Politically Correct Indoctrination and Censorship at York University

University education is supposed to be about exploring and discussing ideas. At York University, it's about suppressing them if they don't conform to their hypocritical concepts of political correctness:

Australian Art Gallery declares art must not cause offense

Or at least, must not cause offense to one particular group...

Photos of women depicted wearing hijabs have been pulled from an forthcoming art exhibition in Melbourne's CBD. 

The Platform art gallery in the Degraves Street underpass made a last-minute call on Monday to exclude the photo collection, claiming its representations of hijabs could imply disempowered women.

The photos at the centre of issue show women with hair draped around their necks and faces to resemble the Islamic veil.

From the Islamic Republic of Great Britain: FOI request reveals Geller & Spencer were banned for "pro-Israel" views

Pam Geller in The Daily Caller: 

The British government tried to cover its tracks. But a new cache of documents Robert Spencer and I have received in our battle to overturn our being banned from Britain reveal that a chief reason why we were banned from the country was because we strongly support Israel. As part of our lawsuit against the Queen of England and the Home Secretary et al, we have received numerous documents between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Office of Security and Counterterrorism, and the Home Secretary. In one of them, an official in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office whose name was redacted wrote this letter on May 7 to a recipient whose name was also redacted:

h/t Blazing Cat Fur

Islamic censorship rules enforced at London School of Economics

Proving again that despite the pretense of claiming to want to foster academic freedom and an environment of intellectual discovery, western universities are rapidly becoming a place where only politically correct, leftist opinions are permitted.

More at Harry's Place


h/t Terry Glavin

Jonathan Kay: How 9/11 killed Canadians’ appetite for human-rights speech codes

...Even before 9/11, the notion that neo-Nazism and KKK-style racism was still a real and lingering threat to Canada’s social fabric was beginning to wear very thin. But Section 13 and its provincial equivalents remained on the books anyway. Canadian society, then as now, felt vaguely guilty about the (very real) mistreatment historically doled out to Jews, blacks, aboriginals and immigrants. And though many Canadians rolled their eyes at the manner by which human-rights commissions were expanding the definition of “discrimination,” most bien-pensant types still saw eliminating racism as a more important project than protecting free speech.

All of this changed on October 20, 2006, the publication date of Mark Steyn’s famousMaclean’s magazine essay “The future belongs to Islam” (adapted from his book,America Alone. Its theme was that an enfeebled West was under demographic siege from Muslim immigrant populations bristling with militant attitudes and unassimilated young men. Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress launched complaints with the Canadian Human Rights Commission and its provincial equivalents in B.C. and Ontario. Around the same time, the (now defunct) Western Standard magazine, published by current Sun News talking head Ezra Levant, printed the infamousJyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons, which elicited a separate set of human rights complaints from Syed Soharwardy of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada. The backlash against these two (unsuccessful) human-rights prosecutions ultimately is what led to the elimination of Section 13 of the Human Rights Act.

Read the whole article at THE NATIONAL POST

Two wasteful Canadian institutions bite the dust

Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the part that allowed for kangaroo court Human Rights Commissions to fine and censor Internet and phone messages based on the "likelihood to cause hate" has finally been voted out of existence by Parliament. There will be a one year phasing out period.

And in other good news, the wasteful Canadian International Development Agency, which was a trough for lunatic, anti-Western NGOs in Canada to feed from, has been eliminated and its functions merged into the new Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development.

Despite the warnings of fear mongers, Hate Speech will remain illegal in Canada, but prosecutions will have to meet the standards of courts of law, not the opinions of 3rd rate patronage appointments without law degrees.

Canada will also continue to provide foreign Aid, but in a more sensible, cost effective way.

So how's that Egyptian "Arab Spring" going?

A world where "progressive" means totalitarian liar

I've been saying the same thing for a while now...

Feminazis attack University of Toronto Men's Rights Lecture

As I've written before, I don't find the Men's Rights movement particularly compelling. It seems like more of a harmless oddity than anything else.

But what has made it interesting lately is the hateful vitriol it has inspired in Women's and Gender Studies classes in academia.

One of the significant things Men's Rights groups is doing is challenging the preposterous, self-interested, psudo-academic facade of the ideological-based indoctrination occurring in Gender Studies programs.

