The story's claim of all-party criticism of the bill is overblown, as the only Tory they could find to speak out was Senator Nancy Ruth. Nevertheless, I think Joe Comartin is correct when he says:“The Prime Minister, on more than one occasion, seemed to indicate to the media that he was not in favour of doing away with it,” Comartin says. “There are a number of different communities – the Jewish community, the Islamic community in Canada – are very opposed to that being done away with.”Certainly the gov's official response to the bill thus far is to pretend that it doesn't exist.
Thursday, 27 October, 2011
An update on Brian Storseth and his bill to kill Section 13(1)
I've written before about Tory MP Brian Storseth's private member's bill to kill Section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act. It is to be hoped by those among my kind of crowd that Mr. Storseth is successful with his bill, but BigCityLib is thinking that success is quite unlikely:Update: Welcome Blazing Cat Fur readers.
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Hi Walker,
... hmmm. Now that the CJC is kaput, who in the Jewish Community is against removing section 13(1), is what I would like to know.
[unless BigCityLib can back-up his statement, consider it just more lying bastard liberal bs.]
Hey Paul, long time no talk.
Irwin Cotler looks like he's opposed to Storseth's bill, but I wouldn't expect anything more from him.
Is Cotler on record? If not, I'd sure like to know who gave him the authority to represent "the Jewish community".
And if he is, it would be good for us to know, to start an e-mail campaign.
Yep, the problem is people who can voice concepts like "the Jewish community" or "the Islamic community" without blinking, as if we were all just automatons in the machine. It shows you the core thinking of the control freaks who want to keep Section 13.
Jews, for example, constitute a nation, to be sure, but a nation premised on a constitution that has a high degree of tolerance for whatever opinions/practices are not inimical to the operation of the (divine) constitution. As someone put it to me a while ago: you can eat all the bacon double cheeseburgers you want, breaking most all the dietary rules as you do, but you can't be ex-communicated for that. But of course people like BCF have no idea of how a free society can bind itself; hence their faith in communitarian fascism.
Is Cotler on record? If not, I'd sure like to know who gave him the authority to represent "the Jewish community".
In that Xtra article that's linked to above, this is what Irwin Cotler had to say:
Liberal justice critic Irwin Cotler, who has a history of working with hate speech legislation, would also like to see a number of amendments to the CHRA.
“My views are that the legislation still is constitutional,” Cotler says. “With respect to the Canadian Human Rights Act, I would propose some amendments, but I believe that they’re still constitutional and still valid.”
Not really stepping up for the Jewish Community, I guess.
Yep, the problem is people who can voice concepts like "the Jewish community" or "the Islamic community" without blinking, as if we were all just automatons in the machine. It shows you the core thinking of the control freaks who want to keep Section 13.
Good point, Truepeers.
@ truepeers
I agree. Small typo but big difference TP though. I think you meant BCL and not BCF :)
Walker, if I can make a suggestion. It would be interesting if you tried interviewing Cotler directly about the issue. (Maybe ask him and then send him a list of questions that go deeper into the matter at hand.)
That's a good idea, Paul. I think I'll do that and see if he responds.
Thanks for catching the typo Paul. I'm just not used to typing "BCL" but the other guy is finger-tapping good.
Yeah, I catch myself mixing up the BCL/BCF acronyms, too. It's so easy to do.
@TP
The last Jew that got excommunicated as far as I know was Spinoza. The Dutch authorities were getting down-right pissed about his irreligious "humanist" ideas and started threatening the Jewish Council in Amsterdam that there would be repercussions if they didn't do something about him.
[in the end, his ideas actually didn't wash right, but that's another discussion.]
But one very important thing to remember, being a Jew is not just about religious formalities but something much much more.
Freud, (arguably the second smartest Jew of the 20th century) was well known to be irreligious within the Jewish community in Vienna, was once asked if he considered himself a Jew. He replied he did and when asked why, he replied he actually didn't know why.
[it was the only time in the life Freud that he didn't have an answer to a challenging question.]
Paul,
Everyone in the Jewish Community is. Ask the JDL, ask BB.
I didn't know "everyone" excludes me.
[logical failure BCL]
I haven't heard Meir say anything about it one way or another incidentally. Do you have a reference to where he says he supports limits on free speech?
I'm not sure what the position with BB is at the moment, but I think Frank is paying attention to the huge mistake BB made supporting restrictions on free speech in the first go-around.
