Patrick Cleburne • Friday, June 14, 2024 • 1,300 Words
On June 12, in a shocking development, the Southern Poverty Law Center ($PLC to VDARE.com) announced it was laying off 60 employees, one quarter of its staff, and, in an apparent change of direction, closing some entire operations. My inspection of its financial reports reveals no recent funding shortfall (unfortunately). So what is going on?
The $PLC has acquired a very articulate union, which posted a long and vitriolic denunciation thread on Twitter:
Today, @splcenter – an organization with nearly a billion dollars in reserves, given an F rating by CharityWatch for “hoarding” donations – gutted its staff by a quarter.
As of this writing, Google News has picked up no reports of this event in the Regime Media. Their extreme interest in and reverence for the SPLC has been put on hold. No doubt they are waiting to be told the Party Line.
Neither has the SPLC deigned to put up a statement on its Press Center website page.
BREAKING: The far-left smear factory Southern Poverty Law Center is laying off staff, according to its union. The move comes one week after SPLC smeared a record number of mainstream conservatives as “hate” and “antigovernment extremist” groups.https://t.co/buYLyxvxnRpic.twitter.com/rWZDsAUidM
The Southern Poverty Law Center … has… contributed to a climate of fear and hostility in America. Hotels, web platforms, and credit card companies have blacklisted law-abiding Americans because the SPLC disagrees with their political views … Corporate America, Big Tech, government, and the media are wrong to take the SPLC’s disingenuous tactics at face value.
I must admit this book flew under my radar screen. I plan to buy it: SPLC-watching is getting interesting again.
O’Neil’s account brings one up to date on this curious organization. Among other tidbits
In the wake of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, the SPLC remained silent. The SPLC Union released a statement before the SPLC did, and the union expressed “solidarity with the Palestinian people,” condemning Israel for “the violent imperialist desecration of a people—the beginnings of a genocide.”
…When the SPLC finally did release a statement about the Oct. 7 attacks, it falsely accused Israel of targeting Palestinian children in Gaza for airstrikes. [Links in original]
The impact was immediate. Despite there being in those days very few effective spokesmen for patriotic immigration reform, Regime Media inquiries abruptly stopped, as did major Talk Radio invitations.
The SPLC was thus allowed to determine the scope of debate. They have continuously abused this power to harm the Historic American Nation.
What I found astonished me. Running huge surpluses from what Peter Brimelow called in his article cited above “a shakedown scam that preys on the elderly, Holocaust-haunted rich,” the SPLC had created for itself what it misleadingly calls an “Endowment Fund.” Normally in charities, this would mean a legally established capital fund from which only the income can be drawn. But the use of the SPLC’s endowment is entirely at the whim of the Directors.
And, instead of being held in convenient liquid form, the great bulk of the assets of the “Endowment Fund” have been committed to hedge funds, private equity managers, and other strange instruments, generally illiquid and in some cases hard to value (like President Trump’s real estate holdings). As of October 31, 2023, 89.6% of the “Endowment Fund” was in this category.
I also discovered (I believe I was the first) that the SPLC has a Cayman Islands bank account. Why a tax-exempt foundation needs banking facilities in a tax haven continues to mystify me.
Turning to their most recent accounts, their Audited Financial Statements of October 31, 2023 and their IRS Form 990 of the same date, we find:
The $PLC had $7.9 million in cash on October 31
Their so-called “Endowment Fund” was valued at $662 million then—87.8% of their total assets.
They still have a Cayman Islands bank account.
They took in no less than $110.9 million from the public in the year.
As I said in a later discussion of this strange phenomenon:
The Southern Poverty Law Center has effectively turned itself into a “Fund of Funds.” These are entities that exist to divide resources between a selection of hedge funds, which they monitor… [the SPLC] is really a financial institution with a comparatively small public interest litigation annex attached.
Exactly why the SPLC management is going to all this trouble is difficult to see. Perhaps they enjoy running money, but actually benefiting personally from a capital pool lodged in a 501(c)(3) is not easy.
So what is the $PLC’s mad scramble for enrichment all about?
Does the controlling clique at the Center one day intend to throw off its mask, let fundraising wither, and draw out massive salaries with minimal activity—a pattern not unknown in foundations with inherited endowments?
President Margaret Huang’s action is shutting down marquee programs like the Learning for Justice department and the Southern Immigrant Freedom Initiative, which provided free legal representation to detained immigrants across Georgia, Louisiana’ and Mississippi, certainly does suggest a loss of commitment.
Huang, right, was only imported in April 2020, after still unexplained scandals forced the eviction of cofounder Morris Dees and President Richard Cohen. She has absolutely no institutional history with the SPLC and quite possibly no institutional loyalty. Being Chinese may also reduce her interest in black/white conflict.
Furthermore, in note 14 of the financial statements, I read
On December 7, 2023, the Center closed on a 2.5 acre parcel located in Atlanta, Georgia amounting to $10,200,000…The establishment will be the site of the Center’s future Atlanta office.
If the land cost $10.2 million, the whole project must be several times that: big, even for the $PLC. I suspect Huang, who, although raised in East Tennessee’ has spent her adult life mainly in New York and Washington, is planning to move the whole outfit from hick Montgomery to cool Atlanta.
And yet, and yet… why was such a wholesale and embarrassing butchery needed?
I think Tyler O’Neil may have uncovered the reason. Since the Hamas October 7 attack, the Left has been falling into civil war. Surprisingly fierce pro-Palestinian forces have activated. These include apparently the SPLC Union.
But it turns out that the “elderly Holocaust-haunted rich,” or more to the point their even richer descendants, have no intention of extending to this faction the political tolerance long claimed for Leftist demonstrators generally.
This is a huge problem for the SPLC because it has long drawn much of its funding from these people (and the entities they influence).
I think, besides the $PLC management’s probable wish to lead a quieter and more elegant life, this was a Stalin-style Purge of Left Deviationists. In fact, it was an act of terrorism. The Union lost five stewards and their “Chair.” Perhaps the departments liquidated were particular strongholds of forbidden opinion.
For as long as the $PLC remains in Montgomery, this puts the remaining employees in a stressful situation. There are not many communist think tanks in Montgomery.
Many critics have long believed that the SPLC, notwithstanding its pretensions, is simply an instrument for Jewish ethnic interests.
This weekend, more unemployed Montgomery residents may be newly willing to agree.
Abundantly Degenerate Liberals: An Expose of the ADL
The Anti-Defamation League has been in the news again. When, two years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center (sic) was hit by a series of scandals concerning such matters as its dubious fundraising, amassed wealth, and deliciously ironic allegations of racial discrimination and sexual harassment leading to the firing of its founder Morris Dees and the resignation of its president Richard Levin, I hoped that some similar fate would befall the ADL. Sadly, this hope failed to materialize. Indeed, it might be said that in this period in which the SPLC’s reputation has sunk to an all-time low, the ADL’s influence has soared to new heights. Due, presumably, to its new director’s connections to Silicon Valley, the ADL has been working alongside Big Tech to censor online speech and purge the internet of opinions of which it disapproves, a campaign that has turned into a blitzkrieg of thought suppression in the course of the last year. It has now declared war on Tucker Carlson, the most popular talk show host on FOX News, basically for being the only mainstream television news persona with the stones to speak the unvarnished truth about immigration.
