I had the pleasure of meeting one of Canada's top columnists, Doug Collins
of the North Shore News, last year - ". . . the one that got away"
as Ernst likes to spar with mock regard and Collins takes just like the
kind of crusty Brit he is who still remembers the old-fashioned kind of
chivalry that honors men of battle on opposite sides of the trench.
Collins was a soldier during World War II who, to this day, hates Hitler
- but scoffs at fairy tales of genocide. Collins came to Ernst's defense
during the first Great Holocaust Trial, and there exists a tape where he
made an impassioned speech on behalf of Ernst's right to speak up. It is
one of my all-time favorites!
Ever since the Zundel Trials, Doug Collins has known who the enemy is -
and vice versa. If we had more Collins-type journalists within traditional
media, we would have fewer meddlers of the kind he is shaming below.
Like all Doug Collins columns, this one is sparse yet punchy:
"A small victory for free speech
IN the struggle for free expression it sometimes happens that the good guys win a round.
That has happened with radio station CKST-AM 1040's victory over Alan Dutton in the David Irving affair.
In March of last year open-liner Charles Maclean invited Irving, the controversial British historian and author to come on his show. Whereupon the usual would-be censors complained to the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
A few years ago Irving was arrested while making a speech in Victoria and bundled out of the country in handcuffs on an immigration pretext. But his real sin was that he had enraged Jewish organizations with his views on the numbers of Jewish deaths in the "holocaust" and the alleged gas chambers.
Foreign killers and crooks can roam this country but Irving is a no-no.
What can't be stopped, however, is his voice. Ottawa can prevent him from crossing its sacred borders but it finds it more difficult to control the phones.
Maclean interviewed Irving for 90 minutes and listeners got an earful. He was unbeatable in arguing his case, which is why his critics refuse to face him.
As Professor Gordon Craig of Stanford University wrote in the New York Review of Books after a top American publisher was bullied into cancelling Irving's latest book, "The fact is that he knows more about National Socialism than most professional scholars in his field."
The pressure groups have got him banned not only from Canada but also from Australia and Germany, in which latter country he was convicted of the "crime" of "defaming the dead," a law that exists nowhere else. He was also barred from South Africa until Nelson Mandela lifted the veto against him.
Maclean invited Toronto's Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress to come on the air the same night as Irving. Farber was in fact asked to appear with Irving but declined. Predictably.
Enter Alan Dutton, he of the Canadian Anti-Racism Education and Research Society (CAERS), who gets funds from the feds and from his friends in Victoria to act as a freelance, self-appointed watchdog over the politically incorrect.
Dutton whined to the CRTC that Maclean had provided a forum for "historical revisionism, holocaust denial, racism, and anti-Semitism."
The CRTC threw the complaints into the trash basket. Not that Maclean had put a foot wrong. But these are strange times.
It stated in its judgment that "while certain Jewish organizations were the subject of negative comments by Mr. Irving and [by] callers to the show, the commission is unable to conclude that these comments, when taken in context, would tend or be likely to expose Jewish people to hatred or contempt."
What is the world coming to? Someone in an official capacity believes that pressure groups like the CJC are not above criticism? Where will it all end? Will freedom of speech be returned to this country?
The CRTC dealt Dutton another jab in the gut by rejecting his further complaint that Paul Fromm and Maclean had launched a personal attack on him in a subsequent broadcast.
Fromm is a Toronto teacher who runs the Canadian Association for Free Expression (CAFE). He is also a critic of our immigration stupidities and foreign aid.
Needless to say, Jewish groups and Dutton are trying to get him fired.
The CRTC stated, dryly, that "the comments of Mr. Maclean and his guest Paul Fromm appear to have been targeted at your [Dutton's] views, rather than your character."
Dutton's charges of "racism" and "anti-Semitism" were carried in the Jewish Western Bulletin, and the station is suing that newspaper and Dutton for libel.
Something tells me that the CRTC findings will not be of much help to the defendants."
Doug Collins, I am told, is THE most visible politically incorrect columnist
of Canada - a distinction that is very well deserved. I have heard there
are bulletin boards on some buses that say so. As I said, he writes for
British Columbia's North Shore News, a paper with a sterling reputation
also for never playing skittish - and more power to them for their stand!
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"I have always believed that to have true justice we must have equal harassment under the law."
(Paul Krassner)