Muslim columnist: To say Islam isn’t a race is “overly simplistic,” and “Islamophobia” is racism

From here, and as picked up on by Robert Spencer, here:

Amjad: 

Canada must call Islamophobia what it is – racism

Canadian officials were in Geneva this month to answer critical questions about the country’s human rights record.

The appearance before the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination comes every four years and is an opportunity for racialized communities to hold our governments to account for their action, or inaction, on promoting racial equity in a pluralistic society. This year, there was a painful omission.

Canada omitted identifying Islamophobia as a form of racism in its official report. This reinforces harmful narratives that can render Islamophobia invisible.

All too often, when someone perceived as Muslim is discriminated against, assaulted, harassed or disparaged, offenders and their supporters are quick to shrug off accusations of racism, arguing that Islam is not a race.

This is an overly simplistic understanding of the social construct of race itself.

“Since all racisms are socially and politically constructed rather than reliant on the reality of any biological race, it is perfectly possible for cultural markers associated with Muslimness (forms of dress, rituals, languages, etc.) to be turned into racial signifiers,” points out British academic and author Arun Kundnani.

In identifying anti-Muslim discrimination to be the leading form of contemporary creed-based discrimination in Ontario, the Ontario Human Rights Commission has noted that visible minorities are sometimes broadly targeted based on outward appearances, and “perceived” associations with Islam.

This helps explain why members of the Sikh community have sometimes been targets of anti-Muslim attacks. It also explains why, according to a poll conducted by the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants and Mass Minority last year, opposition to Syrian refugees was higher among those who held unfavourable impressions of Islam, demonstrating a popular misconception that all Syrian refugees are Muslims.

When a woman wearing a scarf is assaulted on the bus, and told to go back to her country; when a Sikh temple is burned to the ground; when a turbaned man is faced with additional scrutiny at the border, it is the perception of the offending party that serves as the motivation of the Islamophobic, racist action, not whether or not those victimized are in fact Muslim.

And while it may be challenging to understand these complexities, the government must not forsake the complex extrinsic and systemic discrimination faced by racially diverse Canadian Muslims in any discussion of racial discrimination.

Over the past four years, there has been an appalling 253 per cent rise in the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes, according to Statistics Canada. It’s a trend that has been corroborated by the growing number of hate crimes and alleged human rights violations that are reported to our organization on a regular basis.

These numbers don’t take into account the intersectionality of hatred.

Individuals can be attacked for various identities; our statistics must further capture this.

The stereotyping of Muslims as a racially homogeneous group cannot be overlooked. The Ontario government has made progress by establishing an anti-racism directorate and committing to the study and eradication of systemic racism, including Islamophobia.

The Alberta government is exploring similar ways to address the phenomena and the federal government is gearing up to study Islamophobia and other forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination in the fall. All governments should make this a key priority.

It has been 13 years since Canada adopted an action plan against racism before the World Conference Against Racism. This unfulfilled plan must be reinstated and adequately resourced to meet these ongoing challenges.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has acknowledged that Islamophobia is a problem in Canada – our government institutions must do the same.

Sehrish Amjad is a former human rights officer at the National Council of Canadian Muslims.

(Wow - a "human rights officer!" My, doesn't that sound official LOL?)!

=======

I live in Ottawa and read the Ottawa Citizen rag daily (mostly against my will, out of a morbid curiosity to see what The Enemy of rationality, civilization and humanity is up to – but it’s like watching a slow-motion train-wreck) and this sort of nonsense is all-too-commonly featured as part of its tiresome and endless globalist anti-white racist propaganda.

1.)

Re: All too often, when someone perceived as Muslim is discriminated against, assaulted, harassed or disparaged, offenders and their supporters are quick to shrug off accusations of racism, arguing that Islam is not a race. This is an overly simplistic understanding of the social construct of race itself. “Since all racisms are socially and politically constructed rather than reliant on the reality of any biological race, it is perfectly possible for cultural markers associated with Muslimness (forms of dress, rituals, languages, etc.) to be turned into racial signifiers,” points out British academic and author Arun Kundnani.”

Let’s excise the relevant part of that screed:

“all racisms are socially and politically constructed rather than reliant on the reality of any biological race”

So these extortionists’ use of their favourite term, “racism,” doesn’t rely on reality. Got it!

2.)

Re: “In identifying anti-Muslim discrimination to be the leading form of contemporary creed-based discrimination in Ontario, the Ontario Human Rights Commission has noted that visible minorities are sometimes broadly targeted based on outward appearances, and “perceived” associations with Islam….”

Utter bullshit! The Ontario Human Rights Commission has no legal mandate whatsoever, and is nothing more than a liberal’s wet-dream Frankenstein miscreation designed as a parallel and only quasi-“legal” system to extort those accused by butthurt whiners. It has no due-process whatsoever, so the process is the punishment: The accusers don’t need lawyers or even evidence (because they Commission is run by non-lawyer SJW activists and has no actual Judges on its tribunals to judge people with), while the accused defendants have to pony up thousands to lawyers to defend them selves. Oh, and it also doesn’t abide by any legally recognized rules of evidence either, often only relying on hurt feelings.

So, for them to pretend to “identify anti-Muslim discrimination to be the leading form of contemporary creed-based discrimination in Ontario” while of course ignoring all the muslim-on-Jew crimes, is typically laughable – and public fraud.

3.) Re: ” it is perfectly possible for cultural markers associated with Muslimness (forms of dress, rituals, languages, etc.) to be turned into racial signifiers,”

-Indeed YES, but what he fails to mention is, that in sharia, “muslim” forms of dress are officially FORBIDDEN to all non-muslim infidels, on purpose, in order to turn such “cultural markers” into religious “signifiers” so THE MUSLIMS can more easily discriminate against and humiliate all the non-muslims!

Trump/Russia Collusion Review 101:

I didn't write this, but it had to be re-published with an easy link available somewhere, so here goes!

;-)

Subject: Russia

Remember when Donald Trump formed a business partnership with the Russian government and his company got $53 million from the Russian government investment fund called Rusnano .....that was started by Vladimir Putin and is referred to as "Putin's Child?”

        Oh wait, that wasn't Trump; it was John Podesta.

Remember when Donald Trump received $500,000 for a speech in Moscow that was paid for by Renaissance Capital, a company tied to Russian Intelligence Agencies? 

          Oh wait, that was Bill Clinton.


Remember when Donald Trump approved the sale of 20% of U.S. uranium to the Russians while he was Secretary of State giving control of it to Rosatom, the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation? 

          Oh wait, that was Hillary Clinton.

Remember when Donald Trump lied about that and said he wasn't a part of approving a deal that gave the Russians 1/5 of our uranium, but then his e-mails were leaked showing he did lie about it? 

        Oh wait, that was Hillary Clinton and John Podesta.

Remember when Donald Trump got $145 million from shareholders of the uranium company sold to the Russians?

        Oh wait, that was Hillary Clinton & the Clinton Foundation.

Remember when Donald Trump accepted millions in donations from Russian oligarchs like the chairman of a company that is part of the Russian Nuclear Research  Cluster;  the wife of the mayor of Moscow and a close pal of Putin's?

        Oh wait, that was the Clinton Foundation.

Remember when Donald Trump failed to disclose all those donations before becoming the Secretary of State, and it was only found out when a journalist went through Canadian tax records? 

        Oh wait, that was Hillary Clinton.

Remember when Donald Trump told Mitt Romney that the ' "The Cold War is over?"

        Oh wait, that was President Obama.

Man, Trump's ties to Russia are REALLY "disgusting!"

