H*te Speech

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Dutch retrial ordered for Wilders hate speech case [concerning Islam]
The Associated Press: Dutch retrial ordered for Wilders hate speech case

A Dutch court ordered a retrial Friday for anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders, sending the closely-watched hate speech case back to square one before a whole new panel of judges.

The far-right politician faces charges of inciting hatred against Muslims for many remarks, including some equating Islam with fascism and violence and others calling for a ban on the Quran and a tax on Muslim headscarves.

Wilders accused judges at the Amsterdam District Court of bias and called for their dismissal after they refused to recall a defense witness who wrote on a weblog that a member of an appeals panel directly involved in the case had improperly contacted him.

A hastily convened substitute panel ruled Friday that Wilders' objections were valid, which means the trial that began in January must restart from the beginning with new judges.

Wilders welcomed the decision.

"This gives me a new chance on a new fair trial," he said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "I am confident that I can only be acquitted because I have broken no law but spoke the truth and nothing but the truth and exercised my freedom of speech in an important public debate about the dangerous totalitarian ideology called Islam."

Judge G. Marcus said the panel understood Wilders' "fear that the court's decision displays a degree of bias ... and under those circumstances accepts the appeal."

Since the charges were filed, Wilders' party has become part of the Netherland's ruling conservative government, making him one of the most powerful politicians in the nation.

Wilders' case pits his right to freedom of speech against the right of Muslims to worship freely. Dozens of complaints had been filed against Wilders by Muslims who said they felt insulted or threatened by remarks such as "let not one more Muslim immigrate" and "I've had enough of the Quran in the Netherlands: Forbid that fascist book."

Prosecutors initially refused to take the case, saying Wilders' remarks are part of legitimate political debate. But they were ordered to do so by appeals judges, who said there was sufficient evidence for a hate speech trial.

Defense witness Hans Jansen, called as an expert on Islamic culture, wrote on his personal website that he had been approached at a dinner party by one of the appeals judges, Tom Schalken.

"He kept steering the conversation back to the Wilders case," Jansen wrote. "He tried to convince me that his decision to drag Wilders in front of the Amsterdam District Court was correct."

Wilders earlier had asked the court to dismiss the judges because one said that Wilders appeared to be dodging debate by remaining silent in court. That motion was rejected.

The politician asked again Friday that the judges be dismissed, calling Schalken's contact with Jansen "scandalous."

"A judge that's part of my process in the sense that he decided I should be prosecuted ... without blinking an eye goes to dinner and tries to convince a witness that he's right," Wilders told a new panel of judges convened to rule on the dismissal. "I wonder which circus I've landed in here."

A conservative government that depends on Wilders' Freedom Party to reach a one-vote majority in parliament took office this month. In return for his support, the government has vowed to turn away more asylum seekers, halve the number of new immigrants from non-Western countries, ban face-concealing Muslim garb for women in public and force immigrants to pay for their own mandatory citizenship classes.


The following article discusses how Canada crushes freedom of speech in the name of human rights. For example, Mark Steyn was put on trial for offending Muslims in Canada.

The Tyranny of Nice
FrontPage Magazine - The Tyranny of Nice

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Kathy Shaidle, a veteran blogger, having started in 2000 and still posting daily at FiveFeetOfFury.com. She is the co-author, along with Pete Vere, of the new book The Tyranny of Nice: How Canada crushes freedom in the name of human rights -- and why it matters to Americans.



FP: Kathy Shaidle, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Shaidle: Thanks for having me. It feels odd being on the other side of a FrontPage interview.

FP: What inspired you to write this book?

Shaidle: I'd been writing about the Human Rights Commissions (HRCs) most famous cases since they first broke: when a Calgary imam charged publisher Ezra Levant with hate speech for reprinting the "Mohammed Cartoons"; and then, shortly thereafter, when Maclean's magazine (Canada's version of TIME or Newsweek) was charged with "flagrant Islamophobia" for printing Mark Steyn's columns about Europe's changing demographics.

Meanwhile, my co-author Pete Vere (a canon lawyer as well as a journalist) had been covering the anti-Christian cases at the HRCs, such as the lesbian couple who took the Catholic Knights of Columbus to court for refusing to rent the K of C banquet hall to them for their "wedding" reception.

