When I was a kid, we used to say that, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt.” Nowadays, offensive speech is considered violence. Silence is violence. And those whose words are deemed by the state to be most egregious will be treated like serial killers.
“All of us expect to be safe in our homes, in our neighbourhoods and in our communities,” said Justice Minister Arif Virani, after tabling Bill C-63, the online harms act, in the House of Commons on Monday. “We should be able to expect the same kind of safety in our online communities.”
Except many Canadians don’t feel safe in their communities anymore. Last summer, Statistics Canada reported that the police-reported crime rate in 2022 had increased by five per cent compared to a year earlier. The homicide rate rose for the fourth consecutive year, reaching its highest level since 1992.
Rather than focusing on the type of crime that puts Canadians’ property and physical safety at risk — the “sticks and stones,” if you will — the government has chosen to focus on the words being transmitted to our smartphones and laptops.
To accomplish this, the Liberals propose burdening “social media” platforms with heavy-handed regulations; creating a giant censorship bureaucracy to force compliance; and re-empowering kangaroo courts to persecute people for thought crimes.
Bill C-63 establishes a new digital safety commission, digital safety ombudsperson and digital safety office (to assist the commission and ombudsman), which will be responsible for ensuring revenge porn and child pornography are taken offline within 24 hours. (Though child porn is already taken seriously by social media platforms and, if history is any indication, it won’t be long before the new bureaucracy’s mission expands).
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Websites will be responsible for ensuring they have tools that allow users to flag posts and systems in place to determine whether they meet the definition of “harmful content,” which includes “content that induces a child to harm themselves,” “content used to bully a child,” “content that foments hatred,” “content that incites violence” and “content that incites violent extremism or terrorism.”
While social media companies will be required to submit data on the volume of harmful content found on their sites to the new digital safety commission, enforcement will be punted to the courts and the human rights tribunal, where the penalties are much steeper than merely having a post arbitrarily deleted.
The bill would reinstate parts of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which will once again put decisions over what constitutes online hate speech in the hands of the quasi-judicial Canadian Human Rights Commission (HRC) and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.
It would also increase the penalty for anyone who “advocates or promotes genocide” to a maximum of life in prison — the same sentence, it should be noted, as was handed to Robert Pickton, one of Canada’s most prolific serial killers and rapists. And it specifically prohibits website operators from notifying users when they have been reported to law enforcement.
Although the Criminal Code uses the standard definition of genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part any identifiable group,” there is no longer any consensus — within government or society — on what the term “genocide” actually means. This could have profound implications for how the online harms act is enforced.
Even the strict legal definition could be muddied by the fact that Trudeau accepted the conclusions of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, “including that what happened amounts to genocide” — even though what took place doesn’t meet the legal definition of genocide.
As law professor Bruno Gelinas-Faucher told The Canadian Press in 2021, “A court could say … that the state has accepted responsibility under international law for the crime of genocide” — which is “a big deal.”
Even though prosecuting and enforcing penalties for the crime of promoting genocide would be left to the courts, vindictive users looking to punish those whose views they disagree with will be empowered to flag content, which websites will then have a responsibility to investigate (and possibly incentivized to censor in order to look as though they’re complying with the spirit of the law), and to submit frivolous complaints with the Human Rights Commission.
Do we trust the ideologues working for the HRC or the left-wing activists churned out by universities and scooped up by tech companies to determine whether any given social media post or online video meets the strict legal definition of promoting genocide? How could we, given that the term has been so watered down, no one seems to agree on what it means anymore?
Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, Jews and other supporters of Israel have been claiming that protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” are advocating genocide because a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean would necessitate the destruction of the Jewish state. On the other side are people who erroneously claim that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza and that anyone who supports its war against Hamas is therefore advocating genocide.
I’ll let you decide which group is more likely to end up on the wrong side of Trudeau’s new censorship regime.
