopher once said, "I might not like what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it if I'm not busy that day."

When it comes to heroic rhetoric in Canada, there is no shortage of people trying to stop it. Speech heroic could be potentially harmful and hurtful to someone's feelings someday somewhere maybe potentially. Free speech, sometimes a good thing, is sometimes a bad thing. Sometimes "free speech" is Hate Speech.

You, as a private citizen, can't know all there is to know about the whole of the nation and Humanity, nor how the the world feels about various things that could be deemed insulting to them. How could you know about people's feelings, those from around the world, unless you were an expert in sensitivity and one trained in spotting racism and hate? Come on, you can't know all that. It takes an expert.

Lucky you, there is a collection of fine women and men who are expert in sensing hurt feelings and emotional harm done by hate-speech mongers, those writers and poets and bigots among us, those like that Canadian author Mark Steyn. Thankfully, among us walk investigators and adjudicators of Human Rights Commissions and Tribunals. Experts in finding hate wherever it lays, however deep, no matter how hidden from the lay person. Yes, B.C. has it's Human Rights Tribunal; and those who work for it, who work for you, have found Mark Steyn. Will they expose him as a hate-monger? Will we find the truth about hate? About Steyn? Only if the Human Rights Tribunal can do their work.

Mark Steyn is a best-selling Canadian author, writer of America Alone. America. Need we say more?

In a tolerant society, how can we tolerate hate? How can we tolerate Steyn? How can a tolerant society tolerate Steyn's hate-speech? Who will stop him?

Mohammed Elmasry, head of the Canadian Muslim Congress, he who unsuccessfully attempted to bring Shari'a law into the family court system of Ontario in 2005, is hurt, is deeply hurt, by Steyn's racist and islamophobic book. Elmasry has filed a complaint against Mclean's magazine for republishing part of Steyn's book. Hate speech. The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal will hold a hearing to decide what to do, will decide for us if we as a society can tolerate such writing in this nation. They are Human Rights experts. They know hate speech.

You? Not so much.

What about referring to an ethnic group as the Sons of Apes and Pigs? What about advocating wife beating? What about advocating the murder of homosexuals? How about advocating in public the killing of civilians in war? You see, you might think these are bad things, but you would be mistaken-- because of you not being an expert; and you might not realize that such as above is commanded by Allah in the Koran. Elmasry advocates tKoranic things, it's true, but it is Steyn who is the hate-monger. It takes an expert to understand these things, which is why we have the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal to think for us. You don't know the fine details of hate. How could you? It takes an expert to understand. It takes a hearing.

That hearing is occurring now in Vancouver. Hate-speech? It could happen to you.

Let us be thankful that bureaucrats trained in understanding things for us have taken on such an arduous task. Praise them. And let us do nothing while yet there is time.

For more details, please search:
http://covenantzone.blogspot.com/
Or: http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/

Everything old is tired again

Some good ideas have their day and then fade away. And then sometimes everything old gets tried again.

Censoring Nazis was a terrific idea.

I'm all for it. I think Nazis should be fought till they're defeated and the ones responsible for major crimes should be hanged. I'm a tad liberal when it comes to defining major crimes, but there is the legal system to even out my attitude. So we might see daylight while walking down the street after all. Courts are a moderating influence on folks like me. Except when folks like me are in charge. Then they're more like kangaroo courts with a strong bent toward revenge rather than sense and justice. Even worse than that, though, would be a court with a mission to seek out and destroy all hints of crime, even if those crimes haven't yet been committed. Thought Crimes. Crimes hunted down and expunged before they happen. Hunters in offices seething with righteous rage and moral fury. Clerks with fire in the eye and a determination to-- git 'em.

We got them already. Nazis are done. We got them years before I was even born, and I'm an old guy. They got got when Dietrich was one of the hottest babes on the planet. Getting Nazis was a great idea then. We got them. We hanged some. Not enough, but we hanged some and made a point. I like it. We got 'em. And then we moved on.