Pete was interviewing Steyn for one article, and Steyn mused, "I hope somebody writes a book about all these cases one day." Pete piped up: 'Kathy and I are working on one right now.' (He'd raised the idea tentatively over the phone the previous week.) Steyn replied, 'Then I'll write the introduction,' and we were off. It is very easy to get a book contract when you can guarantee Mark Steyn's name on the cover.

Pete and I wrote The Tyranny of Nice rather quickly -- in about six weeks-- to take advantage of the international interest the Steyn and Levant cases were generating, and also because a Canadian election was coming up and activists like Levant were hoping to make the HRCs and Canada's draconian "hate speech" laws, an election issue.

FP: How did the Human Rights Commissions morph from 'well intentioned' policing of housing and employment equity to censorship?

Shaidle: When the HRCs started out in the 1970s, they were already an idea whose time had passed. Canada was experiencing a rush of immigration from around the world, and like all waves of immigrants, some of these people experienced bigotry.

But the days of signs in windows reading "No Dogs, No Irish" (which were, incidentally, highly exaggerated in the first place, according to one expert anyway) were long gone, and Canada had never had institutionalized segregation like the US had.

But when Canadian leftists saw the Civil Rights Movement in the US, they were actually jealous rather than relieved that Canada had been "left out" of this great noble romantic cause. So they invented the idea that Canada was just as "racist" as the US (without a trace of irony btw -- Canadian leftist are vicious anti-American bigots.)

So a bureaucracy was set up to deal with bigotry and -- there wasn't much bigotry about. Like the mayor in Blazing Saddles, the HRCs realized their "phony baloney jobs" were at risk.

They began rather liberally interpreting Canada's hate speech laws, like the poorly worded Section 13.1 of the Human Rights Act, which makes it a crime to write or say anything "likely" to expose certain protected victim groups to "hatred or contempt." Now think about it: anything is "likely" to "expose" someone to "hatred or contempt". I could argue that the HBO shows Curb Your Enthusiasm or The Sopranos are "likely" to expose Jews and Italians to hatred or contempt. It is therefore literally impossible to be found "not guilty", given the way the law is written. Hence the HRC's Stalinist 100% conviction rate.

And rather than waiting for ordinary Canadians to bring them complaints (that was taking way too long) the HRCs teamed up with organizations like the Canadian Jewish Congress to go out looking for (and in some cases, cooking up) "hate speech" to indict:

"Hate speech" morphed from "No Irish need apply" signs that you couldn't avoid seeing if you walked down the street, to rantings at Holocaust denial web sites you really had to search out to see. In going after these previously obscure neo-Nazi idiots, the HRCs and Jewish groups inadvertently made these idiots international celebrities and "martyrs."

You'd think the embarrassing irony would cause the HRCs to re-think their strategy. However, Jewish groups and other ethnic organizations began realizing that they could make lots of donations based on telling potential donors that the next Holocaust was just around the corner, and only they and the HRCs were fighting these Nazis, on the front lines of the internet. The same with the HRC's budgets, which grew and grew.

That there were more Nazis on the average Hogan's Heroes episode than in all of Canada didn't matter; anyone who questioned the HRCs campaign against free speech was labelled a Nazi-sympathizer. And if anyone protested when gay activists used the HRCs to bankrupt and ridicule Christians who opposed a radical gay agenda, they were condemned as homophobic. In Canada's elite liberal Establishment, such labels were the kiss of death in terms of (again, ironically) employment.

This all finally changed in the past couple of years, when Muslim groups (figuring if the Jews could use the govt to silence their enemies, they could too, and who can really blame them) started going after Jews (Ezra Levant) and "guys with Jewish sounding names" (Mark Steyn).

Unlike their neo-Nazi and Christian fellow victims (and I feel funny putting those two groups together in the same sentence, but as far as the Canadian Left is concerned, the two groups are interchangeable), Steyn and Levant were two articulate, energetic, brilliant minds with, not incidentally, really impressive Rolodexes. Steyn and Levant went public with their cases, mocked their accusers (who were simply intellectually incapable of matching their brilliance) and generated lots of public sympathy thanks to their acute P.R. sense, wit and energy.

