Stupidity and Arrogance

It is fitting, perhaps, that when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke out in defence of his decision to hand over ten and a half million tax dollars to the terrorist Omar Khadr, it was from Hamburg, Germany, where he is attending a G20 summit. It is fitting because his argument displays a particular combination of stupidity and arrogance for which the German government is also notorious. I refer to the stupidity and arrogance of thinking that a country’s laws apply outside the boundaries of its own territory. Sadly, Justin Trudeau is not the only one in Canada who shares this combination of stupidity and arrogance. His apologists, toadies, sycophants, and butt-kissers, who are the pathetic and contemptible excuse for journalists in our country, have been sanctimoniously shoving out drivel about how Khadr’s “Charter rights” were violated and how he “deserves” this compensation all week ever since the news about the payoff was leaked. That the less-than-Solomonic solons who sit on our Supreme Court are also infected with this brain rot is evidenced by their ruling in 2010 that Khadr’s rights had been violated.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms has been part of Canada’s constitution since 1982. Note my wording carefully – part of Canada’s constitution. Far too many people in this country have gotten into the habit of equating the Charter with our constitution. It is not uncommon, for example, to hear people praise the father of the present Prime Minister for “giving us our constitution”. He did nothing of the sort and this kind of talk demonstrates incredibly sloppy thinking. Canada’s greatest constitutional expert, Eugene Forsey, used to complain about how people talked about our having gotten a “new constitution” in 1982 when the repatriated constitution was, in fact “the old constitution with knobs on.” The Charter is one of those knobs and it is not one that I am particularly fond of because, contrary to what the Prime Minister said in his defence, it does not protect all Canadians “even when it makes us uncomfortable.”

The Charter, for example, did not protect Ernst Zündel from the abominable treatment he received at the hands of our government during the premiership of Jean Chretien. Zündel, you might recall, was the German-born graphic artist and publisher who was charged and prosecuted, a little over thirty years ago, with spreading “false news.” The “false news” in question was the contents of a number of pamphlets he had published that presented a rather less-than-conventional account of the number of victims of the Holocaust and the intentions of the Third Reich during that whole nasty business. The pamphlets, dismissed by most people as kooky nonsense, did absolutely no harm except to the feelings of the oversensitive. Those who still revered the British tradition of liberty and justice upon which our country was built, easily recognized that if Canada was under the threat of a revived Hitlerism it came not from Zündel and his publications but from the attitude and actions of our government in putting a man on trial over the ideas he had published. The Supreme Court at the time agreed and stuck down the law under which Zündel had been charged as violating the Charter.

In 2003, however, Zündel, who had been living with his American wife in the United States for a couple of years, was deported here by the Yanks who claimed – probably falsely – that he had violated the terms of his visa. Our government then stuck him in a tiny isolation cell – 6 by 8 feet – and kept him in this hole, where bright lights were kept on around the clock, for two years. He was neither charged nor tried with any crime during this time – a judge heard evidence, that neither Zündel nor his attorney were given access to – that he posed a security threat, and he was deported to Germany.

We will get to what happened once he arrived in Germany in a moment. First, let us address the rather glaring problem of why this treatment of Zündel – far worse than what Khadr received and on Canadian soil to boot – did not violate the Charter.

Zündel received this treatment under a national security bill that Jean Chretien had rammed through Parliament in the fall of 2001 after the terrorist attack on the United States. The bill authorized the government to dish out this sort of treatment to anyone who was deemed to be a threat to national security. How could the Liberals, the party of the Charter, get away with passing a bill which so obviously tramples over basic Charter rights? It was easy. They set the bill to sunset in five years. Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms gives parliament and every provincial legislature the right to pass laws that violate the fundamental freedoms and legal rights enumerated in the Charter provided that those laws expire in five years. This would not have happened prior to 1982. The Charter made the rights and freedoms of Canadians less secure not more. As former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney once remarked it is not worth the paper it is printed on.

And yes, Zündel, although he only held landed immigrant status, having been turned down for citizenship repeatedly, was far more truly a Canadian than Omar Khadr. Khadr might have been born here, but he was never integrated into our society but was raised elsewhere to be an enemy of the civilization of which we are part. Zündel, on the other hand, regardless of whatever zany ideas he might have held, had moved here as a teenager, lived here for decades, and fully contributed to and participated in our society.