You folks get your facts...where??
....CJC isn't "kaput." It merged with another Canadian Jewish organization within the last 12 months and has a new name.TheCentre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA)
Section 13 isn't about to be quashed anytime soon. There's more and more jurisprudence upholding it in various ways. Today there was an appeal decision against someone called Terry Tremaine upholding charges of contempt on an S13 charge launched in 2004.
http://anti-racistcanada.blogspot.com/2011/10/chrc-appeal-on-tremaine-contempt.html
BB is still very much in the game. Was represented at the Supreme Court of Canada as an intervenor in the Bill Whatcott case.
Irwin Cotler is still huge spokesperson for the Jewish Community in Canada.
Section 13 isn't about to be quashed anytime soon. There's more and more jurisprudence upholding it in various ways. Today there was an appeal decision against someone called Terry Tremaine upholding charges of contempt on an S13 charge launched in 2004.
That's contempt of court. Since Marc Lemire gummed up the works, Section 13(1) has been dead in the water.
Lemire has his court date in December. All new and current S13's including mine are on ice until Lemire's stuff has settled out. However the outcome of Whatcott may trump whatever Lemire has to say. Again, S13 is nowhere near done.
@Harry,
Fact: CJC was dismantled after 90 years of serving the Jewish Community in Canada. In large part and to the discredit of its leadership and their hijacking of core Jewish values. (no, as Jews we do not endorse petty inquisitors like Bernie Farber throwing their weight around under the guise of representing the Jewish community's interests.) SOME of its people were hired by the new agency.
Fact: Cotler is an MP of TMR and while he may make some headlines when it comes to filing his reports on (non)-progress in Iran, the party he belongs to was resoundingly rejected by Jewish voters accross Canada. And while I respect the man, he does not by no means speak for most Jews.
Fact: We are still waiting for Frank to come clean on the direction BB will be heading with respect to changing their position on free speech in light of the fact that they themselves were subject to a section 13(1) complaint that lasted 5 years because some Muslims thought they were engaged in "hate speech".
However the outcome of Whatcott may trump whatever Lemire has to say. Again, S13 is nowhere near done.
Fair 'nuff.
@Paul
" We are still waiting for Frank to come clean on the direction BB will be heading with respect to changing their position on free speech in light of the fact that they themselves were subject to a section 13(1) complaint that lasted 5 years because some Muslims thought they were engaged in "hate speech".
You don't know who I am, do you Paul?
Paul: "But one very important thing to remember, being a Jew is not just about religious formalities but something much much more."
That's right; the formalities are a way of giving shape to the worship of God. But that's in a way secondary. What comes first, in being a Jew, is being a member of the group that thinks of having discovered, and that others, at least in the Western tradition, resent/love for having first discovered the God who is not only the Jews' one God but also the God of all humanity - i.e Jews are those marked as having first discovered, or formalized, the concept that all humanity shares in a singular and universal Being.
As such God did not give the Jews (when asked by Moses) a specific or privileged name for them to call. He only told them, I am what I am, i.e. a universal truth to be further discovered through the lessons of history. But you can't organize a community around an open-ended universal. Jewish religious life is a way of responding to that great opening by giving a necessary shape to one nation's ritual life, of providing a specific discipline, a way, a law, to approach the divine. God may be universal but we can't all worship him in the same way because we cannot all have the same place in the historical line of discovering/unveiling qualities of his universality. We need freedom because we can't all bow down to the same ritual prohibitions without forgetting the important truth that the universal can only be approached from a particular historical position or discipline. All that Jews expect of non-Jews is adherence to the minimal covenant that God made with Noah for all humanity.
Freud was not so much interested in the rules of Jewish ritual life, but he was interested in the universal question of why we all internalize rules or prohibitions/inhibitions, e.g. what he came to recognize most famously in the form of bourgeois guilt. And he wanted to link the personal inhibition to its common human origin (see his theory of human origins in Totem and Taboo).
So, I would imagine that he understood, if inchoately, that his concerns stemmed from the Jewish discovery of universal Being and from the resentment of those who first developed, and refused to give up, a particular set of prohibitions for their own national worship of the one God of every nation.
