Time Immortal

All kudos to the Cat for getting a mention in the National Post. And such praising words, too!

[Wahida Valiante] compared Mark Steyn, the author of the Maclean’s article in question, titled The Future Belongs to Islam, to James Keegstra, an Alberta high school teacher who taught and tested his students on how Jews “created the Holocaust to gain sympathy.”

“They basically talk about the same theories,” she said. “This is not a civil dialogue.”

This isn’t BCF’s honourable mention, but it’s worth pausing here to reflect on what Wahida Valiante has to say: Mark Steyn’s quotations of Islamic community leaders saying — openly! — that Islam will dominate Europe are entirely the same thing as skepticism about the Nazi extermination of the Jews.

I can totally see the similarity.

She said that, in Germany, long before the Holocaust, “it was the words that set the stage for what happened later on…. We may end up with the same fate, and that is at the heart of why [the complainants] wanted to take this on.”

Yes, words were what really caused things to happen in Nazi Germany. Not the fact that Jews were legally denied property rights. Not the fact that Jews were denied the legal right to self-defence. Not the fact that the Jews were denied the right to move about freely, and ultimately to live and thrive as persons in the Reich. None of those things really caused problems — it was words.

Would the Reader be surprised to learn that, just prior to the Nazis taking power, the Weimar Republic had a very comprehensive body of anti-hate legislation? Is it perhaps possible that the Nazi reality became possible in part because the Weimar Republic muzzled freedom of expression?

Anyhow, on to BCF’s mention.

Both she and Ms. [Pearl Eliadis] had harsh words for the growing contingent of bloggers who lambaste the commissions, and have been invigorated by the prominence of the Maclean’s complaints.

Ms. Eliadis singled out one in particular, blazingcatfur.blogspot.com, as “poisonous” for referring to her panel at the conference as a “Texas cage match.”

She said it was evidence of the “appalling tone” that is “illustrative of how badly this debate has gone.”

Yeah, that’s poisonous talk, all right. A “Texas cage match” indeed…of course, perhaps for a lefty, any mention of Texas can be considered “poisonous”?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!