Blow It Out Your Ear, Bernie!

It would almost seem as if Bernie Farber is trying to set a world record. That would be the world record for the number of unrelated news stories in which someone who is neither a celebrity nor a world leader appears within a short period of time. In the last half of August he appeared in connection with three stories of which I am aware. Perhaps there are others that I have not seen. He appeared on television and was quoted in the newspapers in connection with the story about a member of the Canadian Armed Forces Reserves who was accused of recruiting for a supposed neo-Nazi organization. He was also quoted in reference to the sentencing of Dr. James Sears who had been found guilty of the promotion of hatred in his satirical Your Ward News. I am sure that few of you will be surprised to learn that rather than lamenting and decrying this latest blow to freedom of thought and expression, as any decent Canadian would, Farber expressed an attitude that struck me as being smug, self-satisfied, cocky, hubristic, and downright arrogant.

The third story is the one that really takes the cake. Grant Hunter is a member of Alberta’s provincial Legislative Assembly and a minister in the province’s government. He holds the portfolio for red tape reduction. I have not checked, but I suspect that Alberta is the only province in the Dominion with such a ministry. Since red tape is generated by bureaucracy, expanding the bureaucracy for the purpose of reducing it seems slightly counterproductive to me, but apparently Mr. Hunter is of another opinion. He has come under criticism for a tweet that said the following:

Wernher von Braun said, “To conquer the universe you’d have to solve two problems: gravity and red tape.” We’ve made it clear that we are committed to reducing red tape in Alberta. Lots more to come.

It is not the part of the tweet in which he toots his own ministry’s horn for which he has been criticized, but for the opening quotation. He removed the tweet after a bunch of triggered snowflakes jumped down his throat. A more appropriate response would have been to tell them to stuff it.

The objection to the quotation is based not upon what it says but upon who said it. Wernher von Braun was a German aerospace engineer – in layman’s terms that means rocket scientist. He turned twenty-one shortly after Adolf Hitler became Germany’s Chancellor in 1933 and in 1937, like any other German in those days who valued his professional career – the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the industrialist Oskar Schindler are other famous examples that come to mind - he joined the Nazi Party. He served the Third Reich in his professional capacity as one of the leading scientists in their rocket development program, and yes, the rockets were designed for military purposes rather than space exploration. Then, following the Reich’s defeat in 1945, he and several others who had worked under him were drafted by the United States government to serve their military in basically the same capacity. It was undoubtedly von Braun who was foremost in legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s mind when he made fun of the American government’s recruitment of scientists, engineers, and other technical experts from Nazi Germany in his hilarious 1964 dark comedy Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. However, von Braun served the United States much longer than he served the Third Reich and was essentially the architect of the American space program.

Unlike Bernie Farber, Wernher von Braun was a brilliant scientist who achieved great things, and until very recently the idea that he was tainted with the crimes of the government he worked for at the beginning of his career and that quoting him is some sort of grave moral offense would not have been taken seriously and anyone silly enough to propose it would have found himself laughed to scorn. Sadly, those days are behind us and so we find CBC News reporting on Hunter’s tweet, the silly backlash, and its removal, and sure enough, there is Bernie waiting and ready to toss his two cents in:

“It was an unnecessary quote," said Bernie Farber, chair of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and former CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress.
"He's at best a controversial figure. He is for sure a Nazi and … it was silly to quote a man like him. Politicians have to know better," Farber said. "I just think it shows his [Hunter's] thoughtlessness."
…
Farber, whose organization monitors hate groups, said he doesn't think people's concerns about the quote's use are being overblown. It would have been easy to quote a Canadian economist or another figure on the topic of red tape, he said.
"I just think [Hunter] should acknowledge he should have made a better choice in terms of who to quote and apologize," Farber said. "That's always the way forward out of things like this to acknowledge your mistake and move forward."

