Hate and Hypocrisy

Just before Parliament adjourned for the summer, David Lametti,  who has been the Minister of Justice and Attorney General ever since his predecessor Jody Wilson-Raybould was shifted to Veteran Affairs after she refused to cave to pressure to improperly intervene in the prosecution of SNC Lavalin, introduced a truly odious piece of legislation in the House of Commons.    If Bill C-10, which the Liberals rushed through the House and is currently on hold for the summer in the Senate, which would give the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission regulatory oversight over social media similar to that it exercises over traditional broadcasting, is a threat to Canadians’ freedoms of thought, conscience, expression and speech, and it is, Bill C-36 is much worse.    Bill C-36 aims to undo the efforts of those who fought long and hard for the repeal of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.   Section 13, which was included in the CHRA in 1977 because grievance groups had complained to the first Trudeau government that it was too difficult to silence their enemies using the hate propaganda provisions that had been added to the Criminal Code in 1971 since these required that the accused be given due process, defined it as an act of discrimination to communicate via the telephone – or any electronic communications after an amendment in 2001 – anything “likely to” expose someone to “hatred or contempt” on the grounds of membership in a group protected against discrimination, a definition so broad as to make anyone who said anything negative about members of such groups susceptible to a complaint from which there was, in practice, no defense, where the complainant had no liability for false or mischievous prosecution and was not held to the reasonable doubt standard of proof, which could potentially result in crippling fines and other penalties completely inappropriate for something that is supposedly remedial civil law.    This repulsive statute was the textbook example of bad law.   Up until the final complaint made under it, during the hearings over which it finally came under intense public scrutiny, no defendant had ever won.   Lametti’s Bill C-36, if passed, would reintroduce a clause to the CHRA defining certain types of speech as defamatory.   The new “hate speech” provision would define hate differently than Section 13 did prior to its repeal passing Parliament in 2013.   The government seems to be relying upon this to sell the idea that this new law will not have all the problems that Section 13 had.   According to Lametti, “simple expressions of dislike or disdain that pepper everyday discourse, especially online” will not fall under the new “hate speech” provision, only speech that “is likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals”.    This is disingenuous, however, because it is the words “likely to” which occur in the new provision as they did in Section 13, which make the law so subjective, that anything anyone chooses to take offence to could potentially be ruled “hate speech”.   Indeed, Bill C-36 would actually create something worse than Section 13, because the new provision would make offenders liable to up to $50 000 in fines, which is five times higher than the already absurdly high maximum fine under Section 13.   Even worse, it would allow people to go to court, say that they are afraid they are going to be made the target of online “hate speech” by such-and-such a person, and have a “peace bond” issued against this person, who has not yet committed any offence.

 

The Prime Minister, Captain Airhead, whose admirers and detractors sometimes call him by the insulting epithet of Justin Trudeau, has made no secret of his intention to pass a bill of this sort ever since he first took office six years ago.   This is yet another demonstration of his utter contempt for the rights and freedoms of Canadians, due process, and the entire traditional concept of limits and restraints on government power that prevent the government from being able to just do whatever it wants.    The Liberals argue that this sort of thing is necessary on the grounds that the internet is full of “hate” from which “vulnerable groups” need protection.   The further left parties, such as the NDP, say the same thing, only louder and with far less concern for keeping their rhetoric within the boundaries of what is sane and civil.   Resistance to this line of thinking from the Conservatives in Opposition has been pathetic to the point of being virtually non-existent.   Early in June, the Prime Minister and Jimmy Dhaliwal, the clown who leads the NDP and performs under the stage name of Jagmeet Singh, jumped all over an incident in London, Upper Canada, where the driver of a pickup truck had run down a Muslim family as they were waiting to cross at an intersection, and seized the opportunity to condemn “Islamophobia” while pointing to the incident as illustrating the need for strict new “hate” laws, although little in the way of evidence that the driver had been motivated by “hate” was presented to the public.

 

Later in June we saw the beginning of the longest string of hate-motivated crimes in Canadian history, one which is still ongoing.   Lest you think that this is evidence which supports the Liberals’ claim that we need “hate” legislation, understand that although these crimes involve actual violent and destructive behaviour rather than merely words posted on the internet, they are not the sort of hate that the Liberals and other progressives say they are determined to eradicate.   This is because those perpetrating these crimes are targeting people that progressives have no interest in protecting from the hatred of others.  Indeed, several progressives have openly egged the perpetrators of these crimes on.

 

In less than a month, the buildings of approximately  twenty parishes, mostly of the Roman Catholic Communion, but also a few that were Anglican, at least one Lutheran and United, and a handful belonging to such sects as the Christian and Missionary Alliance and Baptists were set on fire and in several cases burned to the ground.  About thirty others have been vandalized in other ways, such as being splattered with red paint.

 

Imagine if this had been done to a single synagogue, mosque, Buddhist or Hindu temple.   Captain Airhead would have immediately called a press conference and there would have been no stop to his hand-wringing, weeping crocodile tears, and lecturing all the rest of us who have never worn blackface once, let alone on at least three separate occupations of which there is photographic and video evidence, about how we need to be more enlightened, tolerant, loving of diversity, and less prejudiced and bigoted, from that day to this.    Jimmy Dhaliwal would have commenced riding around the ring on his unicycle, honking his nose, and angrily berating Canadians, especially white Christians, about how such-and-such a group doesn’t feel safe in Canada.