America Continues Funding Global Jihad

From here:

Putting an End to Government Funding of Islamism
by Sam Westrop National Review August 24, 2017

In Tuesday's speech, President Trump denounced the flow of U.S. money to Pakistan while that nation harbors terrorists. South Asian Islamism is an enormous problem, and yet a great deal of the discussion in America surrounding Islamism focuses on the Egyptian-founded Muslim Brotherhood. But the Muslim Brotherhood is far from the only Islamist network in the United States; it is simply the best known. Other Islamist movements also benefit from government ignorance about the diversity of Islam and Islamism across the globe. The South Asian Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), for instance, has received millions from the U.S. taxpayer for its powerful network of charities and welfare services, which are designed to obtain external funding as well as legitimize JI as a representative voice of Muslims, in both America and South Asia.

Although JI has its own ideologues, literature, and infrastructure, it is often described as the South Asian "cousin" of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qazi Ahmad Hussain, head of JI in Pakistan, has declared: "We consider ourselves as an integral part of the Brotherhood and the Islamic movement in Egypt.#...#Our nation is one." JI's history is bloody. During the 1971 Liberation War in Bangladesh, JI fighters helped Pakistani forces massacre hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis seeking independence from Pakistan. Several JI leaders guilty of these war crimes fled to the West, where they helped establish JI organizations that operated as community leadership groups. Two western JI leaders have since been sentenced to death in absentia for these killings by a UN-backed war-crimes tribunal.

One of those convicted, Ashrafuzzaman Khan, served as a leading official of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a prominent American Muslim organization. Twice a year, ICNA jointly hosts a conference with the Muslim American Society (MAS), a leading Muslim Brotherhood institution. Unsurprisingly, these conferences are filled with extremist preachers. Ahmed Taha, an ICNA-MAS official who organized their conference in December, has republished posts on social media stating: "O Muslim, O servant of God. There is a Jew behind me, come kill him."

Despite its long history of extremism, in 2016 ICNA received $1.3 million of taxpayers' money as part of a grant awarded by the Department of Homeland Security.

ICNA is not the only JI organization in America. Nor is it the only JI group to have received taxpayer funds. Behind ICNA and other front groups around the world, JI operates an enormous network of registered charities and community organizations. One of the most prominent is the Rural Education and Development (READ) Foundation.

READ manages 374 schools in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the Pakistani-controlled area of the Kashmir region, as well as in nearby Pakistani rural areas. These schools teach over 100,000 students. Although based in Pakistan, READ has offices in the United Kingdom and a network of representatives in the United States. ICNA and other U.S.-based JI groups describe READ as their "partner."

READ's own JI links are clear: board member Mohammad Ayub also appears to serve as a leader of the JI branch in Azad Jammu and Kashmir. As Canadian journalist Sonya Fatah notes, READ is part of a "complex web of organizations" run by JI. These welfare and social-services agencies serve both to "gain converts in poor rural communities" and to "win votes."

Within this web, READ's "sister organizations" include the Al Khidmat Foundation and the Ghazali Education Trust, two other Pakistani charities focused on schools and education, which openly identify as JI institutions and also enjoy close partnerships with ICNA. In 2006, JI's own website announced that Al Khidmat had given 6 million rupees ($100,000) to Hamas for their "just Jihad." Officials from both the Al Khidmat Foundation and the Ghazali Education Trust work closely with Syed Salahuddin, the leader of Hizbul Mujahideen, JI's paramilitary wing. Both Salahuddin and Hizbul Mujahideen have recently been designated as terrorists by the U.S. government.

From 2013 to 2016, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development handed out over $2 million to READ.

If JI's involvement with acts of genocide, its funding of Hamas, and its continued terrorist links are not enough to suggest these grants were a bad idea, there is also the question of what READ schools are actually teaching their students, subsidized by the American taxpayer.

There is no information publicly available about the textbooks or curricula used in these schools. We do not know what students are taught, and when we asked the State Department, they failed to respond. But a glance at the social-media pages operated by READ schools is not promising. Posts include a homage to Mumtaz Qadri, an Islamic extremist who, in 2011, murdered Punjab governor Salman Taseer in retribution for Taseer's public support for a Pakistani Christian woman convicted of blasphemy. The READ Facebook post features a portrait of Mumtaz Qadri with a caption that states: "We are all in your debt, O messenger of Allah."

Other social-media postings include text denouncing the "American Secular Terrorists#...#dirty people" who "destroyed Iraq and killed 150,000 Iraqis" on the "instructions of Iran." A number of READ schools have also published photos from school ceremonies in which young children wearing military uniforms and holding guns act out battles -- reminiscent of similar events in the Gaza Strip under Hamas.

The U.S. government is not READ's only publicly listed partner. It enjoys support from a number of Western governments, including grants of over $360,000 in 2012 and 2013 from the British government. Other named READ partners include the terrorism-linked International Islamic Charitable Organization in Kuwait, the Wahhabi-run World Association of Muslim Youth, and the Qatar Charitable Society, all of which have funded Hamas and other terrorist groups.

In the West, READ does not bother to distance itself from hard-line clerics. Speakers at READ events have included Uthman Lateef, an overtly anti-Semitic preacher who has expressed support for convicted terrorists, and Sulaiman Gani, a prominent supporter of convicted al-Qaeda operative Aafia Siddiqui. In April 2017, the British government's regulator of charities investigated the READ Foundation after the Times reported it had hosted an event with Yasir Qadhi, an American Salafi preacher who has declared that the punishment for homosexuality is death.

Millions of dollars of American taxpayers' money has been given to Jamaat-e-Islami organizations. These funds serve to bolster JI's influence and power in South Asia, to the detriment of moderate Muslims in the region, and legitimize the claims of JI's organizations in America to represent ordinary Muslims.

The Trump administration is showing interest in addressing the threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood. A recent review of the Countering Violent Extremism program divested MB groups of government patronage. Now it falls to the administration to understand that Islamism takes many other forms, and with the help of moderate Muslim organizations, the government must actively work to confront and defund them all. Taxpayer subsidy of Islamism at home and abroad must not continue.

— Sam Westrop is Director of Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

TERRORISM WORKS!

Terrorism works.

By now, everyone knows islam is nothing more than a terror gang and all muslims are at least potential terrorists.

When confronted by fear, people can respond in two ways:

1.) Honestly – they admit they’re afraid, and so then try to do something about solving the problem; (Conservatives;)

2.) Dishonestly – they pretend to be martyrs, but remain masochists, advising everyone else to Submit, too. (Liberals).

Guess which category most politicians (self-promoting salesmen and liars) fall into?
The solution?

Whenever any organism is attacked, it counter-attacks. (Organisms which submit to diseases like islam, die off).

Cells which have already been successfully co-opted by the disease are also destroyed by the white blood cells.

No problem was ever solved by ignoring it, yet the criminally negligent greed-creed motto of those in charge always seems to be the exact opposite, that: “There’s No Money In Solutions! Whee!” (and its corollary: “It’s not broken, so let’s fix it!”)

The real reason the islamic threat is being ignored in public, is this not-so-nascent “Globalization” movement, which is clearly treason to ALL sovereign national people’s governments. It’s a plutocratic kleptocracy to be run by all those corporazis who never want to pay any taxes to anyone, anywhere, ever; by the global communazi labour guys who want free movement and the same lowest common denominator wages for their 3rd-world slaves, and of course by the moslems who want their one-world islamic ummah, to be run by their theocratic caliphate government. It’s a triple-threat. Against all these evil forces, we have only the Truth … while only they currently control both the fear and the greed.

As long as ONLY the enemy controls both the behavioural Conditioning binaries of the stick (fear of personally having one’s own family firebombed or beheaded by the Jihad) and the carrot (greed for oil-money bribes), those sales-puppets we laughingly call “our leaders” and their complicit media presstitute pets will insist on maintaining their preposterously backwards, victim-blaming "narrative” that only we are to blame for the Qur’an’s 1,400 years of hate, so that we should all “Submit and learn how to be better victims!”

As long as we remain the lesser threat to them, "our leaders" will continue to ignore islam.

Islam can be easily studied and known in its entirety, by anyone. It will never change!

