Khadr and Zündel Revisited

I have argued that since the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is part of Canada's constitution, and Canadian laws, constitutional or otherwise, are only in effect within the Dominion of Canada, the Charter rights of Omar Khadr could not have been violated in either Afghanistan, where he was captured by the Americans, or the detention centre at the American naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because neither of these places is within Canadian territory and subject to Canadian law. It has been objected, against that argument, that because Canadian officials were involved in the interrogation of Khadr at Gitmo, his rights were therefore violated because Canadian officials are still bound to act within the limits of the Canadian constitution outside Canadian territory.

Let us grant the validity of the premise. It is, after all, a valid one. If Canadian officials were not bound by the constitution outside of Canada then Canadian citizens upon whom the sitting government looks with displeasure could conceivably be in danger from agents of that government every time they set foot outside of the country. That having been said, the conclusion does not follow from the premise.

The reason for that is simple: if Canadian officials are bound to act within the limits of Canadian constitutional law outside Canadian territory then that is true of the constitution in its entirety, including Section 33 of the Charter. Section 33 authorises both Parliament and each provincial legislature to pass legislation that violates the fundamental freedoms listed in section 2 of the Charter and the basic legal rights enumerated in sections 7 through 14, provided that legislation is set to expire within five years of the date it comes into effect (section 15 can also be overridden by the terms of Section 33 but it contains neither fundamental freedoms nor basic rights). As it so happens, at the time that agents of CSIS and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were participating in the interrogation of Khadr at Gitmo, just such a bill was in effect, the same antiterrorism/national security bill that was used to justify the detention of Ernst Zündel in a tiny isolation cell on Canadian soil for two years without charge or trial and his deportation to a country where he stood to serve prison time for controversial opinions expressed outside of that country's territory. If the law that allowed our government to do this to Zündel in Canada was constitutional by the terms of Section 33 then, quod erat demonstrandum, it also renders the involvement of CSIS and the Foreign Ministry in the Khadr interrogation, constitutional and legal.

As it happens, while I am satisfied with the conclusion of that reasoning, that the way our agents treated Khadr was constitutional and legal, I am not particularly thrilled with the part of the Charter that renders it valid. I reiterate my longstanding objection to Section 33 of the Charter. This clause is the reason that Brian Mulroney said that the Charter was not worth the paper it was printed on. Former Senator Eugene Forsey, who was one of our leading constitutional experts - his booklet explaining our form of government is still published by the government - was quoted by Charles Taylor as having called this clause "ghastly" and having said "if you are going to have a charter of rights - on balance I'm for it, but not without reservations - it had better be entrenched." (1) I have long maintained that Canadians were freer and their basic legal protections and rights were more secure prior to 1982 than after.

I am also not a fan of legislation passed in the wake of terrorist attacks that enhances government powers at the expense of civil liberties and legal rights. I can see the need for governments to detain and interrogate suspects quickly in the midst of an actual crisis situation but the kind of legislation the American government tried to pass in 1995, did actually pass in 2001, and which our government passed in 2001, all struck me as opportunistic power grabs. My long time readers will recall that prior to the last Dominion election I cited Bill C-51 as the reason why I could never vote Conservative again as long as Stephen Harper led the party.

All of that having been said, I stand by my judgement that it is the Zündel case and not the Khadr case that demonstrates the problem with both this kind of national security legislation and the constitutional loophole that allows for it. My critics may object that in so judging I show greater concern for a non-citizen (Zündel was only a landed immigrant) than a Canadian but in doing so they have elevated a technical distinction that happens to be irrelevant over the real differences between the two cases.

To preserve the corporate integrity of a state and the value of citizenship itself, legal citizenship must contain privileges not fully extended to non-citizens. Basic rights and freedoms, however, belong not to the category of the privileges of citizenship but rather that of the protections extended by the law of the land to all who fall under its jurisdiction, i.e., everyone who happens to be in the country at the time whether citizen nor not. Section 33 of the Charter certainly makes no distinction between citizen and non-citizen when it allows these rights and freedoms to be overridden.

The distinction between citizen and non-citizen is therefore irrelevant to the comparison being made. (2) The only thing further that needs to be said about it is that it ought to be of far greater importance to us that the laws of our country are justly enforced and their protections fully secured to everyone who falls under the jurisdiction of those laws than that privileges of our citizenship are respected abroad. It boggles the mind that anyone could find that ranking of priorities to be controversial.

