Assault On Free Speech In Canada

By James Fulford

07/22/2007

Kathy Shaidle of RelapsedCatholic.com has a posting on an assault on free speech taking place now in Canada. A website called FreeDominion.ca, similar in concept to the US’s FreeRepublic.com has been served with a complaint by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. This is apparently based not on what they said, but on what a commenter said.

OK, it looks like a non-Muslim woman was offended by "anti-Muslim" comments posted by an anti-gay-rights guy (who doesn’t own the site in question, unlike the person who was served the complaint).

Got that? Then you must be Canadian.

Allegedly, these are the offending comments by some guy named Bill Whatcott, (who has a history with provincial Kangaroo Courts for "distributing flyers denouncing homosexual behaviour" for which he was fined — $17,500!)

Here are the alleged offending statements made by Whatcott on some FreeDominion.ca thread, the ones that led to this new complaint: 04/24/06 "I can’t figure out why the homosexuals I ran into are on the side of the Muslims. After all, Muslims who practice Sharia law tend to advocate beheading homosexuals."

03/09/06 "I defy Islamic censorship and speak about what I believe is the truth about violent Islamism and its threat to religious liberty in Canada."

"Gentes also claims she was discriminated against [remember, she is not a Muslim] due to the appearance of the following posts which she claims appeared at Free Dominion:"

"How many of us pay nothing but lip service to the Muslim threat here in Canada?" "Probably everyone want to jail a Muslim." "I have to ask why we are importing them here?" "Islamic fundamentalism and its threat to Canada’s religious and civil liberties."

I know, you're thinking: but Kathy, I read that stuff every day at JihadWatch and LGF. Congratulations — you live in the United States of Frickin' America.

With the First Amendment, is what she means. Canada doesn’t have one of those. This is something we don’t cover enough on VDARE.com, but we mentioned it in 1999 in response to a story in the Washington Post called In Canada, Free Speech Has Its Restrictions: Government Limits Discourse That Some May Find Offensive [By Steven Pearlstein, December 12, 1999]which Walter Olson called at the time the "Most unsettling thing we've heard about Canada in a while."

Peter Brimelow wrote

This striking article is an example of how much of the best journalism is ignorance-broking, broking between relative levels of ignorance, since the facts are well known to anyone active in Canadian journalism, particularly on the right. I discussed them in in my 1986 book The Patriot Game: Canada and the Canadian Question Revisited,

drawing a parallel with Roland Huntford’s seminal study of Swedish political correctness, The New Totalitarians. How could this happen to a nice country like Canada? Well, read my book. But one reason is that the country’s deep ethnic division between French and English has allowed the political left unnatural power, like a circus stuntman riding two horses in tandem. Imported ethnic divisions bid fair to do the same in the U.S.