Columnist Andrew Coyne Calls for End to "Hate Law"
Written by Paul Fromm
Wednesday, 11 July 2012 03:44
*Columnist Andrew Coyne Calls for End to "Hate Law"*

For the third time in a week a major newspaper or columnist has called for
the end of Sec. 319 of the Criminal Code, Canada's notorious "hate law,"
Now, that Sec. 13 (Internet censorship) of the Canadian Human Rights Act
has been repealed by the House of Commons and is all but certain to pass
the Senate, the remaining legal throttle on free speech on the Internet is
the "hate law." Today, the following excellent article by columnist Andrew
Coyne appeared front page int he National Post (July 10, 2012) and the
*Saskatoon
StarPhoenix*, among other outlets.

Last week, in reaction to publicity CAFE had put out about the Terry
Tremaine Sec. 319 case, moving its way at a glacial pace through the courts
in Regina, the *National Post* picked up the story. On July 4, columnist
Marni Soupcoff wrote a column entitled "Tremaine’s platform for neo-Nazi
views helpfully provided by Canada’s criminal code." While gratuitously
slagging Mr. Tremaine, Soupcoff said: "The real problem lies with section
319(2) of the Criminal Code, which makes “willfully promoting hatred
against an identifiable group” by “communicating statements, other than in
private conversation” an offense punishable by prison time. The Supreme
Court ruled in 1990 in the Keegstra case that the provision is
constitutional. But the Tremaine case is reminding us that
constitutionality doesn’t make a law sensible or desirable.....

The trouble starts once the government enters the equation, at the
invitation of section 319(2), and sets itself up as the arbiter of whether
Tremaine’s ideas are simply too offensive and disagreeable to legally
abide. Suddenly, then, to counter this hefty power to subjectively vet a
citizen’s speech and decide whether it should land him behind bars for a
several years, the government forces itself into the position of having to
provide Tremaine a far prettier platform than he’d ever have been able to
achieve on his own."



The next day, the *National Post* weighed in with an
editorial questioning Sec. 319: ". However, he will now be treated to a
media-publicized trial in a Canadian courtroom, in which he will be able to
air his nasty views for the benefit of mainstream journalists."



We can only hope that calls will continue and grow for Canada to be rid of
this minority-inspired piece of censorship that would be more fitting in
Red China or despotisms like Burma (or Myanmar, or whatever it's calling
itself this week.)



*Paul Fromm*

*Director*

*CANADIAN ASSOCIATION FOR FREE EXPRESSION*
Andrew Coyne: Why does Canada still have a hate speech law?

Andrew Coyne <http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/author/acoynenp/> Jul 9,
2012 – 7:52 PM ET | *Last Updated: Jul 10, 2012 9:39 AM ET*
[image: Todd Korol / Reuters files]

Todd Korol / Reuters files

It isn’t enough that the speech is considered offensive. It must be shown
to have caused, or be likely to cause, some demonstrable harm to some
identifiable person.

- Comments<http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/07/09/andrew-coyne-why-does-canada-still-have-a-hate-speech-law/#disqus_thread>
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Hardly was there time to celebrate the demise of Section 13, the infamous
provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act prohibiting “communication of
hate messages,” before we were reminded this was not the only unwarranted
restriction on freedom of speech on the books.

Section 319.2 of the Criminal Code, for example, forbidding the “willful”
promotion of hatred “against any identifiable group,” is currently getting
a workout in a Regina courtroom in the case of Terry Tremaine, a sometime
math lecturer and avowed neo-Nazi. While Tremaine will have available to
him the sorts of due process rights denied to those hauled before the human
rights tribunals — the defence of truth among them — the end result is much
the same: the suppression of speech society finds objectionable, for the
sole reason that it is objectionable. If convicted, he faces up to two
years in jail.

Terry Tremaine founded the neo-Nazi National-Socialist Party of Canada.
Tremaine faces 11 criminal charges of willfully promoting hate against
identifiable groups.

The *National Post*, in an editorial, made the case that such prosecutions
only provide a platform for the promotion of the very ideas that were
supposedly so toxic as to require suppression. In the age of the Internet,
moreover, only a tiny fraction of such material is ever likely to be caught
in the state’s web, raising questions as to what, if anything, is being
achieved.

But these are practical arguments. I want to raise a more fundamental
objection. Societies that maintain such laws, after all, are making a
statement about who and what they are, the sorts of principles they value
and why.