As to the real differences between the Khadr and Zündel cases, note that the legislation that allowed the Chretien government to override basic rights and freedoms for the sake of national security was passed in order to combat the threat of terrorism of the type the United States had experienced in September of 2001. Omar Khadr actually was such a terrorist. He was fighting for al-Qaida, the same terrorist group to whom the 9/11 attack was attributed. He was at war with an American-led coalition in Afghanistan to which our government under Jean Chretien had committed Canadian troops and hence at war with our country but not as any sort of legitimate soldier for he fought out of uniform. He is exactly the sort of enemy Parliament had in mind when it passed Chretien's antiterrorism bill.

Zündel, on the other hand, was a political prisoner. He was not a terrorist and has never been a violent man. Indeed, when he was living in Canada he was himself the victim of terrorism - a bomb attack on his Toronto home incited by left-wing antiracists during his highly publicised trials. He posed no realistic threat to Canada's national security and the only motivation for the treatment he received was the desire to punish him for saying unpopular and controversial things and to silence him.

Zündel's case, therefore, was clearly an abuse of the legislation that gave the government the temporary power to override our basic rights and freedoms to combat terrorism whereas Khadr's case is an example of the real threat that inspired the legislation to begin with. It is Zündel, not Khadr, to whom we must point to demonstrate what is wrong with that kind of legislation and the section of the Charter that allows for it.

The basic rights and freedoms of Canadians as subjects of the Crown were protected by Common Law, grounded in centuries of prescription, long before Pierre Trudeau passed the Charter, Section 33 of which, rendered them less protected and secure than before. National security legislation, while understandable in a crisis, creates too much potential for abuse, as demonstrated by the Zündel case. The best way to combat terrorism, therefore, is not to fight wars abroad while undermining our own rights and freedoms to create a surveillance state at home. Rather, it is to leave other people alone in their own countries, and tighten up our immigration policies and citizenship laws so that terrorists from other countries like the Khadr family cannot get in, much less have anchor babies here who they then raise elsewhere to be enemies of our country and of Western Civilization of which we are part.

(1) Charles Taylor, Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition In Canada, (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1982), p. 122)

(2) To the objection that citizenship v. non-citizenship matters when it comes to the question of deportation and denial of entrance, I answer that this is true but still irrelevant to the present comparison for the following reasons: a) While it is true that a citizen cannot be deported but a non-citizen can it is against Canadian policy to deport people to countries where they will become political prisoners, as was the case with Zündel's deportation to Germany; b) While it is true that Canadian citizens cannot be denied entry to the country except under extraordinary circumstances this does not mean that the government is in violation of a Canadian's rights whenever it places an obstacle in the way of his return - otherwise, the taxpayers would be liable every time a customs officer keeps a citizen waiting for hours while he does a thorough investigation - and at any rate, Khadr's having been convicted of murder, terrorism, and war crimes constitutes the extraordinary circumstances that justify the government's not wanting to take him back; c) Chretien's anti-terrorism bill may have expired by the time the government tried to block his repatriation but, since it was still in effect during the time in which our agents participated in his interrogation, their actions were therefore legal and constitutional under Section 33 of the Charter and the role the interrogation played in securing the conviction referred to in the previous point cannot invalidate the government's raising that conviction as an objection to his repatriation.

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.

The Circus is Over

The circus that was the Canadian federal election of 2015 is finally over. My response, upon hearing the results, first posted at Free Dominion at 10:24 CST last night was to say:

The projected results of this election, as they stand right now, just go to prove what I, ala Evelyn Waugh, have been saying for some time now - the Queen needs a better method of selecting her ministers than popular election. If we absolutely must have elected officials, then we need a more limited franchise. At least 75% of the current electorate don't deserve the vote and shouldn't have it. The real percentage is probably closer to 95%.

At a future date, we may explore the idea of limiting the franchise at greater length. Now back to the election.

The Liberal Party, headed by Justin Trudeau, has won a majority of 184 seats. The Conservatives, who won a majority in 2011, have been reduced to 99 seats, making them Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The NDP, who were the official opposition during the last government, have been reduced to 44 seats, the Bloc Quebecois are at 10 seats, and the Green Party has a single seat which I assume to be that of its leader Elizabeth May.

The outcome is a mix of the good and the bad. We will briefly consider the good, before looking at what is bad in all of this.

