Figuring Out Liberals

The quality discussion one expects from View From the Right continues on the post "The escape from uncertainty: a theory of liberalism." I chimed in just to add a detail to the discussion. But, I fully agree with commentator Kristor that "We must remember that the change [the progress] liberals desire is a change from novelty and uncertainty toward a static ideal."

Yes, and I think the liberal's project really has no constructive end point, as I wrote in this draft of an email which I didn't send to VFR:

The idea of "eliminating uncertainty" at its most common denominator really means the elimination of uncertainty through the (controlled) power of destruction. Only destruction is controllable, doable and certain.

So, liberals never build anything, they simply destroy. But each uncertainty, or as I prefer to call it "unfairness" leads to another unfair situation, which also needs to be destroyed. The final outcome, if taken to its logical conclusion, is simply annihilation.

How Bjorn Larsen Could Have Presented a Multi-Faceted Solution to Problems Facing Free Speech

Larsen focused his speech at the Free Speech and Liberty symposium on hate speech laws. His solution is that we should simply repeal them. In Canada, these laws are enforced through Section 13 of the Human Rights Act and its corresponding Human Rights Commissions, which state:

It is a discriminatory practice for a person or a group of persons acting in concert to communicate telephonically or to cause to be so communicated, repeatedly, in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a telecommunication undertaking within the legislative authority of Parliament, any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.

Or through the Criminal Code of Canada which has three sections:

- Section 318 makes it an offence to advocate or promote genocide against an identifiable group;

- Section 319(1) makes it an offense to communicate statements in a public place that will incite hatred against an identifiable group, and thereby lead to a breach of the peace; and

- Section 319(2) makes it an offense to communicate statements, other than in private conversation, which willfully promote hatred against an identifiable group.

Read about the differences between the Criminal Code and the Human Rights Act provision here.

In 2003, David Ahenakew, a First Nations politician, was charged by the Saskatchewan Justice Department (not the HRCs) with inciting hatred against Jewish groups when he justified these comments on the holocaust "That's why [Hitler] fried six million of those guys, you know. Jews would have owned the goddamned world" by saying "How else do you get rid of a disease like that, that's going to take over, that's going to dominate?" He was convicted and fined $1,000, but the charge was later overturned.

The focus may be on the HRCs for now, but there is room in the Criminal Code for belligerent and aggressive groups to use the hate speech laws to continue to silence legitimate discussions. These hate speech laws are very much present, and are not simply gathering dust in some drawer.

Larsen states in this symposium (which focused purely on free speech) that we must repeal them. I have no law background, so I have no idea how possible this is.

The other solution is to reduce, and strategically remove, the group that is now most likely to put these laws into effect, which is the Muslim group. Even in Holland, it is the Muslims that are bringing Wilders to court.

I have maintained throughout Our Changing Landscape that the high levels of minority immigrant groups, who will cry "racism" and "discrimination" at opportune moments, will also continue to be problematic when it comes to the HRCs and the hate speech laws. So the aim should be to reduce immigrations levels in general.

Thus, the problem should be viewed as a combination of aggressive Muslim groups, high levels of non-white immigrants, and toxic hate crime laws. Larsen, with his ample experience with prominent counter-jihad individuals, should have provided a multi-faceted solution to the problem that includes the reduction of Muslim immigration. Currently, free speech, freedom of expression and freedom of the press cannot be discussed separately from the Muslim problem specifically, and the immigration problem in general.

No News Might Really Mean No News

No news from Rebekah of The Miss Marprelate Tracts regarding my email to her asking about Bjorn Larsen's presentation at the recent Free Speech and Liberty symposium in Ottawa. I find that making specific recommendations of reducing Muslim immigration to solve the "free speech" problem that has escalated in the Western world often is met with silence or with resistance by bloggers and other writers (including Islam experts - see here my email interview with Robert Spencer).

I attribute this partly to the severity of the solution, and that most Islam experts are liberals at heart when it comes to discriminating against groups of people. Many excuses are presented, including the timing is wrong, and that we need to educate people more about Islam before taking drastic measures that many might disagree with.

I think it is also some kind of addictive need to keep talking about the problem, and hoping it would go away just with the rhetoric.

Anyway, since it looks like Rebekah did such a thorough job presenting the speakers' speeches to us on her blog, there is no need to think that she may have left information out. Which holds that Larsen, despite his time with prominent counter-jihad groups, and his many interactions with Geert Wilders who is one of the main proponents for the reduction of Muslim immigration into the West, did not present that solution in his speech. Dare I say that he might be a "Semi-Usual Suspect?"

Free Speech and Liberty Symposium in Ottawa

The Canadian Centre for Policy Studies recently held a symposium titled "Free Speech and Liberty." Here is the list of speakers, and the topics they presented.