What was that you were saying the other week Justin about how you are “jealous” of “people who got to make the deliberate choice” and how “being able to choose it, rather than being Canadian by default, is an amazing statement of attachment to Canada” and “This is your country more than it is for others because we take it for granted”? Oh, I see, that only applies if the immigrants are brown-skinned and the Canadians who are born here are white-skinned, not the other way around.

At any rate, the Charter, whether it secures our rights as the Grits claim, or makes them less secure as is the case in reality, is part of Canada’s constitution. That makes it law in the Dominion of Canada but it does not govern elsewhere in the world. It was in Afghanistan that Omar Khadr, acting as a terrorist not a legitimate combatant, killed an American medic with a grenade just before being captured by the Americans. Afghanistan is not now and never has been in the past a part of the Dominion of Canada. After he was captured, he was taken to the American detention centre at their naval base in Guantanamo Bay. The Americans govern this base, which is located in Cuba, under a century old Lease Agreement. Neither Gitmo, the United States of America, nor Cuba is part of the Dominion of Canada. Neither Afghanistan nor Gitmo, therefore, is under Canadian law, constitutional or otherwise. It is absurd, therefore, to claim that anyone, Canadian citizen or otherwise, is protected by Canadian constitutional law – which is all that the Charter is – in either of these places. It is not only absurd but arrogant – the arrogance of asserting that our laws apply universally.

Twenty-three years ago, when an American teenager, Michael Fay, was sentenced to jail time, a fine, and a caning for vandalizing cars with graffiti and stealing road signs, the American government asked Singapore to be lenient on their delinquent citizen, because of his age, but at no point made the arrogant assertion that Singapore was violating Fay’s rights under the US Constitution. The Yanks, despite their talk about being the “first universal nation” and their world-wide reputation for arrogance, understood that their constitution only protects their citizens on their own soil.

Justin Trudeau, in claiming Charter protection for Khadr outside of Canada, has exceeded the legendary arrogance of the Yanks and approached that of the bloody Krauts. Germany promptly arrested Zündel, when he stepped down out of the plane after having been deported from Canada, charged him under their laws against Holocaust denial for material that had been posted on his website, and sentenced him to five years in prison. That his website was operated out of North America where he had been living did not faze them. The German government took the position that it has the right with its thought control laws to dictate to anyone living anywhere in the world what he may or may not put up on the internet. It has recently reiterated this position by threatening to fine social media outlets if they do not remove material that violates their idiotic and draconian laws.

It is arrogant enough to claim that your country’s laws protect its citizens everywhere in the world. It is far worse to claim the right to punish people for word and deeds that took place outside the borders of your country. Let us hope that Justin Trudeau hasn’t picked up any more of this German arrogance at the G20 summit. He has enough of his own as it is.

The Story of Fritz Schnitzel

Have you heard the story of Fritz Schnitzel?

Freidrich Johann Wilhelm Helmut Gerhard von Schnitzel was born in Toronto in 1925. His parents were Germans who had moved to Canada after the First World War. The family moved back to Germany in the spring of 1933 shortly after the Reichstag voted plenary powers to the newly appointed Chancellor Adolf Hitler, the first of many steps in which the famous tyrant seized total power and turned Germany into a police state. Fritz’s father was a member of the National Socialist Workers Party and when Fritz turned fourteen in 1939 he was enrolled in the Hitler Youth. Already thoroughly indoctrinated in his father’s ideology, Fritz was an enthusiastic supporter of the organization, the Nazi Party, and its Fuhrer.

By this time the events leading up to the Second World War were well underway. It was not long after Fritz joined the Hitler Youth that the Third Reich signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union. This took place on August 23rd. During the night of August 31st, German agents posing as Poles attacked a radio station in Gleiwitz in the false-flag operation that provided the pretext for Germany to invade Poland. On September 1st German troops were rolling across the Polish border. Two days later, the governments of the United Kingdom and France, made good on their pre-invasion guarantees to Poland, and declared war on Nazi Germany. The British Commonwealth of Nations rallied to the support of the United Kingdom, with the parliaments of Australia and New Zealand issuing their own declarations of war that very day. One week later, the Dominion of Canada passed her declaration of war and faithfully took her place by Britain’s side.