Not a single one of these statements is accurate. Von Braun, at his best, was a genius, a pioneer in the field of rocket science, whose work laid the foundation of space exploration and gave subsequent generations a new heroic role model to add to policeman, soldier, and fireman – the astronaut. As for his being a Nazi, it would seem that English verb tenses are not Farber’s strong suit. The present tense is hardly appropriate for someone who has been dead for forty-two years and whose membership in the Nazi Party ended thirty-two years prior to his death. Perhaps Farber holds to a rather twisted version of Calvinism and believes “once a Nazi, always a Nazi.” It was not silly to quote von Braun, what is silly is Farber’s attitude about all of this. There is no indication here of any “thoughtlessness” on Hunter’s part, and there is absolutely no need for him to apologize. Indeed, there is a need for him, Hunter that is, not to apologize, because he is the victim of a form of bullying, and the true way forward in this situation is to refuse to apologize to people who do not deserve an apology and to tell them to take their manufactured offense and blow it out their ears.

If anyone should be apologizing over a quotation it ought to be the news media apologizing to the Canadian public for inflicting so many Bernie Farber quotes on us. By uncritically accepting him as the expert on hate and hate groups that he has appointed himself to be, much as the American media used to do with Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center [sic] before that organization's reputation finally collapsed under allegations of hypocrisy, shady fundraising, serial defamation, and the like, they have lent him a credibility that in my opinion he does not deserve. Incidentally – or perhaps not, I’ll let readers judge for themselves – when Farber and Evan Balgord founded the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, of which Farber is chairman, last year it was with a start-up grant from the SPLC, and the organization, in a letter to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security that was signed by Farber and Balgord, along with two of its board members, said of itself “The organization is modeled after, and supported by, the esteemed Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in the United States.”

I first remember hearing the name Bernie Farber around the turn of the millennium. At the time the Liberal Party, headed by Jean Chretien, had been governing the Dominion since 1993 and their Immigration ministers had been trying to strip several elderly men of their citizenship and deport them. These were men of German and Ukrainian ethnicity, who had fled to Canada as refugees following the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War. They had been teenagers during the war and had been forced by the Nazis to serve the German forces in various auxiliary capacities, usually as interpreters but in some cases also as guards. On February 2, 1997, CBS aired an episode of 60 Minutes in which the main segment was entitled “Canada’s Dark Secret.” In this segment Mike Wallace interviewed a private investigator named Steven Rambam who claimed that Canada was a haven for Nazi war criminals. The Liberal government, in response, was trying to project an image of clamping down on Nazi war criminals and since there were no Adolf Eichmanns or Klaus Barbies at hand to prosecute they decided to pick on these men instead. Cheering them on at every turn was the Canadian Jewish Congress, which had hired Rambam and for which Bernie Farber worked as Executive Director for the Ontario Region and National Director of Community Relations. Later Farber was promoted to Chief Executive of the entire organization before it was taken over by the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy which soon after renamed itself the Centre for Jewish and Israel Affairs and dissolved the CJC. Farber had also been interviewed by Mike Wallace in the aforementioned 60 Minutes segment and in the controversy surrounding the attempted deportations was frequently quoted as supporting the government’s actions.

Peter Worthington, the late, great, founding editor of the Toronto Sun, went to bat for the elderly Ukrainians who were being so unjustly railroaded. He was particularly incensed over the cases of Wasyl Odynsky and Helmut Oberlander. Odynsky had been forced by the SS, during the German occupation of the Ukraine, to serve as a concentration camp guard. The Nazis told him they would kill him if he refused and would kill his family if he ran away. Oberlander, a Ukrainian of German ancestry, was forced by the Nazis to serve as a translator and supply guard for the Einsatzgruppe. Neither man served the Nazis voluntarily, nor was either of them an active participant in the war crimes of the Schutzstaffel. As Worthington put it in his column for April 29, 2001:

Men like Odynsky and Oberlander were victims, too - first of Sovietism which seized their country, then of the Nazis and now of a misguided quest for justice without discretion.

