Time Immortal

Ezra Levant reports that Jennifer Lynch was allowed to place a wreath from the CHRC at the Cenotaph in Ottawa — her disgusting insult to the memory of fallen Canadian soldiers went as planned.

He also includes a photograph that enables one to precisely locate the wreath, and makes a suggestion:

If any reader is in Ottawa, help fight vandalism — remove that filthy wreath from the cenotaph, and place it where it belongs: in the garbage.

This is actually not a bad suggestion for one simple reason: Lynch placed the wreath not in memory of fallen soldiers, whom the Cenotaph commemorates, but to mark the 60th anniversary of the UN declaration concerning human rights (a declaration that is ignored by most UN member states anyhow). It seems to matter not to Lynch that she’s a month early in marking that anniversary, and she evidently thought nothing was wrong with co-opting a national day of remembrance to serve her own agenda.

The point is: the wreath was not placed in memory of fallen soldiers, but in lip service to what might just be the single most often ignored UN document. As such, it doesn’t belong on the Cenotaph, and should be removed.

Think I’m overstating the case?

Jennifer Lynch, Chief Commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC), plans to lay a wreath during the Remembrance Day ceremony in Ottawa tomorrow. This despite the fact that she and her department are committed to the very antithesis of the ideal of freedom for which so many Canadian men and women gave their lives in war.

(And, as Ezra Levant points out, despite the fact that the CHRC is essentially the biggest purveyor of neo-Nazi rhetoric in Canada today, which only gives additional insult the the memory of the men and women being commemorated who gave their lives in the cause of defeating Hitler’s dark regime and ideology.)

The kicker in all this, though, is that Lynch plans to lay her wreath to mark the 60th anniversary of the UN’s “universal declaration” concerning human rights. Which includes the right to freedom of expression. Which is the right that Lynch and her ilk seek to deny to Canadians.

So she’s not even laying the wreath because its Remembrance Day, nor is she laying the wreath to mark the sacrifices that we are supposed to be remembering on the solemn day that is November 11th, Remembrance Day. She’s laying it to mark the ratification of a UN document that most UN member states ignore anyhow, and which she herself does not fully give heed to.

This warrants a letter of complaint to an MP, methinks.

Update: For the record, the declaration of human rights was ratified by the UN on December 10, 1948. Not only is Lynch’s gesture tone-deaf, it’s just plain incorrect.

Two examples today.

In the first, a Saudi man butchered his daughter after she converted to Christianity and apparently bested him in a theological debate. He cut her tongue and burned her alive. Also, he was a muttawa, a member of the — the religious police of Saudi Arabia.

Which means he probably won’t be punished.

In the second, a Canadian — from Ottawa — was found dead in a hotel room just a few miles from where a Democratic Party convention was to take place. The man, Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, had immigrated to Canada from Somalia. The cause of death was cyanide poisoning, which may have had something to do with the pound or so of the stuff that police found in the room with him. Apparently, “friends [of Dirie's] told The Ottawa Sun that he was dead six days before he was discovered.”

Just for the record, that much cyanide would be enough to kill hundreds if it were aerially dispersed somehow…as one might do in a jihad-inspired terror attack. Just a thought.

Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred have a short post up with the actual comparison, and while I’m sure there’s probably room for variance, I have to say that overall the results don’t surprise: wait times in Ottawa average about 20 hours, whereas wait times in Boston average about 1 hour.

I never understood what Michael Moore was getting at in Sicko. Not that I expect the man to turn in anything other than a distorted, misleading account of the subject he is covering, of course…but still. Dude totally glossed over several real problems that exist and persist in Canada’s system today.

Health care would have worked so much better in this country had it been able to stick to its original mandate: providing care for the chronically ill and accidentally injured. But as society got more and more lazy, and as Canadians took less and less interest in being active participants in their own health (see: obesity), it was inevitable that the system would become overloaded.

I wasn’t aware that there was a human rights monument in Ottawa. That said, I’m not at all surprised that it seems to be, in BCF’s incomparable turn of phrase, “a product of the ‘Turd in the Plaza School’.”

