We, Canadians, are being muzzled. Our Prime Minister is preventing free speech within the Houses of Parliament. It saddens me because it is beneath the Office of Prime Minister and Mr. Harper is better than that.
As Matt Gurney wrote in the National Post on Thursday April 18, Mark Warawa has been muzzled not only from speaking but in asking to speak on a subject that contrary to those who protest is not closed in Canada. Abortion.
But this muzzling goes beyond the Parliament. Our Supreme Court has decided to narrow the meaning of hate speech when in the 21st century I believe we need to broaden it as wide as possible. We need to hear and see and discuss it because it spreads like wildfire and destroys like cancer.
We need room to talk about illogical, irrational, ideological hate in whatever dress it’s wearing. If we prevent the hateful speech in the public square, which now includes social media, then it will go underground. It will be supressed and then repressed. Freud taught us long ago of the dangers of repressing emotions. Hate comes back to haunt us. The banality of evil. We must allow this speech so that the rest of us can smack it down publicly and shame the author.
The problem with hate speech is the definition and who defines it. On our university campuses, most recently the University of Calgary, pro-life organizations are being prevented from showing pictures of aborted fetuses because revealing them could lead to “a potentially hostile environment.” But there is no worry of a potentially hostile environment when pro-choice sets up their booths.
The leaders of the universities are members of the opinion shapers in our society who set the definition of what is and is not hate. Many of them have taken on the ideology of the left and have left out those who disagree.
Hate speech in Nazi Germany was just one part of a cultural ideology that was supported by the government. Hate speech in Rwanda was played over the radio and no one felt empowered to speak against the hate: not the citizens and not the outside world. The lesson from the Holocaust was not learned. Hate speech is only a problem when the silent majority stays silent whether out of apathy or fear.
I have written about anti-Semitism on my blog on Huffington Post. Anti-Semitism has been in our cultural memes for more than two thousand years. And it is a shape-shifter. It transforms itself to fit the ideology of the time. Considering the comments posted to those blogs, I can’t imagine the ones that were blocked but I would have liked to have seen them and have everyone else see them as well.
I have chosen to share several comments from one person to illustrate my point. His comments are not unique, especially in the Quebec media. I have copied his comments. English is not his first language. First, his “justification” for the hate for Jews:
For the hate of the jews in the past ,present and futur,only the jews know the reasons why.No one ,ot new born baby,child, comes to lifes with anti-semitism within its soul…people become anti-semites when facing the facts, the evil actions of Israel,the ultra-orthodox who do not care of follow the laws .
Then his comments on the Holocaust:
I know that the '' holocost '' has existed ,but also know that there were a lot of exagerations and that many many jews became rich with fabricated stories and identites..like Benjamin Wilkomirski (Googlle it !!) Elie Weisel nobel peace price (a farce) denounced by Nikolaus Grûner…Frank..even Spielberg has cashed in a lot of dough…or Norman Finkelstein is a liar ?
This commenter had no idea that I read French. I had read his comments as well as many others on a blog posted on Huffington Post Quebec. I wrote back to him referring to his comments in Quebec and he replied:
I'm glad to read that you speak french and most probably a few more languages…(like a juif averti) to ear and understand the whisperers around you….and yiddish would be the last one, unless you don't trust your sibblings..:-)
I am grateful to Huffington Post for printing these comments, in Ontario and Quebec. Canadians must be given the opportunity to see and then speak to hate. We must not muzzle that speech. We need to hear all hateful speech in order to put it in its place. The garbage.
The hateful speech on my blog, multiplied many times over on blogs written by people from all walks of life must be discussed, analyzed, deconstructed and be exposed to fact. Fantasy history, racist, bigoted comments must be called out over and over or they will pollute our society.