Following the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, in which the terrorist organization not only unleashed the predictable barrage of largely ineffective rockets on the Jewish state, but penetrated the barrier between Gaza and Israel with a large force that killed about 1500 people and took about 150 hostage, we were treated to the disgusting spectacle of progressives gathering en masse in cities and academic campuses around the West, not to protest these despicable acts, but to cheer them on. This was immediately denounced as a display of anti-Semitism, mostly by neoconservatives many of whom called for such demonstrations to be banned. While I don’t have much better an opinion of these demonstrators than the neocons have this call to criminalize the demonstrations is extremely foolish. There is already too much suppression of the expression of thought and opinion, we do not need to add any more. I don’t agree that this is an expression of anti-Semitism either. This essay will explain why.
A discussion of this sort requires that we define anti-Semitism at some point so we might as well get that out of the way. H. L. Mencken said that “an anti-Semite is someone who dislikes the Jews more than is absolutely necessary”. That is amusing, at least to those who do not have a politically correct pole permanently lodged up their rectums, but not particularly helpful. Joe Sobran said that “an anti-Semite used to be someone who didn’t like the Jews. Now he is someone the Jews don’t like”. This is more helpful as an explanation of the neoconservative use of the term than of what it really means.
Most people, I suspect, use it to mean any dislike of the Jews for any reason. The late rabbinical scholar, Jacob Neusner, objected to this promiscuous use of the term. In an article entitled “Sorting Out Jew-Haters” that appeared in the March 1995 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture he gave this account of anti-Semitism:
According to anti-Semitism, Jews are a separate species within humanity, peculiarly wicked, responsible for the evil of the human condition. A political philosophy formulated in the world of late 19th-century Germany and Austria, anti- Semitism formed the ideological foundation of political parties and served as the basis for public policy. It provided an account of life and how the Jews corrupt it. It offered a history of Western civilization and how the Jews pervert it. It formulated a theory of the world’s future and how the Jews propose to conquer it. People make sense of the world lay appealing to anti-Semitism, and in World War II, millions of Germans willingly gave their lives for the realization of their country’s belief in an anti-Semitic ideal of national life and culture.
The term, he argued, should be reserved for Jew hatred of the type that fully meets this description, and to apply it to lesser prejudices trivializes it.
Now, you might be thinking that what we are seeing meets Neusner’s requirements to be called anti-Semitism. The rallies that we have been talking about, after all, are not just in support of the Palestinian people, but of Hamas, the terrorist organization dedicated to the elimination of Israel, and of its actions on 7 October. Why would anyone support such an organization and such behaviour unless their mind was in the grips of the sort of hatred described in the paragraph from Neusner’s article quoted above?
There are a couple of obvious problems with that way of thinking.
The first is that if these progressives, academic and otherwise, were motivated by anti-Semitic hatred we would expect that their support for violent, murderous, organizations and their behaviour would be limited to Hamas and other similar groups. This is not the case. The progressive activist crowd has a long history of supporting violent, murderous, groups. In the post-World War II era of the last century, for example, they supported every Communist group available from the Stalinists to the Maoists to Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Communism killed 100 million people in the twentieth century. Pol Pot’s group murdered about 2 million people, a quarter of the population of Cambodia. Yet Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguistics professor who became the guru of the student activist wing of the left and who is regarded by most neoconservatives as a self-loathing Jew for his support of the Palestinians, decades ago was defending Pol Pot and claiming that the accounts of the “killing fields” were American propaganda. My old friend Reaksa Himm, whose account of seeing his family slaughtered by these brutes and being left for dead himself, was published as The Tears of My Soul: He Survived Cambodia’s Killing Fields, His Family Didn’t, Could He Forgive? in 2003, would no doubt have a few things to say about that. Then, of course, there are the countless progressive students who thought it “cool” to wear t-shirts or put posters up in their dorm room bearing the image of vile Communist terrorist and mass murderer Ernesto “Che” Guevara. So, no, this sort of stupidity on the Left, is not all about the Jews.