That the far-left NDP, which at one time looked like it might win the election, has been reduced to 44 seats from 103 can only be regarded as a good thing. The NDP was dedicated to the destruction of Canada’s traditional, mixed, constitution. It had vowed to eliminate the Senate, and in response to the Monarchist League of Canada’s question, sent out to all parties earlier this year of whether they and their leader “support the continuance of the constitutional monarchy as Canada's form of governance?” were the only party to give an evasive answer, the three others stating their support for the continuance of the monarchy. The leader of the NDP, Thomas Mulcair, is a man who, displaying an astonishing lack of perspective, simultaneously demanded that Omar Khadr be brought back into Canada and that Conrad Black be kept out. He has also declared that nobody who opposes abortion will ever be allowed to run for the NDP and that the issue should not be open for debate and that evangelical Christians are “un-Canadian”. That he will not be Prime Minister or even leader of the opposition is a blessing. That Pat Martin, the obnoxious jerk who served as NDP incumbent in my constituency of Winnipeg Centre, has finally been ousted, is icing on that cake.

It must also be counted as for the good that Stephen Harper has resigned the leadership of the Conservative Party following his defeat. The party had been in need of a new leader for some time now. Without denying the good that has been accomplished on his watch, such as the abolition of the long-gun registry and the restoration of the “Royal” designation of our Navy and Air Force, the greatest achievement of the Conservative government, the scrapping of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, was brought about by a private member’s bill without Harper’s support and overall he has been a disappointment as a Conservative leader. His courting of the votes of social conservatives while refusing to do anything to halt or reverse the social and moral decay of the country is one example, his Yankee style neoconservative approach to foreign policy coupled with his ludicrous inversion of Teddy Roosevelt’s proverb “speak softly and carry a big stick”, is another. His government’s countless attempts to police Canadians thoughts and words on the internet, culminating in this year’s Bill C-51 was the last straw for me as far as ever voting for the party again while it remained under his leadership was concerned.

Worst of all, however, was his cuckservatism. If you are not familiar with that expression, is has recently become popular in altright, neoreactionary, and other right-wing movements outside of established mainstream conservatism to refer to the tendency, within the latter, to embrace multiculturalism, Third World immigration, political correctness, feminism, and basically the left-wing “rainbow strategy” of appealing to the interests of everyone except whites, Christians, heterosexuals, males and especially all of these combined. Stephen Harper was and is the quintessential Canadian cuckservative, despite the ridiculous efforts of the left-wing parties and media to portray him as a rabid, xenophobic, racist, bigot. Unfortunately, the man who many believe to be the likely next leader of the party, indeed the first name mentioned by Steven Chase in his look at the question of who will succeed Harper for the Globe and Mail, Jason Kenney, is just as much a cuckservative as he is. As Immigration Minister and Minister for Multiculturalism, the only people he seemed to be interested in banning from the country were controversial speakers, whether of the left, like British Labour MP George Galloway, or the right, like Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor of Chronicles Magazine. Worse, he was determined to suppress dissent on the part of Canadians to multiculturalism and mass immigration. As Kevin Michael Grace put it in a 2010 article that demonstrates just how much of a cuckservative Kenney is:

Kenney remains ever vigilant in his search for (secular) heresies.So anyone who criticizes his and Harper`s bemusing obsession with Israel is an "anti-Semite",while anyone who criticizes immigration is a "racist."

Harper’s resignation as Conservative leader, then, must be chalked up on the side of the good that has come out of this election, with the qualification that his successor as leader may end up being as bad as or worse than he is.