At this point in time the Nazis had not yet thought of using the Hitler Youth as a military force – that would come out of desperation towards the end of the war after the tide had turned against them. Fritz, however, in his zeal for the Nazi cause, was determined to take part in the fighting despite his age. In 1940, through a combination of lying about his age and family connections – his father was reportedly very close to Himmler – he was enlisted in the Waffen wing of the Schutzstaffel and sent to fight in France. At the young age of fifteen, he joined in several of the Waffen-SS’s bloody massacres with ghoulish delight. He was captured by the Allies, however, and, after the United States joined the war in December of 1941, was shipped to a prisoner of war camp in America.

Finding himself a prisoner in North America, Fritz made contact with the Canadian embassy in the United States. He appealed to our diplomats to intervene with the American government and the Allied high command and arrange for him to be transferred to a camp in Canada. He naively thought he would be given more lenient treatment here, little realizing that in 1940s Canada, decades before the social and cultural revolution wrought by the Liberal Party in the 1960s, he would not find namby-pamby courts content with slapping him on the wrist, patting his head, and telling him it wasn’t his fault, that he was a basically good kid who was just misguided and misunderstood. The Canadian ambassador read his letter of request, showed it to his friends and his superiors in Ottawa, and after they had all had a good laugh over it, used it to light his cigar. Fritz remained in the American POW camp until the end of the war.

When the war ended, Fritz filed a lawsuit against the Canadian government demanding an apology and $20 000 000 in compensation. The courts threw the suit out and told him not to waste their time. He then turned to the media to air his grievances but found little to no sympathy. Eventually, during the premiership of John Diefenbaker, he was barred from even setting foot on Canadian soil.

The preceding story is, of course, fiction. It is accurate, however, in its depiction of what would have happened, in that era, had an enemy of our country attempted to capitalize on his having been born here in this way.

Sadly, we are living in a very different day and age.

In 2002 Omar Khadr was captured in Afghanistan where he had been fighting on the side of the Taliban. He was just short of sixteen at the time that he launched the grenade that murdered American medical officer Christopher Speer. He had been born in Toronto, but was raised by his father in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he was indoctrinated in Islamic jihad and trained to follow in his father’s footsteps as an al-Qaida terrorist. Captured by the Americans after the murder of Speer, he was held in Guantanamo Bay where he was interrogated both by American officials and, since he had Canadian citizenship, by CSIS and representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When charged before a military tribunal he pled guilty to several war crimes, including the murder of Speer, and received a light sentence of eight years, not including the time he had already spent in Gitmo. He applied for and received a transfer to a Canadian prison, which the federal government tried unsuccessfully to prevent during the Harper premiership, and under the jurisdiction of our penal system he was eventually released on bail. He launched a lawsuit against Canada, claiming that his rights under both our Charter and international treaties governing the treatment of prisoners of war had been violated, and demanding both a public apology and twenty million dollars. The media, both the CBC and most of the private media companies, fell in love with him and elevated him to superstar status. The Supreme Court ruled that his rights had been violated and most recently it was revealed that Justin Trudeau plans to issue an apology on behalf of Canada and to give him a cheque for ten and a half million dollars.

In the World War II era, Canada, her people, and her leaders, still knew who we were as a country. Consequently, they would not have made the mistake of thinking of someone who had been raised in Germany, indoctrinated in a toxic ideology like National Socialism that is hostile to our traditions of freedom and justice, and who had zealously taken up arms against our country and its allies in war, could possibly be a “Canadian” just because he had been born on our soil. Today, after decades of the Liberal Party’s relentless assault upon our traditions, history, and heritage, our politicians, judges, educators, clergymen, and other opinion-shapers, have lost sight of who we are. In their minds, Canada has been almost reduced to a mere geographical location and so they find it difficult to understand why anyone would not regard someone raised on the other side of the world, in an ideology hostile to our way of life, and who literally waged war against our country and its allies as being fully “Canadian” if he happened to have been born here. Ordinary Canadians have no such difficulty but it is ordinary Canadians who will have to pay the price – all ten and a half million dollars of it – for the folly of our leaders.

Canada needs to recover her roots, traditions, history, and heritage or we will sink yet further into this madness.