The second problem is that even when progressive bile is directed towards Israel as it is in these pro-Hamas demonstrations it is not against Jews qua Jews. There is an element of racial hatred in it but that racial hatred is not directed against Jews as distinct from everyone else. It is directed against Jews as white people. Some might object to that statement on the grounds that not all Jews are white, Jewishness being primarily a religious identity. Others, including some Jews who hate whites and Christians and some whites who don’t like Jews, would make the polar opposite objection that in their opinion no Jews are white. These wildly differing objections aside, my statement is nevertheless true. The hatred the immature, idiotic, Left is displaying towards Israel is the same hatred they display towards all Western countries, i.e. countries that lay claim to the heritage of Greco-Roman, Christian, white European, civilization, and to the extent that there is a racial element it is that which is on display almost ubiquitously on university campuses in the form of the claim that “whiteness” is a cultural and civilizational cancer that must be “abolished”. The language used against Israel is the same language used against Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and basically any country and society settled and built by Europeans as an extension of Western civilization. The only difference is that in this case the settlers were Jews rather than Christians.
It is not therefore a case of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism and its counterpart Zionism began around the same time in the nineteenth century. Both were the result of “Enlightenment” philosophy’s war against God, revelation, religion and faith. For centuries Christians and Jews had been at odds over a religious issue. We, rightly, believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah promised in the Old Testament. They, wrongly, reject Jesus as the Christ. This was not an insurmountable divide. Any Jew could become a Christian by believing that Jesus is the Christ and being baptized into the Church. The “Enlightenment” brought about a loss of faith on both sides but this did not eliminate the divide. Instead, post-Christian Gentiles and secular Jews began to regard their division as being based on biological racial differences. Division on this basis is insurmountable. You cannot change your race. At least, you couldn’t until the whole “I’m whatever gender, sex, race, species, I want to be” garbage started up in the last few years. The expression of this idea of an insurmountable race divide was anti-Semitism on the part of post-Christian Gentile Europeans and Zionism on the part of secular Jews. In the early days of both movements they supported each other. Each believed that the racial differences between Jew and Gentile prevented them from living in peace together, therefore the solution was for them to live in peace apart. Whatever else might be said about this way of thinking it is clear that the animosity directed towards the Jews of Israel on the part of the pro-Hamas progressive demonstrators is not this anti-Semitism. It is based, indeed, on the very opposite concept – that the Jews are fundamentally one with other Western Europeans rather than being fundamentally divided from them by race or even religion.
Just in case you mistake this as an attempt to white-wash the progressives, let me assure you my intention is quite the reverse. The progressives’ anti-Israel position arises out of a far more pernicious attitude than mere anti-Semitism. It arises out of the hatred that is at the very heart of leftism.
The Left is the openly revolutionary form of liberalism. Sometimes liberalism tries to hide its revolutionary nature behind a mask of reform, of working within the institutions of civilization to accomplish its goals, but when that mask is removed what you get is the Left. The Left, therefore, is the true face of liberalism, and that face is one of revolution and sedition. Liberalism is not a constructive force but a destructive force. In its earliest recognizable form it began as an attack on Christendom or Christian civilization, the heir to classical Greco-Roman civilization. Its first targets were kings who are the earthly political representatives of the King of Kings Who rules over all of Creation, and the Church, the corporate body of Jesus Christ in which His Incarnational presence is sacramentally continued after His Ascension to the right hand of the Father. In attacking God’s earthly representation in this way liberalism revealed that its ultimate hatred is of God Himself. Liberalism is essentially the earthly continuation of Satan’s revolt against God. After attacking king and Church, liberalism launched its siege on every other tradition and institution of Christian civilization. From what we have just seen about liberalism’s essential nature its hatred of civilization is entirely explicable. Liberalism hates kings because they are the earthly representation of God’s Sovereign rule over Creation. Liberalism hates the Church because the Church is the earthly representation of Christ’s priestly intercession in Heaven. Liberalism hates civilization because civilization is the product of man as builder and it is in his capacity as builder that man most displays the image in which man was created, the image of God the Creator.
