Pat Condell: A word to left-wing students

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.

I am shocked! Shocked to learn there is a double standard applied to "hate speech" in Canada

..in a bid to rebut Mark Steyn (best o' luck with that!) and to make the Chabad rabbi who had the temerity to invite Pamela Geller to speak at his synagogue look like a Hatey McHaterson, an ex-Big Deal Jew tweets thisarticle from the local Toronto gay rag. In it, Insp. Ricky Veerappan, the "celebrate diversity--or else" enforcer who made the rabbi an offer he couldn't refuse, has an entirely different reaction to revelations of "hate" on his beat..

UPDATE: It gets worse 

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

Motives behind Gypsy anti-Sun News demonstration

Somewhere between "minuscule" and "small" would describe the size of the demonstration held outside Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission offices in Toronto last Tuesday by the Roma community protesting against the Sun News Network. There were about two dozen people in total, including speakers which included "social activist" Bernie Farber and former Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj.

There is no defending the content of Ezra Levant's tirade against the Gypsy community last year. Sun News issued an apology almost immediately after its broadcast and Levant himself apologized in great length and detail last month. 

Hopefully, that would have put the unfortunate episode in the past, but the issue has become less a cause about offense to the Gypsy community than as a spear opponents of Sun News would use to strike at the fledgling conservative news network.

That motive was so transparent that aspects of the protest took on an element of self-parody. Among the complaints by Roma Community Centre Director Gina Csányi-Robah was that Sun News continues to use the "offensive" term Gypsy to describe the Roma people. Making that claim ridiculous, following her speech, the event's Master of Ceremonies announced a performance by two musicians from the group "The Gypsy Lions."

A definitive monograph on the Gypsies by University of British Colombia Sociology Professor Werner Cohn refutes much of what Ms Csányi-Robah, who was born in Canada, alleges. Cohn is extremely sympathetic to the Gypsies, whose culture he studied in great detail and he dispels dangerous slanders against them such as the allegation of Gypsies "stealing children."

But he also points out that the Gypsies are in fact a number of peoples, most of whom self-identify as Gypsies and of whom the Roma (or Rom or Romani) are just one group.

Bernie Farber's interest in the Roma community is curious. He undoubtedly is sincere in advocating for people he considers oppressed. But it is remarkably convenient for him that in agitating against Sun News, he can attack people with whom he has an apparent ax to grind. As Farber pointed out in an interview on CBC Radio's As It Happens, there is a long history and no love lost between him and Ezra Levant.

That interview is fascinating in a number of ways. The biases and abuses of the state-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation have been a frequent Sun TV target that could possibly even be described as an obsession, and Levant's Gypsy faux pas is being seized upon as an opportunity for payback.

In the interview, Farber and As it Happens host Carol Off compete with each other to malign Sun News and Levant, working themselves into a crescendo of bile. Off is famous for her lack of emotional allocution. For those unfamiliar with her vocal style, imagine a lobotomized, female Ben Stein on Ritalin and that will give you an idea of her bland droning.  But on this occasion her disdain for Sun News was so evident that she actually conveyed feeling in her voice.

But that feeling was rife with hypocrisy. As blogger Blogwrath has noted, the CBC has broadcast anti-Gypsy programming that invokes the most hateful stereotypes they face.

At the protest, former Liberal MP Wrzesnewskyj betrayed himself as an intellectual featherweight by comparing Ezra Levant to the unapologetic neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. 

Wrzesnewskyj was one of the most anti-Israel MPs in the House of Commons while he sat there. He co-authored a heavily biased anti-Israel report along with pathologically anti-Israel NDP MP Libby Davies.  On his trip to make that report, he was accompanied by Sea Hitler organizer Ehab Lotayef  and a group of fanatics who routinely support and participate in the "Israeli Apartheid Week" hate-fest that has been condemned by the last two federal Liberal Party leaders, Ignatieff and Rae. Wrzesnewskyj was compelled to resign as Liberal Foreign Affairs Critic in 2006 after he advocated that Canada engage with the terror group Hezbollah.

Ms Csányi-Robah has her own odd history of engaging, on behalf of her community, with nefarious groups. She has aligned the Roma cause with radical fanatics who want an end to Israel as a Jewish state. That association has shamed a number of Canadian Roma who wanted to distance themselves from such hate. That may partially account for why she was unable to garner much support from her own community for her Tuesday protest. 

It might strike some as remarkable that former Canadian Jewish Congress boss Farber would be part of such an event.  But Farber has been remaking himself recently since losing his role as one of  Canada's top "Official Jews." He has been using his twitter account to promote links from anti-Israel hysterics such as blogger Dr. Dawg, and the vehemently anti-Israel website rabble.ca. 

As blogger Sassywire points out, many in the Jewish community have been urging Farber for some time to come to protests against anti-Semites and Islamist hate-mongers seeking Israel's elimination, but he has not notably done so. Ironically the protest he makes a point of attending, he does so alongside people associated with anti-Israel causes to condemn the most pro-Israel media outlet in Canada.