The bad side of the outcome of this election is, of course, that Justin Trudeau will now be Prime Minister of Canada with a larger majority behind him than Stephen Harper had for the last four years. If I had my druthers the entire Trudeau family would be permanently banned from ever holding any position of influence in Canada. Justin’s father was the detestable Pierre Elliott Trudeau. An admirer of Red Chinese tyrant Mao Tse-Tung and virtually every tin-pot dictator the Third World ever produced, Pierre Trudeau succeeded Lester Pearson as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Canada in 1968. With the exception of a half-year span in which Joe Clark had a minority Conservative government, he was Prime Minister until mid-way through 1984. During that time he completed the “revolution within the form” that Lester Pearson had begun with the changing of Canada’s flag in 1965. In 1969 he legalized homosexuality and in certain circumstances abortion, and began relocating the visa offices to which prospective immigrants then had to go to apply to immigrate to Canada to Third World countries, with the deliberate intention of altering the ethnic makeup of the country. In 1970, he began the war on freedom of thought in Canada by adding the hate propaganda provisions to the Criminal Code and in 1971 declared Canada to be officially multicultural, which meant that from then on Canada would adapt to immigrants rather than expect them to adapt to Canada. In 1977 he introduced the Canadian Human Rights Act, which attacked and undermined Canadians’ traditional freedoms of speech and association, and in 1982, when the Constitution was repatriated to Canada, the culmination of his revolution was the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Ever since 1982 the Liberal Party has arrogantly taken credit for giving Canadians the rights and freedoms listed in that foul document, but the only things in the Charter that are worth more than the ink they are written in, the fundamental freedoms listed in section two, and the basic legal rights listed in sections seven through fourteen, Canadians already possessed as their heritage under Common Law as free subjects of Her Majesty. Indeed, Canadians were much freer before the Charter than after, because before 1982 we were brought up to think of ourselves as free to do whatever was not specifically prohibited by law. Since 1982 we have been told to think of our freedoms as those which are specifically defined as such in the Charter. Furthermore, the Charter makes these freedoms and rights less secure than they were before, because section thirty three of the Charter gives the federal and provincial governments the right to pass legislation that violates these rights and freedoms provided it is only temporary. No such exception is made for the sections of the Charter that enshrine multiculturalism, feminism, and bilingualism into our Constitution.

The consequences of the Charter’s making multiculturalism, feminism, and bilingualism inviable, while allowing the government to trample all over the freedoms and rights that are our birthright as free subjects of the Crown, soon became apparent. It turned the Supreme Court of Canada into the instrument of cultural revolution that the American Supreme Court had already been for decades. The ruling in the Singh decision of 1985, which made it next to impossible to deport anyone who claimed refugee status, no matter how obviously bogus the claim, and the ruling in R. v. Morganthaler in 1988 that struck down all existing laws against abortion, are among the examples of Charter based Supreme Court decisions that have radically transformed the country.

All of this is what Justin Trudeau and his supporters proudly look to as their legacy. This is to say nothing of the way Pierre Trudeau courted the good opinion of every Third World shithole while alienating other Western countries, ran Canada heavily into debt, jacked up our taxes, drove inflation through the roof while ruining the economy with heavy-handed statist mismanagement, and turned regional dissatisfaction in both Quebec and the Western provinces into separatist movements that continued to threaten to tear the country apart long after he stepped down from power.

Justin Trudeau gives every indication of being cut from the same cloth as his father. His father was an admirer of Mao, and he expressed admiration for Red China’s dictatorship at a ladies’ fundraiser in Toronto in 2013. His father made abortion legal in cases where three doctors agreed that the mother’s life was in danger, he made the pro-choice position the Liberal party line and told his MPs that they were expected to vote pro-choice on all relevant bills. His father began the browning of Canada by moving our visa officers to our Third World embassies and by allowing the family class of sponsored immigrants to bypass the points system. Justin has promised to eliminate visa requirements for Mexican citizens coming to Canada and to “expand Canada’s intake of refugees from Syria by 25,000 through immediate government sponsorship”, to help private sponsors bring even more in, and to spend $250 million extorted from the Canadian taxpayer to do so. He has promised to continue the moral and intellectual degradation of this country by legalizing marijuana.

Justin Trudeau has accused the previous government of practising “the politics of fear” in its response to Islamic terrorism, but he himself supported the worst of Harper’s anti-terrorism bills, Bill C-51. In fact, the practice of overreacting to terrorism in a way that infringes on the rights and freedoms of ordinary Canadians, goes back to the premiership of his father who invoked the War Measures Act to deal with the FLQ in 1970. In 2001 the Liberal government of Jean Chretien passed anti-terrorist legislation of which the only significant difference with Bill C-51 was that it was set to expire in five years in accordance with the provisions of the notwithstanding clause. As far as the "politics of fear" goes, how else could one describe the way the Trudeau Liberals exploited a completely unrealistic fear of a Canadian revival of Hitlerism and encouraged Canadians to suspect their neighbours and countrymen of harbouring neo-nazi sentiments, in order to discourage dissent from their dogma of egalitarian multiculturalism, thus creating the "political correctness" that has chilled the atmosphere of public debate for the last three decades or so?