For obvious reasons, you couldn't very well call Levant and Steyn 'neo-Nazis' (although that hasn't stopped some rather prominent liberals from trying, believe it or not.) The two men broke the politically correct "silencing" spell the HRCs had cast over Canada, and now we are slowly but surely on the road to finally having an honest, adult discussion about freedom of speech, immigrant assimilation, and multiculturalism and other long time "forbidden" subjects.

FP: Can you talk about how these cases within the context of class and private property?

Shaidle: Most of the debates about the Human Rights Commissions and freedom of speech in Canada take place in the rarefied realm of "Capital I" Ideas, about what John Stuart Mill said 150 years ago and so forth. However, I was one of the first to point out publicly the rather more mundane facts that many debaters seem either accidentally or intentionally oblivious to:

The fact is, 100% of those found guilty of "hate speech" in Canada have been white, Christian and/or conservative -- and about 90% have been working class. And obviously the staff of the HRC are all university types, lawyers etc, as are the most vocal members of the Canadian Jewish Congress.

Now, I grew up below the poverty in Hamilton, Ontario -- Canada's version of Pittsburgh, with a little New Jersey thrown in. I was the first person in my family to finish high school. I grew up around people who talk to each other in the flesh the way all these alleged "neo Nazis" did on the internet. Not the crazy Protocols stuff they reprint, mind you, but some of those guilty of "hate speech" have done little more than question immigration levels or make crude jokes about this or that ethnic group.

And because multiculturalism is the de facto state religion of Canada -- as far as the liberal Establishment is concerned -- such jokes and discussions are forbidden. You see, the proles must remain silent as the great enlightened liberal Elite rule the nation.

At the risk of taking this observation too far, I find it fascinating that Steyn's accusers were a university professor and a group of young law school grads, and Steyn himself dropped out of high school at age 16.

When you read the anti-free speech, pro-HRC argumentation in Canada, you don't have to scratch the surface too much to reveal lots of class snobbery. So much for egalitarian Canada.

About property rights: the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (our Constitution) doesn't enshrine private property rights. That's (again, subconsciously) why those gay activists felt they could try to force a Christian printer to print gay rights pamphlets, or Muslims could try to, in effect, hijack Maclean's magazine, demanding that they reprint
their Islamist "counterpoint" to Steyn's articles.

These demands are made with straight faces, because most Canadians simply don't have that bred in the bone sense of private property that Americans have; the Kelo decision would have been greeted with shrugs up here, had it even made it to the Supreme Court. And Canadians take it for granted as well that the government is obliged to guarantee their "equal right" to well pretty much everything from cradle to grave, including having their articles published in privately owned magazines or using someone else's printing press.

Few writers other than me have brought these issues up, maybe because of my own class-conscious background (which sets me apart from my highly educated and well connected media colleagues) and my "unCanadian" obsession with American/conservative politics and history.

As an outsider of sorts, I guess I see these things. And as a borderline Asperger's type, it never occurs to me not to say these and other unthinkable thoughts aloud.

FP: Is America going along the same path as Canada? What can be done?

Shaidle: Oddly enough, just as Canada is slowly digging its way out of our HRC/hate speech mess, the US seems to be getting worse.

For instance, at the recent Conservative Party convention, 99.5% of the 2000 delegates passed a resolution to re-visit Section 13.1. And Keith Martin (a Liberal Party MP and, as he points out himself, a visible minority) has just re-introduced his Private Members Bill to Parliament, suggesting that the govt do likewise.

On the other hand, I read about police investigating "anti-Obama" threads on MySpace, and Obama's interest in "localism" which is the Fairness Doctrine without the radioactive name.

In our book, we actually talk about troubling cases being heard by American Human Rights Commissions, like the New Mexico (Christian) photographer who was punished for turning down a lesbian "wedding" assignment.

I think all any American needs to know about Human Rights Commissions is that the former head of the Indianapolis HRC was... mass murdering Marxist Jim Jones.

FP: Kathy Shaidle, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

Shaidle: Thank you Jamie.

Stop the hate speech against Islam