In the end, it doesn't take much examination to get the impression that, like most people opposed to free speech, the protesters against Sun News appear less interested in suppressing hatred than they do in suppressing points of view that differ from theirs. 

A world where "progressive" means totalitarian liar

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

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."

Islam Vs Free Speech

Ezra Levant, the Left and Hate Speech Hypocrisy

As is now well-known, Ezra Levant apologized for his anti-Gypsy rant last Monday, both on-air during his Sun TV show The Source, and in print in Sun News publications.

Though they failed in their efforts to abort it before it debuted, and detesting it as they do, Canada's political left still keeps a keen eye on the Sun News Network and in particular, it's most flamboyant personality, Ezra Levant.

Levant's ability to combine rhetorical dexterity with showmanship has, on practically a weekly basis, forced attention to a variety of issues that have embarrassed Canada's left-leaning political cliques. Those include included the waste and corruption and deception by many of the leaders of the Idle No More movement, which Labor leaders and NDP and Liberal politicians had hoped to exploit as means of embarrassing Stephen Harper and his Conservative government.

Levant also ridiculed, belittled and exposed the hypocrisy of left-wing sacred cows David Suzuki and the Occupy Movement among many others.

So it was with virtual glee that the Toronto Star's editorial board and the likes of far-left media outlets such as rabble.ca and The Vancouver Observer seized on a monologue by Sun TV's Ezra Levant in which he injudiciously and unfairly characterized Gypsies as a people with a primarily criminal culture. Delighted in their outrage, immediately came calls from the left for his prosecution for Hate Crimes.

Levant's motives for apologizing, six months after-the-fact were questioned by both his detractors on the left and supporters on the right. Sun News' application for a CRTC Common Carry license and the possibility that Hate Speech charges would be pursed by Ontario's Attorney General were among the speculative reasons.

But regardless of why, Levant's words were well-crafted, sounded sincere, and explicitly retracted his earlier statements about Gypsies.

Yet desperate to silence Canadian TV's Grand Inquisitor of left-wing hypocrisy and deceit, calls for his criminal prosecution have not abated despite Levant's apology last Monday.

Which in a way, proves many of the points Levant makes when he preaches his gospel of absolute free speech and thunders about the hypocrisy and double standards of a Canadian left who would have others live by rules that they hold themselves above.

In November 2010 the National Post and later other media outlets did extensive coverage on an anti-Semitic thesis produced at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).  The Department of Sociology and Equity Studies produced a number of theses with anti-Semitic themes, the most well-publicized of which was by a Jenny Peto wherein she accused the Jewish community of conducting Holocaust education to further the aims of "Israeli apartheid." She also, in contradiction to any credible empirical evidence, defamed the Jewish community by claiming it was dominated by "racist" ideologies.

The thesis was condemned for its anti-Semitism in the Ontario Legislature by members of both the Progressive Conservative and governing Liberal parties, including then Citizenship Minister Eric Hoskins.

Unlike Levant, who apologized for slurring an entire people, Peto doubled down, making the claim that it was she who was owed an apology after her anti-Semitic, academically inept polemic was brought to light.

Peto was roundly and vociferously condemned by conservative and pro-Israel commentators, and there were calls for an investigation into the teaching practices and deficient standards at the radical, biased, politicized Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. University of British Columbia Professor Emeritus of Sociology Werner Cohn noted that Peto's and another anti-Semitic thesis which shared OISE instructor Sheryl Nestel as a thesis adviser "consist of hate propaganda, possibly in violation of the Criminal Code of Canada," but no one among those so called "right-wing" voices actually called for criminal prosecution or Human Rights Commission proceedings against them.

And what about the left side of the political spectrum? One would expect those people who are so enthusiastic about the use of state apparatuses to penalize Hate Speech would have wanted them used in such a blatant case of Jew-hate.

But this was not so in the case of Peto and OISE. Hate Speech in the service of "progressive" causes, like the destruction of Israel and defaming Canada's Christian conservatives, is not only tolerated but vigorously, if somewhat preposterously defended by the far left.

The same people who are now calling for Ezra Levant's criminal prosecution for a distorted description of Gypsy culture ridiculously decried mere condemnation of Peto's thesis and OISE as "silencing free speech."

For the hypocritical would be-censors on the left, Hate Speech is only Hate Speech when it is uttered by conservatives and those they disdain.

The Toronto Star's Haroon Siddiqui produced a diatribe about Stephen Harper's alleged "inconsistencies on hate laws." There are a number of valid reasons why those laws should not be employed against Levant. But if Siddiqui and his fellow travelers are genuinely concerned about inconsistencies in the application of unjust laws that seek to censor opinion, they would best look to their own hypocrisy first.

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.

Support Free Speech, Support Blazing Cat Fur

A Message from Kathy Shaidle of FiveFeetOfFury.com

As you may know, my husband Arnie Lemaire–also known as BlazingCatFur–was sued a few years ago by former Human Rights Commission investigator Richard Warman.

Warman sued Arnie for libel, largely for comments made by Arnie’s readers, as well as for linking to Mark Steyn’s website,SteynOnline.com.