The Anti-Defamation League is decades older than the SPLC and is, to the best of my knowledge, the very first organization of this type to have been founded. Whereas most self-appointed, full-time, anti-racist watchdogs sprung up after World War II, during and after the American Civil Rights Movement, in order to capitalize on that era’s wave of popular sentiment against racism, the ADL predates the First World War going all the way back to 1913. While it is popular among some of the ADL’s foremost critics on the right today to maintain that the organization started well but got sidetracked during the tenure of its current director who had been a special assistant to Barack Obama, in reality the organization started out bad and became worse.
The ADL started out operating under the Chicago branch of the B’nai B’rith (Sons of the Covenant), a fraternal philanthropic organization that could roughly be said to be the equivalent for Jews of what the Knights of Columbus are for Roman Catholics. Its founders were two Chicago lawyers, Adolf Kraus who was the president of the order at the time, and Sigmund Livingston who became the first president of the ADL. Its stated purpose was to combat the defamation of the Jewish people in particular, and ultimately “to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens”. This, as good and noble as it sounds, was a mere façade. Apart from the fact that the ADL has never seemed to have any qualms about lying about (defaming) its enemies, thus making a mockery of its own name, throughout its history it has blurred the distinction between unfair and unjust words and acts towards Jews qua Jews and justifiable criticism of the same, just as it has blurred the distinction between criticism of Jews qua Jews whether unfair or justifiable and criticism of individuals who are Jewish on the basis of their words and deeds as individuals. It has also been susceptible to the charge of promoting Christophobia, which, of course, contradicts the second part of its purpose statement.
With regards to the first of these points, consider the incident that sparked the founding of the ADL in the first place. Earlier in 1913, Leo Frank, the factory supervisor of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Georgia was convicted of murdering 13 year old Mary Phagan, an employee of the factory who had been found raped and strangled in its basement. Frank was the president of the local chapter of B’nai B’rith and the story became the subject of contentious discussion throughout the United States. Powerful Jewish individuals in the American northeast such as Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, and Albert Lasker, the Chicago based advertising baron (he had just become the head of Lord and Thomas which became Foote, Cone & Belding) , became convinced, or at least took the public position, that Frank was innocent and was being railroaded for anti-Semitic reasons. The founders of the ADL were of the same persuasion and today their interpretation of these events is taken as established in the history books. It is curious though, that fabricated evidence at the site of the murder pointed to the black nightwatchman Newt Less, and the man whom the supporters of Frank’s innocence maintain was the real culprit, the janitor James Conley whose testimony to being Frank’s accomplice helped convict him, was also black. For the ADL’s interpretation of the incident to be correct, it would require that in the city of Atlanta, Georgia at the height of Jim Crow, anti-Semitism so trumped anti-black prejudice that a white man was framed for the rape and murder of a 13 year old white girl by a black man, because the white man was of the Jewish faith. The story did not end with Frank’s conviction. He appealed, with Lasker covering much of his legal fees, and eventually his sentence was commuted from death to life imprisonment. About two years after his original conviction he was kidnapped from prison and lynched to death near Phagan’s home town. An ugly ending to the story for sure, but it reinforces the point. How likely is it that in the Georgia of 1915 a white man would be lynched for a crime of this nature perpetrated by a black man?
I have given much detail about the Frank case because of its instrumentality in the founding of the ADL but it is hardly an isolated incident. In 1982 the ADL hosted a posh luncheon ceremony in which the legendary sharp-tongued comedian and actress Joan Rivers in an unusually teary-eyed and sentimental performance for her presented the “Torch of Liberty” award on their behalf to one Morris B. “Moe” Dalitz. A few years later they would name him “Philanthropist of the Year”. Dalitz, who had made a fortune in bootlegging and illegal gambling during the Prohibition era, had taken his ill-gotten gains and invested them in legal casinos in Las Vegas, where he later expanded his legitimate business interests into a more general property development, earning himself the nickname “Mr. Las Vegas”. In the post-World War II era he carefully constructed for himself the image of a reformed gangster turned legitimate businessman which he fiercely defended, famously suing Penthouse magazine in the 1970s for an article that maintained that a country club and spa resort that he had built near San Diego was built with mob money and serviced a mob clientele. Dalitz dropped the suit after the magazine published a letter of apology, although by Rolling Stone’s 1976 account of the case the defendants appeared to have been winning the suit. A more serious allegation was that beneath his veneer of legitimacy he was the head of operations for the Las Vegas branch of the activities of his life-long friend Meyer Lansky. Lansky, who died the year after Dalitz received the award from the ADL, was the co-founder, with his best friend Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel whom he later had killed, of Murder Inc., and who went on with Charles “Lucky” Luciano to build the National Crime Syndicate. He was the biggest mobster in the United States for half of the twentieth century and his criminal empire stretched around the globe. Siegel had run Lansky’s Las Vegas operations until his murder in 1947, and Dalitz, who began investing in Las Vegas casinos around that same time, was widely believed to have been his successor. Indeed, there have been allegations that the ADL itself basically functioned as a public relations firm for Lansky and while the ADL never honoured Lansky, who lacked a respectable public image, the way it did Dalitz, and Lansky does not seem to have directly donated to the ADL in his own name (many of his most prominent associates, Dalitz among them, however were substantial donors), there is plenty of circumstantial grounds for believing these allegations to be not entirely false. At any rate, the ADL had always been quick to make charges of anti-Semitism against those who concentrated on Lansky, Siegel, Dalitz, etc. in exposing organized crime.
With regards to the second point, the ADL’s promotion of Christophobia, this has been evident throughout the history of the organization but became especially prominent during the directorship of Abraham H. Foxman, who succeeded Nathan Perlmutter in that role in 1987 and continued as director until his retirement in 2015. In 1999, Foxman attacked the Rev. Jerry Falwell for saying that the Antichrist would be a Jewish male. Regardless of whether one agrees with Falwell’s understanding of Bible prophecy or not, this was hardly an anti-Semitic statement but a logical implication of the very idea of the Antichrist – the devil’s counterfeit of the true Christ who will arise in the last days as the ultimate villain of history. A counterfeit is a fake that is intended to be passed off as the real thing imitates. Therefore it has to be as close to the real thing as possible. Thus, that the ultimate counterfeit of the Messiah would have to be Jewish, can be logically deduced not only from Christian theology, which correctly asserts that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the true Christ, but from Jewish theology, which denies this truth but certainly teaches that the awaited Messiah will be Jewish. It does not require the belief that the Jews are the source of all evil, are the worst evil in the world, or any other such nonsense, and indeed, obviously contradicts such crudities because it is based upon the ultimate God-sent Deliverer being Jewish. Foxman, however, betrayed no capacity for understanding these points.