Jews today are still trying to mediate that resentment. And so some think that laws like Section 13 are the solution. But resentment of the Jews' particular historical position can't be overcome by trying to prohibit expressions of resentment. People need the freedom to better understand, transform, and hopefully transcend their resentment. Pretending resentment is not necessary in the first place is simply wrong and dangerous. Resentment is inevitable to any historical position, including much (naive) reflection on Western history and the Jewish role in it. Because we all have a somewhat different relationship to history, we all need freedom to mediate that in our own ways. We need some freedom to vent our naive resentment of others in order to transform and transcend, not in some impossible Utopian oneness where all differences are denied, but in the shared reality that we each have a different relationship to the discovery and unfolding of universal truths.
@ Harry
re:
[All new and current S13's including mine are on ice until Lemire's stuff has settled out. ...
Again, S13 is nowhere near done]
The good old days,
Are good and gone now,
That's why they're good,
Because they're gone.
You should quit while you're ahead, my friend.
@Harry
You don't know who I am, do you Paul?
I believe you used to own a bookstore in Toronto. (and I'm assuming you have a case filed against some decrpeit individual in Victoria.)
... but your point with respect to Frank is?
Or as Freud might have put it, we each have our own problem family histories to deal with.
@TP
I found parts of your longer post interesting but to be candid it was a bit like trying to decipher Buber. (too many life / history variables that when injected bring out the inconsistencies.)
[the Freud post was a bit of a platitude though.]
As I recall, you're in university? Is philosophy / theology your major?
@TP
I should have been clearer, I have simple take-aways on life and the issues.
Freedom as Satre put it, is the ability to say "no".
[it trancends the formality of religion and shapes an in the moment divinity.]
Paul, it's been a long time since I was at university. What I was trying to give you was a boiled down form of thinking known as genrative anthropology, something I've studied since leaving the academy.
It raises the question of how human self-understanding is generated in the historical process. Events happen that unveil shared truths. But we can't all have the same relationship to those events/truths. We see the universal from our own particular position. And that's the problem, for it raises all kinds of resentments of our differences which we shouldn't try to deny by pretending everyone can have exactly the same relationship to some basic truth.
Anyway, freedom is more than the ability to say "no". It also requires the other guys to say "no", to see that we have a shared interest in guaranteeing each other's freedom. But how do you come to such an understanding. SOmeone has to take the lead, and, again, that's a problem because it starts to differentiate us. Anyway, when things work out, we get freedom by agreeing that some things are untouchable. But if "freedom" entails saying "no" and controlling our desires to consume or control something, in order to avoid conflict with others, if freedom begins in an act of deferral, then it's a paradox, one central to "hate speeech" debates where each side claims the other is touching the untouchable by not deferring to what should be sacred. When faced with such a paradox, how do we intuit who has the better claim on a necessarily shared freedom? For me, it entails going back and thinking about the origins of the sacred and human self-understanding (how could either have emerged out of nothing). That's a kind of anthropological thinking but religious thinking, and humanistic thinking generally, is a kind of anthropology too.
Wow, Maikeru haunts this place too. This is almost a reunion.
I'm a small businessman in Victoria, however I'm also on the Board of Governors of B'nai Brith Canada and rep. the League for Human Rights of B'nai Brith. Here's a short version of the Collins decision:
http://www.queensu.ca/humanrights/hreb/Signs/abramscase.htm
The current feeling by B'nai Brith concerning the Federal S13 is that the law is reasonable and constitutional, but should only be used very selectively for the worst kinds of hate expression. Also the administration of S13' needs some tweaking. We'd like to see safeguards so that these kinds of complaints cannot be "piled on" as in multiple human rights complaints simultaneously, and also that the levying of fines for a first offense be removed. There's more, but that should do it for now. The Westcott matter is in many ways potentially more significant than Lemire. Westcott is a pamphleteer who targets gays. The worst part of his propaganda tars all gays as stalkers and molesters of children. He managed to win an appeal with in my view a weaselly "I'm not condemning the sinner, just the sin." But the the challenge to that bit of jiggery pokery is what the Supreme Court of Canada just heard.
@Harry
The current feeling by B'nai Brith concerning the Federal S13 is that the law is reasonable and constitutional
If that's the case, BB is dead wrong in my opinion. I understand there's an "old guard" supposedly representing the interests of the Jewish community but you should try to understand, it's incredibly presumptuous and arrogant.
The (current) law is an ass and it's turning the BB into a bunch of yackling donkeys.
I hope your better judgement and intelligence will help you change your position as it directly conflicts with my idea of freedom of speech. Something I hold as sacred as the Torah.