Like his father before him, Justin Trudeau has been swept into office by the machinery of the organized media that has endowed him with celebrity status and duped a gullible public into accepting glitter as gold. Let us hope that the second Trudeaumania does not last as long as the first.

The Pollution of the Mainstream or Turn off the Bloody Television and Read a Book!

I am not a regular television watcher and have not been one for about fifteen years now. Towards the end of my college years I realized that I had already wasted far too much of my life sitting in front of a box that projects mind numbing drivel onto a screen. So when I moved to the city and got a job and my own place I made a conscious decision to make better use of my spare time. Having been a book-lover all my life, cutting television out meant that I had more time to devote to reading and so I have never regretted this decision. Today I only watch television when I am out at my dad’s place or visiting friends.

Consequentially, I had never heard of the Duggars until their recent scandal became a news item. I now know, thanks to the scandal, that they are a family from Arkansas whose television show, “19 Kids and Counting”, had apparently become the most watched program on what used to be called The Learning Channel. It is not a television show I would ever have watched belonging to a genre of programming that I particularly despise, that in which it is assumed that the absence of scripting and directing means that what is being recorded and broadcast is therefore “reality”.

The scandal concerns the eldest of the family’s nineteen kids, Joshua. A couple of weeks ago one of those celebrity gossip rags that offend the eye at checkout stations across North America dug up a ten year old police report about how he had groped several girls when he was 14-15 years old. This had been reported to his father, who disciplined him privately, put him through some kind of a counselling program, and made him confess it to an Arkansas state trooper who in a bizarre twist is now serving time for a sex crime himself.

The media have been using these revelations to crucify the Duggar family who are fundamentalist Baptists and believe in all sorts of things such as Christianity and patriarchy which the bien pensants of the media in their politically correct chronological snobbery consider to be appallingly backwards. Thus they are downplaying the fact that Josh Duggar was himself a kid at the time the groping took place. Omar Khadr was about the same age when the Americans captured him in Afghanistan and tried and convicted him for war crimes and the media has not stopped yapping about how he was “just a kid” ever since. Khadr’s were the greater crimes, but the same people that excuse his terrorism on the grounds of his youth, are howling for Duggar’s blood in spite of his. Unfortunately for Mr. Duggar he is of the wrong race and religion to attract media sympathy despite being himself a media personality.

This weekend an article appeared in the D section of the extra thick Saturday edition of the Winnipeg Free Press entitled “Stop whitewashing religious extremism for ratings”. One might be forgiven for thinking, based on the title alone, that the column, penned by sportswriter Melissa Martin, was calling for an end to the media lovefest for Omar Khadr. Alas that was not the case. For while the Khadr family, who as members of al-Qaeda consider themselves to be mujahideen, holy warriors of Islam, waging jihad against us Western infidels in the name of Allah, are certainly religious extremists in the sense of those who resort to the rather extreme means of lethal violence to accomplish the ends of their religion, it is the faith of the Duggar family that Martin is talking about. Since the Duggars, whatever their faults and failings, whatever their sins of omission and commission, may or may not be, have as yet, to blow up buildings, kill people, and commit war crimes on behalf of the Christian God, they are clearly not extremists in this sense of the term.

By calling the Duggars’ religious beliefs “extremism” Martin is saying that they fall outside what is considered at the moment to be the mainstream. This is an accurate enough assessment. The problem is that the contemporary mainstream has become so polluted and toxic that it is not a place that any sane person would desire to be.

Martin’s article is evidence enough of that. It is a feminist diatribe that begins with a progressive cliché that would have been almost clever had it not been done a gazillion times already in the past, the bait-and-switch in which she asks her readers to think of a hypothetical faith with a very negative attitude towards women which she describes in terms that seem intended to conjure up images of the Khadrs’ religion before revealing that it is the faith of the Duggars of which she is speaking. Her complaints against the Duggars’ faith are that it stops women “from seeking true education”, that it sees “all of women's hardest-won rights” as “pathways to sin” and their bodies “as vessels from which to beget a new army for their faith”, and that it has attacked “not just abortion rights, but also protections and rights for LGBTQ people, and sometimes take aim at equal-pay laws and no-fault divorce” and has sought “limits on access to contraception”.

Pardon me while I stifle a yawn.