That column, entitled “Ukrainian Teens Were Nazi Victims” was written as a rebuttal of one by Bernie Farber that had appeared the previous day, itself in response to an earlier column by Worthington on the subject. Farber took the position that these men deserved to be deported, because even though they may not have tortured and murdered anyone themselves, their labour as translators and guards – forced labour, remember – enabled those who did commit these crimes. This is a particularly disgusting form of the fallacy of guilt by association and Worthington, quoting from Farber’s column, rightly, in my opinion, said “In my view, that statement by Farber is so wrong, mistaken and out of line, that it inadvertently demeans the Holocaust.”

This would not be the last time Worthington and Farber would lock horns on this subject and while Worthington always got the better of Farber the latter never retreated one iota from his position. In 2012, when Stephen Harper’s Immigration Minister Jason Kenney stripped Oberlander of his citizenship – one of many reasons why I have nothing but contempt for the present premier of Alberta – Farber told the Globe and Mail “It matters not if he was a translator or a cook – they were all part of the pirate ship and they helped oil the wheels of genocide.” Earlier this year, when the Federal Court of Appeal dismissed the 95 year old Oberlander’s motion to have the fourth (!) revocation of his citizenship overturned, Farber was again all over the news gloating and saying that he hoped the Liberal government would quickly deport him.

My point, if it is not obvious, is that someone who cannot tell the difference between the Nazi thugs who tortured and murdered civilians and kids who were forced by these same thugs to do their bidding, should not be taken seriously when he poses as an expert on Nazis and Nazism. Someone who for over twenty years acts as the head of the cheerleading squad while governments, Liberal and Conservative alike, try repeatedly to denaturalize and deport an elderly man, who has been a law-abiding subject of Her Majesty for his entire adult life, because the unit that he had been forced to serve by the invaders of his country of birth when he was still a teenager were responsible for war crimes, caring neither about the aforementioned difference nor the trauma being inflicted upon this man’s family, has absolutely no business whatsoever lecturing the rest of us about “hate.” When he throws a silly conniption about a government minister quoting the leading American aerospace engineer we should pay him no heed.

Good luck with the Nobel Prize, Bernie, but you can take your silly posturing and blow it out your ear!

This and That No. 12

WHAT NOT TO READ BEFORE GOING TO CHURCH

Before going to Holy Communion yesterday morning I decided to look over the Winnipeg Sun. In the op/ed pages there was a column by Warren Kinsella entitled “Doors barred to Israel hater, but Islamophobe ushered in”. Against my better judgment I decided to read it.

I say that it was against my better judgment because Warren Kinsella is not a man I like very much. I generally disagree with everything he has to say and the way he says it. Reading a Kinsella column can produce one of two negative emotions that should not be brought into Holy Communion. The first is anger, an emotion the Master expressly warned that we should not take to the altar with us. The second is pride. It is very easy to get a sense of personal superiority when one reads Kinsella’s column, and we are to take the Sacrament with a spirit of humility and repentance not a spirit of pride.

So against my better judgment I read Kinsella’s column. I was not surprised to find that he took pretty much the exact opposite position on everything I took in my last essay “The Long War Against Free Speech In Canada”. I would be horribly disgusted with myself if that were not the case.

In his column Kinsella accuses the Harper government of letting a “Muslim-hating white supremacist” into Canada. He is referring to Geert Wilders, Dutch politician, and leader of the Party for Freedom. He also calls him a “creep” and a “lunatic” but we need not concern ourselves with that. Being called names by Kinsella is a compliment and Mr. Wilders should consider it a badge of honour.

Calling someone a “white supremacist” is a bit different than calling someone a “creep” or a “lunatic”, however. The last two terms are just insults. Few people take them seriously. Calling someone a “white supremacist” can ruin that person’s reputation and/or his career, place him in danger of violence, and possibly even put him at risk of legal harassment.

Is Geert Wilders a white supremacist? No. He is a classical liberal who wants restrictions on immigration to the Netherlands, particularly Islamic immigration, not for racial reasons but for cultural reasons. He believes Islam to be incompatible with the liberal tradition of individualism and democratic institutions which he defends. Is he right or is he wrong? That is a matter of debate and Kinsella is, as he should be, free to disagree with Wilders.