That is the hatred that is on display whenever the progressive Left blithers on and on about “colonialism” and “imperialism”. Man, in his fallen estate, is incapable of building a perfect civilization. Imperfect civilization, however, is better than no civilization at all. The Left is no more capable of building a perfect civilization than the builders of the past it is always decrying, sometimes for their real sins but more often for new offences they just made up yesterday, and the Left is not interested in trying to build a perfect civilization. It is only interested in tearing down the civilization others have built. It claims to be speaking out for “victims”. Sometimes the “victims” are people who have suffered actual harm in some way from civilization building. Other times, they are merely those who have not shared equally in the benefits of civilization with others. Either way, the Left’s idea that civilization must be razed, its history erased, and its builders “cancelled” and defamed is hardly the answer and in the support they are now showing for the despicable acts of murderous terrorists they show that their motivation is not genuine concern for those who have not fared as well from civilization as others, but a Satanic hatred of civilization builders, for representing, even in an imperfect way, the image of the Creator God.
That is a far more vile form of hatred than the extremely banal one of which the neoconservatives are accusing them. Posted by Gerry T. Neal a
As you are all most likely aware, the Israel-Palestinian conflict has flared up again. Like clockwork, the apologists for both sides have come crawling out of the woodworks insisting that we all take sides. Interestingly, this time around the apologists on each side are taking rather the same position with regards to the apologists of the other side that they insist the side they are cheering for in the Middle East take towards the other side, i.e., one of eradication and elimination. The pro-Israel side is calling for the pro-Palestinian side to be silenced, their protests shut down, and their views criminalized. Some on the pro-Israel side are capable of distinguishing between being pro-Palestinian, that is to say, someone who seeks to promote the basic human rights of the Palestinian Arab population, and being a supporter of the murderous terrorist organization Hamas, but it seems to me that they are outnumbered by those lacking this capacity. To be fair, this same incapacity characterizes the other side as well. On either side, it is most ugly in its manifestation. The pro-Israelis who fail to make the distinction have come close to calling for all expressions of humanitarian concern for the Palestinians to be outlawed as hate. They clearly have come dangerously unhinged because all rational, sensible, and decent people are categorically opposed to laws criminalizing hate qua hate. The other side, however, has made it difficult not to sympathize with them to some degree in that they have been openly cheering on the most vile and despicable sorts of behaviour on the part of Hamas.
Two and a half years ago, in an essay entitled “The Holy Land Returns to the Old Normal” I gave an overview of the Israel-Palestine conflict, rebutted a few common fallacies concerning it, offered an explanation of where the insistence that we all take sides comes from, and answered that demand. I do not intend to go over all of that material again, but I hope you will excuse my quoting myself here. At the end of the essay I pointed out the obvious real nature of the relationship between the Israeli government and Hamas:
The most ill-kept secret of the Middle East is that Likud Israeli governments and Hamas each rely upon the other to maintain their popular support among their own people. The Palestinians expect Hamas to keep on harassing Israel. The Israelis expect their government to brutally punish the Palestinians. Each, therefore, provides the other with the excuse to do what they need to do to play to their own crowds. So we come to May of this year. On the sixth the Palestinians hold a protest in East Jerusalem, on the seventh the Israelis crack down and storm the al-Aqsa mosque, on the tenth Hamas issues an ultimatum which Israel naturally ignores and the rockets start flying, on the eleventh the Israeli Air Force begin several days of bombing the hell out of Gaza. On the twentieth, having given their fans the show they were looking for, Netanyahu and Hamas agree to a ceasefire. Bada bing, bada boom, it is all over in a fortnight, mission accomplished, everyone is happy, high fives all around. Too bad about all the people who had to die, but didn’t someone somewhere at sometime say something about an omelet and eggs?