“Abortion rights”, while accepted as mainstream today, are a concept that is indefensible in itself. The expression refers to a woman’s supposed right to have an abortion, which feminism predicates upon the argument that a woman’s body belongs to her, that she alone has the right to decide what happens with and in it, therefore since pregnancy occurs within a woman’s body, she has the right to terminate it if she wishes. While there is a semblance of logic to this argument it vanishes completely when you realize that the right to have an abortion which feminism claims for women, would bestow upon each woman the power to decide for reasons personal to herself whether another human life lives or dies and upon women collectively the power of life and death over the entire next generation and unilateral control over human reproduction. Seen in that light, abortion rights are utter madness. That our society has given women these “rights”, in recent decades, and that the mainstream of our society accepts that women ought to have them, proves nothing except that our disregard for the value of human life is such that we now owe Adolf Hitler an apology for the way we have been judging him for the last seventy years.


I could make similar arguments against no-fault divorce and everything else on the list individually, but it would be simpler to address the glaringly obvious theme running through virtually all of them. From “access to contraception” to “abortion rights” what stands out about the modern, mainstream, things Martin finds it so incredible that anyone would oppose is that in one way or another, they tend to separate sex from reproduction, and womanhood from motherhood. Feminist ideology declares its goal to be the liberation of women and their elevation to full humanity which feminism accuses Christianity and pre-feminist Western tradition in general of having denied them by the reduction of women to being merely wives and mothers. The idea is that for a woman to be human in the fullest sense, she must first be an individual who shapes her own role and destiny according to her own will. Feminism, therefore, looks with suspicion upon motherhood and those who enthusiastically embrace it by, for example, having 19 children, while itself embracing everything that separates sex from reproduction, such as contraception, abortion, and homosexuality.

To separate sex from reproduction, however, is to separate it from life, to render it sterile. It is hardly appropriate to regard this as being a liberation. Rather than elevate human eros to something higher than the biological function we share with the animals, as everyone from Plato to the doctors and theologians of the medieval Church sought to do, it reduces it to something less than that biological function.

What if, similarly, feminism got it wrong and the path to full humanity is not a generic, plastic, individuality but manhood for a man and womanhood for a woman? What if it was not Christianity, tradition, and “the patriarchy” which reduced women to something less than fully human by seeing them as wives and mothers – just as men were seen as husbands and fathers – but feminism which has reduced womanhood to something less than fully human by separating motherhood from it? While feminists love to accuse their opponents of being narrow-minded and bigoted feminism itself is such a narrow ideology that those within it find it difficult to formulate such outside-the-box questions for themselves. When a feminist does ask herself such questions and honestly strives for the answers she will usually find herself outside feminism, like the late Dr. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.

Unfortunately, susceptibility to narrow ideologies like feminism is the norm rather than the exception.

It is ironic, therefore, that the first accusation Martin makes against the Duggars’ Christian faith is that it stops women from seeking “true education”. For the very fact that Martin is undoubtedly correct in identifying her own views as those accepted as mainstream today is an indicator that true education has simply not been available to most people of either sex for decades. True education begins by training people to think - to learn and understand what others have said, thought and written, to reflect critically upon it, and then to express intelligently their own thoughts - and it develops and expands through contemplative exposure to “the best that has been said and thought in the world” from the earliest ages down to the present.

A mind that has truly been educated is unlikely to fall prey to indoctrination by the kind of narrow ideology that expresses itself in such shibboleths as “women's hardest-won rights” and “long dominated by a white Christian majority” or to the chronological snobbery that assumes that the ideas that are generally accepted by the public today are therefore superior and enlightened, even if they would have been regarded as sheer lunacy in all times and places previous to our own day, and regardless of whether or not they can withstand scrutiny. We could do with more true education today, but it can no longer be found in the public schools or the universities, or anything else belonging to the now hopelessly polluted mainstream. Men and women seeking that education today, will have to look for it outside the mainstream, in the territory that the Melissa Martins of this world call extreme.

GTN Tory Classics No. 9: To Admit or Not To Admit: Who is the Hypocrite?

When I began writing political essays to distribute to my friends in the spring of 2009 they were initially quite different from the essays that I would later post after starting Throne, Altar, Liberty. I do not mean different in terms of positions taken and ideas expressed. I mean that they were shorter essays and that they focused upon topics that were in the news at the time. When I started Throne, Altar, Liberty, I decided to write essays that were less a commentary on the news than an exploration and expounding of basic conservative political, philosophical, ethical, and theological concepts. This meant that I would abandon the self-imposed page limit that I had more or less stuck to n my 2009 essays.