The Human Rights Commissions which come under the Canadian Human Rights Act (instituted in 1977), and the Hate Speech Provisions (sec. 318-320) which were amended into the Criminal Code of Canada in 1970, were a reaction to the multicultural, multi-racial and multi-ethnic Canada that started to form after Lester Pearson removed restrictions on non-white and non-European immigrants entering Canada after the revised Immigration Act of 1967. Some of these institutions have been used against individuals, although sparingly and with minimal public awareness, prior to the Alberta Human Rights Commissions case filed against Ezra Levant for publishing the Mohammed Cartoons, and the cases filed in the B.C. Human Rights Commissions and the Federal Human Rights Commissions against Mark Steyn and MacLeans magazine for a reprint of an excerpt from Steyn's book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It titled "The Future Belongs to Islam."

Prior to these two cases, most of the HRC complainants were homosexuals, or those protesting what appeared to be white nationalist (possibly anti-Semite) individuals. But, the public was abruptly introduced to these institutions with the vocal and aggressive Muslims, who had no qualms against taking on media giants in the name of defending their culture and religion.

My point here is that free speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press in our current debate are strongly intertwined with this multicultural landscape, and more specifically with the Muslim population. In fact, Muslims' incessant curtailment on speech is becoming common practice all over Europe, which has a longer history of Muslim immigration. In Canada, and in the United States, we are only beginning to see the tip of the iceberg.

I was curious to see if anyone in the Symposium mentioned the clearly strong influence Muslims have in the domain of "free speech and liberty." Blogger Rebekah, who hosts the blog The Miss Marprelate Tracts, did a great job of transcribing what she heard at the Symposium onto her blog. According to her account, only one person focused, his speech on the Muslim angle. That was Bjorn Larsen, now the President of the International Free Speech Society - Canada.

It is well and good to talk about the Muslim influence in restricting speech and liberty, but the final, and constant, question should be: "What do speakers who bring this up in their discussions suggest the solutions should be?"

I emailed Rebekah this question. I hope she answers, and will post her response when I get it:

Dear Rebekah,

Thanks for your great transcript of the symposium "Free Speech and Liberty." It was really helpful to get the viewpoints of the various speakers, and how they approach free speech and liberty.

One of the things I blog about here at Our Changing Landscape is how Muslims are now the prime influence in restraining, even restricting, free speech, freedom of expression, and consequently liberty in Canada. I discuss in various posts that one way to put a stop to this is to reduce, and even to stop, the number of Muslim immigrants into Canada as part of a multi-faceted solution.

I notice that Bjorn Larsen, now the President of the International Free Press Society – Canada, was the only one who explicitly brought up the Muslim influence in the restrictions on free speech. In your summary of his speech, you didn’t mention if he offered any solutions to this problem. Do you remember if he did say what to do about the presence of Muslims and their recurring and aggressive attempts to curtail free speech, freedom of expression and freedom of the press?

Thanks for you time and effort.

All the best,

Kidist Paulos Asrat

Respected Muslim Family Man Now in a Canadian Jail

Respected Muslim family man now in a Canadian jail

Here is an exemplary family man, community organizer, leader in his professional group, and a "modern" Muslim, who has been jailed for threatening to kill his daughter.

His whole family (minus the daughter, who has been hiding for two years now), who say that he was simply a strict father and nothing more, apparently see nothing wrong with him pressuring his daughter into an arranged marriage. Of course, threatening to kill her could simply mean that he lost his temper when his daughter disobeyed him. His fellow-workers think he's an exemplary colleague, and he even has been offered to keep his job while in jail.

Such is the fate of the "good Muslim family men" in the West. Why don't we give these people a break and simply say:

By coming into our countries, your children will change, you will have a hard time keeping your family together, and anything that you try to do to retain your culture and your religion could be misconstrued as criminal. So, just stay home, in your Islamic countries, where you will live much more peaceful lives and where you can maintain your beliefs and your families intact.

This is surely the least we can do to alleviate all this hardship and heartache.

"Abolishing The West: Immigrants Reject Assimilation"

This is the title of Sam Francis's article written in 2002. I have provided the whole article here below. I've highlighted some points I think are worth emphasising. You can substitute "Canada" or "America" for "Britain."

Here is one quote though that is apt for the current Canadian scene.

[T]he Home Office has been suggesting that maybe the "minorities speed the process of integration by adopting British 'norms of acceptability,'" and proposing that newcomers take an oath of allegiance, study British history and culture and embrace "our laws, our values, our institutions." The suggestions promptly received the British (excuse me, the African-Caribbean) equivalent of a Bronx cheer.

Jason Kenney has recently revised the citizenship test to include those very ideas, and received the Canadian equivalent of the "Bronx cheer" from the Multi-Culti Intelligentsia.