Otherwise, please refrain from using the word "Jewish community" as it is a complete misrepresentation.
NB: I have donated to the BB over the years and will likely continue to do so. While I have no respect for the leadership at the moment I do support BB as an institution.
I don't know Paul's been talking to or why exactly he would receive this kind of impression, but for my part... B'nai Brith represents IT'S MEMBERSHIP and also acts for a perceived collectivity of the very diverse Jewish Community in Canada.
Not everybody at BBC including members of the League who specialize in anti-defamation are of one mind concerning section 13.
However the general consensus is that hate propaganda needs to be controlled in society, because it is violent, demeaning and destructive. Exactly where to draw the line as to what constitutes hate propaganda is arguable. There's 2 standards. Civil and criminal. Our experience has been that most propaganda that's to a criminal standard, what I would call existential or inciting genocide..is just not dealt with sufficiently by our criminal authorities. We need and deserve a remedy that's reasonable and controls the worst kinds of hate expression, but still allows for a very wide range of free expression of many kinds. Indeed, hate propaganda doesn't encourage an exchange of ideas. If anything, it shuts down and marginalizes people unfairly.
Uhhh...if Harper sabotages this bill or it fails to get support, that will not go down well at all with conservatives. Conservatives may be stupid enough to pull this, or conservatives grassroots may be docile enough to put up with it, but I'm not sure about both. I don't think Harper has a chance but to let it pass.
Harry, here's where your theory fails.
Every second page of the Koran is dripping with incitement to injure harm and kill non-Muslims.
It's binary. You only have two choices.
Either you have the "law" to prosecute the "hate crimes" in the Koran or you don't
Since you don't, because of a "fundamental right" to believe in whatever you want to believe in, (and they believe that Jews and Christians are apes and pigs),
why should freedom of speech be compromised as a "fundamental right", it being of the same order as "freedom of religion".
But regarding other hate crimes, in practical terms, while Jonathan Kay may be a yutz half the time, he is completely right in his definition of a "hate-crime'
I believe you can still read it online at NP.
[It's simple to understand, whcih makes it very easy to implement as a working principle on acceptable limits on free speech.]
Many ancient religious texts have all kinds of violent things in them, which by today's standards must be considered archaic and not to be taken literally.
The religion of Islam should no more be condemned in its entirety than should the whole of Christianity for the Spanish Inquisition.
Don't condemn Islam. Condemn the extremists. At its essence, every major religion is about tolerance and humility and respecting your fellow man.
Both Freedom of religion and freedom of speech should all be subject to not causing harm to one's neighbors.
I quite enjoy and agree with some things by Jonathan Kay, but not others. He's done a bang-up job exposing the 9-11 Truth cult, but his idea of freedom of speech, like many major media pundits is to the effect that everyone had their own printing presses that that and enough ridicule would take care of hate speech.
Not a position I agree with.
@Harry,
I beginning to think you're talking at me and not quite listening.
As practiced by contemporary Muslims, Islam has been transformed in its entirety as a gospel of hate.
So you only have two choices. Either you prosecute it's practitioners as hate-mongers or you don't.
If you're not prepared to do that, then you have absolutely wrong-headed in thinning that by tampering with our fundamental right to "free speech" you will get the desired result.
[it breeds our own kind of inquisitors. We know that already so we don't need to re-learn it]
"I ('m) beginning to think you're talking at me and not quite listening."
No. If you're determined to hate millions of people not for what they've done, but because they belong to a group then our conversation has pretty much run its course.
@Harry
not all all Harry. I don't hate millions of people. [in point of fact, I'm a lover not a hater.]
But facts are facts. Mohamed got his divinity BY slaughtering the Jews of Mecca. It's core to THEIR religion.
You can act deluded about it but it ain't gonna change a thing about their hatred for you.
And the point remains, BB by trying to compromise one of our fundamental rights as Canadians will not change a thing about their hatred for you, other than reinforce the notion that ANYONE can subvert a fundamental right.
Uhhh...if Harper sabotages this bill or it fails to get support, that will not go down well at all with conservatives. Conservatives may be stupid enough to pull this, or conservatives grassroots may be docile enough to put up with it, but I'm not sure about both. I don't think Harper has a chance but to let it pass.
Good point. Harper is going to be getting a lot of pressure from the grassroots on this one.
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