I did intend to eventually re-post most of my 2009 essays here but the following essay but I did not think the following essay would be one of them for the simple reason that the subject matter is quite dated. The essay comments on two stories that were in the news in early 2009 – South Africa’s refusal to grant a visa to the Dalai Lama and our own government’s decision to ban British MP George Galloway from the country.

The reason I have decided to repost this essay, commenting on a couple of three-year old news stories, is because the question of who the government lets into the country is back in the news. Of course the issues and individuals are quite different than in 2009. In this essay, I expressed contempt for the decisions made by our own government and that of South Africa to exclude Galloway and the Dalai Lama, but also expressed contempt for the nonsense being spouted by self-righteous pundits around the globe that these decisions were violations of rights. A country has the right to deny entry to people. That does not always mean that it uses that right in a wise manner.

Today, the question of who the government lets in is back in the news in a rather different way. Thomas Mulcair, who has recently taken over leadership of the New Democratic Party, has been quite vocal in his opposition to the government’s decision to allow Conrad Black to return to Canada. Yet the NDP have also loudly insisted that Omar Khadr be allowed to return to Canada. Black and Khadr were both born in Canada. Both were imprisoned by the Americans. Black verbally renounced his citizenship in 2001, when, after he was offered the title of baron by the Queen, the humunculus who was our Prime Minister at the time declared that as a Canadian citizen, Black could not accept the honour. He was charged with “fraud” in the United States because he accepted large payments from Hollinger, at the time the company was falling apart, in return for non-compete agreements with the companies who were buying up Hollinger’s assets, and with “obstruction of justice” because he cleaned out his office after being told by the company to do so. Khadr did not verbally renounce his citizenship. He was captured by the Americans in Afghanistan, where he had taken up arms against the Americans and their allies, including Canada, on behalf of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, was put in Guantanamo Bay and was tried and convicted for war crimes.

How would a normal, sane Canadian, answer the question which of the two should be re-admitted to Canada? He would say that there is simply no contest. Black was born here, raised here, and lived here most of his life. Khadr was born here, but was largely raised in Pakistan. Black verbally renounced his citizenship but Khadr took up arms against our country and its allies in war, in acts which speak much louder than Black’s words. Black’s business ethics may be highly questionable, but even if his actions did cross the line from unethical over to criminal, it was fraud at the worst, which is hardly comparable to Khadr’s violent actions.

Yet the party which is now Her Majesty’s “Loyal” Opposition in Ottawa would appear to be giving the exact opposite of the normal, sane, answer to the question.

Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney have made stupid decisions in the past as to who they should let into the country. It was foolish to ban George Galloway and, more recently, it was foolish to ban Srdja Trifkovic.

Their foolishness, however, pales in comparison to that of the socialist opposition.


To Admit or Not To Admit: Who is the Hypocrite?


By Gerry T. Neal,
March 27, 2009

The Republic of South Africa is in the news again and just like in the good old days it is inflaming world opinion against itself. What is it all about this time? Have the nationalists returned to power? Have they brought back apartheid? Have they thrown Nelson Mandela back in prison? No, no, and no. The source of the outrage this time around, is the decision of the South African government to deny a visa to the Dalai Lama who had been invited to attend a peace conference in Johannesburg.

It is difficult to decide, after reviewing the uproar, who appears the more foolish. Is it the South African government, which recently admitted that its decision was made in an attempt to please the Communist government of China, after initially giving the amusing excuse that they did not want the Dalai Lama to take attention away from the World Cup which is scheduled to take place in South Africa next summer? Or is it the countless self-righteous opinion-makers, in newspapers and on the internet, the world over who are decrying the Republic's decision as a "violation of human rights"?

Lets make the erroneous assumption, for the sake of discussion, that there are such things as "human rights", i.e., rights that belong to every human being by virtue of their humanity, rather than from prescription via membership in a particular society. Whose rights have been violated here? The Dalai Lama's? Does he have an unlimited right to visit South Africa whenever he wishes regardless of whether the South Africans want him there or not? If he has such a right, and that right is a "human right", does that not mean that the same right is also possessed by every other human being on the planet? Would there be such an outcry if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been the one denied entrance? How about Osama Bin Laden?