There is no good reason to think that any of this has changed in the present situation. Indeed, the current conflagration could be said to exemplify the point. The actions of the Israeli government and Hamas both clearly serve the interests of the other. Consider Hamas’ attack on 7 October. On top of the usual barrage of rockets, Hamas breached Israel’s supposedly impenetrable barrier and almost 3000 of their agents entered Israel, attacked towns, kibbutzim (collective farms), and even a weekend music festival. They murdered some 1500 people, and took about 150 hostages. The murder victims and hostages were mostly Israeli citizens, although there were a few soldiers and a number of people from other countries who were in Israel in various capacities – workers, students, attendees of the music festival – among both the dead and hostages. This was far better organized and co-ordinated than any previous Hamas attack and consequently far more lethal but it is difficult to see how it accomplished anything for Hamas other than the bloodshed itself. It did, however, clearly serve a purpose of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu, who had been ousted as Prime Minister of Israel in June of 2021, was re-elected in December of last year on a hard-line platform and needed to at least appear to be making good on his promises. Cracking down on Hamas is the easiest way of doing that and by carrying out an attack of this nature Hamas handed him an iron clad justification for doing so. On a side note, whatever else you might say about Benjamin Netanyahu, his political longevity is something to be marvelled at. I fully expect that sometime down the road we will be reading, a week or two after his funeral, that he has just won re-election as Prime Minister of Israel in a landslide.
Now some of you might be thinking “Aha, gotcha, there is a flaw in your argument. Hamas’s actions might serve Netanyahu’s ends, but in retaliating the Israeli government will wipe them out so there is no reciprocal benefit, it is a one-way street this time around”. This, however, very much remains to be seen. So far, apart from the rhetoric, Israel’s retaliatory actions have consisted of the same sort of aerial bombardment with which they have responded to past Hamas attacks, albeit on a larger scale. There has been talk of an imminent and massive ground incursion into Gaza for a week and a half now but if it ever materializes the IDF’s overwhelming military superiority does not guarantee Israel a quick and easy victory. Ask the Americans. Israel would be walking into the same sort of situation in which the United States found herself entangled in Vietnam and later Afghanistan. This is a long term operation and the longer it drags on the more it is to Hamas’ favour, because the longer such a conflict stretches out, the less international public sympathy will be with Israel, and it is in the arena of international public opinion that Hamas fights all its true battles.
It sounds crazy but it is nevertheless true that every time Hamas attacks Israel it is with the intention of provoking a retaliatory attack. The reason this seems crazy is because Israel is so much stronger than Hamas in terms of military might. It conjures up the picture of a chihuahua getting in the face of a big bruiser of a bull dog and yipping away annoyingly until the larger dog barks or bites its head off. One moral of the Old Testament account of David and Goliath, however, is that size isn’t everything. In this case, Hamas wants Israel to attack back because every time Israel does far more Palestinian civilians are killed than Hamas agents, enabling Hamas to run to the international news media, the General Assembly of the United Nations, the World Council of Churches, humanitarian organizations, university professors and student activists, and basically every group of self-important jackasses with a lot of money and power and not enough brain cells to fill a thimble, and whine and cry about how mean old Israel has been beating on them again, after which these groups wag their fingers in Israel’s face saying shame on you, shame on you, and dump tons of money in humanitarian relief into Hamas controlled Palestinian territory, keeping Hamas solvent, and freeing up other resources with which to buy more rockets.
A great illustration of the Hamas strategy can be found in the 1959 film The Mouse That Roared. In the movie, a small European country, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, has built its entire economy on a single export product, the wine Pinot Grand Fenwick. When a California wine company produces a cheap knockoff, and the country is threatened with insolvency, Duchess Gloriana (Peter Sellers) and her Prime Minister, Count Mountjoy (Peter Sellers) hatch a scheme to attack the United States, lose, and then reap the rewards of losing to the United States, which pours plenty of money into rebuilding the countries it has defeated in war. So they send the United States a declaration of war and then put their game warden, Tully (guess who), in charge of their small army of soldiers, mail-clad and armed with bows and arrows, and send him over. The scheme goes awry when Tully accidentally wins the war – watch the movie to find out how. The point of course, is that Hamas’ strategy is essentially that of Grand Fenwick. It is a darker version that involves much more bloodshed including the sacrifice of large numbers of their own and the payoff is expected more from third parties than from the victorious attackee, but it is the same basic scam.