So, when Western people won't educate them *selves* about islam because our culture defers all thinking to those "authorities" we PAY to do our thinking and research for us, while they secretly know full-well that the salesmen in charge will always sell us all out, they ARE CRIMINALLY NEGLIGENT INFANTILE DELINQUENT TRAITORS TO RATIONALITY AND CIVILIZATION!

It should never be allowed by backwards people to be considered “illegal” to accuse these criminals (muslims) of their crimes, allegedly because the painful truth might offend them or hurt their feelings, and so “make” them commit even more crimes!

No problem was ever solved by ignoring it, and nobody is doing even these muslims any favours, by indulging their historic lies that islam is a “religion” (at all, much less one “of peace”) or a “race” (much less one of poor oppressed "People Of Colour”)!

Pretending there is NOT a Muslim problem but only a white racist problem accepting diversity, is criminally negligent TREASON.

Keeping the muzzie masses ignorant of their own hate-crime death-threat canon seems to be the self-imposed mission of most of the enemedia, government and of course their corporazi owners these days – it’s most likely why they keep lying about islam being a “great religion of peace” all the time! That, and their inherent racism, of course!

We wouldn’t want any of these poor oppressed mentally-inferior swarthy holy-mobster criminals to suffer any “blowback” retaliation (i.e: JUSTICE) for their crimes, now, would we?

;-)

To advocate for suicidal masochism as the highest moral virtue, while also claiming the only real crime is to hurt the feelings of and offend criminals by accusing them of their crimes, outs any and all progressive liberal apologists for islam as massively treasonous criminals themselves!

Since islam is nothing more or less than the world’s oldest and largest ongoing extortion-racket CRIME syndicate, where the only “religious” part in it is where its holy mobster crime-gang members slander “god” as their #1 alibi to excuse their own criminal desires and actions where they claim:

“God told us to commit these crimes!”

(CAPISCE?)!

… it’s obvious that our Western governments, with our legally-mandated respect for universal equality of individual, not group or gang, human rights, do indeed have both the right and the responsibility to ban islam from our shores.

.......

Even if muslims "win" they will only "win" a life of harsh depravity for their descendants.
After all, who is most likely to be "married" to, and raped by, pedophiles? Muslim kids!

(Which will be OUR kids, too, if we let the "elite" enslave us)!

.......

Similarly, check out Dajjal's latest proof-of-islamic-terrorism post, here!

;-)

Libs Criminalize Truth and Legalize Lying

From here and here:

SHOULD THE NET FORGET?

STRUGGLING TO ESCAPE THE NET

Our past sins remain a click away

• Ottawa Citizen
• 5 Aug 2017

A quick Google search of her name, one woman complained, brought up court cases that laid bare her medical information.

SO SUE THE DOCTORS WHO PUT IT UP ON THE WEB, NOT THE WEB SEARCH ENGINES.

Another said her daughter was being identified in online court documents as “a sex worker.”

TRUTH HURTS, DOESN'T IT? IT ONLY COST $150. FOR A LEGAL NAME-CHANGE, IDIOT!

A mother worried her son might read an account of the bitter custody battle fought for him.

SO YOUR SON ISN'T ENTITLED TO KNOW THE TRUTH ABOUT HIS PARENTS?!

A former inmate said his official pardon had been rendered all but meaningless.

WAAH! CRIMINALS FEEWLINGS ARE BEING HURT BY THE TRUTH BEING EXPOSED!

The four were among 49 Canadians who lodged complaints with the federal privacy commissioner between October 2013 and April 2016. 

All of them were angry that old court cases had suddenly started popping up in Google searches of their names. 

SO WHO CARES IF THEY'RE ANGRY, OR THAT THE COURT CASES WERE "OLD!"? THE TRUTH ONLY PROVES THEY WERE ONCE PRONE TO COMMIT CRIMES!

What’s more, they said, the Romanian website that had posted the material — thus making it discoverable by Google’s search engine — was demanding money to take it down: It would cost them about $300 to be forgotten.

SO THEY COULD HAVE SPENT ONLY $300., BUT CHOSE TO SPEND THOUSANDS IN COURT, IN STEAD?! THERE IS NO LIMIT TO LIBERALS' STUPIDITY ENTITLEMENTS.

Welcome to the internet, circa 2017.

The web’s hive mind has a long memory — and a mean streak  OH NO:  "THE WEB IS MEAN!" (HURT FEEWLINGS AGAIN) — which can be a serious problem for anyone trying to move past an ugly divorce, a criminal record, a bankruptcy or a foolish mistake. For years, officials turned a blind eye to the problem, declaring the web a wild and unruly frontier.

"FOR ANYONE TRYING TO MOVE PAST" IS A METAPHOR USED TO EVADE THE TRUTH THAT WHAT THEY ARE REALLY TRYING TO DO IS TO MAKE IT LEGAL TO COVER UP AND DESTROY EVIDENCE OF THEIR PAST CRIMES.

But now, two decades after the advent of Google (the domain google.com was registered on Sept. 15, 1997), courts and regulators are increasingly asking the question: Should the internet’s cache of damaging personal data be made to disappear at some point? Or should it remain in place forever, burned onto the online presence of the once guilty like some kind of digital scarlet letter?

ONLY CRIMINALS ASK THAT KIND OF QUESTION AND EXPECT SYMPATHY FOR IT!

Those who argue for a bestbefore date call it “the right to be forgotten” and say it should be a fundamental tenet of the digital age.

i.e: "DESTROYING EVIDENCE OF OUR CRIMES SHOULD BE A FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT!"

But free speech advocates contend that enshrining the right in law will diminish the revolutionary power of the web by creating “black holes” where information can disappear.

“There are two competing interests at the heart of almost everything that goes on online,” says Montreal lawyer Allen Mendelsohn, an internet law specialist. “In the simplest terms: It’s your right to your reputation versus the other person’s right to freedom of expression.”

NO THERE AREN'T, YOU FLAMING CRIMINAL LEFTIST! YOU HAVE NO "RIGHT" TO AN UNTARNISHED REPUTATION, ONCE YOU TARNISH IT! CRIMINALS HAVE NO RIGHT TO BE REGARDED AS UPSTANDING CITIZENS, AND, ON THE OTHER HAND, THERE IS NO OTHER RIGHT TO FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION WHICH INVOLVES LYING ABOUT OTHERS, EITHER! YOU JUST SAID ONE PERSON HAS A RIGHT TO LIE ABOUT HIS PAST, WHILE ANOTHER HAS AN EQUAL RIGHT TO SLANDER YOU ABOUT YOUR PAST, TOO!

Europe and Argentina are among the jurisdictions that have already recognized an individual’s right to be forgotten. The issue has played out for years in Europe, where regulators are now wrestling with the thorny question of how to enforce removal orders on the transnational, shape-shifting web.

THEY HAVEN'T "RECOGNIZED AN INDIVIDUAL'S RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN" - STATING THE FACT THAT THEY ARE REALLY ONLY CRIMINALIZING THE TRUTH IN SUCH A MANNER  IS LIKE SAYING "WE RECOGNIZE YOUR INVISIBLE UNICORN'S EXISTENCE!"

In May 2014, the European Union’s highest court ruled that Google must remove links to damaging personal information deemed inadequate, irrelevant or excessive.

SO IF SOMEONE HAS *SOME* EVIDENCE OF ANOTHER'S CRIMES, BUT YOU DEEM IT TO BE "INADEQUATE" IT HAS TO BE REMOVED? SIMILARLY, WHATEVER TRUE FACTS YOU DEEM TO BE "IRRELEVANT" ARE VERBOTEN AS WELL? AND FINALLY,  ALL FACTS YOU YOU DEEM "EXCESSIVE" (LIKE THE 50 FAT TELEPHONE-BOOKS' WORTH OF LISTED EVIDENCE OF HILLARY CLINTON'S CRIMES) SHOULD BE EXPUNGED, TOO?!

