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.

Remarkably, I’m actually not talking about Jennifer Lynch’s tasteless and tone-deaf plan to lay a wreath at the national Remembrance Day ceremony to mark the passage of a UN declaration concerning human rights that a) most of its member states ignore anyhow, and b) wasn’t actually ratified until a month (less a day) after November 11th.

Although it must be said that Lynch’s gesture is the height of tastelessness. But then, what else might one expect from the lady in charge of the state Censorship organ in Canada. The mere fact that she is laying a wreath, when her very department exists as a mockery of one of the fundamental rights that so many Canadian soldiers sacrificed their lives for, is insulting beyond the ability of words to describe.

But I digress.

No, remarkably, I’m not talking about CHRC tone-deafness today. The tone-deaf group that is the target of my considerable ire today is something called the “Urban Alliance on Race Relations,” who are going after a magazine called Toronto Life for publishing an article on Aqsa Parvez which (gasp!) dares to discuss her brutal murder (at the hands of her father) as an “honour killing.”

There’s even a Facebook page, created by said Urban Alliance, urging people to complain to the editor of Toronto Life, Sarah Fulford.

The article in question, entitled Girl, Interrupted and written my Mary Rogen, presents the facts of Aqsa’s life and final days, and captures the tension that arose in the Parvez household between Aqsa and her father, Muhammad Parvez, who insisted that she wear the Islamic headscarf, the hijab. And when she refused, he strangled her to death.

Rogen’s article says some things which are at once uncomfortable to hear, but which ring true. But that’s the problem with truth, isn’t it? It can sometimes be very uncomfortable to hear:

Aqsa Parvez had a choice: wear a hijab to please her devout family or take it off and be like her friends. She paid for her decision with her life. When her father and brother were charged with her murder, it raised the spectre of religious zealotry in the suburbs. Is this the price of multiculturalism?

…

In the days following her death, Aqsa’s story was widely reported in the Canadian media as well as on CNN and the BBC. Was her murder an honour killing or simply a gruesome case of domestic violence? Worldwide, an estimated 5,000 women die every year in honour killings — murders deemed excusable to protect a family’s reputation — many of them in Pakistan, where the Parvez family had emigrated from.

Canada prides itself on its multiculturalism and, to varying degrees of success, condemns institutionalized patriarchy. But there is growing concern that recent waves of Muslim immigrants aren’t integrating, or embracing our liberal values. Aqsa’s death — coming in the wake of debates about the acceptability of Sharia law, disputes over young girls wearing hijabs at soccer games, and the arrest of the Toronto 18 — stoked fears about religious zealotry in our midst. Is it possible that Toronto has become too tolerant of cultural differences?

The rest of the article gets into a lot of depth, including interviews with many of Aqsa’s friends, and presents a very comprehensive picture of a girl torn between two worlds. Along the way, it gives glimpses into the home life of the Parvez family, and communicates the abject fear that Aqsa felt in her final days.

It also points out that Aqsa was a victim of peer pressure and a desire to fit in with the rest of her friends; she was aware that her religious garb was setting her apart, and took great strides to fit in with the crowd. Seraphic notes that in this sense, the article is “as much an indictment of youth culture in Mississauga high schools as it is of Aqsa’s family,” which I think is very much the case as well. Indeed, the article does a lot to suggest that Aqsa was being led astray by her “friends”, who evidently thought it was Aqsa’s “right” to part ways with her virginity before parting ways with high school.

Not that this excuses the fate she arrived at. And for all the threads it plucks at, the article leaves very little doubt as to the probable motive behind her murder — her death was, as the article notes, Toronto’s first honour killing. Or, at least, the first one to become public knowledge.

But let’s come back to the Urban Alliance folks and their tone-deaf campaign against Toronto Life. While there hasn’t been a human rights complaint filed yet, their clear opposition to the right of the magazine to publish content of its choosing comes across, and the usual points get missed. As Kathy notes, the group seems to be “more upset about Islam being “insulted” and “misrepresented” by the violence perpetrated by its own members (and by a mere infidel’s decision to publish an article about it) than by the actual dealth of a young girl.”

And much like the tone-deaf Jennifer Lynch, they opted to launch their campaign on Remembrance Day. Because hey, who cares about those 60,000+ dead Canadians anyhow?

This is why I can’t stand “professional victim” groups and grievance-mongers: they are unabashedly narcissistic, and think nothing of co-opting even solemn national holidays to serve their own narrow-minded ends. It’s Remembrance Day, you tasteless losers! Would it have been so hard to just wait until the 12th? Did you just have to attack a magazine’s right to publish content of its own choosing on the day that marks the sacrifices of thousands of Canadian men and women made in the cause of that very right, and others like it?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

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.