A few years later Foxman began attacking Mel Gibson over his film The Passion of the Christ. The attacks began long before the film was released and before Foxman had even seen it. Foxman condemned the movie as anti-Semitic because it portrayed the Gospel accounts of the betrayal, trial, and crucifixion of Christ accurately – to the point of using the actual tongues of the day with English translations in subtitles – without altering the story to place 100% of the blame for the crucifixion on the Roman authorities and excusing the Pharisees, the chief priests, and the Jerusalem mob. For Foxman, irrational though this false dichotomy be, it was either place all the blame for the crucifixion on the Romans and completely exonerate the Jewish leaders of two millennia ago or place all the blame for the crucifixion on all Jews of all times including those alive today. Underlying this irrational point of view was the idea that traditional, historical, Scriptural Christianity had been discredited by the Holocaust- despite the obvious fact that the Third Reich was the product of the shift away from Christianity in Modern German culture – and that therefore Christianity had to change its beliefs, wherever Jews found them to be offensive, even if this involved falsifying the facts of history as recorded in Christianity’s sacred texts of the New Testament. When groups like the ADL speak of meaningful interfaith dialogue between Christians and Jews this is precisely what they mean by it – a one-way discussion in which Jews speak, Christians listen, and then Christians make whatever changes to their own faith and practice that Jews demand. Those like Mel Gibson who are too traditionalist to go along with this nonsense are then vilified and condemned. When, several years later, the actor in a state of inebriation went into a tirade against the Jews, Foxman gloated that he, that is Foxman, had been vindicated in his accusations, demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of cause and effect, or of the simple fact that after years of being subjected to Foxman’s style of abuse, which included unbelievably arrogant demands that Gibson denounce his own father (a traditionalist Roman Catholic who rejected Vatican II, pointed to by ADL types as the prime example of a positive outcome of the kind of interfaith “dialogue” described above), if anyone was justified it was Gibson in his tirade and not Foxman by it.
Abe Foxman retired from his official position at the ADL, if not from his career as America’s foremost equine rump impressionist, six years ago, but the organization can hardly be said to have improved under the leadership of his successor, Jonathan Greenblatt, whose previous gigs included corporate executive and Obama administration advisor, and who looks like someone who crawls out of his parents’ basement only to do a bad cosplay of Lex Luthor at comic book conventions. Under Greenblatt’s leadership the ADL has moved much further to the Left than it was even under Foxman. Foxman was a liberal, for sure, but at the beginning of his tenure as National Director the ADL commissioned Harvey Klehr’s 1988 survey of Communist subversive groups in the United States published by Transaction as Far Left of Center: The American Radical Left Today, something that it would be difficult to imagine the ADL doing under the current leadership. Daniel Greenfield, Shillman Journalist Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (sic), has done an excellent job of documenting the ADL’s further-Left shift under Greenblatt at the Center’s e-zine Frontpagemag, including the ADL’s strange new alliance with the segments of the Far Left that are rather less than friendly towards either Israel or the Jews (see here, here and here for examples).
It is Greenblatt who in his capacity as ADL CEO has been writing letters and giving interviews on CNN, demanding that FOX News fire Tucker Carlson for having the audacity to use the word “replacement” in criticizing liberal immigration policy in the United States. “White supremacists”, use that word after all, and to use a word that “white supremacists” use is to fully embrace and endorse everything “white supremacists” believe, just as to be in the same room as a “white supremacist” or breathe the same air as a “white supremacist” is to implicate yourself in his ideology. Absurd as that sort of “argument” is, it is what has passed for logic at the ADL for decades, long before Greenblatt took over. Anybody who has perused the profiles they have put together of people they have accused of “racism”, “hate”, etc. over the years, will recognize the style.
Lachlan Murdoch has, so far, stood by Carlson and refused to give in to the ADL’s demands. Let us hope that he continues to do so. There are not many today who have the courage to withstand the ADL’s bullying and intimidation tactics for long, just as there are very few willing to speak the truths that Tucker Carlson has been speaking.
If Murdoch is willing to stand by Carlson for the long haul, then perhaps it is time for FOX News to go on the offensive, and shine the light of exposure upon the bullying, lies, and corruption of the ADL.
Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN) Exposed: The Wrath of CAHN by John Klein
The Wrath of CAHN
John Klein
January 22, 2020
Canada is among the world’s most tolerant and peaceable countries.
The Canadian Anti-Hate Network wants you to believe otherwise, however,
working tirelessly to convince Canadians their country is a seething
hotbed of (mostly white, right-wing) hate groups. John Klein lays bare
the hypocrisy, intolerance and damage done to individuals and free
speech rights when a small group of political activists model themselves
on a much larger American group and appoint themselves as our country’s
figurative judge, jury and executioner.
You can’t tell the haters without a program.
For
decades the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has styled itself as the
indispensable guide to what constitutes hatred in the United States.
Its signature “Hate Map”
has long been cited in the media and by commentators as an objective
and reliable reference point for measuring the worrisome growth of hate
groups across America. And according to the SPLC, hate is always
growing. The latest Hate Map puts the number of active hate groups in the U.S. at 1,020,
up by 70 percent since 2000. Another thing that’s seemingly always
growing at the SPLC: its bank account. Thanks to its self-declared
status as arbiter of American hate, and in conjunction with highly
sophisticated fundraising techniques, the group holds an astounding half-billion dollars in assets, making it one of America’s richest non-profit advocacy groups.
Despite
such obvious trappings of success, the Alabama-based SPLC has lately
found itself on the receiving end of the sort of nasty accusations it
typically makes of others. Last year the organization was rocked by
several internal accusations of sexual impropriety and racism against
co-founder and former chief litigator Morris Dees, who was fired that
March. Dees − long the public face of the organization, as well as a
member of the Direct Marketing Association’s Hall of Fame for his
masterful use of direct mail solicitations − was apparently fond of
reminding his black female staffers how much he liked “chocolate”, among
other lewd remarks, as well as inappropriate touching; it was recently revealed that decades ago he faced an accusation of molesting his stepdaughter with a sex toy.
“Chocolate” lover: SPLC co-founder Dees was at last fired from the organization.
Beyond the damaging hypocrisy of an anti-hate group being accused of sexist and racist behaviour, the SPLC has also been sued
by several organizations and individuals claiming they were maliciously
and erroneously targeted as “haters” and, in the case of Muslim
reformer and counter-extremist Maajid Nawaz (whom it had labelled an
anti-Muslim “extremist”), has had to pay out millions of dollars. This
is a remarkable fact, considering the legal hurdle for defamation in the
U.S. is nearly insurmountable.
The reputation of the SPLC’s much-cited Hate Map has also been seriously damaged in other ways. A recent insider’s account in the New Yorker alleges the SPLC’s hate data has been deliberately exaggerated in order to coax donations from “gullible Northern liberals”. And the far-left magazine Current Affairs devastatingly declared that the SPLC “is a scam: It finds as much ‘hate’ as possible in order to make as much money as possible.”