The ruling — based on the complaint of a Spanish man who wanted Google to remove links to a 1998 news story about his bankruptcy — said search engines were data “controllers,” not just neutral conduits, and therefore had a responsibility to cleanse unfair and damaging information.

"WAH! I MISMANAGED MY MONEY & WENT BANKRUPT! IT'S NOT FAIR THAT PEOPLE KNOW IT!"

In its wake, Google received a deluge of requests for cache removals from EU residents: more than 735,000 people filled out the company’s digital application form. It has since delisted 1.1 million search results inside the EU, according to the company’s public transparency report.

France’s data protection agency, however, said that wasn’t good enough, and it has ordered Google to censor those same links worldwide so that someone conducting a search in Canada, for instance, couldn’t find information unavailable in the EU. (Google Search uses different domains for different countries: Canada is www.google.ca, Germany is www.google.de, Spain is www.google.es, Australia is www.google.com.au, the U.S. is www.google.com.)

OF COURSE THEY DID - THERE'S NO COUNTRY MORE LIBERTINE LIBERAL (CRIMINAL) OUT THERE THAN FRANCE - EXCEPT FOR MAYBE SAUDI ARABIA ITSELF...

Google has challenged the order to France’s Conseil d’Etat, which in July referred the issue to the EU’s top court.

The company says the case has profound implications for the free flow of digital information.

“If French law applies globally, how long will it be until other countries – perhaps less open and democratic – start demanding that their laws regulating information likewise have global reach?” Google general counsel Kent Walker wrote in a recent blog post.

Information that is legal in one country, he said, is verboten in another: “Thailand outlaws insults to its king; Brazil outlaws negative campaigning in political elections; Turkey outlaws speeches that denigrates Ataturk or the Turkish nation.”

WAAH! HURT FEEWINGS! SUBJECTIVE HYPOCRITICAL DOUBLE STANDARDS ARE ALWAYS ADVERSARIAL EXTORTION ATTEMPTS LEADING TO ENSLAVE EVERYONE!

He warned that the case, if upheld, could trigger “a global race to the bottom.”

Google is already in an uncomfortable situation. By recognizing the right to be forgotten, European courts have handed the multinational the judge-like responsibility of weighing individual privacy rights against the public’s right to know.

AGAIN, DEAR LEFTOPATHIC PRESSTITUTES: THEY HAVEN'T "RECOGNIZED A RIGHT" BUT PROMULGATE A LIE, AND THEY HAVEN'T "HANDED GOOGLE A RESPONSIBILITY" BUT HAVE EXTORTED GOOGLE BY OBLIGING THEM TO COMMIT SIMILAR CRIMES AGAINST EVERYONE ELSE, TOO!

Google officials have reviewed more than two million EU web addresses (URLs), and have decided 

to remove 56.9 per cent of them.

GOOGLE IS ACTING UNDER DURESS TO COMMIT EVIDENCE-DESTROYING CRIMES.

The company provides examples of the decisions it faces, but it does not set out hard and fast rules for removals, nor does it explain how its officials balance public versus private interests.

THERE IS NO SUCH "BALANCE" POSSIBLE: EITHER ONE GOES WITH UNIVERSALLY OBJECTIVE FACTS, OR ONE GOES ALONG WITH SUBJECTIVE LYING DOUBLE STANDARDS.

The Global Commission on Internet Governance, an independent think-tank led by former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, decried that state of affairs in a 2016 report: “Private companies — as opposed to courts and legislatures — are only accountable to their shareholders; they should not be the arbitrator on how to weigh fundamental rights and public interests.”

AND YET CANADA, FOR INSTANCE, GIVES PRIVATE COMMUNICATIONS COMPANIES LIKE ROGERS, BELL CANADA, AND QUEBEC'S VIDEOTRON, THE POWER TO INVADE THE HOMES OF PRIVATE CITIZENS TO KIDNAP THEM AND STEAL THEIR PROPERTY.

Courts around the world are now wrestling with issues raised by privacy on the internet, and Canada is no exception.

In January, the Federal Court of Canada issued a judgment that excoriated Sebastian Radulescu, the owner of the website Globe24h. com, as someone who “has essentially made a business of exploiting the privacy of individuals for profit.”

In 2012, Globe24h.com downloaded thousands of decisions from the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII), a nonprofit organization that offers access to decisions from Canadian courts and tribunals.

CanLII shields its database from search engines in keeping with guidelines published by the Canadian Judicial Council. (In 2005, the judicial council said that while internet publishing enhances the open-court principle, it also raises legitimate privacy and security concerns. Most Canadian courts follow the council’s guidelines, but not all: The Manitoba Court of Appeal, for instance, allows its judgments to be indexed by Google. Once indexed, the material is infinitely more accessible to the average web user.)

Globe24h.com circumvented the Canadian convention by conducting a bulk download of CanLII data and posting it to a company website. That made it discoverable by Google’s search engine. As a result, people searching an individual’s name — even if they were not looking for court records — would quickly find the cached legal documents.

In response to a flood of complaints, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada investigated.

Radulescu defended his website. He told the privacy commissioner that he was engaged in a “journalistic enterprise” to broaden the availability of Canadian legal decisions. His company didn’t create the documents, he argued, but simply amplified their distribution: “If courts do not want everyone to see (their decisions), why do they publish them online in the first place?” he asked.

In June 2015, the privacy commissioner issued a report that found that the website generated most of its revenue by collecting fees to remove the unwanted material. It recommended that Radulescu take down the Canadian content from his website.

But the Romanian flatly refused. So the case ended up in the Federal Court of Canada, which can add legal force to the privacy commissioner’s findings.

In his ruling earlier this year, Justice Richard Mosley concluded there was nothing journalistic about Radulescu’s business: “The evidence indicates that the respondent’s primary purpose is to incentivize individuals to pay to have their personal information removed from the website. There is no evidence that the respondent’s intention is to inform the public on matters of public interest.”

The judge ordered Radulescu to remove the documents, and awarded the anonymous complainant $5,000 in damages. Globe24h.com is now inoperative.

WHY SHOULD HE HAVE HAD TO REMOVE PUBLIC DOCUMENTS WHICH THEY THEM SELVES HAD MADE AVAILABLE ONLINE? LEGAL DECISIONS AREN'T COPYRIGHT PROTECTED, NOR ARE CRIMINAL RECORDS PRIVATE INFORMATION. THE "JUDGE" TRIED TO MAKE TELLING THE TRUTH ILLEGAL, AND PUNISHABLE BY FINE.

Some observers believe the decision represents the first major step toward establishing a court-sanctioned right to be forgotten in Canada. 

NO, IT SIMPLY REPRESENTS ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF COMMON JUDICIAL  ATTEMPTS TO ILLEGALLY CRIMINALIZE TELLING THE TRUTH IN FAVOUR OF "HURT FEEWINGS!"

At the very least, says Ottawa-based lawyer Colin Lachance, it highlights the need for a national debate.

When you consider how easy it is to destroy someone’s reputation, or cause them a lot of financial and social harm, it’s kind of ridiculous. It’s not a just situation right now.

“It’s really time for a new national conversation about this,” said Lachance, CEO of the legal publisher, Compass, and former president of CanLII. “Personally, I’m of the view that case law should be open and free.”

BUT WAIT - AS FORMER PRESIDENT OF CanLII, WEREN'T YOU THE ONE SUING THE ROMANIAN FOR PUBLISHING THAT OPEN AND FREE CASE LAW, AS BEING "ILLEGAL!"?

Mendelsohn used to believe in a no-holds-barred internet, but tempered that view after years of trying to help people whose lives had been damaged by web posts.

i.e: "I USED TO BELIEVE IN THE TRUTH, BUT HURT FEEWINGS CHANGED DESTROYED MY MIND!"

