Apropos the post below, a gentleman with the splendidly Teutonic moniker of Ernst Gauss writes:
Mr. Steyn, you wrote:
'As for the white "supremacists", it would be nice if they reflected that it was the brown guy and the Jew who stood up for their rights'
Actually, we did. See the link below.
http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php/ezra-levant-mathdoctor-456383.html
>>>>To his great credit, Ezra Levant is writing about the legal violence committed against MathDoctor by the Dick.<<<
It would be nice in turn if you mentioned the legal violence inflicted on Terry Tremaine by Warman and his handlers. Tremaine is a PHD holder, fired from his job at a university, now facing 2 years in jail, for the crime most prosecuted under Canada's Hate Crime laws. That of annoying Jews.
I'm aware you have to be careful of biting the hand that feeds you, but Ezra is at least brave enough and honest enough to point to the elephant in the room.
How about you?
Ernst Gauss
What do you mean "biting the hand that feeds you"? That my Jew masters won't let me tell the truth about the Canadian Jewish Congress' stupid and self-defeating pursuit of the last ten self-declared "Nazis" in Canada? A strategy that's caused them to hook up with a twisted misfit like Richard Pieman? I'm on the record my entire adult life as opposing not just prosecutions for "annoying Jews" but laws against Holocaust Denial and all the rest. As I wrote in Britain's Daily Telegraph three years ago:
"In a Europe grounded in peace and freedom there should be no place for Nazi symbols," declared Markus Soeder, general secretary of the Christian Socialist Union party. "They should be banned throughout Europe, as they are with good reason in Germany."
Personally, I found the sight of the Prince of Wales climbing into the full Highgrove hejab for dinner with that bin Laden brother a week after the 9/11 slaughter far more disquieting: it seemed a rather more conscious act of identification than his son's party get-up. But a good indication of societal decadence is when it prefers to obsess over fictional offences rather than real ones... If Adolf Hitler were to return from wherever he is right now, what would he be most steamed about? That in some countries there are laws banning Nazi symbols and making Holocaust denial a crime? No, that wouldn't bother him: that would testify to the force and endurance of his ideas - that 60 years on they're still so potent the state has to suppress them.
What would bug him the most is that on Broadway and in the West End Mel Brooks is peddling Nazi shtick in The Producers and audiences are howling with laughter...
Alas, tyranny doesn't always come with a self-evidently hilarious dress code. And the soft, supple, creeping totalitarian inclinations of our present-day rulers are sometimes harder to resist. If I had to pick the single most revolting remark from this bogus Reichsfuror, it would be this: "I think it might be appropriate for him to tell us himself just how contrite he now is."
That's Michael Howard, the leader of the supposed Conservative Party. What's conservative about demanding people submit to public self-abasement? Wasn't it the Commies who used to insist you recant on TV and then disappear into re-education camp? A conservative party ought to be a refuge from the sanctimonious nannytollahs of the age...
The problem with the left is its inability to get over ancient battles. The only defendant ever acquitted under Section 13 at the CHRC is the "Canadian Nazi Party", on the quaint grounds that, despite the plaintiff Richard Warman's best efforts to whump it up into a huge threat, it did not, in fact, exist. That tells you everything about what Warren Kinsella calls Warman's "bravery". It's easy to be brave when you're fighting phantoms. As I wrote in The Western Standard of March 27th 2006:
The free world is shuffling into a psychological bondage whose chains are mostly of our own making. The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, you'll recall, published an advertisement directing readers to Romans 1:26, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, and I Corinthians 6:9, and was fined $4,500, as was the advertiser, for "exposing homosexuals to hatred or ridicule".* The British "historian" David Irving sits in an Austrian jail, having been convicted of Holocaust denial. It's not unreasonable for Muslims to conclude that, if gays and Jews are to be protected groups who can't be offended, why shouldn't they be also?
They have a point. How many roads of inquiry are we prepared to block off in order to be "sensitive"? And, once we've done so, will there be anything left to talk about other than showbiz gossip? Holocaust denial should be ridiculous and contemptible but not illegal. If the objection is that it's a uniquely terrible stain on humanity, that's all the more reason to talk about it openly. How did we end up in a world where David Irving sits in a cell for querying the numbers of the last Holocaust while men march through London streets promising a new Holocaust and are given a bodyguard of police officers to help them do so?
The above column is not available on line, but it will be included in my forthcoming book, The Mark Steyn Flagrantly Islamophobic Reader.