The SPLC’s upside-down world: Counter-extremist Muslim reformer Nawaz was labelled an “anti-Muslim extremist.”
While
the reek of hypocrisy was highly inconvenient, the allegations of “hate
inflation” undermine the group’s very legitimacy. The confluence of internal crises and external criticisms has prompted nearly every top SPLC official abruptly to leave the group, Twitter to drop the SPLC as one of its hate-monitoring “safety partners” and a U.S. Senator to request the IRS investigate its non-profit status.
In
short, the SPLC’s carefully crafted public image as a virtuous
hate-fighter has been shredded. It hardly seems a model to emulate. Yet
that’s exactly what the fledgling Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN) is
doing.
Canada’s SPLC
CAHN began operations in early 2018, billing itself
as an “independent, nonprofit organization made up of Canada’s leading
experts and researchers on hate groups and hate crimes.” Its mandate,
according to CAHN’s website, “is to monitor, research, and counter hate
groups by providing education and information on hate groups to the
public, media, researchers, courts, law enforcement, and community
groups.” And it makes no bones about the inspiration for its domestic
anti-hate crusade. In a letter
to a House of Commons committee introducing itself to Canadian
parliamentarians last April, CAHN claimed to be “modelled after, and
supported by, the esteemed Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in the
United States.” The letter was delivered several weeks after the no-longer-esteemed Dees was fired for allegations of sexual and racial misconduct.
CAHN claimed to be “modelled after, and supported by, the esteemed
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in the United States.” The letter was
delivered to Parliament several weeks after the SPLC’s
no-longer-esteemed co-founder Dees was fired for allegations of sexual
and racial misconduct.
Tweet
CAHN
is chaired by Bernie Farber, well-known in Canadian media circles for
an earlier career as CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC). Other
key members of the organization include executive director Evan Balgord,
a former special assistant to Toronto mayor John Tory, controversial
“anti-hate” lawyer Richard Warman and Ontario Institute of Technology
professor Barbara Perry.
The
first necessary step in following the SPLC’s path is to establish CAHN
as a useful source of hate information in Canada. CAHN’s principals make
themselves readily available to media outlets eager to tell terrifying
stories about the proliferation of hate groups in our midst. The CBC and Global News appear to be the most ardent devotees of this service, although a wide range of publications at home and abroad
avail themselves of CAHN’s self-proclaimed expertise. In a particularly
successful twist on its formula, CAHN board member Amira Elghawaby
recently announced on Twitter that the Toronto Star will have her write a “bimonthly” column focused on “exploring human rights”.
The
group also makes savvy use of social media for publicity and
fundraising, and as a weapon in its anti-hate activities. Ricochet
Media, an online portal that bills itself as a crowd-funded public
interest journal (but is at least partly Government-of-Canada funded and
seems to publish only left-wing content), is another outlet where
CAHN’s messages are quoted approvingly and amplified. This breathless article,
for example, alleged “levels of extremist activity not seen in
generations” and called upon governments to do more than merely monitor
and research right-wing extremists.
Perry makes the stunning claim that approximately 300 hate groups
are extant in Canada. If true, this would give Canada a three times
higher per capita incidence of hate groups than even the SPLC claims
exists in the U.S.
Tweet
Having
inserted itself into public discussions on hate, the next requirement
in SPLC mimicry is to build a case that Canada is a seething hotbed of
hatred. CAHN’s website offers a veritable avalanche of revealed hate: neo-Nazi groups are lurking in central Canadian suburbs, hate groups you’ve never heard of are organizing across Atlantic Canada, gender-identity hatred is simmering on the West Coast, anti-Semitism is surging everywhere.
The
recent federal election produced an apparent bumper crop of hate in
Canada, with CAHN training its steely eyes on everything from Maxime
Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada to the Yellow Vest movement to an entirely insignificant collection of political no-hopers
scattered across the country. As for the total amount of hate in this
country, Perry makes the stunning claim that approximately 300 hate groups are extant in Canada. If true, this would give Canada a three timeshigher
per capita incidence of hate groups than even the SPLC claims exists in
the U.S. Despite the shock value of her allegations, Perry has not
produced the actual list, or any verifiable evidence that such a claim
is accurate. In 2015, Perry claimed there were only 100 hate groups in Canada.
Haters,
haters everywhere, from PPC leader Bernier to the Yellow Vests. If this
is the best CAHN can do, is there really that much hate in Canada?
Arguing hate is in such great supply in this country is quite a feat given that Canada generally tops global surveys on
racial tolerance and acceptance of immigration. And despite CAHN’s
breathless claims, open expressions of racism in Canada are actually quite rare. Interestingly, visible minorities and non-visible minorities often report experiencing similar rates of discriminatory acts.
The most recent Statistics Canada survey
of police-reported hate crimes happily reveals a substantial
year-over-year decline. Some places in Canada reported precisely zero
hate crimes in 2018. Belleville, Ontario and Trois Rivières, Quebec were
two such cities. Many other places recorded a mere handful. Examples
are St. John’s, Newfoundland with one; Lethbridge, Alberta with three;
and Abbotsford, B.C. with six. Out of 2.3 million Criminal Code
violations that year, there were just 1,798 hate crimes – substantially
less than one-tenth of one percent of the total. And the vast majority
of these offences were for mischief or graffiti. Actual violence is
very, very hard to find. Fewer than 100 instances of hate-motivated
assaults were recorded across the entire country in 2018, of which just
two were homicides.
In truth, Canada appears to be a country remarkable for its lack
of hate. But you wouldn’t know this from listening to CAHN. In response
to the recent happy news that hate crimes fell sharply in 2018, CAHN
complained that these new figures “aren’t showing the whole picture.” It then launched a campaign for “better hate crime statistics.” What CAHN really wants, presumably, is bigger hate crime statistics. As American journalist Wilfred Reilly memorably said of the Jussie Smollett hate-crime hoax in Chicago, “the demand for bigots exceeds the supply.” Reilly is African-American.
Judge, jury and executioner
In
addition to claiming hate is always on the rise, CAHN closely follows
several other discreditable SPLC tactics. Among these is the practice of
“doxing” its enemies. Doxing
involves publishing the details and contact information of
organizations, businesses and even private individuals deemed to be
purveyors of hate. The objective is to expose those it declares to be
haters to public opprobrium, or worse. It can get out of hand.
CAHN has doxed the founder of a far-right podcast who owns a small business in Thunder Bay. It also threatened to publish
the names and addresses of members of the Canadian Nationalist Party in
an unsuccessful attempt to derail their application for official party
status with Elections Canada. And it published the names of hundreds of
donors to the quixotic Toronto mayoral campaign of Faith Goldy. “Naming
and shaming is part of our mandate,” the group explains on its Twitter
account.
In many cases, the only evidence of hate to be found amongst CAHN’s
targets is that they question Ottawa’s sacred twin ideologies of
diversity and multiculturalism. But simply calling for illegal
immigrants – who have, after all, broken Canada’s laws – to be deported
is not itself evidence of hate.