I’ll make the customary disclaimer here: freedom of speech is indeed not
absolute. But the classical exceptions developed over the centuries —
libel, fraud, and so on — typically find justification in the concept of *
harm*. It isn’t enough that the speech is considered offensive. It must be
shown to have caused, or be likely to cause, some demonstrable harm to some
identifiable person.
\This begins from the recognition of what an extraordinary thing it is, in
a free society, for the state to stop up people’s mouths. Speech is not
merely useful for debating political ideas. It is innate to us as human
beings, built into our very thought processes: to prevent us from speaking
is the next thing to preventing us from thinking. The burden of proof must
therefore be on those who would seek to restrict freedom of speech, and not
on those who wish merely to enjoy that freedom. And that burden must be a
heavy one.
Is there another kind of harm that would justify its imposition? Hurt
feelings, as I’ve said, aren’t enough

How heavy? In a criminal trial, as everyone knows, the accused enjoys the
presumption of innocence. The state is required to prove his guilt “beyond
a reasonable doubt.” What is more, there are no exceptions. Often the law
requires the courts to weigh one principle against another, most famously
via the Charter’s “reasonable limits” clause. But in a criminal trial, the
requirement to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt is absolute.

To deprive someone of their freedom of speech is perhaps not so grave a
matter as to deprive them of their physical liberty. But it is not that far
off. It is defensible in certain limited cases, and only with the most
rigorous justification. The harm asserted, therefore, cannot be vague or
subjective. It must be of a kind that others can agree is harm. That is why
the classical exceptions have tended to focus on individuals, and on the
more tangible forms of harm.

Physical injury is an obvious example. And indeed, the ban on hate speech
is often justified by invoking the threat of violence. But there are other
areas of the Criminal Code to deal with that. For example, Sect 319.1, the
section just before the one in dispute, outlaws inciting hatred against an
identifiable group “where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of
the peace.” The purpose of 319.2, then, can only be to cover cases where no
such breach is likely.

Is there another kind of harm that would justify its imposition? Hurt
feelings, as I’ve said, aren’t enough: all sorts of things can cause
subjective offense, with no objective basis for distinguishing between
them. Attempts have been made to draw an analogy to libel, on the grounds
that hate speech amounts to defamation of an entire group. But the broader
and more abstract the claim of harm, the harder it is to show.

Probably the strongest case is that recently made by the American legal
theorist Jeremy Waldron, in his book *The Harm in Hate Speech*. Hate
speech, he argues, is nothing less than an assault on the dignity of the
targeted groups, robbing them of the “implicit assurance” a just society
owes to all of its citizens: that they are accepted as members of that
society. Without such assurance, it becomes difficult, if not impossible,
for them to participate fully in the community.
I can see that applying, in a society where such views were dominant. But a
handful of neo-Nazis?

I can see that applying, in a society where such views were dominant. But a
handful of neo-Nazis? How is anyone’s membership in society threatened
because somebody, somewhere, has an Adolf Hitler decoder ring? Perhaps it
might be argued that it is only the law that prevents the few from becoming
the many: that in its absence, hatred would be, not the exception, but the
rule.

Yet that is not the experience of free societies. Rather, it is in backward
dictatorships that hatred of minorities is most virulent. How, indeed, does
the impulse arise to protect vulnerable groups in this way except amid the
general climate of tolerance of others that is the very basis of freedom of
speech? Is it the ban on hate speech, then, that protects them, or the
broader absence of such limits?
 
Another Eloquent Letter-to-the-Editor that Canada's Poodle Press Will Never Publish
Written by Paul Fromm
Tuesday, 10 July 2012 04:53
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Another Eloquent Letter-to-the-Editor that Canada's Poodle Press Will
Never Publish

Dear Ian:

Another eloquent letter with no more chance of publication in our
constipated controlled media than the findings of Copernicus in the
era of the Inquisition.

Paul

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

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: 7/8/2012 7:20:48 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
Subj: "Handing hatred a microphone" NP July 5, 2012

Paul - is this innocuous enough for you? Contrary to the editorial, I
doubt that the trial will do much to clear the air on the historical
facts since the media, as with the judiciary, do not give heretics a
fair hearing and will simply ridicule or ignore any unwelcome evidence
. Ian

July 8, 2012

Editor
NATIONAL POST
Toronto

Dear Sir

Hatred versus Historical Reality (editorial July 5, 2012)

The debate on "hate" has become so convoluted and confused that it is
now possible for the National Post, nominally an ardent
freedom-of-expression supporter, to advocate imprisonment for Terry
Tremaine, a presumably loyal Canadian citizen, for doing no more than
expressing his opinion that "negroes" are intellectually inferior,
that Jews are "parasites" and that the Extermination of the European
Jews in WWII is a lie.