Recently, the Canadian government received a lot of flak over a decision to deny access to British MP George Galloway. Now, I don't like Galloway and his socialist politics very much. Nevertheless, I found the reason for his being denied entrance to be imbecilic. Galloway, had following the latest Israeli-Gaza conflict, raised humanitarian relief for the Palestinians, and delivered this relief in the form of ambulances and medical supplies to Gaza a few weeks ago. A couple of years ago, however, the terrorist organization Hamas was elected to form the government in Gaza. Thus, the Canadian government reasoned, Galloway, in bringing these supplies to Gaza, was providing support for Hamas a terrorist organization, making him a security risk for this country. The idiocy of that conclusion should be obvious to everyone. If we denied visas to everyone who provided financial and humanitarian relief to governments headed by terrorists, we would pretty much have to issue a blanket visa denial to all Western politicians. For that matter, we would have to deny access to quite a few rock stars and Hollywood actors as well. That, I suppose, is the bright side. We have set a precedent for banning Bono and Bob Geldof from Canada.


No, George Galloway is an obnoxious, left-wing nutter, but he is no threat to Canadian security, and we should have admitted him if for no other reason than that that is the proper respect officials of Her Majesty's government in Ottawa ought to show for someone serving their Queen in Her Majesty's Westminster Parliament. However, that decision as to who gets a visa and who doesn’t, lies in the hands of the Canadian government, and it should be made on the basis of what is in Canada’s interests, not on the basis of world opinion.

Likewise, South Africa's decision to grant or deny a visa to the Dalai Lama, is South Africa's decision. If they prefer to kiss the arse of Red China and keep the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and head of Tibet's government-in-exile out, that is their prerogative, and it is nobody's business but their own. It is certainly not a matter of "human rights".

But, someone might say, human rights enters the question in another way. By siding with the government of China against the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan separatists is the South African government not siding with an oppressor against the oppressed? Yes. And is that not hypocritical in the extreme, on the part of an ANC government, which fought against oppression themselves for so many years?

The outraged commentators who are asking the latter question are ill-informed as to the true nature of the ANC. The African National Congress, was and is, a Communist party. That it would side with Red China against the Tibetan separatists is natural. Prior to its 1994 rise to power, the ANC waged a terrorist war against the government of South Africa for 30 years, with their military wing the Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). The Mk (as it is usually abbreviated) started out by sabotaging infrastructure and progressed into car bombings and other acts of urban violence. It committed numerous gruesome executions (often of South African blacks that refused to jump on the ANC bandwagon). The commander of the Mk was Nelson Mandela. He was responsible for the early sabotages and for the long term plan that produced the bombings and executions. It was for the sabotages he was responsible for that he was justly arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. He was not a political prisoner like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, imprisoned only for his words or beliefs. Just because the World Council of Churches, Joe Clark, and countless Hollywood celebrities and humanitarian organizations claimed he was, does not make it so. Following the ANC's 1994 rise to power, the Republic of South Africa was transformed from a prosperous, self-sufficient nation, into a country that can no longer feed its own people, where violent crime runs rampant in the streets of Johannesburg and Pretoria, and where guerilla armies roam the countryside waging war on Afrikaner farmers, the new government of South Africa being unable or unwilling to stop them.

No, hypocrisy does not lie in one Communist government supporting the oppression of another Communist government. The hypocrisy lies in the self-righteous outrage of liberal commentators who allowed themselves to be blinded to the true nature of the ANC by the fact that it was fighting apartheid. While injustices and repression were undoubtedly committed by the old Nationalist government of South Africa, it was the least oppressive government in Africa at the time, apart from Ian Smith’s government in Rhodesia. Black Africans were fleeing to South Africa from all over the continent. In contrast, for the past 15 years since the ANC took control, Afrikaners have been fleeing South Africa in droves. As Ronald Reagan pointed out to Mikhail Gorbachev over 20 years ago, the oppressive country, is the one people are trying to get out of, not the one people are trying to get into.

The facts about the ANC, both during the apartheid era and today, are there for anyone to look at. Liberals have no excuse for not knowing them. Further, they have no reason to be indignant that a Marxist party whose rise to power they demanded the world force upon South Africa 15 years ago, is acting like the Marxist party it is, today. Particularly when that indignation is expressed only about the relatively minor matter of the refusal of a visa to the Dalai Lama, and not about the way the ANC has withdrawn the protection of the rule of law from citizens of South Africa.