Tweet
In
one horrifying example of naming-and-shaming’s potential consequences
in the United States, Jessica Prol Smith, an editor at the
Washington-based Family Research Council, a pro-marriage group opposed
to homosexuality, found her life threatened by a gunman. In 2012, Floyd
Lee Corkins II shot and wounded a security guard at Smith’s building
before being subdued; he later admitted his actions were largely
motivated by the SPLC’s designation of Smith’s employer as a hate group.
Corkins was charged with domestic terrorism and is serving a 25-year
prison sentence. Smith recounted these events last summer in the
memorably headlined USA Today article “The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate-based scam that nearly caused me to be murdered.”
The
SPLC and CAHN thus grandly claim for themselves the overlapping roles
of investigator, adjudicator and punisher of actions, opinions and ideas
they determine to be wrong. Of course, all of these properly belong to
government, and all are wisely separated in democratic states. No single
organization should ever have such sweeping powers combined, let alone a
private group of activists. CAHN’s arrogance in assuming all three
brings to mind the ancient Roman poet Juvenal’s famous aphorism: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guards themselves?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? After her employer was labelled by the SPLC, Jessica Prol’s life was threatened by a gunman.
Other CAHN tactics borrowed from the SPLC include filing highly-dubious requests to police for criminal hate speech investigations and restraining orders
against utterly inconsequential people, such as long-time polemicists
Kevin Goudreau and Paul Fromm. Elsewhere, CAHN has successfully pushed Facebook to de-platform its opponents, such as the Soldiers of Odin,
a tiny group of nativist bikers who have done charitable work and who
dispute the news media’s characterization of them as racist. And it is
currently pushing the same for Canada’s chaotic Yellow Vest movement,
which embraces a dizzying array of social and economic concerns (and
whose sister group in France is led by a native of Martinique). It also convinced Toronto City Council to audit Goldy’s mayoral campaign finances.
A field guide to spotting hate in Canada: bring your microscope
Often,
those targeted by CAHN or the SPLC are not only insignificant and/or
obscure, but too weak or disorganized to fight back. One SPLC staffer noted
Dees’s favoured approach was to pick opponents who had a “poor
education…limited funds, few if any good lawyers…[it] was like shooting
fish in a barrel.” During Farber’s time as head of the CJC, former Maclean’s columnist Mark Steyn described him
as someone who’d spent most of his career fighting “irrelevant
penniless shaven-headed nobodies” as opposed to actual threats to
minority rights and society as a whole.
As
with the SPLC’s targets, sometimes CAHN’s also push back, however.
Canadian Nationalist Party leader Travis Patron some time ago sent a
cease-and-desist letter to CAHN’s Balgord, demanding he retract “false”
claims that his Canadian Nationalist Party is “Neo-Nazi” and that it is
“under investigation for alleged ‘hate speech.’” If Patron’s bank
account permits, it will be up to the courts to decide the validity of
his case against CAHN.
Regardless
of the legal outcome, Canadian voters don’t appear to be buying what
Patron is selling. He received just 166 votes – or 0.4 percent of total
ballots – in the Saskatchewan riding of Souris-Moose Mountain in the
recent federal election. Patron has demonstrated such little traction
with the voting public that it seems pointless to bother getting worked
up about anything he says. CAHN’s efforts have likely provided him with
far more publicity than his trivial Canadian Nationalist Party could
ever have hoped to earn on its own.
In
many cases, the only evidence of hate to be found amongst CAHN’s
targets is that they question Ottawa’s sacred twin ideologies of
diversity and multiculturalism. But simply calling for illegal
immigrants – who have, after all, broken Canada’s laws – to be deported,
as Patron has, is not itself evidence of hate. Neither is engaging in a
debate over Canada’s annual immigration intake. CAHN’s animosity
towards Bernier’s PPC (whose supporters are “terrible people”,
according to executive director Balgord) and his pledge to limit
immigration to 150,000 people per year is rather hard to fathom.
Any party committed to admitting 150,000 immigrants per year – about the same as Australia’s annual intake
and significantly more than Canada itself welcomed for many years under
former prime ministers Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney − cannot
logically be considered anti-immigrant, regardless of who chooses to
join the party as a result of such a commitment. Most of the world’s
countries, in fact, accept almost no immigration at all. Regarding
Bernier’s criticism of “extreme multiculturalism”, in his later years
Pierre Trudeau also came to lament
how official multiculturalism had metastasized into identity politics.
Plus, Bernier’s party was recognized by the federal Leaders’ Debates
Commission as a serious and legitimate entity deserving a place in the
national televised events.
It is certainly not necessary for a reasonable person to agree with the positions taken by Patron, Goldy, the Soldiers of Odin et al − and in many cases their claims are
embarrassingly naïve, delusional, aggressive or simply plain wrong − to
recognize that democracy works best when a full-range of views can be
aired and dismantled as necessary. Censorship is not the answer to bad
ideas. Better ideas are.
CAHN
has targeted Faith Goldy, pictured above with her then-Toronto Mayoral
campaign team, and the Soldiers of Odin, seen here at a Fraser Valley
community clean-up event.
Instead
of engaging or debating, the preferred tactic of the aggressive
anti-hate movement is to attack. The CAHN website boasts that, “We convinced an Art gallery to Cancel a People’s Party of Canada Event in Winnipeg.” How? Via smear tactics and other ugly de-platforming techniques. But with a large segment
of the Canadian population deeply concerned about current immigration
policy, wildly throwing around claims of “hate” and neo-Nazism at
opponents who merely seek to debate immigration orthodoxies can only
coarsen public discourse.
Naming-and-shaming for thee, but not for me
CAHN
makes no evident attempt to acknowledge the massive grey area between
hotly debated viewpoints and outright hate. Rather, it actively picks
sides and ignores the consequences. The group flatly bills itself as a “monitor” of “right-wing extremist groups” (and then just white supremacist groups, apparently). Warman has explained his purpose is to create “maximum disruption”
for alt-right organizations. As such, CAHN habitually ignores equally
egregious activity by the far-left. In line with the SPLC, CAHN also
generally avoids attacking the speech or association rights of Muslim or
Sikh extremists, current allies of white liberals.
CAHN’s Perry as well complains about law enforcement agencies’ tendency to distinguish between hate groups and terrorist groups.
To most people, such a distinction might seem clear and reasonable. In
the one category are groups holding strong views that many people might
find distasteful or even awful, but that don’t incite or engage in
violence; in the other are groups planning and/or carrying out attacks.
Perry’s preference, however, is to blur the difference between the two –
thus conflating the holding of views she considers objectionable with
illegal activity aimed at destroying Western society.
When
presented with evidence of apparent hate-related activity that appears
to meet or exceed the flimsy standards applied against foes such as
Patron, but emanating from the other end of the political or religious
spectrum, CAHN seems unable to rouse itself off the couch, let alone
commit to a full-on anti-hate or doxing campaign. Consider the group’s
surprisingly flaccid response to Islamist activist Jawed Anwar’s plans for an Islamic Party of Ontario.
