-Caveat Lector-
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 9 Dec 1998 14:02:29 -0800 (PST)
From: Franklin Wayne Poley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [BCPolitics] How I Learned to Love the Hate Laws and Stop Worrying.
From: Franklin Wayne Poley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Having studied a wide range of "truths" promulgated by bigots, liars,
dogmatists and an assortment of those with axes to grind on the internet
I have to agree that "truth" cannot be a defense in these cases.
A case in point is that of the Zundelclown, the funniest act on the
Canadian stage since Wayne and Shuster and his Parody on Truth assisted
by a gaggle of Christie Critters. Now the Zundelclown is amusing all of
us by suing the 11 MP's above. Opinions, facts and alleged facts are
small drops in an ocean representing "the whole truth" so they cannot be
the mainstay of these cases. "Peace, order and good government" is a
foundation clause of the Canadian Constitution. What GOOD is it to shout
fire in a crowded theatre even when it is a fact? What GOOD are the few
axes to grind coming from the mouth of a Zundel or Christie or Doug
Collins, the senile old fart from North Shore News in North Vancouver?
Can any of these people articulate a good society/culture/civilization
starting with even one city? What would a "City of Truth" be like? Would
the tapes of Big Brother,Zundel, be blaring from the loudspeakers?
As far as I know the official position of the Turks is that the Armenian
Holocaust/Genocide of 1915 didn't happen. Regardless of my opinion (to
which I am entitled) or the facts I do not have the right to go into the
Turkish or Armenian communities in Canada and disturb the peace or foment
disorder.
BC does have a Model City project called Bamberton. Currently it is on
the back burner but it can easily be revived by referendum. We could
locate a new city for 100,000 on the US border. That population is a
small fraction of the 2-3,000,000 per year increase of North America. Can
any of these malcontents tell us what a City of Truth would be like?
Would anyone want to live there?
FWP.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 8 Dec 1998 19:41:54 -0400
From: Michael Gurstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [UA-C] FC: Canada loves its "hate crime" legislation (fwd)
Date: Tue, 08 Dec 1998 18:21:38 -0500
From: Declan McCullagh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: FC: Canada loves its "hate crime" legislation
********
From: "Lisa S. Dean" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'[EMAIL PROTECTED]'"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Canada loves their hate crime legislation!
Date: Tue, 8 Dec 1998 14:04:19 -0500
Speech Cops of the Great White North
Dateline: 12/6/98
Every political system has its eccentricities - oddities that become so
much a part of the landscape that people living within the system lose
track of the weirdness. In the case of Canada, it sometimes seems that
the country's political elite is made up of the stiff-necked faculty of
a second-tier liberal arts college, and every session of the legislature
is a meeting of some uptight academic discipline board out to teach
those naughty frat boys a lesson.
The latest emanation from Canada's disciplinarians is a "hate speech
<http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/16525.html>" bill that
might well have been pulled from the University of Wisconsin's
politically correct student handbook. The proposal would amend the
Criminal Code of Canada to make it illegal to possess material "for the
purpose of distribution to promote hate." It would also broaden existing
"hate crimes" law so that it would be unlawful to say unkind things
about people based on age, gender, or mental disability, in addition to
the traditional categories of race, religion, and the like. Defendants
under the charges couldn't even plead that they believed the material to
be true.
The suggested law comes from the Federal, Provincial, and Territorial
Working Group on Diversity, Equality, and Justice, an agency that was
destined to do mischief from the moment it was named. You know the
group's meetings must have been a barrel of laughs.
"Madame Chairperson, I move that-"
"I object! 'Madame' is a sexist term that denigrates persons of
the female gender."
"Move to strike 'Madame' and substitute 'warm-blooded
co-citizen.'"
That the working group is deadly serious is demonstrated by the
participation of Ujjal Dosanjh, the Attorney General of British
Columbia, where a government formed by the New Democratic Party is
laboring to demonstrate that trendy urban leftists can run things at
least as intolerantly as anybody else. The working group (hereafter
known as the FPTWGDEJ ... aww, hell, just call it "the working group")
proposal seems to be little more than a federal extension of an existing
law <http://www.nsnews.com/proj/freespeech/fs3.html> in British Columbia
that caused something of a scandal when it was used to club a journalist
into submission.