Israel is running a big scam too, of course. In her case it is not the gullible “international community” that is the mark so much as the equally gullible United States of America. Israel, which paid for the creation of Hamas – see my previous essay alluded to earlier – has long been the single largest recipient of American foreign aid, in part because the various pro-Israel lobby groups in the United States make the National Rifle Association look like rank amateurs in comparison, but also because Israel knows how to play on the United States’ national mythology by presenting herself as the only liberal democracy in her region, surrounded and besieged by anti-Semitic autocrats, just like those that the United States likes to imagine herself as having single-handedly defeated in the Second World War. Of course there is some truth in that depiction. When did you ever hear of a successful scam that consisted completely of falsehoods?
This is why it is best for the rest of the world to stay out of this conflict and refuse to give in to this demand that we pick sides. Our involvement, whichever side we end up supporting, however well-intentioned, ends up facilitating the worst sort of behaviour of both sides.
We need to stop looking at the conflict in the Middle East through the lens of the “good guys” versus “bad guys” dichotomy, rooted in the heresy of Mani that has permeated Western popular culture through the pernicious influence of Hollywood movies and the comic book industry. There are no “good guys” in this conflict although there are a lot of innocent victims, both Israeli and Palestinian Arab.
If someone were to point a gun to my head and demand that I choose sides I would chose Israel, although I would be sure to hold my nose while doing so. Israel is a legitimate state, or at least the closest thing to a legitimate state that a modern democratic government without a king can be, which isn’t very close. Hamas is a criminal organization of lawless thugs and murderers. Israel has spent the last three quarters of a century trying to build up a civilized society for herself and her people. Hamas are destroyers not builders. I am a life-long Tory by instinct and as the late Sir Roger Scruton wisely put it “Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.” I will never side with those who only ever walk the easy path of destroying what others have labouriously built. Not Year Zero, Cultural Maoist, groups like Black Lives Matter and Every Child Matters in North America. Not Hamas in the Middle East. Finally, while both sides value the lives of civilians on the other side extremely cheap, there is a huge difference in that Hamas places no higher a value on the lives of their own civilians. Indeed, Hamas arguably values the lives of civilian Palestinian Arabs less than Israel. Hamas, when it attacks Israel, targets the civilian population, but prior to 7 October, its attacks have been largely ineffective. It fires tons of rockets at Israel, almost all of which are taken down by the Iron Dome, and the few that make it past are not guaranteed to hit anything or anyone. Its rocket launchers, however, Hamas deliberately places in residential neighbourhoods, mosques, hospitals, schools, and other similar locations where a retaliatory strike to take out the rocket launcher will have maximum civilian casualties. The same is true of anything else Hamas has that would be considered a legitimate military target by the rules that most countries, nominally at least, support for the conduct of warfare. Therefore, Israel must either stand there and allow herself to be attacked, the sort of thing someone whose soul has been killed and brain rotted from training in public relations and/or human resources might recommend, (1) or take out Hamas’ attack bases and in the process destroy the civilian and humanitarian infrastructure within which those bases are hid and kill the countless numbers of Palestinians that Hamas uses as human shields, handing Hamas plenty of ammunition in the form of bad press to use against her..
That having been said, the reasons for refusing the choice, for not taking sides are solid. It is in the mutual interests of Israel and Hamas to keep this conflict going forever, but this is not in the interests of the civilians on both sides, nor is it in the interests of the rest of the world which both sides expect to pay for their lethal and destructive activities. It is in the best interests of everybody, that the rest of the world refuse to be dragged into this any longer, and tell the two sides they both need to grow up.
I shall, Lord willing, follow up this essay with two others. The first will demonstrate that the Christian Zionist position that we are required by the Scriptures to take Israel’s side in Middle-East conflicts is rank heresy. The second will look at the neoconservative claim that the pro-Palestinian Left’s unhinged support of Hamas comes from anti-Semitism and demonstrate that it comes from a different source.
(1) Contrary to what the Anabaptist heresy teaches, Jesus said nothing of this sort in Matthew 5:39. This verse is best understood as forbidding revenge rather than self-defence but even if taken as forbidding self-defence it says nothing about how governments, responsible for the security of those they govern, are to act, as evident from the fact that before this section of the Sermon, Jesus gave a disclaimer that it is not to be taken as abrogating the Law. — Gerry T. Neal