Faced with these challenges, the radical who are immersed in identity-politics react as they usually do - by trying to shut down the free speech of people who they disagree with. That approach, better than anything, illustrates the vapidity and dishonesty of their agenda. What other reason would explain why they are so fearful of criticism that they react violently to try to shut it down?

I passed by the protest on Thursday outside the University of Toronto on my way to another event, but stayed for a minute of two to listen to what was happening.

As I approached, the protesters were shrieking "women hold up half the sky!." That saying is a quote from Chairman Mao, which suggests the totalitarian mindset of the Marxist infused Gender and Women's Studies Programs.





From another angle:



The Ryersonian has a full report, including videos, of the events that night.

GenuineWitty also has details and insight into the motives of some of the protesters

Canada's version of academic freedom: Queen's University cancels free speech

On the night of April 2, 2013 Queen's University administration and student union officials ordered the removal of a free speech display at the university. However, they did not only remove the canvas upon which students expressed their opinions. Campus security took the canvas and refused to return it to its owners, members of the Queen's Students for Liberty. This video shows the sequence of events.

Queen's Students for Liberty had booked a space in the John Deutsch University Centre for its "wall" - a blank space upon which students were encouraged to express themselves. 

Some of the roughly 50 entries on the canvas, however, were deemed offensive by the school's Alma Mater Society, according to the student group, and school security removed the exhibit Tuesday evening.

University officials are expected to comment on the details later this afternoon, but have so far not said what on the wall was found to be offensive.

The Students for Liberty argued that nothing there violated Canadian law, and that the act of dismantling the exhibit is the worse crime.

"I am dismayed with the gross violation of free speech that we saw committed by Queen's last night" Jeffrey Waligun, president of the group, said in a release Wednesday. "It is one thing for a lone hooligan to vandalize a display ... It is far more disturbing when the university itself becomes the hooligan."

That'll learn ya! "Critical Thinkers" at Toronto District School Board complain to police about sarcastic blogger

At the Toronto District School Board and particularly at its ideological godmother, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, they claim their goal is to produce critical thinkers. What they don't tell you is that by their definition, "critical thinking" means to think exactly the way they tell you to, without dissent...or else.

A Toronto blogger who goes by the moniker Blazing Cat Fur has been at the forefront of exposing the hypocrisy as well as the sheer idiocy promoted by the TDSB and it looks like they finally had enough.

Yesterday morning,the mild-mannered, law-abiding blogger received a visit from not one but two Toronto Police Service Detectives to investigate a sarcastic comment left on his blog musing, "OISE and the TDSB need to be purged, or burnt to the ground whichever is more effective."

Interestingly, when my friend, Muslim reformer Tarek Fatah, received an actual death threat via social media from someone in Toronto, the police didn't think it was worth their time to bother with that.

As usual, the TDSB brain-trust has made themselves look stupid and Blazing Cat Fur, as well as other critics of the preposterous social engineering attempts by the public school board, will redouble their efforts to expose them.

Please check out BLAZING CAT FUR'S post on this HERE..

Also check out The Toronto Sun article about this here

Critique of Women's Studies goes on at U of Toronto despite threats

I didn't make it to the Fiamengo speech at the University of Toronto last night, but expected it would be well covered.

Josh Dehaas from Macleans On Campus was there and wrote up a good report:

Only one person really lost her temper, after making a thought-provoking query about the impact of Fiamengo’s assertion that “children need their fathers” on lesbian parents. Fiamengo responded by suggesting there’s research that children do better in two-parent households. She didn’t like the answer. “That’s heteronormative bullshit,” the woman screamed, before a dramatic exit.

I don’t know that Fiamengo made a sound academic case. What I do know is that she deserves respect for gathering evidence and calmly presenting it. She also offered advice all students should heed. “Educate yourselves so you can challenge [each other],” and, “do it will style, not hatred.”

She’s right on that. The freedom to debate unpopular ideas is something universities have a duty to protect. On Thursday night at the University of Toronto, that ideal was challenged but prevailed.

