I am just about to fall in love with the National Post, Canada's magnificently courageous new daily paper. When it first came out, I thought the bold tune wouldn't last, what with the censors breathing down the advertisers' necks - but lo and behold! Hallelujah!
For discerning folks: This paper can be found at http://www.nationalpost.com and will be consulted henceforth by all those magnificent freethinkers worldwide, unjustly smeared as "Holocaust deniers."
The Canadian German descendents, that country's third largest minority, long disillusioned with the stodgy and beholden Globe and Mail, are reading the National Post with ravenous attention, as judged by the mail I receive. In one of its lead editorial, January 4, 1999, titled "Can we talk?", they read with joy and rapture:
National Post:
>>>Is Canada ceasing to be a country in which people can speak their minds? In the last 10 years, political censorship has become solidly ensconced in our legal institutions.
>>>It has reached the point that many judges and academics have come to identify the censorship of offensive ideas as a human right of those they offend. This ideological drift toward enforced orthodoxy took clear form in 1990 when the Supreme Court of Canada decided R. v. Keegstra.
Zundelsite:
For our undaunted history buffs who follow the long Zundel struggle, here is a bit of background color: When Keegstra was first defended by Canada's Battling Barrister, Doug Christie, the latter's fame spread far and wide - and Mr. Zundel, then facing what later came to be known as the Great Holocaust Trial Number One, traveled from Toronto all the way to Red Deer, Alberta and Victoria, B.C. to watch Mr. Christie in action. The rest is Revisionist history!
National Post:
>>>In (the Keegstra) case, the court upheld a federal hate speech law mandating imprisonment for certain individuals who "willfully promote hatred against any identifiable minority group."
>>>Although the court conceded that the law was prima facie unconstitutional under the guarantee of freedom of expression in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it was deemed acceptable because it served such overarching government objectives as promoting Canada's multicultural identity and demonstrating society's disdain for hate mongering.
Zundelsite:
So you see, a victim, in this case Keegstra, had to be burned at the stake to help the multicult along. When you walk the streets of downtown Toronto, you see what it has wrought.
National Post:
>>>In 1996, the Supreme Court took the campaign for ideological conformity to a higher level, with its decision in Attis v. Board of School Trustees. The case centered on the activities of Malcolm Ross, a New Brunswick school teacher who had authored various anti-Semitic publications.
>>>Despite an evidentiary fishing expedition that went back several decades, investigators found no evidence that Ross had conveyed his views to any of his students.
Zundelsite:
Which did not stop the Jewish cartoonist, Beutel, to draw one of the most horrendously offensive cartoons of Ross, portraying him as a "Nazi" with a pencil up his rectum. Filthy to the max! Some leaders of so-called "freedom of speech" organizations screamed bloody murder when Beutel was sentenced to pay a fine - yet, as already pointed out before and will be pointed out again, these so-called "freedom fighters" are nowhere to be seen when it comes to responsible reporting about the Zundel persecution. Mum is the word.
National Post:
>>>Still, a New Brunswick Board of Inquiry concluded that Ross had indirectly produced a "poisoned environment" in the school; and it imposed a slew of remedial measures, including the extraordinary requirement that Ross be prevented from publishing any controversial material on pain of losing the non-teaching position to which he would now be relegated. Canada's highest court duly affirmed the finding of discrimination.
Zundelsite:
Here the National Post didn't dig deep enough. Even though it was symbolic only, Mr. Ross did win a victory against his Jewish cartoonist defamer - a moderate financial settlement of several thousand dollars. I am not sure if an apology was also part of the deal.
National Post:
>>>The combined effect of these two decisions is profound. In defiance of a western free speech tradition that extends from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty through George Orwell's 1984, the court has handed government the right to suppress unpopular opinions.
>>>The Attis decision was particularly disturbing. Under this precedent, protection from hateful views is now conceived as a garden variety human right -- to be read into the plethora of generic non-discrimination provisions in our statute books at every level of government.
Zundelsite:
We couldn't have said it better ourselves!
National Post
>>>Naturally, provincial human rights commissions have been eager to give teeth to this new orthodoxy. Their most recent victim was Fredericton mayor Brad Woodside, who was forced against his will to proclaim municipal recognition of a Gay Pride Weekend that, in the mayor's view, would arouse among his constituents neither pride nor gaiety.
>>>The board of inquiry that sat in judgment of Mr. Woodside, incidentally, was composed of one man -- Brian D. Bruce -- the same one man who produced the original Attis judgment in 1991.
Zundelsite:
And that's the way the cookie crumbled. Sadly.
But all is not yet lost - as long as Canada has people in national print media of the caliber of the still-virginal National Post.
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"A nation may be said to consist of its territory, its people and its laws. The territory is the only part which is of certain durability."
(Abraham Lincoln)
Back to Table of Contents of the Jan. 1999 ZGrams