Ontario Public Service Employee attempts to deprive journalist of basic rights at Queens Park to defer to hate group supporters

Ontarians who were under the impression that they live in a free society where they can use cameras in public places may be surprised to learn they are not free from harassment by agents of the Province.

Well-known Canadian political blogger Blazing Cat Fur was at Queen's Park Sunday afternoon to record the al Quds Day rally held by CASMO,  a Khomeinist hate group that has posted anti-Israel videos to its website by the neo-Nazi former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

A Queen's Park Security Guard, an employee of the Provincial civil service, attempted to get BCF to stop filming since it was "offensive" to the Khomeini-worshipping women who had gathered to denounce and vilify Israel in front of the provincial legislature while waving the flag of a banned terrorist organization.

The Province appears to have omitted to provide basic training in civil rights to its security personnel. A Toronto Police constable finally told the guard that BCF had the right to film a public demonstration on public property - something that would be obvious to any high school civics student, but evidently not to someone entrusted with keeping the peace at the seat of Ontario's government.

CASMO came under fire earlier in the week when Mayor Rob Ford and a number of Councillors, including Doug Ford and James Pasternak, attempted to have the City revoke the Shia Muslim group's permission to hold an al Quds Day seminar and dinner at a city owned facility. City politicians were concerned that CASMO and al Quds Day, an event created by the late Ayatollah Khomeini for the purpose of demonizing Israel, had deeply anti-Semitic overtones and their use of the Scarborough Centennial Centre was a violation of the city's anti-discrimination policy.

The Mayor and Councillors' wishes were overruled by the City Manager, but it came to light that the decision to allow CASMO to use the facility was influenced by a City department head who had written an editorial in favour of the Canadian Arab Federation, which was defunded by the federal government amid allegations of it being anti-Semitic and expressing support for terrorism. This same department head also advocated for use of Sharia Law in Ontario's Family Courts and co-authored a paper with a U of T Professor who stirred up a recent controversy by facilitating anti-Semitism in her class.

It seems the Fords' and Pasternak's concerns about CASMO were well founded. Speakers at CASMO's Sunday afternoon rally at Queen's Park made pronouncements like, "..the Zionist regime that sucks the resources, the blood, and everything that belongs to the people all across the world..and they use it for themselves" while their supporters waved the flag of Hezbollah,  an anti-Semitic terrorist organization. The bigotry was abundant at the event as another speaker at CASMO's hate fest, the Islamic Society of York Region's Zafar Bangash,  referred to President Obama as "that black man in the White House."

At CASMO's Friday evening gathering, the City took unprecedented action in sending a supervisor to monitor what was said. That supervisor's report is not yet publicly available, but this entire episode highlights shortcomings in the decision-making process by the City's bureaucracy and the need to examine it in depth.




UPDATE:  A cruel irony is that the hate-group CASMO was allowed to use city property to spew its bile, but a peaceful, friendly group that wishes ill-will to no one was banned from using City property the same day.

update h/t Scaramouche

From ShiaTV.net, where CASMO routinely uploads its videos:

A call for the ethnic cleansing of Jews