Hypocrites, censors and idiots assailing silly U of Toronto Men's Rights group

Finding someone with a perceptive, analytical, intelligent mind in a university Women's Studies course, either as a student or instructor,  is possibly a greater challenge than finding a Rabbi in Mecca during the Haj.

Their classes are filled with bitter women carrying more chips on their shoulders than you'd find at a lumberjack contest. They are punctuated by a few spotty, desperate males hoping to ooze into some action by demonstrating their subservience to dominant womankind. These classes are filled with facial piercings and tattoos aplenty, and you'll never see less than half a dozen of those miserable creatures draped with kefiyehs as a radical fashion statement, regardless of the time of year. These are the types of students who want a degree, but lack the brains to qualify for medicine, or physics, or engineering, or law, or English Literature, or remedial basket weaving.

Of course there are some who register just to find a date, since being an unattractive, overweight lesbian presents a number of practical obstacles to finding romance in the outside world.

One of the strange phenomenons that the idiocy of Women's and Gender Studies courses has given rise to is the reactionary Men's Rights Movement. The participants in Men's Rights groups are not, despite claims of moronic Women's Studies students, "rape and incest apologists" but a bunch of dorky guys who want some "man time."  As they want it in wonky university environments, they have to give it some sort of academic and `social justice`pretense for official recognition.

It wouldn't bother the Women's Studies thugettes as much if these men wanted gender segregation for the purpose of a big, sweaty Gay orgy of invasions which would undoubtedly increase their empathy with the female experience. But as they are mostly heterosexual males who really just want to be able to drink beer and play video games without some chick making them talk about their feelings, feminist outrage has understandably ensued.

Part of the problem is that the men in "Men's Rights" groups must spend too much time in university classes where Women's Studies students are picking up other credits, or in government-funded workplaces that employ too many people with sociology degrees. Aside from the idiocy those environments present, and assuming you're never litigated in Family Court, men's rights aren't being assailed too vigorously and anyone who thinks otherwise is probably living in an insular bubble.

At least it seemed that way until Feminazis helped by making the Men`s Rights groups' points for them.

Radical feminists deplore the term `Feminazi.`They see themselves as social justice martyrs, and how dare anyone compare their heroic, hairy-armpitted activism with Hitlerism!?!

But what else can you call violent, hateful fanatics who use thuggish tactics and intimidation (see video below)  to try to suppress something as benign as a conversation about male suicide rates and the (alleged) difficulty of being a male in the modern world. And all because it offends their hysterical sensibilities.



There is a laughable irony to a group of people who, as a whole are enthusiastic supporters of the anti-Semitic Israeli Apartheid Week and call mere condemnation of it "an attack on free speech" while they violently try to prevent points of view other than their own from being expressed.

Following the violent melee and attempted censorship of a Warren Farrell  lecture on "Men's Rights"  at the University of Toronto (along with gross misrepresentations of his statements and writing) by that university's Women's Studies students last November, they are now enraged that another lecture criticizing the idiocy of their field of "study" is allowed to be taking place at the same school.

This time the lecturer is a woman; a professor from that bastion of neo-Conservative ideology, the University of Ottawa, by the name of Janice Fiamengo.

Professor Fiamengo's speech will, in the word of the event's organizers, discuss  "the problems of academic feminism at Canadian universities: dubious scholarship, indoctrination, dogmatic teaching approaches, limitations on free speech, effects of “equity hiring,” and the consequences for men in the humanities "

A worthwhile subject, totally within the purview of academic discourse, and so naturally, Women's Studies Feminazis and the totalitarians at the socialist, regressive NDP and Union-controlled website rabble.ca want it shut down.

One of the outcomes of the violent protest at the Farrell lecture was that some of the protest leaders were named and shamed by a US-based "Men's Rights" website. That tactic may be the best way of dealing with those who would like to hide in a mob while trying to take away other people's rights.

According to an article in Metro News:

Heather, a feminist and social justice advocate, says at least one of those young women has been exposed to online bullying and harassment. For that reason, she doesn’t want to see the Janice Fiamengo talk go forward. However, she doesn’t know if she will take place in any kind of protest because she fears the backlash.

Heather, who asked her last name be withheld because she doesn’t want to become a target for harassment, said she doesn’t think a talk criticizing women’s studies belongs at the University of Toronto.

