The Canadian Jewish Congress calls a press conference
After averting its eyes for a week, the Canadian Jewish Congress has grudgingly acknowledged that there is anti-Semitism in Canada that is not perpetrated by ageing Indian chiefs or teenagers on Internet chat sites. They’ve called a press conference for Wednesday to talk about the bigoted pro-Hamas rallies that have been raging across Canada.
According to a release, the CJC’s press conference will be staffed by Bernie “Burny” Farber, Mark Freiman and Sara Saber Freedman.
Burny, as we all know, has a section 13 fetish. He has become Canada’s loudest defender of censorship — which is why I’ve changed the spelling of his name to Burny. He’s the 21st century equivalent to a book-burner.
And that’s a problem. Because it’s one thing to use the law to bully a single political offender for “promoting hatred”, and grind him through years of punitive legal hassles, with the final result being the removal of a single website on the Internet (how pitiful). But what do you do when there’s 10,000 people who have engaged in hateful acts on the city’s streets, and they’re looking forward to doing it again next week?
Try taking 10,000 people to a human rights commission. (Oh, the commissions would love it, though, wouldn’t they? Bigger budgets; a bigger sense of self-importance; more control over more peoples’ lives.)
But you can’t use section 13, actually, because it only applies to hate spread over phone lines and the Internet.
And the Criminal Code provisions require an enormous standard of guilt — what we saw in those rallies, with the possible exceptions of the support for terrorist groups, is likely below the standard of a criminal conviction. Shouting “kill all the Jews” isn’t specific or imminent enough to be taken as a real death threat. It might breach the criminal code provisions against hate speech. But how do you apply that to a mob of hundreds or thousands chanting their Jew-hatred, often in Arabic, often with masks hiding their identities?
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