I haven’t really been commenting much on Omar Khadr, mostly because until recently there wasn’t much to comment about. Khadr, as I understand it, comes from a Canada-based family that has been investigated numerous times for ties to Islamis terrorism. In fact, aren’t some other members of the Khadr family currently incarcerated for their connections to terrorism?

Be that as it may, Omar is a dutiful son of this family, and signed on some years ago with the Taliban in Afghanistan vis-a-vis his father, who had moved to Afghanistan in 1996 and who later (in the wake of the September 11th attacks, in fact) moved into the mountains of that country, where it is thought that he closely associated himself with Osama Bin Laden (to such a degree, in fact, that the bin Laden and Khadr children were playmates).

Omar received weapons training at some point, produced videos for the Taliban, and was even photographed handling explosives for them. He looks like a fresh-faced youth, but it would seem that at every turn he has chosen to align himself with Islamic terrorists.

Khadr was captured after a firefight between Taliban militants and American soldiers worked out decidedly in favour of the Americans. The battle was fairly intense, requiring air support, and the Americans had thought that all of the Taliban fighters had been killed. Khadr, however, had survived. Confilcting reports exist, but it appears that Khadr took one last opportunity to throw a grenade at approaching U.S. troops before being subdued, mortally wounding Sergeant Christopher James Speer.

Recently, footage of Omar Khadr being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba was released to the Canadian public. In it, two CSIS officers interview Khadr about his condition. He appears wounded in the video, and complains of his injuries. Information coming out of Guantanamo isn’t exactly the most reliable, but what evidence is available suggests that Khadr was tortured by U.S. interrogators at various points, using methods such as short shackling and stress positioning, as well as sleep deprivation and a few other methods.

Which, if true, is disgusting. Torture is a grave moral evil, regardless of how depraved the recipient thereof might also be. Yes, Omar Khadr seems to be neck-deep in terrorist connections, and he evidently has no small measure of blood on his hands as well. That doesn’t mean it’s right to torture him.

Now, a brief tangent. I like Matthew Good’s music, for the most part. When he wants to rock, he rocks, and then very well. And his subject matter, while often strange, tends to be a bit deeper and more thought-provoking than one might typically expect of alt-rock and post-grunge music.

That said, I don’t entirely agree with his stance on the Khadr issue:

Legally, Khadr should never have been taken to Guantanamo. International law dictates that he should have been classified a child soldier and treated as such. Instead he was shipped off to the world’s foremost black hole and has been a prisoner there ever since, subjected to God knows what. If FBI documents released this year are any indication, entirely unethical interrogation practices were certainly on the menu.

International law is actually not on the side of Omar Khadr in this matter. For the record, Khadr was 15 when the firefight in which he was captured took place. With that in mind, it should be noted that the UN convention on children’s rights stipulates that “state parties shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons who have not attained the age of 15 years do not take a direct part in hostilities.” Of course, there are two obvious problem with applying this principle to Khadr’s situation: first, the Taliban are not a “state party”, in that they do not represent a national government but are, rather, a terrorist organization attempting to violently overthrow the government of Afghanistan. The second, of course, is Khadr’s own age at the time of his capture.

There is an optional protocol to the aforementioned UN convention which stipulates that state parties “shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons below the age of 18 do not take a direct part in hostilities and that they are not compulsorily recruited into their armed forces.” Note that this does not explicitly prohibit people between the ages of 15 and 18 from voluntarily participating in hostilities. From what evidence we have available, Omar Khadr very gladly and freely participated in the cause of Islamic terrorism.

Moreover, as has been noted, the Taliban (and, by extension, al-Qaeda, which Khadr has also been associated with) are (again) not “state parties”. One could argue that this is a semantic objection, and that while the letter of the convention’s stipulations is perhaps left unsatisfied, the spirit thereof still applies. This, I think, is true. But even in that case, by the UN’s own definition a “child soldier” must be under the age of 15 years. Khadr did not meet this criteria at the time of his capture. So if one wants to appeal to UN conventions to decry Khadr’s situation, one is (sorry to say) out of luck.

Of course, the question can be raised as to whether a UN convention is really the foremost international legal authority in this matter. It might be better to look at the International Criminal Court’s statutes instead, since (unlike the UN), the ICC actually has power to prosecute “war criminals” to some degree.

