"The Harper government is signalling its intention to use hate crime laws against Canadian advocacy groups that encourage boycotts of Israel.
"Such a move could target a range of civil society organizations, from the United Church of Canada and the Canadian Quakers to campus protest groups and labour unions. "If carried out, it would be a remarkably aggressive tactic, and another measure of the Conservative government's lockstep support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ..." http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-considering-hate-charges-against-those-who-boycott-israel-1.3067497 This probably won't mean much, other than political grandstanding, but Glenn Greenwald has the best word on it: "... As I've argued many times ... all applications of hate speech laws are inherently tyrannical, dangerous and wrong, and it's truly mystifying (and scary) that people convince themselves that their judgment is so unerring and their beliefs so sacrosanct that it should be illegal to question or dissent from them. But independent of that, what we see here again is the utter foolishness of endorsing such laws on pragmatic grounds: they will inevitably be used against not just the ideas you hate but the ones you like, and when that happens, if you cheered when such laws were used to suppress the ideas you hate, then you will have no valid ground to object." https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/11/canadian-covernment-exploiting-charlie-hebdo-attack-threatens-prosecute-advocates-israel-boycott -- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað." _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