“I used to think, ‘If it’s truthful information, why should it be removed or delisted?’” he says. “But having seen so many circumstances where individuals have real problems because of things on the internet, I’ve softened that stance a bit: I don’t think there should be some unlimited right to be forgotten where anything can be removed, but I do think something needs to be put in place . ... There are a lot of competing interests that make it a very complicated situation. But there are significant problems with some of the stuff that’s easily discoverable through Google.”

IF YOU WANT TO FORCE GOOGLE TO AMEND OR APPEND IT'S (ALLEGEDLY NEUTRAL) SEARCHES, SIMPLY INSERT DISCLAIMERS ("THIS WAS PROVEN TO BE A LIE, AND IS STILL BEING RETAINED AS EVIDENCE TO BE USED IN COURT AGAINST IT'S AUTHOR") AND LINKS TO UPDATES PROVING SAME, RETARD!

Most people would agree with the notion that a doctor who committed serious malpractice, or someone who abused a child, should not have their internet footprints easily erased. But how long should lesser crimes be allowed to damage reputations online? What about allegations of cheating, adultery, bad food, poor service?

ALLEGATIONS (OPINIONS) ARE PART OF FREE SPEECH, IF AND WHEN IDENTIFIED AS SAME; BUT PRESENTING ONE'S OPINION AS A FACT, IS A LIE (AKA CRIMINAL FRAUD AND SLANDER). DUH!

A handful of U.S. websites — including The Dirty, Cheater Report and The Ripoff Report — routinely publish allegations that can damage the reputations of ordinary people and small businesses. 

The websites post mostly unverified accusations and complaints. AGAIN: IF THEY POST THEM AS OPINIONS, IT'S NOT ILLEGAL; WHILE POSTING THEM AS FACTS REMAINS ILLEGAL.

“They hide behind certain American laws, and make it very hard to remove content,” says Mendelsohn. “It’s unfortunate, but there’s very little you can do except get active on the internet so that the item in question gets pushed down in the Google rankings.”

Sometimes, business owners and individuals turn to online reputation managers, such as Reputation.ca, to help them bury an offensive post or a bad review. Restaurants, hotels and retailers can be devastated by a single, cranky customer who takes to social media.

Reputation.ca has a number of strategies to repair an online reputation. First, it appeals directly to the person or group that posted the material. If it’s not possible to have the post removed, the firm employs what it calls a “suppression” strategy: It develops 20 or 30 pieces of factual content about a client and publishes them to the web. Optimized for search engine algorithms, the material can displace negative posts on Google’s search index.

SO THEY USE THE CRIMINALS' MIGHT-MAKES-RIGHT STRATEGY? BIG OF THEM (NOT)!

“When you consider how easy it is to destroy someone’s reputation, or cause them a lot of financial and social harm, it’s kind of ridiculous,” says Matt Earle, founder and president of Reputation.ca. 

“It’s not a just situation right now.”

The Supreme Court of Canada recently entered the debate.

The country’s highest court issued a judgment in late June that upheld a worldwide removal order against Google. The ruling has broad implications for content policing on the web: specifically, whether search engine companies can be ordered to suppress search results in other countries. (It’s the same issue that’s now before EU’s top court.)

The Canadian case dealt with a commercial interest rather than an individual’s privacy, but internet lawyers believe it will inform the debate on the right to be forgotten. Explains Mendelsohn: “For a right to be forgotten to meaningfully exist, you must have the ability to say that Google must remove something.”

MORE TYPICAL STUPIDITY, TO SEPARATE COMMERCIAL (GANGS OF INDIVIDUALS') INTERESTS, FROM THOSE SAME INDIVIDUALS' PRIVATE PROPERTY INTERESTS.

The case involved Equustek Solutions Inc., a Burnaby, B.C. based firm that makes networking devices to improve industrial automation.

In 2012, Equustek won a court order that prevented a Vancouverbased competitor, Datalink Technologies Gateways, from selling counterfeit versions of its products. Datalink, however, closed its Vancouver office and continued to operate as a virtual company through an ever-expanding series of websites.

Equustek appealed to Google for help in dealing with its scofflaw competitor. The California-based company voluntarily removed 345 web addresses from its list of search results on Google.ca to limit public access to Datalink. But Datalink simply moved its content to new web pages, and continued to sell products online — mostly to customers outside of Canada. Equustek lawyers described its pursuit of Datalink as an unhappy game of “Whac-A-Mole.”

As a result, the firm went back to court, seeking a broader injunction that would order Google to block all search results that linked to Datalink’s websites worldwide.

Google lawyers said the order went much too far. They argued that a permanent, worldwide injunction would set a dangerous precedent, and undermine freedom of expression.

The lower court, however, sided with Equustek, ruling that an injunction with international force was the only practical way of protecting the company’s economic interests. The B.C. Court of Appeal upheld that ruling, and Google appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, which heard the case in December.

STUPIDITY - IF THE DATALINK OWNERS WERE FRAUDULENTLY IMPERSONATING THE OWNERS OF EQUUSTEK AND COUNTERFEITING THEIR GOODS, FUCKING JAIL THEM!

PROBLEM SOLVED!

In its written submissions, Google said the case, if upheld, opened the door to abuse by nations eager to control information. Other countries, it warned, could turn to similar international blocking orders to scrub the web of ideas they consider offensive. “Should Russia grant orders prohibiting Canadians from finding and reading websites that contain anti-Kremlin content?” Google lawyers asked.

The case attracted a host of interveners, including the Wikimedia Foundation, Human Rights Watch and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. Wikimedia’s lawyers cautioned: “While this case relates to commercial speech, the court should be mindful of the fact that expression that is creative, educational, and informative will also come before courts around the world.”

In a 7-2 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld the worldwide deindexing order against Google. It’s the first time that a nation’s highest court has upheld such a sweeping removal order against the search engine giant.

OF COURSE THEY DID - THESE ARE THE SAME ASSCLOWNS WHO RULED THAT COPS STEALING YOUR PROPERTY WITHOUT COURT ORDERS CHARGES OR ARRESTS IS PERFECTLY LEGAL, THUS IMPLYING THAT NO LAWYERS, COURTS, OR JUDGES NEED EXIST!

Writing for the majority, Justice Rosalie Abella said that although Google was not directly responsible for what happened to Equustek, it cannot be considered a simple bystander since, as a key internet gatekeeper, it “facilitated” that harm.

THAT'S SLANDER, WHICH READS SUBJECTIVE CRIMINAL INTENT (OR, IN "CIVIL LAW CRIME" TERMS, "MALICE") INTO A SIMPLE AND OBJECTIVELY-NEUTRAL INDEXING FUNCTION. IT'S EXACTLY THE SAME AS CLAIMING THE ROAD-PAVER KNOWINGLY "FACILITATED" THE GETAWAY DRIVER'S CRIMES AFTER HE HELPED HIS GANG ESCAPE A BANK ROBBERY SCENE, SIMPLY BECAUSE HE PAVED A ROAD FOR GENERAL USAGE!!

The judge noted that Canadian courts routinely grant international injunctions to deal with intellectual property and copyright infringements.

“The problem in this case is occurring online and globally,” the court said. “The internet has no borders — its natural habitat is global.” aduffy@postmedia.com

Canadian "Judges" Grant SEARCH WARRANTS To Corporate Thugs

From here:

WHERE IN CANADIAN LAW DOES IT SAY A JUDGE IS EMPOWERED TO ISSUE SEARCH WARRANTS TO PRIVATE CITIZENS OR CORPORATIONS, OR TO ANYONE ELSE NOT AN AUTHORIZED DEPUTY OF A BRANCH OF THE VARIOUS LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT?!

TV Addons website owner Adam Lackman. Three major telecoms have appealed a Federal Court ruling that the raid on his home was unfair.Allen McInnis/Postmedia News

=======

If you run a website that helps people stream pirated movies and TV shows — even if you’re not providing the pirated video yourself — are you breaking the law?

