Time Immortal

Jay Currie has been busy, and deserves a ton of credit for breaking this story. Assists, as I understand it, go to Dr. Dawg and The Black Rod.

Briefly, what has transpired is this. Yesterday, Jay broke the story of Liberal Party of Canada candidate Lesley Hughes, who had for years been publishing Twin Towers conspiracy theories of an anti-Semitic nature on the internet. In one such writing, she asserted that Jewish businesses vacated the World Trade Centre in the days prior to the 2001 attacks.

(The “Jews were Warned!” meme is a fairly common one in the circles of those who insist that the most devastating act of Islamic terror perpetrated yet in North America was, in fact, an inside job or the work of the Israeli Mossad.)

Not twenty-four hours later, after initially defending his candidate and refusing to take action, Stephane Dion asked for, and received, her resignation from the electoral race in the Manitoba riding of Kildonan-St. Paul. This was a story that emerged, and was carried, almost entirely in the blogosphere — the mainstream media has been struggling to play catch-up.

And in a somewhat ironic twist, the Liberal Party’s “Team BC” website yesterday ran a story about an NDP candidate who is also a “troother” (e.g. a 9/11 conspiracy theorist), one Bev Collins by name.

Methinks that Jay has opened himself a rather large can of worms here. If you ever needed to see a quick demonstration of the power of the blogs, O Reader, look no further than this example.

Also: very sweet…I haven’t used the “Conspiracy nonsense” category in a while!

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Apparently, Lady Black was hauled before it back in 1978. Then, as is the case now with the likes of Mark Steyn and , there was no good reason for it.

The Manitoba and the Ontario human rights commissions had complained about an article I had written for on the “British disease.” The U.K. was lurching from crisis to crisis with strikes that left bodies unburied and bread unbaked. I had used the word “Huns” to explain British apathy as in “the Huns are no longer at the gate.” The word was clearly used in a historical context, but to no avail. In the bowels of Manitoba, a lobby group of professional grievance collectors found solace for my wounding word in Canada’s up-to-date human rights legislation. I was, wie schrecklich, slagging off all German Canadians. After a bout of correspondence I saw both HRCs off but not before they had tried to get me censored, possibly fired, and all behind my back. Fortunately, then-editor of Maclean’s Peter C. Newman felt I ought to be made aware of their complaints.

Cut to 2008 with Maclean’s being asked to respond to complaints issued by various HRCs about an excerpt it published from the book America Alone by columnist Mark Steyn. It makes me nostalgic. The magazine’s plight occurs on the 30th anniversary of my similar encounter with the same Thought Police (the gemstone is pearls). The charges against me then were as empty as the ones now brought against Maclean’s, though as Steyn pointed out last week, the poison is not in the truth or falsehood of the complaint but the notion that it is the business of government to judge it.

In the balmy days of the seventies, human rights commissioners and their allies who monitored one’s “errant” views were mainly ultra-liberals, people with whom you could, more or less, have a reasoned discussion. Indeed, I cranked out my 1980 book Confessions as a response to Rabbi Gunther Plaut’s questions at that luncheon about my opposition to the very existence of HRCs. Many of those old-time liberals are having spots of amnesia now about their early support for the HRCs, but never mind. One was reasonably safe in their hands then, even though you knew as surely as night follows day that the safety was temporary and their hands would not be the last ones censoring ideas.

As victimhood became fashionable, unsurprisingly Canada’s Thought Police expanded. A few years later when I was editor of the Toronto Sun, city taxpayers footed the bill for an investigation into the newspaper’s alleged “racism.” I was cleared personally, but Sun columnist McKenzie Porter was not. Porter, an elderly British writer who yearned for the lost grandeur of the British Empire, and I had an understanding: I spiked any overly offensive columns of his but promised never to edit him. This seemed to work to his and readers’ satisfaction if not Toronto’s city hall.

Today, Canada’s human rights industry flourishes in a barren landscape where there are no proper rules of evidence, legal procedures or public and press scrutiny. Tribunals can cause you to lose your job and fine you. Fail to answer a witness summons and you face contempt of court � possible imprisonment. Under this scenario, Steyn could become a fugitive from Canadian justice in his New Hampshire home, where he and “Tiffany” (his assistant, long rumoured to actually be Mark avoiding phone conversation with editors) could survey the plains, shotgun ready, for red-coated policemen riding over the hills. Mark has long counselled my husband to stay out of the clutches of the American judicial system. I offer him refuge in Palm Beach.

…

Whether stupid or prejudiced, true or false, suppressing opinion is always bad. Seven of my columns are used as examples of Islamophobia in the report. I want to sue the authors myself for defamation, but my view of their view should not be actionable. One would think most Canadians intelligent enough to grasp that freedom doesn’t mean you are free only to express nice thoughts. Freedom is not a maple-syrup nut cake to be sliced up: you cannot have some freedom of speech or freedom of speech only for those people you like. By definition, freedom is indivisible. It should be so simple really. The thing speaks for itself.

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