While
admitting Anwar espouses the sort of hardline religious views about
gender and homosexuality that CAHN despises when promoted by white
Christian polemicists like Patron or former Ontario Progressive
Conservative leadership candidate Tanya Granic Allen, it brushes off
Anwar as an inconsequential distraction. “There are no indications that
[Islamic Party of Ontario] has any support,” reads CAHN’s Facebook page.
“To make it out to be a significant threat at present time is
fearmongering.” To a principled defender of free speech rights, this
statement could seem reasonable on its face. Coming from CAHN, it is
remarkable for its hypocrisy. If causing a ruckus about idiosyncratic
groups with an insignificant public presence is “fearmongering”, then
CAHN is a banner candidate to be Canada’s fearmonger-in-chief.
CAHN seems equally unconcerned about Canadian branch plant operations of the violent Antifa movement or the overt anti-white prejudice of Black Lives Matter
(BLM). Both organizations are examples of alt-left extremism, no
different in principle from the alt-right groups CAHN seeks to put out
of business, and often far worse in practise. Antifa members are
frequently found assaulting their opponents in messy
counter-demonstrations, while BLM
prefers civil disobedience that often seems to go just slightly too
far, at times resulting in serious physical injuries, including to police officers.
The Antifa and BLM movements are somehow exempt from investigation and scrutiny by CAHN.
In this area, CAHN’s approach is unlike the SPLC’s, which regularly denounces the violence of these groups (although still keeping them off its extremist list). The CAHN website actively encourages citizens to partner with Antifa in staging counter-demonstrations (which the SPLC specifically advises against). Balgord has also defended its tactics in print despite the movement being accused of domestic terrorism
by the Obama Administration. And with no hint of irony, Balgord
explicitly defends Antifa thugs’ preference for facemasks as a necessary
precaution since it “protects themselves from doxing” − the very tactic
favoured by CAHN against its opponents.
Given
such tendentiousness, Farber and his cohorts’ attempt to position CAHN
as a reliable and objective arbiter of what constitutes hate strains
credulity. When combined with CAHN’s behaviour to date, it is difficult
to envision anyone who stumbles into the organization’s crosshairs
receiving an impartial evaluation.
Section 13 redux
Beyond simply making life difficult for its carefully-curated enemies, CAHN’s broader ambition appears to be establishing itself
in the space vacated by the departed but unlamented Section 13 of the
Canadian Human Rights Act. This notoriously stringent law once barred online speech that “may expose” identifiable groups not just to hatred, but mere contempt. It allowed no
defences with regards to truth, intent or fair comment on matters of
public interest. And not only direct targets but any non-targeted third
party could file a complaint, while the federal human rights commission
only rarely tried to mediate the complaints. This proved to be a big
problem for poor defendants, considering free legal representation was
not available.
Section 13
was thrust into the public eye in 2002 with the arrival of Warman’s
novel strategy to proactively use the legislation to shut down voices he
disapproved of. While the law was intended for the protection of
minority groups, Warman – a white male − was responsible for an
impressive 16 complaints, the most of any individual.
Balgord has defended Antifa’s tactics in print despite the movement
being accused of domestic terrorism by the Obama Administration. And
with no hint of irony, he explicitly defends Antifa thugs’ preference
for facemasks since it “protects themselves from doxing” – a tactic
favoured by CAHN against its opponents.
Tweet
In some instances, Warman obtained his evidence by provoking extremist statements from obscure online message boards. Sometimes he even posed as a neo-Nazi poster himself, which one tribunal adjudicator later said “diminish[ed] his credibility” and “could have precipitated further hate messages.” Partly because his targets were mostly poor and couldn’t afford legal help, Warman was successful in every case but one. He was awarded tens of thousands of dollars in monetary compensation for the damages he purportedly suffered. As one Huffington Post contributor wryly described Warman: “He’s sacked more peewee quarterbacks than any other NFL linebacker.”
When
it became apparent that Section 13 was being used as a bludgeon against
free speech in Canada – most notably when three human rights tribunal
complaints were launched against Maclean’s columnist Steyn – public opinion finally shifted against it. A 2008 report
by University of Windsor law professor Richard Moon identified it as a
clear threat to legitimate political discourse and recommended it be
removed.
Journalist
Steyn torpedoes the listing ship that was Section 13 of the Canadian
Human Rights Act. Now it might be making a comeback.
A
year later Warman’s final and only failed Section 13 complaint, against
Internet provocateur Marc Lemire, was famously dismissed when a human
rights tribunal declined to enforce its provisions because it found they
were inconsistent with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ guarantees
of freedom of expression. The section was finally repealed in 2013 by
the Conservative government of Stephen Harper.
Stolen identities
As
an attorney early in his career, SPLC co-founder Dees once represented
the Ku Klux Klan and had his bill paid by the White Citizens’ Council in
a case involving the beating of a Montgomery, Alabama Freedom Rider (a
group of civil rights activists who fought segregation). In 1958 Dees
had campaigned for arch-segregationist George Wallace in the Georgia
gubernatorial campaign. According to his former law partner, Millard
Fuller, Dees’ “overriding purpose…[was] making a pile of money.” He
transformed himself into an anti-racism crusader – with the Klan
becoming one of his favourite targets – after discovering it offered an
alternative route to riches via the miracle of direct mail
solicitation.
CAHN has yet
to prove itself as adept at fundraising as the SPLC, which in 2018
generated US$103 million in donations alone. We do know, however, that
CAHN boasts of receiving direct funding and support from its big brother south of the border. And in 2018 Toronto-area businessman Mohamad Fakih made a media splash with a donation of $25,000 to CAHN following a successful defamation lawsuit against his online critics.
But
now CAHN is facing its own troubling allegations of profiteering from
hate. In February 2019 Elisa Hategan, an anti-racism activist and former
member of an early-90s skinhead group called the Heritage Front, teamed
up with professor and human rights lawyer Yavar Hameed to file a
$200,000 civil claim against CAHN. Farber is also named. The lawsuit
alleges CAHN Advisory Committee member Elizabeth Moore (also a former
Heritage Front member) “fraudulently appropriated several significant
elements of Ms. Hategan’s personal life story in order to boost her own
credentials as a former neo-Nazi and did this to monetize a fraudulent
narrative.” These stolen elements include Hategan’s experience as a
former spokesperson for the Heritage Front and later as a defector who
helped prosecutors bring the group down.
Elisa
Hategan, posing here with her book Race Traitor, has filed a lawsuit
against CAHN for appropriating her story and allegedly hoping to gain
from it.
Moore
had simply been an unmemorable Heritage Front fellow traveller, says
Hategan. But instead, Hategan claims Moore took credit for a film made
about Hategan’s experiences: 1998’s White Lies. Her
suit alleges that appropriating her “narrative would be an important
method of securing greater publicity, speaking engagements and financial
opportunities for Moore, as well as publicity, consulting and speaking
engagements for Farber.” On top
of this, Hategan alleges that Farber and Moore have disparaged her
publicly in order to cut her out from employment and advocacy
opportunities, maximizing their own in the process. If true, this
wouldn’t exactly be behaviour consistent with an organization “committed
to increasing public awareness about the scourge of ‘hate’ across
Canada.” The civil trial is set to begin in March.