“That in itself is disrespectful to all of the female students and staff at U of T,” she said.

A bully who complains about not participating in an attempt to bully others because she is afraid of being bullied is just one of the astounding ironies you can chalk up to the hypocritical idiots populating Women's Studies courses.  Extrapolating academic criticism of Women's Studies programs to being "disrespectful to all of the female students and staff at U of T" is another.  But that is to be expected from people in an academic field that endeavors to restrict academic expression it finds offensive.

The lecture by Janice Fiamengo will occur Thursday, March 7 at 7 pm in the University of Toronto's George Ignatieff Theatre. The talk itself should prove interesting, but there is every possibility the real excitement will take place on the way in.

University of Western Ontario student union wants to shut down student newspaper and give space to Muslim association

This is typical of some of the Stalinist student unions at Canadian universities.

This ain't good - The United Nations wants to take control of the Internet

The Russian Federation is leading the charge for a UN treaty which would give national governments control over the Internet.

The UN itself wants the ability to impose Internet taxes to be applied from wealthier countries to poorer ones. Free speech, as always, is being threatened by the world forum whose membership includes a number of totalitarian regimes threatened by their inability to censor criticisms of their government or impose blasphemy regulations.

To give you an idea of what's in store, the UN's conference on International Telecommunications is set to take place next month in Dubai, on of the undemocratic United Arab Emirates.

If you live in a democratic country, pray your government has the wisdom and sanity not to ratify the treaty on your behalf.

Girl Fight in the Arena

Adrienne Batra and Marianne Meed Ward rumble on The Arena with Michael Coren over censorship and unusual applications of environmental policy..and strippers!

Thousands of Muslims rally against free speech in Toronto

In the public square beside the Ontario Superior Court building, across the street from the US Consulate in Toronto, about two thousand enraged Muslims exercised their right to free speech this afternoon to call for that same right to be deprived to anyone who mocks their religion.

If the gathering and the speakers looked familiar, it's with good reason. The speakers, the organizers and much of the crowds were made up of the exact same people responsible for the anti-Israel al Quds Day hate fest in Toronto last month. In fact, despite the professed excuse of demonstrating against a low-budget YouTube video that denigrates the founder of Islam, Mohammed ibn Abdullah,  the rally was clearly an excuse for local Islamists to vent their unrelenting hatred of the United States and Israel. That neither of those countries` governments had anything to do with the film was of course immaterial to them.

The chants were the same as you would hear at any rally where local radical imam Zafar Bangash, who spoke at today`s rally, spews his hatred. For the benefit of anyone whose English or memory for simple expressions of mindless fury isn`t quite up to par, the organizers were thoughtful enough to distribute sheets with the chants printed out.

The only difference with today`s angry throng was, aside from the usual invective against western democracies and promotion of crazed Zionist conspiracy theories was the call for censorship and punishment of those who insult Islam. Among the swarm of grubby, bearded men and veiled women were signs calling for the silencing and punishment of those who mock a long-dead tribal chieftain they believe to have been a prophet. The area resembled a huge outdoor mosque for about an hour as profession of love of Mohammed combined with heavily accented chants of  ``Shame, shame USA!`` and ``Shame, Shame Israel!`` filled the air.

A cute female RCMP officer guarding the outside of the consulate I was trying to flirt with laughed when I said to her, ``this must be very...routine.`` But though the anger and slogans were, in an ominous way, the message was different. Today wasn`t just about Muslims hating the west, it was about them trying to stifle western freedoms from within.

UPDATE - Check out the sanitized mainstream media reports that avoid the overwhelming hate and craziness that characterized the rally today.

Blazing Cat Fur has coverage too

Guarding the US Consulate

Mad about Mohammed

All photos in this post © 2012 Eye on a Crazy Planet 

Rabble.ca: Canada's regressives who want to censor you

The ridiculous website rabble.ca is a favorite target of this blog for a variety of reasons, and not just because its writers are so radical, vapid, and histrionic that they make easy subjects for mockery (although that certainly is the case).

But the site itself is, in one place, the manifestation of a destructive, stupid and hateful strain in Canadian politics and social engineering policy that has influential support in parliament, organized labor and the media.