Of course not, and only a fraudulent and slanderous leftopathic masochistic hypocrite could ask that!

That’s the question at the heart of a legal battle that saw three of Canada’s biggest telecom companies search a Montreal software developer’s home for more than 16 hours in June, an experience he says left him “in total shock.”

“I thought I was going to jail that night,” said Adam Lackman in an interview with the National Post.

Lackman is the founder of TV Addons, a popular site for apps that allow users to access online content, like TV shows, and display it on any electronic device. It had 40 million unique users every month before it was shut down.

Lackman claims his website is essentially a search engine, and he has no control over the content people are accessing with these apps.

But Bell Canada, Rogers Communications and Videotron say the website infringes upon their copyright by enabling users to watch pirated TV shows like Game of Thrones for free.

TV Addons’ users are people who use Kodi — an open source media player that can be used to play video, music and games on many devices, including laptops, tablets and smartphones.

So basically, it only projects the content one has already accessed through legal (or illegal) means. In other words, he's designed the equivalent of a video screen projector - it doesn't illegally "hack" into the source of whatever content one hooks it up to; it just projects whatever you have already plugged into it.

The add-ons on Lackman’s site are software that “scrapes” content from different online sources that can then be played using Kodi. Some add-ons are legitimate, and scrape video that’s freely available online. But others allow users to stream pirated content.

So it's like going after the Sony corporation for making the videocams someone uses to go into a theater and pirate a movie with! As usual with leftopathy, it blames tool makers for users' choices!

Lackman said he can’t be held responsible for the content that people access through add-ons on his site. “It’s impossible for us to test every add-on and know where the content is coming from,” he said.

TV Addons is a popular website for apps that allow users to access online content, like TV shows, and display it on any electronic device. Screengrab

In early June, the telecoms filed a lawsuit against Lackman, alleging that his website makes it much easier for clients to watch unauthorized content.

Later that month, they got what’s called an Anton Piller order, which allowed them to search Lackman’s home without warning. Such orders are issued when there’s a risk of a defendant destroying evidence.

On June 12, a group of men showed up at Lackman’s apartment at 8 am. They stayed well into the night, making copies of all his electronic information. He said they demanded his passwords for his website and social media accounts, and then changed them to lock him out. He said they threatened him with contempt of court if he didn’t comply.

Not only did that infringe on his own proprietary copyrights, but it made about as much sense as any "judge" authorizing not the cops to search a private citizen's home - in a civil lawsuit initiated by any other private citizen or group of same, but actually allowed those private citizens to invade his home!

It's as if I said "Your honour, my readers stole my property - so allow ME to go search their homes!"

“It was crazy,” he said. “Really the only device in the house they didn’t copy was my fridge.”

In late June, a Federal Court judge declared the Anton Piller order null and void, finding that the search lasted too long and Lackman treated unfairly. The judge pointed out that Lackman was asked about other people who might be running similar websites — an attempt to gather new evidence, when the order is meant only to allow existing evidence to be preserved.

Irrelevant.

He concluded that the true purpose of the search “was to destroy the livelihood of the defendant, deny him the financial resources to finance a defence to the claim made against him, and to provide an opportunity for discovery of the defendant in circumstances where none of the procedural safeguards of our civil justice system could be engaged.”

Even worse than that, the whole premise of a search warrant being issued directly to private companies is illegal.

If it had been issued to the cops on behalf of the companies' claims their property was stolen, then it might have been technically legal, (although still stupid) and a prosecutor could have reviewed it.

The judge ordered that Lackman’s information and passwords be returned to him. But that hasn’t happened. The telecoms appealed the decision, and in July, a Federal Court of Appeal judge ruled the appeal could be heard. Lackman won’t get anything back until that happens.

“The mere existence of a platform which enables TVADDONS.AG users across the world to access copyrighted content without authorization… violates the rights acquired by the appellants (the telecom companies) respectively,” the appeal judge found.

That's exactly like saying "The mere existence of videocams violates the rights of every woman who has ever been video-captured in compromising positions by peeping perverts. So go and arrest Sony!"

• Illegal downloading is like smoking — a bad habit picked up in my youth that I still can’t kick

He also found that Lackman had attempted to conceal evidence, and it was therefore necessary to prevent him having access to all his information until the appeal can be heard, which could take months.

Wrong. He had really only tried to preserve his own proprietary copyrights from being illegally accessed under colour of law by his competitors. Both the original and second appeal judge should be arrested by the the police, if only for infringing on their monopoly use of force as government agents.

So for now, the original TV Addons website is shut down and Lackman says he has no source of revenue and a legal bill of $76,000 and climbing.

He has managed to create a new TV Addons website with a different domain name, but said his reputation is tarnished and he’s unlikely to get the same traffic again.

“I’m just fighting to not get further penalized, because I have nothing to gain,” he said. “I won’t even be able to sell the (original) domain for five dollars.”

He’s also started an Indiegogo fundraiser to help pay his legal bills.

Bell, Rogers and Videtron did not respond to requests for comment. Their lawyers, from Montreal-based law firm Smart & Biggar, said they were bound by a confidentiality order.

Impossible! They are the ones who subverted the judicial process by tricking credulous "judges!" As such, they should be jailed for at the very least helping bring the justice system itself into disrepute!

Canada has some of the toughest anti-piracy laws in the world, including an “enabler provision” that allows companies to go after sites that facilitate copyright infringement, said University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, an expert in copyright law. And in recent months, telecom companies have made a “very aggressive” push to fight this type of technology.

The existence of such "laws" (crimes) which, if they do enable companies to act as extra-judicial enforcement arms - to invade private citizens' homes and kidnap them while doing so - is reason enough for all judges to ignore and indeed void them, while issuing arrest warrants for the legislators who wrote them!

But what makes this case complicated, he said, is that TV Addons doesn’t exist just to supply unauthorized content — it provides lots of legitimate add-ons, too.

That's not a "complication." That's only a symptom that he provides a tool, he doesn't force people to use it for their own criminal ends.

“I think (the telecoms’) time is better spent targeting the sites that are doing the infringing,” Geist said, referring to websites that actually host pirated videos.

“What I think at a minimum is clear is that Rogers, Bell and Videotron used their power to try to crush this site.”

They have subverted justice and the Canadian constitution (such as it is) to commit their crimes.

TV Addons is facing another, similar lawsuit from U.S. TV provider Dish Network, filed in late May. At the time, the company didn’t know who was behind the site.

Still, Lackman maintains he would never have knowingly flouted copyright law.


“I would never have gone against media giants,” he said. “I’m not suicidal. Why would I go against these people?”

Canada's Supreme Court Demands Communism - Or Else!

From here:

Re: "the Court struck down a passage forbidding speech that “ridicules, belittles or otherwise affronts the dignity” of certain groups, while upholding  ...  a commitment to equality and respect for group identity and the inherent dignity owed to all human beings.”

A "COMMITMENT TO GROUP IDENTITY EQUALITY" = COMMUNISM!

SO, WHILE AFFRONTING GROUP DIGNITY IS NOT VERBOTEN, THE COURT IS STILL "COMMITTED" TO IT BEING OWED THE GROUPS!?

As I have to keep saying for some strange, unexplained, leftopathic reason...

Any and all legislators, judges, and educators who put criminals' hurt feelings above facts should be fired and JAILED.

And that includes using the words "Respect!" and "Dignity!"

Any and all "laws" criminalizing hurt feelings should be repealed and their originators fired and JAILED, too!

Because all subjectivist "laws" are really adversarial crimes, seeking to use fraudulent slander to extort and enslave others. Fraud, slander, extortion and slavery (aka "Political Correctness") are already crimes.

And what else is totalitarianism ("socialism," "communism," "fascism" or "islam") but total control over everyone else - merely gangster extortion which always leads directly to full-on slavery?!

READ IT AND WEEP:

Canadian Supreme Court Kills Last Hope for Free Speech

Even stating factual information will be met with state oppression.