To call him a “white supremacist”, however, is absurd and low, although not unexpected when one considers the source.

Kinsella goes on to contrast Mr. Wilders recent visit to Canada, with George Galloway’s having been barred from the country two years ago. Note that Kinsella supports the ban on Galloway:

When kooky anti-Israel British politician George Galloway wanted to visit Canada in 2009, the Conservatives (appropriately) denied him entry, citing his extremism as justification.

Why was the denial of entry to Galloway appropriate? His supposed “extremism” consisted of remarks critical of the government of Israel and a humanitarian mission to bring relief supplies to the Gaza Strip (which is governed by the terrorist organization Hamas thanks to the American government’s foolish insistence upon bringing democracy to these regions). How can anyone take seriously the Harper government’s absurd claim that he poses a security risk to Canada because of this?

George Galloway is a leftist ideologue. He is a lot closer to Kinsella’s political beliefs than he is to mine, yet I say he should have been allowed into Canada to speak, just as Mr. Wilders has been. Neither man is a threat to Canada, both have unique perspectives and people in Canada who wish to hear them speak. There is no good purpose that could be accomplished by banning either man.

That, of course, is the difference between my position and Kinsella’s. I support the freedom of speech even of people like Galloway whose views are diametrically opposed to my own.

Blast it all. There is pride sneaking in.

The next time I decide to glance at the Winnipeg Sun before going to the Eucharist I am going to have to avoid Kinsella’s column and flip directly to more wholesome material like the Sunshine Girl.

THE EXCEPTION

In my last essay “The Long War Against Free Speech in Canada” I described how Canada’s defamation laws are currently biased in favour of the complainant creating great potential for their abuse. Labels like “white supremacist”, “racist”, and “neo-nazi” are popularly associated with violence and racial oppression, can ruin a person’s social status and career, and can lead to that person being targeted for violence by anti-racist terrorist thugs.

One would think, that in a country where defamation laws are so strict, that people would be extra careful about how they use these harmful labels. On the contrary, however, these labels are carelessly thrown at anyone who disagrees with multiculturalism and liberal immigration by the media, liberal and leftist politicians, and progressive bloggers.

Why is this the case? Are the labels accurate?

No.

Take “neo-nazi” for example. The National Socialist party was a revolutionary party in Germany, with its own private army, known for its violence even before it was elected to office in 1933. Once in power it established a dictatorial police state, demanded absolute loyalty from its citizens which it encouraged to spy on one another, and frequently murdered people that it considered a threat to itself. In this, it was remarkably similar to the Communist Party. The Nazi party, however, was committed, not to an economic utopia, but to a Darwinist ideology in which life was regarded as a struggle for existence between rival races and a belief in the “Aryan” race’s destiny to come out on top of this struggle. The Nazi party considered the Jews to be the Aryans’ worst enemy, regarding them as a racial fifth column.

Needless to say Nazism and its ideology was and is repugnant. It is almost as repugnant as the ideology of progressive liberalism.

One would think that the term “neo-nazi” should be applied to similar people who hold to the same ideology today. It is not. All it takes to be labeled a “neo-nazi” by many progressives in Canada is for you to oppose multiculturalism, diversity, and liberal immigration and take the position that white people have a right to a collective identity and have legitimate interests of their own. The same people, can be non-violent, life-long defenders of free society and such fundamental freedoms as freedom of speech, and yet progressives feel free to call them “neo-nazis”, associating them in people’s minds with the violence and oppression of the Third Reich.

In many cases, the very progressives who are so loose with this life-destroying, defamatory label, are themselves the type to sue at the drop of a hat over the slightest exaggeration of their own views.

How is it possible that in a legal system which makes it far too easy for people to successfully sue others for defamation, the only exception is that of the most damaging defamation of all?

SPEAKING OF PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT NAZIS

Last Thursday, John Demjanjuk was convicted in a German court of being an accessory to the murder of almost 30, 000 Jews. Nobody testified to his having taken part in committing a single murder or other atrocity. He was convicted on the theory that his presence in Sorbibor as a guard during WWII establishes his guilt as a participant in the crimes that went on there.