With that in mind, the ICC’s Rome Statute stipulates that “conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years into the national armed forces or using them to participate actively in hostilities” is a war crime.

So here again, international law does not work out in Omar Khadr’s favour: at the time of his capture, he was (just) old enough to not be designated, under international law, as a child soldier.

Note that I’m neither agreeing with Khadr’s being incarcerated at Gitmo. Given that prisoners there are often tortured, I can’t really say that I support sending anyone there. However, I do dispute Matt Good’s appeal to international law on this matter; unfortunately, as regards young Mr. Khadr, the law is inapplicable here.

Of course, your average kill-em-all pundit thinks it all pathetic, that the video demonstrates that the CSIS agents that questioned Khadr displayed a semblance of compassion. But let’s remember one thing — they left him there. In fact, they, and the government of this country at the time, and currently, are just as complicit as those holding Khadr.

So what does that make us, exactly?

Well, it doesn’t say much about the moral fortutide of the Canadian government, admittedly. But then, neither does the fact that Henry Morgentaler is still apparently going to be receiving the Order of Canada. And unfortunately, Mr. Good is also over-simplifying matters somewhat in his statement here: it’s not as though the CSIS agents could have just escorted Mr. Khadr out of the prison at their leisure. Yes, he’s ostensibly a Canadian citizen, but he was arrested in the course of engaging in hostilities against American soldiers in Afghanistan. Under the same international law that Mr. Good erroneously appealed to earlier on, the U.S. does have a right to detain him in a facility of their choosing.

We can add to this observation the Chestertonian wisdom that to have a right is not at all the same thing as to be right in exercising it. Equally, though, Matt Good’s charge of Canadian “complicity” in the Khadr affair is off-base and incorrect; under the applicable laws, there’s actually not much the Canadian government can do. And now that Mr. Khadr is 21, the question also might be asked why anyone should feel that the Canadian government is obligated to do anything at all for an open supporter of Islamic terrorism whose own direct actions led to the death of a U.S. medic.

And in typically left-wing fashion, Mr. Good can’t resist implying that those with whom he disagrees are irrational, uncompassionate, and “back woods xenophobes”. Oh, and “Conservative mouthpieces” — leaving aside the fact that Mr. Good is himself something of a mouthpiece for Amnesty International, an organization that I (for one) no longer support because they now include abortion advocacy in their mandate.

Well, if you’re a Conservative mouthpiece from rural Saskatchewan that adorns their blog with the picture of a deal animal, it makes us noble allies in a xenophobic war against a religion of evil. If you’re a rational and compassionate human being that has the ability to view the complexities and personal history of Khadr’s situation, one that isn’t some back woods xenophobe and has grown up in a highly diverse multicultural area, it makes you sick to your stomach. If you’re a Canadian that believes that this nation is not the sort of nation that stands shoulder to shoulder with those that have been responsible for holding individuals for years only to discover that many of them are innocent (see the McClatchy reports from June), despite the fact that they’ve been denied their rights under the law and international conventions while, at the same time, those holding them profess to be globally instilling the virtues of the rule of law, then you have cause for serious concern. Because that is not what my grandfather and two of my great uncles fought to defend sixty some odd years ago, and that is certainly not the nation in which I want to die.

With respect to Mr. Good, I grew up in a fairly “diverse multicultural” environment, but this is not what makes me sick to my stomach regarding the issue of Mr. Khadr. Quite frankly, I don’t care what the colour of his skin is; I care that he chose to side with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and I care that he killed a U.S. medic with a grenade. What makes me sick to my stomach is the fact that he has been tortured, but I have no problem at all with the fact that he has been captured and incarcerated.

Were he Caucasian, I would say as much. Were he Catholic, I would say as much. Were he my own kin, I would say as much. In each case, I would say as much because I believe that people must accept the consequences of their actions, and I note that Omar Khadr’s documented actions were, at every turn, antithetical to the very principles that Mr. Good’s grandfather and two great uncles fought to defend.

I have traveled across this country almost seventy times, coast to coast, and seen more of it, and its people, than the majority of Canadians ever will. And I can honestly say, given my experiences, the acceptance, and even the participation, in such criminality is not what this country stands for.

If CSIS agents interviewed Khadr that means that our government has been complicit in condoning US detentions and all that they entail.

I agree that Canada should not be complicit in torture. But equally, I don’t think Canada should be complicit in releasing known terrorists back into the wild, so to speak. I don’t think it’s right that Omar Khadr has been tortured — that is, as I have said, a grave moral evil. But by saying that, I in no way mean to suggest that he should be released from custody.