February 28, 2013 By Bruce Bawer

That sound you hear is Voltaire rolling over in his grave.

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Once upon a time, it was commonly understood that this sentiment is the very foundation of a free society.  Compromise free speech, water it down, and you destroy freedom itself.

In Toronto there lives a man named Bill Whatcott. During the last two decades or so, he has spent much of his time traveling around Canada, waving protest signs at gay-pride parades and Planned Parenthood clinics, agitating for the criminalization of homosexual acts and abortion, and distributing fliers packed with incendiary language about gays and graphic images of aborted fetuses. In 2010 the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal fined him $17,500 for distributing “hateful” materials; an appeals court overturned the ruling, whereupon the province's Human Rights Commission appealed the case to the Canadian Supreme Court. Now the Court has ruled, and it's an icy day for freedom in the Great White North.

To be sure, the Court's unanimous ruling on the Whatcott case pretends to be nuanced, measured, carefully thought-out – a product of the most sophisticated kind of legal deliberation. In evaluating the hate-speech section of Saskatchewan's Human Rights Code, for instance, the Court struck down a passage forbidding speech that “ridicules, belittles or otherwise affronts the dignity” of certain groups, while upholding a prohibition on language that is “likely to expose” those groups to hatred.

For the most part, the Court upheld the province's hate-speech legislation, maintaining that it “appropriately balances the fundamental values underlying freedom of expression with competing Charter rights and other values essential to a free and democratic society, in this case a commitment to equality and respect for group identity and the inherent dignity owed to all human beings.”

One of the many striking aspects of the Court's decision is the insistence that any judge, jury, or commission seeking to determine whether a speech act crosses the threshold of being punishable by law must not look to the speaker's intent but must, rather, make an assessment of the potential of that speech act for causing hate. 

Speech capable of causing emotions that are negative but that fall short of full-fledged “abhorrence,” the Court dictated, cannot be banned.

WHICH IS OF COURSE A TOTALLY SUBJECTIVE ASSESSMENT!

Another key detail is that truth is no defense: it is impermissible even to state demonstrable facts if, in the authorities' estimation, those facts might spark enmity toward a group. Yet another point worth mentioning is that any judgment rendered in such matters must, the Court posited, be arrived at in an “objective” manner.

WHICH NOT ONLY TOTALLY CONTRADICTS THE PREVIOUS ASSERTION, BUT IS IMPOSSIBLE! OFFENSE CAN ONLY BE TAKEN; BEING OFFENDED IS A CHOICE!

Many commentators in the major Canadian media gave the Court's decision at least a partial thumbs-up, agreeing that it struck an admirable balance between free speech and censorship. National Post columnist Jonathan Kay, for example, while regretting that the Court's ruling will effectively stifle “strict religious conservatives” and deny them “the same free-speech rights enjoyed by secular Canadians,” claimed that it “can’t be considered a win” either “for free-speech champions” or “for human-rights censors,” and even characterized it as “a measured blow against political correctness” that puts Canadian human-rights commissions on notice “that they may target only public expressions of true hatred that create a genuine climate of menace for a targeted group.” EVEN CRIMINALS.

Meanwhile, over at the Globe and Mail, Michael Plaxton, a law professor at the University of Saskatchewan, served up a wishy-washy analysis in which he praised the Court's “nuanced and well-crafted decision” while admitting that it “all but strangle[s] certain kinds of argument – particularly those made from a religious point of view.” While accepting that “a commitment to equality” may indeed require that some faith-based views “be muffled somewhat,” Plaxton suggested that if we do choose to tone down certain people's opinions, “we should be honest about what we are doing.”

And in the Montreal Gazette, human-rights lawyer Pearl Eliadis called the Court's ruling “reasonable and balanced” and said that it “should provide comfort to those concerned about being found liable for 'offending' others,” given that judges will now be required to “look at the objectively verifiable effects of the speech, and not whether a person is merely affronted or offended.”

IN OTHER WORDS, SHE HAS SERIOUS READING COMPREHENSION PROBLEMS!

Terrifying, isn't it?

As the major Enlightenment thinkers and America's Founding Fathers understood, free speech is really quite a simple matter.

Yes, out-and-out libel is something else, as is shouting fire in a crowded theater.

But beyond that, either speech is free or it isn't.

The Canadian Supreme Court's decision – with its tangled, tortuous logic, its quaint, absurd confidence in the possibility of “objectively” ascertaining whether this or that statement is capable of engendering hate, and its prioritizing of group sensitivities over truth itself – has now verified that north of the border, speech is decidedly unfree.

And they've done this, supposedly, for the benefit of the kinds of groups targeted by Bill Whatcott's rhetoric.

Now, I'm not Canadian. But as a member of one of the groups the Court professes to be protecting, I feel obliged to say the following to the Court: Don't do me any favors. I feel far less threatened by the likes of Whatcott than I do by courts that consider it their prerogative to limit the liberties of a free people in such an arrogant fashion. The justices seem not to recognize – or to care – that if you want to live in a truly free society, you've got to be willing to share that society with people who consider you an abomination and who feel compelled to shout their views from the rooftops. Curb their right to have their say, and you put your own rights on exceedingly shaky ground.

A further point. As we've seen, Jonathan Kay and Michael Plaxton, while generally approving of the Court's decision, express concern that it will inhibit the articulation of religious convictions.

But what they don't note is that the Court's decision is also a shot across the bow at those who might be inclined to criticize religion itself – notably Islam.

Indeed, as law professor Alan Shanoff pointed out in the Toronto Sun, Canadians have effectively been enjoined by their Supreme Court to “tiptoe around criticism of any religion no matter how odious we may find some of its practices.”

This isn't fundamentally about Whatcott and other Christians of his stripe – their numbers up north are minimal and they pose no real threat to anything or anybody. No, one strongly suspects that for the Supreme Court, the Whatcott case represented, above all, a golden opportunity to set down guidelines for those individuals whose opinions have been perceived by Canadian authorities, in recent years, as the real menace to Canadian social order and harmony – namely, Islam critics like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant.

A welcome dissent from the Court's ruling came from National Post political columnist Andrew Coyne, who focused on a truly staggering sentence in the ruling, the intent of which was to justify the prosecution of even thoroughly veracious statements: “truth,” wrote the justices, “may be used for widely disparate ends.” 

Coyne's thoroughly legitimate reaction: “I cannot quite believe I am reading these words, even now.”

Coyne rightly questions the very premise of the Court's ruling – namely, that people like Whatcott actually do succeed in convincing others to hate while “cut[ting] off any path of reply by the group under attack.”

Take a gander at the National Post's photo of Whatcott with some of his posters, and ask yourself: has this guy caused hatred to spring up in formerly hate-free hearts – or is it more likely, on the contrary, that he's intensified a lot of people's contempt for the very views he seeks to spread?

The bottom line here is that the Canadian Supreme Court, in the name of justice, has struck a blow against freedom and promulgated a pack of lies – among them, first, the lie that free speech can and should be “balanced” against other worthy social objectives; second, the lie that it is possible for government officials to make “objective” determinations as to the possible consequences of a given speech act and as to the exact location of the boundary between hate and lesser emotions; and, third, the lie that “hate speech,” in some way, silences its targets.

No, “hate speech” doesn't silence – the prosecution of “hate speech” does.

Yes, the Court's decision may well be used to suppress the vigorous expression of religious people's opinions – or, more specifically, the opinions of people who agree with Bill Whatcott. But does anyone honestly think that, say, Canadian imams who preach core Islamic tenets – such as the obligation to punish gays, apostates, and adulteresses with death – are henceforth in serious peril of prosecution?

Or has the Court, instead, handed the “objective” instruments of Canadian justice a fresh new club with which to bludgeon the few brave souls in that nation who dare to tell the truth about the Religion of Peace?