Theatrical vs. substantive advocacy
While
assuming the mantle of hate-fighter sounds like a heroic exercise in
defending minority rights and rescuing the oppressed, the crusade
embarked upon by the SPLC – with which CAHN, as we’ve seen, openly
associates itself – is criticized even by members of the intellectual
left as a fraudulent exercise. The far-left Nation
magazine has called “anti-hate” advocacy a form of “theatrical” rather
than “substantive advocacy.” If advocates were truly concerned about
minority uplift, its columnist wrote, they should be fighting more
tangible problems like employment and housing discrimination –
practising actual poverty law, in other words − instead of simply “fingering militiamen in a potato field in Idaho.”
That
the SPLC lost the plot by preferring activities that boosted its
fundraising effectiveness over fighting for tangible improvements in its
alleged clientele’s lives is not a new idea. As long ago as 1988, a
former SPLC staffer admitted to The Progressive
that there were “certainly bigger problems facing blacks and the poor”
than continuing to tackle a now-toothless Ku Klux Klan. The Klan, said
another former staffer, “was such an easy target − easy to beat in
court, easy to raise big money on”, and so it dominated the SPLC’s
attention. Last year, Current Affairs
also argued that the SPLC’s habit of elevating minority rights by
targeting inconsequential right-wing groups continues a “politics of
spectacle.”
Even some liberal voices in Canada have expressed concerns about “anti-hate” advocacy and hate speech generally. Former
Liberal Party MP Keith Martin, a doctor of mixed-race background,
fought hard against hate speech restrictions during his nearly 20 years
in Parliament, saying they represented what Canada fought against in the Second World War. Martin noted that
while Canadians have a right to be free from slander, they “do not have
the right to not be offended.” Laws like Section 13 created a “slippery
slope” in that they could be easily politicized and used to simply shut
down debate.
Notable Holocaust
historian Deborah Lipstadt is against such laws for the same reason.
The criticism seems particularly apt when applied to organized and
powerful groups like the SPLC and CAHN. Refusing to debate or engage
with groups or people they don’t like, and choosing instead to malign
them in the most alarmist terms possible, is to engage in the politics
of spectacle. The same goes for the active use or tacit approval of such
ignominious tactics as de-platforming, doxing, Antifa mobbing and
piling on spurious legal complaints.
Antifa
protester (l) grabs a Canadian flag from a Bernier supporter (r) at a
campaign event at Mohawk College’s McIntyre Theatre.
Because hate speech charges are so nebulous and problematic, free speech advocate and author Stefan Braun refers
to them as a “packaged idea.” When unpacked, Braun writes, hate speech
allegations are often revealed to be based on “many different reasons
besides the public good, including fear, political expedience, moral
comfort, public approval, or even the ‘bottom line.’” And because it is
so far from a clear concept, the Supreme Court has ruled that “hate
speech” requires intense and highly fact-dependent inquiry. For this
reason, hate-incitement is unique in the Criminal Code in requiring a
province’s attorney-general to personally sign off on any charges.
Policing
hate, in other words, is properly regarded as the most complex and
delicate aspect of the entire criminal justice system, balancing as it
does the Charter’s guarantees of “freedom of thought, belief, opinion
and expression” with the Criminal Code’s protection from incitement of
“hatred against any identifiable group.” Given its intricate nature, why
would anyone willingly hand over responsibility for policing hate to a
private group of activists that shows so little interest in the legal,
democratic and social ramifications of the task and openly styles itself
after a badly-tarnished American outfit? And why would so many media
outlets give such an outfit the credibility it craves by treating it as a
reliable and unbiased source of information?
A better and more civil way
Anyone
looking to reconcile concerns over hate speech in Canadian discourse
with the demands of free expression is advised to reread Moon’s 2008
report on Section 13. Therein, he suggested dealing with problematic
public opinions and statements through engagement rather than
prohibition and punishment. “We must develop ways other than censorship
to respond to expression that stereotypes and defames the members of an
identifiable group,” Moon wrote.
At
the very least, before attacking someone in public, branding them
“neo-Nazis” or doxing them to reveal their intimate personal details in
hopes someone else will make their life miserable, CAHN should first
define what it means by the labels it employs. And these labels –
hate-mongering, for example – should be applied equally to everyone who
expresses such animus, regardless of race, religion or politics.
Policing hate is properly regarded as the most complex and delicate
aspect of the entire criminal justice system. So why would anyone
willingly hand such responsibility to a private group of activists that
shows so little interest in the legal, democratic and social
ramifications of the task and openly styles itself after a
badly-tarnished American outfit?
Tweet
When
a group is identified that meets these equally applied criteria, it
should first be asked to clarify or disavow its impugned statements. If a
disavowal is forthcoming, this could be put on record to, first, credit
the target for its goodwill and, if needed, embarrass the target should
it later recant. If not, those opinions could be met by way of a debate
(in public, online, etc.) and refuted with more and better-quality
speech. As 18th-Century French essayist Joseph Joubert put it, “It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.”
In addition to lubricating mutual communication and clearing up
potential misunderstandings, both sides might even learn something from
one another.
Were
“anti-hate” groups such as CAHN to take such an approach, the public
might be better assured the group was properly concerned with the best
interests of civil society and free speech. Improved transparency with
respect to donors, salaries, and its watch-list of hate groups wouldn’t
hurt, either.
John Klein is a business owner in the United States and an advocate for freedom of thought, belief and opinion.
It would almost seem as if Bernie Farber is trying to set a world record. That would be the world record for the number of unrelated news stories in which someone who is neither a celebrity nor a world leader appears within a short period of time. In the last half of August he appeared in connection with three stories of which I am aware. Perhaps there are others that I have not seen. He appeared on television and was quoted in the newspapers in connection with the story about a member of the Canadian Armed Forces Reserves who was accused of recruiting for a supposed neo-Nazi organization. He was also quoted in reference to the sentencing of Dr. James Sears who had been found guilty of the promotion of hatred in his satirical Your Ward News. I am sure that few of you will be surprised to learn that rather than lamenting and decrying this latest blow to freedom of thought and expression, as any decent Canadian would, Farber expressed an attitude that struck me as being smug, self-satisfied, cocky, hubristic, and downright arrogant.
The third story is the one that really takes the cake. Grant Hunter is a member of Alberta’s provincial Legislative Assembly and a minister in the province’s government. He holds the portfolio for red tape reduction. I have not checked, but I suspect that Alberta is the only province in the Dominion with such a ministry. Since red tape is generated by bureaucracy, expanding the bureaucracy for the purpose of reducing it seems slightly counterproductive to me, but apparently Mr. Hunter is of another opinion. He has come under criticism for a tweet that said the following:
Wernher von Braun said, “To conquer the universe you’d have to solve two problems: gravity and red tape.” We’ve made it clear that we are committed to reducing red tape in Alberta. Lots more to come.