If these supposedly offensive opinions are conceivably true, (for
enlightenment, refer to any scholarly study on race and IQ; "The Host
and the Parasite" by Greg Felton (Amazon), and any major Revisionist
study) it is a conceptual or semantical error to label them hateful -
especially the presumably happy notion (at least to Jews) that
millions of Jews, presumed to have perished in the legendary
"gas-ovens", in fact survived!

Genuine, justifiable hate, however, is not hard to find. It is
expressed through all branches of the media and in classrooms across
the nation in the form of incessantly repeated, anti-German WWII
atrocity propaganda whose insidious falsifications have taken root in
Gentile society under the guidance of a powerful lobby shielded by
mindless Political Correctness and hate laws, while its vengeful
proponents ensure that sceptics are denied a platform for effective
rebuttal.

It is worth pondering how the most mendacious calumnies can be uttered
in public in Canada with impunity against honourable Christian
Germans, who suffered unspeakably at the hands of the Allies in
violation of the laws of war and norms of civilization, while even the
slightest reference to Jewish wrongdoing, past or present (or to
remarkable German accomplishment under National Socialism, 'though
praised unreservedly by Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King) is
denounced as "hate".

As ever,

Ian V. Macdonald

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Another Eloquent Letter-to-the-Editor that Canada's Poodle Press Will Never Publish
Written by Paul Fromm
Tuesday, 10 July 2012 04:49
*Another Eloquent Letter-to-the-Editor that Canada's Poodle Press Will
Never Publish

**Dear Ian:*

*Another eloquent letter with no more chance of publication in our
constipated controlled media than the findings of Copernicus in the era of
the Inquisition.*

*Paul
*



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

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: 7/8/2012 7:20:48 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
Subj: "Handing hatred a microphone" NP July 5, 2012


Paul - is this innocuous enough for you? Contrary to the editorial, I
doubt that the trial will do much to clear the air on the historical facts
since the media, as with the judiciary, do not give heretics a fair hearing
and will simply ridicule or ignore any unwelcome evidence . Ian



July 8, 2012

Editor
NATIONAL POST
Toronto

Dear Sir

*Hatred versus Historical Reality (editorial July 5, 2012)*

The debate on "hate" has become so convoluted and confused that it is now
possible for the National Post, nominally an ardent freedom-of-expression
supporter, to advocate imprisonment for Terry Tremaine, a presumably loyal
Canadian citizen, for doing no more than expressing his opinion that
"negroes" are intellectually inferior, that Jews are "parasites" and that
the Extermination of the European Jews in WWII is a lie.

If these supposedly offensive opinions are conceivably true, (for
enlightenment, refer to any scholarly study on race and IQ; "The Host and
the Parasite" by Greg Felton (Amazon), and any major Revisionist study) it
is a conceptual or semantical error to label them hateful - especially the
presumably happy notion (at least to Jews) that millions of Jews, presumed
to have perished in the legendary "gas-ovens", in fact survived!

Genuine, justifiable hate, however, is not hard to find. It is expressed
through all branches of the media and in classrooms across the nation in
the form of incessantly repeated, anti-German WWII atrocity propaganda
whose insidious falsifications have taken root in Gentile society under the
guidance of a powerful lobby shielded by mindless Political Correctness and
hate laws, while its vengeful proponents ensure that sceptics are denied a
platform for effective rebuttal.

It is worth pondering how the most mendacious calumnies can be uttered in
public in Canada with impunity against honourable Christian Germans, who
suffered unspeakably at the hands of the Allies in violation of the laws of
war and norms of civilization, while even the slightest reference to Jewish
wrongdoing, past or present (or to remarkable German accomplishment under
National Socialism, 'though praised unreservedly by Canadian Prime Minister
Mackenzie King) is denounced as "hate".

As ever,

Ian V. Macdonald
[image: Another Eloquent Letter-to-the-Editor that Canada's Poodle Press
Will Never Publish-dec-2009-may-2010-053.jpg]<http://www.whitenewsnow.com/attachments/paul-fromms-cafe/476d1341809694-another-eloquent-letter-editor-canadas-poodle-press-will-never-publish-dec-2009-may-2010-053.jpg>
 
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