If Canada stands for human rights, if Canada stands for freedom, and if Canada stands up for what is right, then Canada should work to ensure that known supporters and agents of terrorism are captured, tried, and incarcerated accordingly, with every bit as much vigour as she should work to oppose the use of torture against same.

In saying as much, I suppose that I do disagree, somewhat, with Small Dead Animals, the blog that Mr. Good is directing his ire against. Generally, on political matters, I agree with SDA to one degree or another, and it is one of my daily reads. But as far as I know, the operator of SDA, Kate, is not Catholic, so obviously I don’t agree with her sentiments that Omar Khadr “deserved to be dispatched then and there” (i.e. on the battlefield, by the surviving U.S. troops).

Deborah Gyapong has an excellent report published in the latest edition of the Western Catholic Reporter concerning, of course, Canada’s human rights commissions, this time in light of Pope Benedict XVI’s speech to the UN.

Pope Benedict’s speech to the United Nations last month serves as a reminder to Canada that human rights discourse stems from a world view based on universal truths and an objective notion of right and wrong.

“Either we recover some of these assumptions and make a serious course correction,” McGill University professor Douglas Farrow said, “or we begin to encounter quite rapidly the consequences.”

Farrow sees Canada’s human rights commissions as a sign the country is in a transitional phase, because increasingly the Canadians are seeing human rights as what we say they are.

“Thus laws can be written concerning human rights that have nothing to do with universal standards.”

…

Increasingly, various individuals and groups are using human rights commissions to “generate traction” for that group’s particular construct of rights, he said. This method has often been used to suppress religious freedom, especially that of Christians.

Farrow said the real basis for human rights springs from a world view like that the pope outlined in his speech - a theistic world view that sees a benevolent Creator and human beings made in God’s image, with a capacity to distinguish between good and evil.

The pope exhorted the world body to return to its founding principles as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

The declaration is based on “the natural law inscribed on human hearts and present in different cultures and civilizations,” Benedict told the UN.

Human rights should mean the fundamental freedoms to which all human beings are entitled, exercised within a framework of obligations and responsibilities, the burden of which all human beings must bear. The notion of human rights, however, has been abgorated and, I would say, abducted by those whose view of rights is that they are a series of entitlements which are accompanied by no reciprocal responsibility whatsoever. Whereas there should be a natural “give and take,” the view of the HRCs and their “clients” increasingly is that rights is all “take” with no “give” reciprocal to it.

To call that immoral, to call it unethical, and to call it a violation of natural law would at once be accurate and an understatement.

I’m no fan of the UN, as the regular Reader will know, but at least the UDHR recognizes that the right to freedom of expression is one of the bedrock principles of human freedom. Yes, there are responsibilities that go along with that right, and yes we do have some legal protections in place in Canada to make sure that freedom of expression does not cross the line to incitement to violence.

But in regard to freedom of expression, it is worth noting two things:

1. it is nowhere written that, included among the responsibilities that accompany the right to freely express one’s opinion, we have a responsibility to avoid hurting people’s feelings or offending people’s sensibilities. Social convention encourages us to be polite even when expressing disagreement, but some ideas cannot easily be expressed in a manner that pays good observance to social convention.
2. it is nowhere written that any of us has the right to not be offended, nor is it anywhere written that any of us has the right to not have our beliefs and views challenged

Perhaps the word “yet” should affixed to the end of both of those points; I don’t know.

The plain fact of the matter is that, through the existence and operation of human rights commissions, specifically in regard to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, Canada is going far beyond where it needs to go in order to ensure that so-called “reasonable limits” on freedom of expression exist. There is only one real “reasonable” limit on freedom of expression anyhow, and that is making incitement illegal. Limiting freedom of expression because some things are e.g. hurtful or offensive to others is not a “reasonable” limitation at all — such limitation is, in fact, the antithesis of freedom of expression: it is Censorship.

And as such, it has no business in Canada.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Can we make up our minds already?

Global temperatures will drop slightly this year as a result of the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said.

The World Meteorological Organization’s secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer.

This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory.

But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend - and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years.

La Niná, eh? Surely this cooling trend has nothing at all to do with the fact that solar cycle 24 has only just started, meaning that we are still in a period of “solar minimum” — a minimum which has, historically, corresponded to periods of colder-than-average weather, including the Little Ice Age?

To be fair, this doesn’t make me question climate change per se…of course, the climate (being a non-static system) can be expected to change, and indeed it does. It does make me question the received wisdom of global warming alarmism, however. No net change in global temperature since 1998? Al Gore hadn’t even lost the election then!