Bruce Bawer is the author of “While Europe Slept,” “Surrender,” and "The Victims' Revolution." His novel "The Alhambra" has just been published.

UN, Catholic Church, Ally with Islam, Declare War on Humanity!

 The Archbishop recited a long screed, full of redundant turds, I shall attempt to mark them with bold font emphasis  and deal with them as topic headers in my commentary below the screed. Particularly egregious concepts may be marked with superscripts internally linked to my comments.

    Since I did not discover this until early Sunday morning, and found statements by the Secretary General and Shaykh Abdallah Bin Bayyah along with the Fez Plan, I will try to limit the time wasted on each screed and re-use as much commentary as I can.

Intervention of Archbishop Bernardito Auza, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations
Launch of the Plan of Action for Religious Leaders and Actors to Prevent Incitement to Violence that Could Lead to Atrocity Crimes

United Nations, New York, 14 July 2017

Excellencies, Distinguished Fellow Panelists,

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am very pleased to be present at the launch of this Plan of Action, which is meant to help “better understand, articulate and encourage the potential of religious leaders to prevent incitement and the violence that it can lead to, and to integrate the work of religious leaders within broader efforts to prevent atrocity crimes” (p. 3).

The fruit of three years of hard work, the Plan is intended primarily for religious leaders and workers, but also helpfully includes detailed recommendations for States and state institutions, civil society organizations, and the media, conscious that preventing genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity requires the contributions and collaboration of each of us and all our communities and institutions.

While the Holy See is not able to support every one of the 177 targets flowing from the Plan’s nine groups of thematic recommendations and 35 objectives, the plan as a whole represents a major, practical step forward in fostering a culture and society consistent with what the Outcome Document of the 2005 World Summit called the Responsibility to Protect.

I would like to share three brief reactions.

First, I wish to underline the emphasis in the Plan that “States have the primary responsibility to protect populations from atrocity crimes, as well as their incitement.” This is in line with Articles 138 and 139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome, which states the responsibility to protect falls primarily, but not exclusively, on national authorities. Then the international community is called upon, “as appropriate, [to] encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility.” This encouragement and help can take many forms, among which I would like to recall the duty to refrain from inciting tension and conflict in third States that could constitute the prelude, the scene or still worse, the breeding ground for committing the hateful crimes in question.

There has been some focus recently on the role of religious leaders in preventing atrocity crimes — and this is good, because religious leaders have much to contribute — but, at the end of the day, religious leaders and organizations obviously do not have the resources by themselves to stop atrocities. While they can influence behavior and mentalities, they do not possess the resources and instruments of stopping mass atrocities that only States possess, like law enforcement agencies and armed forces. While I heartily welcome the spotlight on the helpful role of religious leaders, it is important to maintain the crucial focus on the primary responsibility of national governments and the international community to act to protect the innocent from savage acts.

My second point is that, as the Plan helpfully emphasizes, “religious leaders and actors can” — and I would add, do — “play a particularly influential role” in preventing atrocities, “because they have the potential to influence the behavior of those who follow them and share their beliefs.”1

Negatively, this influence has been abused by those religious leaders who have misused their authority and influence to spur or justify atrocities. Positively, it has been seen in the many more religious leaders who have condemned such abuses, stressing that violence against others in the name of God is a great blasphemy against the name of God and the greatest disservice to religion itself.2

Religious leaders and communities are called to uphold the Responsibility to Protect by engaging in interreligious dialogue and promoting peace in their communities. Their vocation is to carry out and inspire actions aimed at helping the building of societies based on respect for life and human dignity, charity, fraternity, which goes far beyond tolerance, and solidarity.

The Plan offers religious leaders many helpful good and best practices in order to inoculate those who come to their houses of worship from the half-truths that ideologues can use to incite them to hating rather than loving, and attacking rather than serving, their neighbor3. The very existence of a Plan directed toward religious leaders is also a humble recognition by the international community that those who are being incited by pseudo-religious motivations for violence aren’t going to be effectively persuaded out of it by secular argumentation from so-called infidels or by economic materialism. They need, rather, valid religious arguments that show that extremists’ violence-inducing exegesis is unfaithful to the text and to the God they’re claiming to serve; they need persuasive counterarguments that plant the seeds of peace and eradicate the weeds of violence.4

The phenomenon of religiously motivated violence is a particular challenge with regard to the defense and protection of Freedom of Religion or Belief.5Understanding the motivations that lie at the root of terrorism and violence is complex and requires careful reflection and analysis, all the more so when there is a religious dimension to it6. Religious leaders are uniquely placed to offer such reflection. Pope Francis has helped to open up spaces for this reflection to occur so that religious leaders are able to contribute to the sensitive debate about religiously motivated terrorism.

Acknowledging explicitly the religious dimension of some expressions of violent extremism is fraught with danger7, and we can understand the reluctance of governments and international bodies to do so. Thus, the most important contribution of religious leaders to this debate is to help people understand that acknowledging the religious dimension of some violent extremism, or more precisely the manipulation of religion for violent ends8, does not mean equating religion, or a particular religion, or an entire religious community, with violence.9

In his April 28 address to the participants of the International Peace Conference in Cairo, Pope Francis emphasized that “religion is not a problem but a part of the solution10.” In order to “counter effectively the barbarity of those who foment hatred and violence,” he said, “we need to accompany young people, helping them on the path to maturity and teaching them to respond to the incendiary logic of evil by patiently working for the growth of goodness, … daily turn[ing] the polluted air of hatred into the oxygen of fraternity.”

For religious leaders to carry out this service, he said, it’s essential that religion not “be relegated to the private sphere, as if it were not an essential dimension of the human person and society,” because such secularizing tendencies can add fuel to the fires being stoked by those who want to instrumentalize religious motivations toward violent ends. Confining religion only to the intimate sphere of the person risks the development of a culture of intolerance, which is one reason why national authorities must recognize and ensure religious freedom as an inalienable fundamental human right.

The public good that comes from religion needs to be appreciated and promoted so that religious leaders can better, Pope Francis continued in Cairo, “unmask the violence that masquerades as purported sanctity, … denounce violations of human dignity and human rights, … expose attempts to justify every form of hatred in the name of religion11, and … condemn these attempts as idolatrous caricatures of God.” 12

My third and last point involves the importance of religious leaders’ participation in meaningful interreligious dialogue, which is the focus of the fifth thematic recommendation.

This is something that Pope Francis has been stressing by both word and action since his 2013 election. “Interreligious dialogue,” he wrote in the exhortation that charts the path of his pontificate, “is a necessary condition for peace in the world.” He elaborated on that conviction this January in his annual address to the members of the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See. He described how interreligious dialogue, beyond the many direct fruits that come from it for believers, provides the peoples of the world a paradigm to discuss their differences, grow in mutual appreciation of others’ perspectives, and journey together toward peace and other common goals.

Religiously motivated men and women, moved as they are by the call of God to reverence the other’s God-given dignity and love their neighbor, he said, have a special responsibility to show everyone how to converse about the deepest and most important matters and to work respectfully through what may divide. Moreover, they show adherents how to fight injustice and root out the personal and social causes of discord that can lead to war, to renounce violence and vengeance in vindicating one’s rights, to transcend selfishness and the hatred that calcifies through lack of forgiveness, and to carry out the works of mercy that build a culture of peace.13

That’s why the role and work of religious leaders and believers in general, and interreligious dialogue in particular, are crucial not just in preventing incitement to violence among susceptible coreligionists, but in fostering incitement to virtue and thereby creating the type of peaceful and inclusive societies in which atrocity crimes are ethically unacceptable, indeed, unimaginable.

Thank you for your kind attention.

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religious leaders

incitement

violence

prevent atrocity crimes

genocide

war crimes

states

breeding ground

role of religious leaders

influential role

negative influence

respect

life

dignity

charity

fraternity

tolerance

half-truths

interreligious dialogue

common goals

believers