But now, way too many years later, we have people still hunting Nazis. There are lots of folks in the world who are bad enough to feel good enough about hanging to feel some enthusiasm for it. But mostly we don't go after folks who deserve hanging. We find instead we have heresy hunters, creepy little clerks in offices who are so wrapped up in their little dramas of the mind that they've completely lost sight of the world the rest of us live in. We get the same drama with a whole new cast and a whole new set, and the plot doesn't make any sense at all.

Deitrich against Hitler. Yeah!

Cherie Blair against 'discrimination"? Uh....

BC human Rights Tribunal against Mark Steyn?

You get the picture.

What Price Free Speech?

Canada. The question here is of censorship: Is it good or is it bad? The question is for a small minority who even care at all. Most not only don't care about the question, they don't even realize it's being asked seriously in this country in our courts and in our daily practical lives. Most people, if forced to say, will say what they think their friends and neighbors would say, having no real idea at all of the nature of the debate. Such is the nature of democracy. It does truly suck but it's better than any alternative to it.

The following quotation by haliburton Jan 05 2008 5:42 PM, comes from a George Jonas column in the National Post Newspaper.

Dean Steacy is an INTERNET "investigator" for the Canadian Human Rights Commission and Barbara Kulaszka, a lawyer representing a website owner)

MS. KULASZKA: " Mr. Steacy, you were talking before about context and how important it is when you do your investigation. What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate one of these complaints?"

MR. STEACY: "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value."

MS. KULASZKA: "Okay. That was a clear answer."

MR. STEACY: "It's not my job to give value to an American concept."

****

Here's a bit more, by Tristan Emmanual, from World Net Daily:

It's not that Steacy rejects "freedom of speech." He simply doesn't believe in the concept of a pluralistic democracy where people actually have a constitutional guarantee that the government won't be able to silence them just because someone like Steacy says so. And the reason he rejects the concept of democracy is because in his world, and in the world of his cadre of "hate-crusaders," it is only his definitions that matter, not ours.

Crusaders such as Steacy are working to "cleanse" the Internet of critical opinions, ideas, and speech they don't like. And unfortunately for Canadians, they have the authority to assess fines of up to $50,000 and incarcerate would-be "haters."

****

There has to be some record of this dialogue actually taking place, right? I won't just accept someone's word for it, even if it's on the Internet. Should I take Mark Steyn's word for it? No, not just because.. Here is what he writes on January 06, 2008 at NRO Weekend:

At the National Review/Thomas More College event in New Hampshire last night, several NR readers were kind enough to enquire about my prospects of "victory" against Canada's "Human Rights" commissars. I think they're best summed up by this exchange from the Warman vs Lemire hearing before the Canadian Human Rights Commission (page 4793). [pdf] Dean Steacy is the principal "anti-hate" investigator of the HRC....

****

Page 4,793. Just in case you didn't down-load the pdf and didn't read the page in question, you might well wonder who Mark Steyn is and why I would trust his reference. Let's see:

[Steyn is] a vile little piece of work that writes for Maclean's under the name Mark Steyn. Steyn is yet another of the "chickenhawk" crowd - pro war, pro American aggression, and desperately phobic of the "brown-skinned menace" that he predicts will overrun Europe in a few generations. (I won't go into the details of Steyn's bird cage liner book - if you really want to read it, find it in the library or a used book store ... or at the bottom of a parrot cage)

Apparently, Mr. Steyn finds himself subject of a human rights complaint....

****

Oh well. We should all be thankful we have the Canadian Human Rights Commission to save us from ourselves. We are not worthy. They do it for us anyway. How lovely.

Because very few people care about the question of free speech and democracy in general we end up with abuse by neo-fascists from the Left, not different really from neo-fascists from the Right. Some concerns end up in the middle, such as the one below.

Should we enable our determined violent enemies to organize themselves using our technology? We have a lot to think through. We won't make any serious moves til the majority of people are in some kind of agreement about whatever we do. It might take years before the people in general in the West conclude that Islam is a serious danger that must be confronted seriously. We in the meantime can look at what we think about our own positions. This piece is a concerned person's questioning. We can all do so of that to our advantage. Then we'll act in some way.