Rabble was founded by anti-Conservative fanatic Judy Rebick. Rebick started her public life as a feminist activist in the long gone days when lascivious curiosity seekers would attend rallies in the hopes of seeing a flash of skin through the orange flames of a bra-burning. Now many decades later with all the feminist battles won, Rebick and her cohorts still leech onto any number of far-fetched grievances, like the vapid Occupy movement, in the hope of regaining long-lost relevance.

These unions and radical organizations keep rabble.ca afloat

Lately, it is to one Kim Elliott, the same-sex partner/spouse of NDP Deputy Leader Libby Davies, to whom the reins of rabble.ca have been passed. The website is financed almost entirely by Labor Unions and NDP- linked advocacy organizations like the Council of Canadians and the Centre for Policy Alternatives. So it is no surprise to find that all rabble's articles essentially act as advocacy pieces for them. In fact, in their online discussion forum, called babble, users can and do get barred for making anti-union (or  pro-Conservative, Republican and Israel) comments. Rabble is not influential outside of its narrow circle, but it is indicative of the thinking of the neo-Marxist elements in Canadian political, academic and other spheres..

Under the guise of being crusaders for progressive politics, rabble pushes backwards policies that are more reflective of Soviet statism than liberal democratic values.

Indicative of the regressive attitudes they would impose on the whole of the Canadian public are three articles published in rabble last Tuesday.

One comes under the very telling title, Why progressives want to turn the clock back.  It was written by rabble.ca columnist and Board of Directors member Duncan Cameron. Naturally,  the era to which progressives want us all to regress is to the socialist paradise of Pierre Trudeau in which government grasped at more and more domination of every segment of society and culture. Trudeau had the wisdom to pronounce that `government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.` Regrettably, that was the only place Trudeau felt that government shouldn`t be able to dominate every aspect of people`s lives.

It would obviously be wishful thinking to expect the failures of EuroSocialism like Increased taxation, spending and deficits,  government control of commerce and industry to have taught anything to people so ideologically indoctrinated that they still have faith that Karl Marx will someday be recognized as the enlightened savior of mankind. Instead, they want a return in Canada to the type of policies that have sent Europe teetering on the precipice of economic ruin. The rest of us need to learn that this is the company kept by the some of the senior echelons of our Official Opposition, and is what lies in store for us if the Canadian public ever makes the catastrophic mistake of ever making them a federal government. 

The other two articles are about something that on the surface is so absurd, it should be the subject of comedy routines. It has to do with outrageously outspoken Sun News Network host Ezra Levant`s rant against the anti-Canadian policies of the Chiquita Banana corporation. Levant infamously ended his invective against the company by telling, on air, one of it`s executives to `chinga tu madre`which is the colloquial Spanish way of inviting him to have carnal relations with his mother.  

A complaint was made to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (SBSC)  by rabble.ca columnist David Climenhaga about Levant' supposed "lack of civility."  While claiming membership is voluntary, the CSRB is a regulatory body that non-government broadcasters are compelled to join in order to secure a broadcast license. The motive for Climenhaga's complaint seems to be a vendetta against the "right wing" Sun network, since by his own admission, he didn't see the broadcast on TV, but in an online video which is not covered by CSRB guidelines. But aside from the hypocrisy of the complainant whose demands for civility appear to be only directed at those with whom he disagrees, it points to the deplorable, totalitarian, censorious nature of the union-beholden NDP cheering squad in radical media.  

Climenhaga makes a laughable, self-contradictory claim that his complaint "  is obviously not a call or censorship, but merely for the enforcement of minimal standards of civility on a publicly owned resource. "

In other words, Clininhaga wrote that obviously he doesn't want censorship, but for a government-affiliated panel with the power to enforce rules and impose penalties to be able to prevent broadcasters from saying things that he doesn't like. Which, as anyone but an imbecile would realize, is censorship.  

In the same day's posting on rabble,  a transgendered woman named Mercedes Allen   parrots Climenhaga's mantra by writing, "freedom of speech also comes with a responsibility to maintain some civility and decorum."       