-------------------

Abolishing The West: Immigrants Reject Assimilation

By Sam Francis

How much longer will the white majority nations of Europe, North America and Australia keep pretending they're "assimilating" non-white Third World peoples into the warm and toasty melting pot imagined by multicultural mythology?

Probably not very much longer at all, as a matter of fact. If Sept. 11 wasn't enough to disabuse some people of their delusions about immigration, the immigrants themselves will do so.

The New York Times reports that in Great Britain, where both Tory and Labor governments have long pushed multiculturalism, welcomed mass immigration from the remnants of the British empire and outlawed virtually any act, word or thought that even looks like "racism," the immigrants themselves are fed up with trying to become British. [Britain's Nonwhites Feel Un-British, Report Says, NYT April 4, 2002]

"The only times I call myself British are when I go to get a passport and when someone asks me where my accent comes from," snorts a native-born Englishwoman, Jenni I'Anson, who happens to be of Jamaican parentage.

"Otherwise I would never class myself as British. There is no sense of belonging here. I would only say that I am African-Caribbean."

Her nephew is a bit more explicit about what he is.

"British to me means white, and I don't get treated like a white person, so I don't think of myself as British."

The Times report dredges up several quotations like these from several Britons (no insult intended) who are either immigrants themselves or descended from non-white immigrants. Last summer's race riots in northern England perhaps hinted to many that the multiculturalist propaganda was all hogwash, but even without riots, terrorism and blatant anti-white and anti-Western sentiments, the evidence is pretty clear that Britain's Third World population is not behaving the way universalist ideology insists it should.

In response to the northern riots, the Home Office has been suggesting that maybe the "minorities speed the process of integration by adopting British 'norms of acceptability,'" and proposing that newcomers take an oath of allegiance, study British history and culture and embrace "our laws, our values, our institutions." The suggestions promptly received the British (excuse me, the African-Caribbean) equivalent of a Bronx cheer.

If there's any place in England where "assimilation" would seem to be able to work, it's Sheffield, the country's fourth largest city, and it's on Sheffield that the Times report focuses. The city "would seem to be a place where that project would enjoy more success than elsewhere in Britain. Race relations have been less combative here than in cities like London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bradford and Leeds with histories of rioting. The local government has been more attentive and the police more communicative." But assimilation, integration, call it what you please, is not what the immigrants (excuse me again, the British) want. "Of course [assimilation is] the wrong thing to be asking of us," declares one Pakistani immigrant who arrived as a child and is now 46.

"What a lot of so-called English want us to want is leafy Oxfordshire. But what we want is a job, a decent place to live, safety, a chance to educate our children. We want to preserve our separate identities. And remember, we must still also maintain the economic link with our original homes. Forty years later, I am still sending money back."

What this gentleman is saying is that neither he nor other non-Western immigrants have the least intention of even trying to adopt the manners and values of the country to which they invited themselves, and that they feel insulted if the "so-called English" suggest they should.

What they expect is that the British people and the civilization they created should provide them with whatever they please — the wealth, security, freedom, education and comfort that is the creation of the white West — but that they do nothing whatsoever to sustain the civilization.

Of course, there is a school of thought that maintains that non-Western peoples are simply not capable of sustaining — or assimilating to — the civilization of the West, that "East is East and West is West," as Kipling put it, and never the twain shall meet. The responses of non-Western immigrants into Britain say nothing to contradict that view.

How long a country like Britain, which now has a population only 7.1 percent non-white but is projected to have a non-white majority by the end of the 21st century, can expect to maintain the fruits of the civilization that even the immigrants demand as their right is not clear.

But whether the immigrants cannot, will not or simply do not assimilate to the civilization of the country in which they chose to live, the fate of extinction that faces British civilization is no different from that which faces all other Western nations that continue to harbor the mythology of mass immigration.

Who are the Real Muslim Anti-Semites?

I really don't mean to focus on Ezra Levan't various attempts at deciphering the Muslim community which put his life on hold for three years when he published the Mohammed cartoons. But I don't think he understands the community. His articles mostly decry individual Muslims who attacked him. But, he has never put them together in the collective whole of Islam. It is not individual Muslims, radical Muslims, moderate Muslims, peaceful Muslims etc. ad nauseam, that are the problem, it is Islam as a religion which mandates the behaviors of all these groups and individuals.

Levant writes about Syed Soharwardy, a rabid anti-Semitic Muslim - who brought him to the Alberta Human Rights Commission for publishing the Mohammed cartoons - almost as though he is the exception to the rule. But, according to the Koran, all Jews are enemies of Islam. However odiously Soharwardy may rant against Jews, and however hate-filled is his website, he is not doing anything radically different from what the Koran mandates.

If Levant is eager to educate his Calgary Jewish Community Council about the anti-Semitism of this one man, he should be more explicit and tell them that the whole Islamic community is required to believe the worst regarding the Jews, if these Muslims are true followers of Mohammed and the Koran’s writings.