Time Immortal

Blazing Cat Fur writes in a brief note regarding this post and Warren Kinsella’s response to the article I quote therein.

I see Kinsella tried to debunk the citizen article

I think the operative word, O Reader, is “tried” — you can read Kinsella’s piece for yourself, but here are the meaty and relevant parts, I think.

Gardner’s column is worth reading, but - in my world - quantitative data will always trump a census statistic and a few anecdotes. If it wasn’t out of print, then, I would recommend that you all pick up a copy of Hate on Trial: the Zundel Affair, the Media, and Public Opinion in Canada, published in 1986 by my friend Professor Conrad Winn. Conrad, who is a polling expert at Carleton University, sampled public opinion during the 1985 trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. He found the trial not only alerted people to the fact of the Holocaust, it turned them against Zundel in droves.

In a poll of 1,054 respondents taken right after Zundel’s trial, Canadians proved the media libertarians wrong, as they often do. Half (47 per cent) said their feelings toward Jews were unchanged by the trial, while one quarter (24 per cent) said they became more sympathetic toward Jews, and only 2 per cent reported less sympathy.

Kinsella would seem to be attempting to state, based on the above, that it was because Ernst Zundel was tried that public opinion shifted still further against his anti-Semitic rantings. This is a dangerous conclusion to draw, because it can lead one to think, erroneously, that it is through acts of censorship perpetrated by government agencies and courts that “the people” can be made to think “correctly.” And indeed, that would seem to be the conclusion that Kinsella, a self-confessed censor and an advocate for the existence of the HRCs, draws.

That would mean, O Reader, that Canadians either did not change their opinion of Jews or became more sympathetic toward Jews out of fear of government reprisal.

This would seem, then, to fly in the face of Dan Gardener’s observations about how allowing Fred Phelps to speak his hate openly has, in the end, only served to inspire Kansans (not exactly known for being of a progressive bent) to side not with Phelps, but with those Phelps denigrates.

But in fact, Kinsella’s story does not quite mean what he thinks it means, nor does it actually fly in the face of what Dan Gardener says — in fact, it affirms it. Zundel was a nobody with a small audience to begin with — few Canadians had even heard of him, and hardly anyone gave him the time of day. When he was put on trial, more and more people were able to become aware of his views. And in an analog to the case of Phelps and Westboro in Kansas, it was in hearing discussion about Zundel’s opinions that inspired nearly 25% of Canadians to become even more sympathetic to persons of Jewish descent than they already were. The fact that it took a trial for Zundel to gain a wide enough audience is an interesting little factoid of history, but also irrelevant.

The Zundel trial and its ouctomes, at least as regards public opinion toward Jews, proves the freespeecher arguments valid — given the chance, Canadians will tend to make the right decisions when they hear someone uttering hateful speech. So why not give people the opportunity to be as open in their hatred as they can possibly be? As was the case with Zundel, many of the haters won’t even find a wide enough audience to have any impact on public opinion (and thus will not be a threat). And the ones that do will, for the most part, either make people shrug their shoulders in dismissal or inspire people to move their own opinions away from those of the haters.

That’s the beauty of the “marketplace of ideas.”

I wonder how Kinsella missed that? And I wonder if it was his intent to argue in favour of government coercion of citizen opinion?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

The left-wing Canadian Jewish Congress, the special-interest lobby group most responsible for criminalizing speech in Canada, is obviously feeling some political heat because of what they have wrought. Their figurehead co-presidents, Rabbi Reuven Bulka and Sylvain Abitbol, wrote a muddled column called “Some human rights complaints are frivolous”. That’s actually less mealy-mouthed than it sounds, given that the commissions have a 100% conviction rate for thought crime hearings. But what is the standard for acquittal that the CJC proposes?

“Human rights commissions must constantly recalibrate where the balance lies between free expression and its abridgement, but the determination of where to place the fulcrum must always be based on the statutory standard that such expression is �likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.”

and

“the appropriate application of statutory criteria is our best defence against those who would eliminate the law to protect their interests, and against those who would use the law to promote a narrow political agenda.”

In other words, the concept of a “pre-crime” is still fine by them. No-one has to be exposed to hatred or contempt for someone to be found guilty. It just has to be “likely” that could happen. And hatred or contempt — emotional feelings — are enough. The CJC doesn’t even think that a discriminatory act is necessary for a conviction. They support the notion of thought crimes.

If the human rights commissions apply the standards in this fuzzy-headed op-ed, Mark Steyn and I will still be convicted.

What an embarrassment the CJC has become. Essentially they are pleading for Steyn and I as special cases. Is it because I’m a Jew and Steyn sounds like he might be, too? Is it because we’re being sued by Muslim fanatics? Or is it because the CJC is taking some political heat for their support of these illiberal, anti-intellectual commissions, and the CJC’s alliance with Richard Warman, the serial human rights complainant and foul-mouthed, anti-Black, misogynist bigot?

The CJC’s op-ed will be seen as nothing but more proof for anti-Semites and neo-Nazis who claim — with historical and statistical validity — that the hate speech provisions are a tool used mainly by secular, leftist Jews to punish their anti-Semitic critics. But now that those same precedents are being used against Jews and philo-Semites by Islamic fascists, the CJC wants to change the rules.

As disgusting a thing as Holocaust denial is, we began the slide down this slippery slope of censorship, and the attendant denial of the legitimate right to that every human being is theoretically entitled to, when we made it illegal to say that the Holocaust was just a hoax. And anyone who says that Levant is innocent, but then turns around and says that the likes of Ernst Zundel are guilty, is just a hypocrite.

Freedom of expressions means that even those opinions we personally consider distasteful have a right to be said aloud, or it means nothing at all.