The radical left, whose marketable skills are limited to the part time food serving jobs some may have held while picking up Equity Studies degrees, are our contemporary Blanche Doboises, dependent on the kindness of strangers (or in some cases cronies) who hand out tax-funded government grants.

And in that spirit, Ms Allen, in the true nature of the mindset of rabble's writers, lets us know what censorship really is, accusing the Harper government of  "waging an economic stifling of speech through the defunding of environmental science, Status of Women groups, Aboriginal advocacy and human rights organizations."   

Among the self-indulgent, cultish, dimwits who populate the pages of rabble, censorship has a different definition than a rational person.. or a dictionary. This is a consistent theme among socialist leeches. They want government commissions to be able to tell you what you cannot say or publish and that's not censorship, that's civility.  But in their minds, censorship is when the government doesn't hand out large tax-funded grants to subsidize their radical causes, including supporters of terror groups, that are in direct conflict with government policies. 

That kind of upside-down idiocy may sound too preposterous to take seriously.  Yet if nothing else, the petty totalitarians at rabble.ca trying to remake Canada into a warped Trotskyite vision are very serious about want they want.

Is this the apology and confession the nitwits at the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council wanted?

I'm guessing it isn't.

Does Canada need an unaccountable body of censors telling us what we can watch and hear?

Background on the story of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) complaint and ruling against Ezra Levant is in the video at the bottom of the post. The complaint was made by originally by a David Climenhaga, an obtuse writer for the union financed, fanatical neo-Marxist propaganda organ rabble.ca, a genius who has written that "there can be no doubt that there is a connection between the North American right's increasing invocation of the language of violence and the actual use of violence."

So perhaps his complaint was motivated by the earnest fear that Ezra Levant and Charles Adler were going to home invade a Chiquita Banana executive's home and force him to have incestuous sex with his mother.

After all, the terrible urban violence in Detroit and Los Angeles that has been going on for decades, but is actually decreasing lately must have something to do with the "right's" use of language. And those Occupy movement imbeciles who assaulted and raped each other were undoubtedly driven to their uncontrollable psychological limits by something Rush Limbaugh said, no doubt.

The great brain of Climenhaga also came up with this gem, that "our own right-wing derives all its political ideas, strategy and style from the United States."  

And his conclusive proof being a link to the facebook page for The Tea Party of Canada which has less than 1500 members, none of whom is a prominent conservative. Come to think of it, perhaps, as his writing suggests, Mr. Climenhaga just isn't a very smart person. ( Although that would still make him above average compared to other rabble.ca writers, many of whom fit the dictionary definition of moron.)

In his latest blathering stream of consciousness on rabble, he crows about how the CBSC's censorious attack against Levant is "a victory for civility in Canadian political discourse."

Let's see what civility means to this dolt..he has written that conservative academics at the University of Calgary are a " group of right-wing ideologues and propagandists," and that Conservative pundit Ann Coulter is an  "offensive hate-mongering American proponent of the murder of her political opponents."  Climenhaga seems to harbor a special hatred for Conrad Black, whom he has described as a "right-wing drivelist" and an "international neo-Con blowhard."  Climenhaga also alluded to Immigration and Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney as a  "jumped-up little twerp of a citizenship minister."

Now there's civility for you!

Climenhaga has every right to his opinions, and in fact it's a good thing he expresses them, as they make him look a far greater fool than any of his intended targets. But for him to whine and complain like a sulky, stupid brat about the "lack of civility in Canadian political discourse" when he is one of the least civil writers in Canada demonstrates both a dearth of intellect and a new height of hypocrisy. Of course, if he wasn't a hypocrite, he probably wouldn't be allowed a regular column in rabble.ca

The welcome death of Section 13 and the arrogance of Canada's censors

Depending on who you talk to, a government lawyer named Richard Warman is either admired or reviled for his unrelenting effort to punish hate speech  in Canada. Joining neo-Nazi online forums, Warman has identified a number of public hatemongers and successfully pursued judgments against them through Human Rights Commission rulings.

His goal of working towards a Canada without racism and illegal discrimination  is an admirable one. From all credible accounts, Warman's efforts are the result of the noblest of motives; the desire to contribute to society and continue, in a different form, the fight against Nazism and fanatical racism that his relatives had done in battle during the Second World War.