 

That is not what happened with this ongoing series of attacks, which are obviously motivated by religious hatred, hatred of the Christian faith and religion in general, and of the Roman Catholic Communion in particular.

 

Captain Airhead, instead of issuing a denunciation of these anti-Catholic, anti-Christian acts of terrorism on the day they started, delayed commenting for over a week, and then, while he opened his remarks by acknowledging that burning church buildings was “unacceptable and wrong”, soon after shifted gears and made a lengthy statement that sounded more like an expression of sympathy for the vandals and arsonists, than a condemnation of their crimes.    If any other religion were being subjected to this sort of attack, do you think he would be talking about how the “anger” towards that religion was “understandable”?

 

As for Jimmy Dhaliwal, if he has issued even the anemic, “this is not the way forward”, type of denunciation that Captain Airhead has, I have not been able to locate it.   He is probably too busy spraying people with seltzer water from his lapel flower, climbing out of tiny cars, and trying to make balloon animals. 

 

Although Dhaliwal has not said anything about the church arsons that I have been able to find, members of his party, at least on the provincial level, have openly sided with the arsonists..    South African born Rima Berns-McGown, for example, who represents the constituency of Beaches-East York in the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada, tweeted her “solidarity with Harsha Walia”.   Walia is the far left activist who became executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association last year and who tweeted a link to an article about the burning of Catholic churches in BC to which she added the words “burn it all down” and later justified this remark by saying that it was “a call to dismantle all structures of violence, including the state, settler-colonialism, empire, the border., etc.” as if this sort of revolutionary Maoism which has never had any but massively evil consequences whenever and wherever it has been put into practice anywhere in the world, somehow made the remark better, instead of, as is the actual reality, much, much worse.   Although in the absence of any official statement from the NDP or its leaders at either the Dominion or provincial levels it would be going too far, perhaps, to say that Berns-McGown was speaking for the party in expressing solidarity with the activist and her violent, incendiary, revolutionary rhetoric, neither the leaders not the other members in general have shown much interest in putting any distance between themselves and their party on the one hand and her remarks on the other.

 

Other Liberals, such as the close friend of Captain Airhead’s who, in order to avoid calling the so-and-so by my own first name, I borrow a joke from The Simpsons and call Seymour Butts, have parroted their leader’s remarks about this Christophobic violence being wrong but “understandable”.

 

As hypocritical as it is for progressives, whether of the liberal or openly radical socialist variety, to demand that “hate”, even when merely in the form of words, against certain groups be punished to the limit, while excusing or even in some cases cheering on hate against other groups, this hypocrisy is hardly surprising.    The left has actively and aggressively promoted Christophobic hatred for a long time.    They have also been actively and aggressively promoting anti-white racial hatred.   Most recently, progressive politicians and their allies in the academe and the media – this includes the vast majority of professors and journalists – have been promoting both kinds of hatred simultaneously, by spinning a few half-truths, many outright lies, and a sea of conjecture, into a disgusting false narrative regarding the Indian Residential Schools.    This narrative is the pretext for the church burnings.  

 

Interestingly, although those fabricating this narrative have incorporated as much anti-white racial bigotry into it as they have Christophobia, the church buildings that have been attacked have conspicuously included a large number belonging to parishes that are not white.   The first Roman Catholic buildings to burn and many of those that have since been set aflame, belong to Native Indian parishes.   The House of Prayer Alliance that saw its building was set on fire on the fourth of July in Calgary had two congregations, one Filipino, the other Vietnamese.   All Nations Full Gospel which was vandalized by paint in the same city has a predominantly African congregation   This does not make these crimes worse than if all the parishes targeted had mostly white congregations, of course, but it shows just how intense the hatred of Christianity on the left is that the burning of church buildings the congregations of which consist of racial and ethnic groups who if targeted in any other way would have provoked an avalanche of outcries and denunciations from progressives has been met instead with the sort of response discussed above.

 

All of this talk about how the anger behind these attacks is understandable needs to cease immediately.    It is empty sentiment.   Taken literally, the statement that anger is “understandable” means that the reasons behind it are capable of being comprehended, which, unless we are talking about a kind of rage that is irrational, psychotic, and detached from any cause outside the angry individual’s own mind, is a truism.   This, of course, is not what those who are talking this way mean by it.   What they mean is that in their judgement the anger is partially or entirely just and that they sympathize with it.    Expressions of this nature are entirely inappropriate in the context of addressing a spree of violent crimes motivated by hatred of a religion. 

 

Can you imagine Captain Airhead saying “this is not helpful, but your anger is understandable” in response to somebody painting a swastika on the wall of a synagogue or an insulting depiction of Muhammed on the door of a mosque?

 

For the same reason such words would be unthinkable in those scenarios they ought to be unacceptable here.   They are also unacceptable in that they indicate an uncritical acceptance of the media’s defamatory spin on the discovery of a large number of graves near former Indian Residential Schools, which spin is at best indicative of a media that has completely abandoned journalistic standards, integrity, and responsibility and at worst of a media with deliberate intent to deceive, defame, and incite Christophobic, anti-white, and anti-Canadian hatred.

 

People who talk and behave like Captain Airhead and other progressives have no business lecturing the rest of us about “hate” or trying to pass laws that are an affront to due process and the freedoms of conscience and speech in an attempt to stamp “hate” out.