How very fitting indeed, that a monument to human rights in Canada should look like a confused, uninspired jumble of poorly-considered components, while at the same time invoking the image of tall walls and a dystopia. A more fitting commentary on the human rights commissions would be hard to ask for.

Certainly one of the weirder search strings that have led people to my doorstep:

VISITOR ANALYSIS
Referring Link: http://www.google.ca/search?q=sound of cats having sex&btnG=Search&hl=en&sa=2
Host Name: 52.141.hiper0-nic0.std.dialup.ncf.ca
IP Address: 134.117.141.52 [Label IP Address]
Country: Canada
Region: Ontario
City: Ottawa
ISP: Carleton University

VISITOR SYSTEM SPECS
Browser: Firefox 2.0.0
Operating System: Windows 98
Resolution: 1024×768
Javascript: Enabled

The sound of cats having sex? I do hope that’s for a grad project rather than some bizarre fetish.

Yesterday, in Ottawa, over 8,000 people turned up for the National March for Life — a massive pro-life rally.

Apparently, the CBC didn’t mention it at all, and the local news concerned itself with 2 broken water mains.

That crowd of people filling up four major roadways, creating massive traffic delays around Parliament? What crowd of people?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

In the wake of the embarrassing actions of Mohamed Elmasry’s three Osgoode Hall law students (read: sock puppets) and the cowardice they displayed when faced with the prospect of having to debate Mark Steyn three-on-one, Maclean’s has responded to the attempt by Faisal Joseph and the Osgoode trio offer a non-settlement (read: shakedown) disguised as a settlement offer.

To sum up, Maclean’s has basically said thus: “we’ll tell you where to shove that offer.”

Ezra Levant has an excerpt of the text of Maclean’s response to the offer:

The time to discuss reasonable replies to Mr. Steyn’s piece was after the article was published and before the human rights actions were launched. For Maclean’s to agree to any “settlement” with quasi-judicial proceedings under way would be tantamount to an admission of wrongdoing on our part when we have done nothing but practise responsible journalism.

It would also be improper and damaging to the integrity of Maclean’s, and a troubling precedent in Canadian media, for us to agree to negotiate the content of our magazine in return for the withdrawal of quasi-judicial legal actions and relief from punitive costs of defending those actions.

Moreover, any settlement at this point would have to be approved by human rights authorities in Ottawa, and would thus involve an implicit acceptance on our part of the jurisdiction of human rights commissions to regulate the content of print media publications in Canada. That is an unacceptable precedent.

We believe that a sincere attempt to settle this matter would have involved a direct and timely approach to Maclean’s rather than a press conference and public ultimatum eighteen months after the publication of Mr. Steyn’s piece. But rather than approaching this magazine for the purposes of conciliation, Mr. Joseph and his clients publicly impugned our journalists at a press conference, tactics sharply at odds with their stated goal of reaching an amicable resolution.

While we have no interest in negotiating with the CIC for the withdrawal of its complaints, we remain committed to fostering free and open discussion of important public issues. Maclean’s would be pleased to host a public debate at a neutral venue between Mr. Steyn and Mohamed Elmasry, head of the CIC and the complainant in both the B.C. and federal investigations. The debate would cover issues raised by Mr. Steyn’s original article as well as the CIC’s decision to resort to human rights commissions. We are sure that such an event would be interesting and informative, and we would publish a transcript of the debate either in the magazine or on our website.

Of course, Mohamed Elmasry is never going to accept the challenge to a debate, lest he again be exposed for what he is: a hateful, anti-Jewish bigot and apologist for terror. Still, it’s a pleasant pipe dream to imagine Mark Steyn tearing in to the man the right-of-centre blogosphere has come to know as “Elmo.”

This is a good, principled stance that Maclean’s has taken: they refuse to be intimidated by the human rights apparatus in Canada, and refuse to recognize the authority of the abrogation of basic human rights that the HRCs in Canada truly are. Likewise, they’re calling the bluff of Elmo, his sock puppets, and his flashy lawyer. It’s a “come and get us” attitude that I think Colonel Maclean, especially, would be very proud of.

Certainly, I’m a little bit prouder to be Canadian for having read it.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!