But there is a dangerous flip side to the Human Rights Commissions that Warman and others have utilized to serve their aim. Conceived for the purpose of fighting illegal discrimination in employment, housing, education and so on, they have morphed  into tools used by special interests to try to prevent any form of speech that they consider offensive.

They have been used to intimidate people who have not promoted discrimination or racism but have merely expressed ideas. Some of the most notorious abuses were the cases of Ezra Levant being prosecuted for publishing cartoons of Islam's founder Mohammad and Mark Steyn and Macleans magazine for an article about the affect of Islam on western society. Though both cases were ultimately dismissed, there are obvious  problems with a quasi-judicial system presided over by individuals of questionable qualifications and dubious judgement, that forces defendants to appear at their own expense, while plaintiffs can launch frivolous publicly funded cases.

The notion that an ideology that is antithetical to the freedoms that western civilization has achieved is above criticism, because of an idolatrous deification of the secular concept of multiculturalism, should be abhorrent to anyone who believes in liberty and democracy. But that is precisely how Human Rights Commissions have been used, with the assistance of its petty-minded functionaries who believe that free speech is only "an American concept" without value in Canada.

Yet that is how Canada's Human Rights Commissions have been employed by defenders of Islamism. While in Canada, the majority of Muslims have rejected violent jihad, but that rejection is not universal, and Islamic nations like Iran are ruled by leaders who embrace the murderous methods of terrorism.

There is a regrettable, though somewhat amusingly illogical arrogance to the Human Rights censors who appear to think they possess a secret knowledge of the human capacity for hate. I was going to ask Richard Warman a question about that a few months ago at a public forum put on by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. At that event, Warman debated Canadian Civil Liberties Association General Counsel Nathalie Des Rosiers about the soon to be undone Section 13 of Canada's Human Rights Act that deals with hate speech. That debate took place, somewhat ironically, at the same place that almost exactly a year earlier was the site of an anti-Israel forum featuring the author of an anti-Semitic thesis sanctioned by the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

Warman had described a short film called "Fitna"  about Islamic radicalism produced by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, as "criminal hate speech."

Fitna is not the ravings of xenophobic "right wingers" against Muslims and Islam. It is a compilation of images of Islamic leaders and demonstrators expressing approval of terrorism,murder, and repressive dictates against Muslim and non-Muslim alike. To be sure, those portrayed in Fitna are not representative of all Muslims. But Wilders did not invent those images and they are a significantly sizable minority within the Islamic world to be of serious concern to those in the West who believe in democratic ideals.

Wilders himself was described by Warman as a "far right" politician. Fitna is a warning against a religious and political ideology that suppresses women and denies them abortion rights, persecutes and kills Gays for their sexuality, persecutes religious minorities, and has no respect for free speech. In what kind of bizzaro world is someone who seeks to defend abortion rights, women's rights, gay rights and free speech against those who suppress them considered  a "right-winger"?

The question I intended to ask Warman was that as he had seen Fitna and had not been transformed into a raving Islamophobe, how is it that he sees fit to try to deprive others of that right on the basis that it would affect other people differently than it did him? Does Warman believe he is so intellectually and morally superior, like some inner party member of Orwell's 1984, that he is of a special class of person capable of correctly processing information the rest of us can not?

As it happened, I didn't get the chance to ask Warman that question, because just as it was my turn at the microphone, I was cut ahead of by Bernie Farber, the anticipated next head of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Farber, another proponent of civil hate speech regulation, used his time with Warman to engage in the verbal equivalent of mutual masturbation in which the two men lavished praise on each other, and so consumed all the remaining question and answer period.

Fortunately, questions related to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act will soon be moot. As a result of a Private Members' Bill put forward by Alberta MP Brian Storseth, the law that let unqualified censors determine the free speech rights of Canadians will soon be repealed. Hate Speech will still be a crime in Canada, but it will have to meet the test of standards necessary for criminal prosecution in genuine courts presided over by real judges. Given the plentiful opportunities for abuse and mischief afforded by Section 13, its death is not only welcome, but long overdue.

Canada's arrogant censor class need to understand that free speech is not a privilege over which they have final say, but a basic human right that should be infringed on only under the most serious of circumstances.