Demjanjuk was not a Nazi. He was not even a German. He was a Ukranian, who was conscripted into the Soviet army during WWII, then captured and made a POW by the Germans. He was one of a number of POW’s trained to be guards in the Nazi camps. It is well known that the Nazis secured obedience from the POWs they made into guards by threats against them and their families. I often wonder what is wrong with people to make them think that it is appropriate for such men, who served the Nazis under duress, to be prosecuted.

Demjanjuk is the man who had been stripped of his American citizenship, extradited to Israel, and then charged with and convicted for the crimes of “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka. It was a case of mistaken identity, although Patrick J. Buchanan was virtually the only journalist who was willing to say so. Ultimately, Demjanjuk and Buchanan were vindicated, when the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction and aquited Demjanjuk, upon hearing evidence that demonstrated that Demjanjuk could not possibly be Ivan the Terrible. Here are Pat Buchanan’s remarks upon the outcome of the trial in Germany: http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2011/05/13/the-persecution-of-john-demjanjuk/

There are a number of similar cases here in Canada, of Ukranian or Polish origins, captured by the Nazis in the war and conscripted into service as camp guards or translators, who emigrated to Canada after the war. Certain organizations have demanded that they be stripped of their citizenship and deported, accusing them of “war crimes”. See Kevin Michael Grace’s “Who needs evidence? The Odynsky case proves Canadian citizenship is a meaningless protection” from the July, 8, 2002 issue of Report Newsmagazine (pp. 26-27) for the story of one of these men. Peter Worthington, columnist for the Toronto Sun (of which he was founding editor) has reported on several of the other cases in his column over the years. Here is a fairly recent example: http://www.torontosun.com/news/columnists/peter_worthington/2009/12/08/12075761-sun.html

It has been a little over one year since I opened this blog. The essays that I have posted here are a continuation of a series that I started the year previous to opening “Throne, Altar, Liberty” and which I privately distributed to my friends via e-mail and Facebook. The earlier essays were written in more of a newspaper column format – shorter, commenting on current events. Some of these I have reposted here, others I have opted not to because they pertained to things which were no longer current in the news. The first of all of these essays, from March of 2009, was about the Demjanjuk case. Since that case has just concluded, making it timely again, I will complete this post by reproducing my first essay.

True Justice and the Strange Case of John Demjanjuk

By Gerry T. Neal
March 13, 2009

So they are after him again. 33 years ago, John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born auto worker in Seven Hills, Ohio, was accused of being “Ivan the Terrible”, a brutal SS guard at Treblinka. The accusation led to his being stripped of his American citizenship, extradited to Israel, convicted and sentenced to death. He was later exonerated by the Israeli Supreme Court after that body heard evidence that Demjanjuk could not have been “Ivan the Terrible”. The overturn of his conviction did not result in an apology to Demjanjuk from the organizations that had pressured the US Justice Department into deporting him. Nor was there a word of apology to Pat Buchanan on the part of the self-righteous commentators, like Norman Podhoretz and the New York Times' Abraham Rosenthal, who had accused him of being an anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer, because he had maintained all along, what the Israeli Supreme Court eventually decided – that it was a case of mistaken identity.

The people who wanted Demjanjuk deported and tried, you see, were the type who simply cannot admit they were wrong. They immediately fell back on the “well, maybe he wasn’t ‘Ivan the Terrible’ at Treblinka, grumble, grumble, but he was a guard at Sorbibor and he must have committed war crimes there” position. That kind of argument usually convinces no one other than the person making it, but in this case they have had no problem getting others to listen to them. Although his US citizenship had been restored, the US Justice Department, which had withheld evidence the first time around, went after him again, and again they managed to get his citizenship revoked. They obtained a ruling that he was to be deported to the Ukraine. Now the German government has charged him with 29 000 cases of accessory to murder and called for his extradition. He is almost 89 years old.