British Columbia's law - actually, the latest version of the province's
human rights code - says that:
No person shall publish, issue or display or cause to be
published, issued or displayed any statement, publication, notice, sign,
symbol, emblem or other representation that
(a) indicates discrimination or an intention to discriminate
against a person or a group or class of persons, or
(b) is likely to expose a person or a group or class of persons
to hatred or contempt because of race, color, ancestry, place of origin,
religion, marital status, family status, physical or mental disability,
sex, sexual orientation or age of that person or that group or class of
persons.
Basically, British Columbia protects everybody from anything that might
hurt their feelings.
Dosanjh and Company are serious about the law, too. Doug Collins, a
controversial newspaper columnist, was dragged before the Human Rights
Tribunal (there goes that college disciplinary board again) for saying
unsavory things about immigrants, Jews, and (to round things out) the
members of the Human Rights Tribunal.
Now, there's no doubt that Collins voiced some rather unpleasant
opinions in his columns. His politics seem to fall somewhere in between
David Duke and that cranky uncle who has sharp things to say about the
new arrivals in the neighborhood. But at no time did he urge violence
against anybody, let alone against an identifiable individual or group.
In fact, under U.S. law, Collins' columns would be afforded the highest
level of free speech protection and any official who moved against the
ill-tempered scribbler could be dragged into court by his, her, or its
presumptuous ear for civil rights violations.
Not so in British Columbia, though. Despite drawing heavy-hitter support
from the press
<http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/orgs/canadian/bc/Human-Rights-Commission/>
and civil liberties groups, Doug Collins went down to defeat after two
years of investigation. The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association
strongly condemned
<http://www.bccla.org/press_releases/collins_decision.html> the
Tribunal's decision, saying that it "fears for the future of freedom of
expression as a result of [the Collins] decision of the B.C. Human
Rights Tribunal." The group's president warned that "such restrictions
of free speech drive hatred underground where it festers unchallenged by
evidence or rational argument."
You better believe it. Doug Collins quickly became a poster boy
<http://cafe.canadafirst.net/press_releases/pr5.html> for the sort of
groups to which that cranky uncle of yours donates money.
Collins has since won a round in his appeal against the Tribunal's
decision, but the thought police seemed energized by the battle. In
fact, B.C. authorities have apparently taken to ~padding their count
<http://www.alberni.net/> of hate crimes in order to keep the ball
rolling.
The Internet is the next stop. As early as 1996, Ujjal Dosanjh told his
Task Force on Hate Crimes to see what it could do about muzzling naughty
speech online. He was apparently motivated by the tagging of the small
town of Oliver, B.C. as the "hate capital of Canada" because an ISP
<http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/11195.html> based there
hosts a large number of unpleasant Web sites. Dosanjh's announced plans
to make the little corner of the Internet in his jurisdiction as
inoffensive as possible drew a sharp response from Electronic Frontiers
Canada, which announced in no uncertain terms that the "Gov't has no
authority to regulate the
'Net<http://www.efc.ca/pages/pr/efc-pr.25jul96.html>."
Dosanjh apparently doesn't agree. The working group's proposed federal
law, he told Wired, is "designed particularly to combat hate propaganda
on the Internet." Canada already has a history of targeting online
speech with the unsuccessful prosecution of Ernst
Zündel<http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/z/zundel-ernst/> for neo-Nazi
efforts on the Internet and in print. Such attacks had the ironic effect
of turning Zundel into a free-speech hero, with cloned "Zündelsites"
sprouting up around the world. The new law would, no doubt, complete
Zündel's martyrdom.
Even more ironically, one of the big losers under the proposed law may
be one of the more successful private efforts to combat bigots and
neo-Nazis. The Nizkor Project <http://www.nizkor.org/> maintains an
online archive of anti-semitic material in order to publicize the thin
clattering of lonely brain cells that lies behind it and counteract the
hate with familiarity - sort of an intellectual inoculation. That effort
may become explicitly illegal if the hate-speech law passes.
Canadian authorities have an answer for that concern - but it's not
likely to soothe free-speech concerns. They promise that they'll
prosecute only those who have an "intent to promote hate." That would
exclude good guys like the folks at Nizkor who really mean well when
they post the material.
Oh good. The Canadian authorities will be prosecuting people not so much
for what they say as for what they mean. Tell me that's not a recipe for
the roughest, toughest, undergraduate disciplinary committee in town.
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