At long last, the lawsuit is over. However, the fight was expensive and Arnie and I still have big legal bills.

We hate to ask for your help again, but we have to.

Already, plenty of individuals who treasure freedom of speech–from Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit to our countless loyal readers–have graciously donated to help settle these bills and we are almost free and clear, thanks to them.

And now, thanks to the great Mark Steyn himself, we can announce one last fundraising push that even includes a terrificthank you gift.

Mark Steyn is generously offering a FREE copy of his wonderful book, Lights Out–about his own battles to restore freedom of speech in Canada–as his way of thanking anyone who kindly donates $200 or more to help Arnie and me.

 Click here to go to LANDMARK REPORT to donate 

Standing up for free speech in Canada

Canada's unelected Senate holding up Bill that protects free speech

Last June many of us who had been fighting to end Canada’s ridiculous internet censorship law breathed a big sigh of relief. Conservative MP Brian Storseth’s bill to remove section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act had passed third reading and was on its way to becoming law.

Yet here we are eight months after the bill was voted through the House of Commons and it is still not passed into law. Why?

Because the bill is stuck in the Senate, that upper chamber of sober second thought.
The bill was introduced in the Senate, and is supported, by Conservative Doug Finley. But since June when Finley introduced the bill two Conservatives have spoken out against C-304 and in favour of section 13 – Pierre Claude Nolin and Nancy Ruth.

This bill, which is a private members bill and therefore does not have the full endorsement of the government, is not assured of passing the Senate.

More at Lilley's Pad 

Gary McHale's Jubilee Medal and the idiots who tried to slander him

[McHale] was nominated by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation for his work of exposing the provincial government’s tax waste in the Caledonia area. At the ceremony he received his medal from Gregory Thomas, Federal and Ottawa Director of the CTP.

I am sure that for the 60,000 ordinary and extraordinary Canadians, who received the medal, that was just another pleasant life episode with smiling officials, clapping family members and boring parties.

Not so with Gary – nothing about him is ordinary. The nomination touched off a storm of wailing and gnashing of teeth, which could be heard “from the Island to Vancouver to the Isle of Newfoundland” (as once Stompin’ Tom put it). There is nothing new about the reaction – Gary’s life resembles a detective novel continuously published in a magazine, where you anxiously wait for every new issue to see what would happen in the next chapter.

read the rest at Blogwrath

Jonathan Kay: On Canadian campuses, it’s open season on Christian social conservatism

Say what you want about the financially beleaguered Sun News and its signature firebrand, Ezra Levant. But sometimes, he and his colleagues do manage to get things exactly right. 

On Wednesday, Mr. Levant interviewed Arun Smith, the 7^th year “human rights and sexuality” major who took it upon himself to tear down a “free speech” installation set up at Carleton University by a group called Carleton Students for Liberty, because he was offended by socially conservative jottings on the wall that expressed support for traditional marriage, and opposition to abortion. Even putting aside Mr. Smith’s appalling act of vandalism, Mr. Levant noted, the very notion that university students feel they need a “free speech zone” is telling. “We have a free speech zone in Canada,” Mr. Levant declared. “It’s called ‘Canada.’”

 Read the rest of Jonathan Kay's column at the National Post

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.

Contemporary Persecution and Oppression of Christians under Islam

An important speech by Michael Coren



h/t Blazing Cat Fur

Why you should support Blazing Cat Fur

One of the real benefits the Internet has brought to society is the advent of the Citizen Journalist.

Mainstream media is beset by a number of conflicting interests. They have advertisers they must make sure are not offended, political interests they fear can harm their financial interests. Big media is made up of people and people have biases. These biases are reflected in their output. Democracies may have (to varying extents) free speech, but self-interest and those same biases can lead to self-censorship and selective reporting.

That's where bloggers can make a big difference.

Unconstrained by some of the same concerns, yet operating with far fewer resources, some dedicated individuals have made it their mission to see that matters that affect the public interest are out there so that people can be aware of them.

And sometimes, these bloggers do this at significant risk. They can be subject to threats to personal safety and are sometimes subject to frivolous law suits.

That's what is happening to the most important of Canada's political bloggers -  Blazing Cat Fur.

Blazing Cat Fur has exposed a vast number of items about malfeasance in the education system, government, Islamic radicalism and media hypocrisy. His coverage has often forced the issues into the mainstream media and has led to government action.

Blazing Cat Fur, at his own expense, has been standing up for the average Canadian and is now being sued by one of Canada's most prolific serial litigators. It's a lawsuit that probably wouldn't hold up in the USA, but because of Canada's antiquated libel laws, Blazing Cat Fur is forced to fight it in court.

He has been standing up for you, and now it's your turn to stand up for him.

There is a fundraiser for Blazing Cat Fur tonight. The details are here. If you can't show up in person, make sure you visit his page and make a donation there. By helping Blazing Cat Fur, you'll be helping the cause of free speech in Canada.

Canada, US, U.K. reject UN control of Internet

Canada said it was forced to reject the proposed treaty because of its commitment to an Internet "in which people are free to participate, communicate, organize and exchange information."