63 years ago, when the Nuremberg Trials concluded, Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, the leader of the conservative wing of the Republican Party, and the son of former US President William Howard Taft, condemned the trials as unjust. They were a kangaroo court, in Taft’s opinion, which violated the sacred principles of Anglo-Saxon justice, upon which the legal systems of countries such as Great Britain, Canada, and the United States were based. At Nuremberg, the victors in the war, were judge, jury, executioner, and prosecutor, all rolled up into one. The court did not exist at the time the crimes it was sentencing took place, and thus, had no legitimate authority to pass sentence. Neither victor’s justice, nor ex post facto justice, was true justice.

It was not a question of whether or not the Nazi leaders deserved punishment. Taft was simply pointing out that the courts doing the punishing had no legitimate right to do so and that they were setting a dangerous precedent. Many did not like to hear these uncomfortable truths. Senator, and future President, John F. Kennedy, although a detestable man in many ways, had the decency to laud Taft for his stand, in his 1956 Profiles in Courage.

In 1960, Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who had been in charge of transporting the Jews to the camps and who had escaped following the War and ended up in Argentina, was captured in Buenos Aires by the Mossad, and taken to Israel, where he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in 1961. He was executed the following year. As Taft had done 14 years earlier, the editors of the conservative journal National Review, among them William F. Buckley Jr. and James Burnham, took a principled stand against these proceedings. Again, it was not a matter of whether or not Eichmann deserved his fate. The state of Israel was non-existent at the time Eichmann committed his heinous acts. Nor, was the state of Israel the successor government, to the territory in which these acts took place. Eichmann was charged under statutes that did not exist in the 1940s. This was clearly a case of ex post facto justice. Israel had no legitimate authority to try this case, and had in fact acted illegally to capture Eichmann, which understandably led to a protest of their actions by the government of Argentina.

Taft in the 40’s, and Buckley, Burnham, et. al., in the 60’s, took their principled stands during periods when the people being tried and condemned were genuine villains, the high command of the tyrannical Third Reich. Today, 64 years after WWII ended, none of these are left. Yet the professional anti-Nazis are still going strong. Having long ago run out of real Nazis to hunt, they are now going after anyone they can find, who they can connect to the SS and its camps, regardless of how minor a role they may have played. Like most single-mindedly obsessed fanatics, these people care very little about the genuine facts.

Here in Canada, the Canadian Jewish Congress, Binai B’rith Canada, and the Canadian version of the Simon Wiesenthal Center have lobbied the Canadian government for quite some time, to deport several men the CJC calls “war criminals”. These men include Helmut Oberlander, Wasyl Odynsky, and a few others. Oberlander is a man of German ethnic background, born in the Ukraine. Odynsky is ethnically Ukrainian, born in what was then a part of Poland. Both were conscripted into the service of the SS when the German army captured their home towns. Oberlander served the SS as a translator. Odynsky served as a guard in the forced labor camps of Trawinki and Poniatowa. Both men served only under duress. In Odynsky’s case he was told that his family would be killed if he did not cooperate. In both cases Judge Andrew MacKay found that there was no evidence that either had participated in any war crimes. Nevertheless both men were order deported (the deportations have not taken place, thankfully) on the grounds that they lied on their application to come here. This was not proven, as the records no longer exist, but merely inferred in each case. Both cases make a mockery of every principle of justice in the long and proud English tradition in which our country stands.

I wonder if something similar is the case for Mr. Demjanjuk. He also was from the Ukraine. He had been conscripted into the Soviet army, and was captured by the Germans. Perhaps he too was forced to serve under duress. Even if he did voluntarily join up with the Germans, it would not have been unreasonable for him to regard the German army as liberators. Lets not forget that he was living in the Ukraine, at the height of Stalin’s regime. The Terror Famine had taken place only a decade earlier. Of course we can only speculate as to what happened in Mr. Demjanjuk’s case. But one thing is certain, the man is no Hitler, no Himmler, no Eichmann.

The parties calling for his deportation are not asking for justice. They are demanding a complete and total revolution in the Anglo-Saxon justice system, which over the course of centuries developed, to protect the rights of the innocent. It is in the interests of all of us, that they not be allowed to get their way.