It is not the part of the tweet in which he toots his own ministry’s horn for which he has been criticized, but for the opening quotation. He removed the tweet after a bunch of triggered snowflakes jumped down his throat. A more appropriate response would have been to tell them to stuff it.
The objection to the quotation is based not upon what it says but upon who said it. Wernher von Braun was a German aerospace engineer – in layman’s terms that means rocket scientist. He turned twenty-one shortly after Adolf Hitler became Germany’s Chancellor in 1933 and in 1937, like any other German in those days who valued his professional career – the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the industrialist Oskar Schindler are other famous examples that come to mind – he joined the Nazi Party. He served the Third Reich in his professional capacity as one of the leading scientists in their rocket development program, and yes, the rockets were designed for military purposes rather than space exploration. Then, following the Reich’s defeat in 1945, he and several others who had worked under him were drafted by the United States government to serve their military in basically the same capacity. It was undoubtedly von Braun who was foremost in legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s mind when he made fun of the American government’s recruitment of scientists, engineers, and other technical experts from Nazi Germany in his hilarious 1964 dark comedy Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. However, von Braun served the United States much longer than he served the Third Reich and was essentially the architect of the American space program.
Unlike Bernie Farber, Wernher von Braun was a brilliant scientist who achieved great things, and until very recently the idea that he was tainted with the crimes of the government he worked for at the beginning of his career and that quoting him is some sort of grave moral offense would not have been taken seriously and anyone silly enough to propose it would have found himself laughed to scorn. Sadly, those days are behind us and so we find CBC News reporting on Hunter’s tweet, the silly backlash, and its removal, and sure enough, there is Bernie waiting and ready to toss his two cents in:
“It was an unnecessary quote,” said Bernie Farber, chair of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and former CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress.
“He’s at best a controversial figure. He is for sure a Nazi and … it was silly to quote a man like him. Politicians have to know better,” Farber said. “I just think it shows his [Hunter’s] thoughtlessness.”
…
Farber, whose organization monitors hate groups, said he doesn’t think people’s concerns about the quote’s use are being overblown. It would have been easy to quote a Canadian economist or another figure on the topic of red tape, he said.
“I just think [Hunter] should acknowledge he should have made a better choice in terms of who to quote and apologize,” Farber said. “That’s always the way forward out of things like this to acknowledge your mistake and move forward.”
Not a single one of these statements is accurate. Von Braun, at his best, was a genius, a pioneer in the field of rocket science, whose work laid the foundation of space exploration and gave subsequent generations a new heroic role model to add to policeman, soldier, and fireman – the astronaut. As for his being a Nazi, it would seem that English verb tenses are not Farber’s strong suit. The present tense is hardly appropriate for someone who has been dead for forty-two years and whose membership in the Nazi Party ended thirty-two years prior to his death. Perhaps Farber holds to a rather twisted version of Calvinism and believes “once a Nazi, always a Nazi.” It was not silly to quote von Braun, what is silly is Farber’s attitude about all of this. There is no indication here of any “thoughtlessness” on Hunter’s part, and there is absolutely no need for him to apologize. Indeed, there is a need for him, Hunter that is, not to apologize, because he is the victim of a form of bullying, and the true way forward in this situation is to refuse to apologize to people who do not deserve an apology and to tell them to take their manufactured offense and blow it out their ears.
If anyone should be apologizing over a quotation it ought to be the news media apologizing to the Canadian public for inflicting so many Bernie Farber quotes on us. By uncritically accepting him as the expert on hate and hate groups that he has appointed himself to be, much as the American media used to do with Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center [sic] before that organization’s reputation finally collapsed under allegations of hypocrisy, shady fundraising, serial defamation, and the like, they have lent him a credibility that in my opinion he does not deserve. Incidentally – or perhaps not, I’ll let readers judge for themselves – when Farber and Evan Balgord founded the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, of which Farber is chairman, last year it was with a start-up grant from the SPLC, and the organization, in a letter to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security that was signed by Farber and Balgord, along with two of its board members, said of itself “The organization is modeled after, and supported by, the esteemed Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in the United States.”
I first remember hearing the name Bernie Farber around the turn of the millennium. At the time the Liberal Party, headed by Jean Chretien, had been governing the Dominion since 1993 and their Immigration ministers had been trying to strip several elderly men of their citizenship and deport them. These were men of German and Ukrainian ethnicity, who had fled to Canada as refugees following the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War. They had been teenagers during the war and had been forced by the Nazis to serve the German forces in various auxiliary capacities, usually as interpreters but in some cases also as guards. On February 2, 1997, CBS aired an episode of 60 Minutes in which the main segment was entitled “Canada’s Dark Secret.” In this segment Mike Wallace interviewed a private investigator named Steven Rambam who claimed that Canada was a haven for Nazi war criminals. The Liberal government, in response, was trying to project an image of clamping down on Nazi war criminals and since there were no Adolf Eichmanns or Klaus Barbies at hand to prosecute they decided to pick on these men instead. Cheering them on at every turn was the Canadian Jewish Congress, which had hired Rambam and for which Bernie Farber worked as Executive Director for the Ontario Region and National Director of Community Relations. Later Farber was promoted to Chief Executive of the entire organization before it was taken over by the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy which soon after renamed itself the Centre for Jewish and Israel Affairs and dissolved the CJC. Farber had also been interviewed by Mike Wallace in the aforementioned 60 Minutes segment and in the controversy surrounding the attempted deportations was frequently quoted as supporting the government’s actions.
Peter Worthington, the late, great, founding editor of the Toronto Sun, went to bat for the elderly Ukrainians who were being so unjustly railroaded. He was particularly incensed over the cases of Wasyl Odynsky and Helmut Oberlander. Odynsky had been forced by the SS, during the German occupation of the Ukraine, to serve as a concentration camp guard. The Nazis told him they would kill him if he refused and would kill his family if he ran away. Oberlander, a Ukrainian of German ancestry, was forced by the Nazis to serve as a translator and supply guard for the Einsatzgruppe. Neither man served the Nazis voluntarily, nor was either of them an active participant in the war crimes of the Schutzstaffel. As Worthington put it in his column for April 29, 2001:
Men like Odynsky and Oberlander were victims, too – first of Sovietism which seized their country, then of the Nazis and now of a misguided quest for justice without discretion.
That column, entitled “Ukrainian Teens Were Nazi Victims” was written as a rebuttal of one by Bernie Farber that had appeared the previous day, itself in response to an earlier column by Worthington on the subject. Farber took the position that these men deserved to be deported, because even though they may not have tortured and murdered anyone themselves, their labour as translators and guards – forced labour, remember – enabled those who did commit these crimes. This is a particularly disgusting form of the fallacy of guilt by association and Worthington, quoting from Farber’s column, rightly, in my opinion, said “In my view, that statement by Farber is so wrong, mistaken and out of line, that it inadvertently demeans the Holocaust.”
This would not be the last time Worthington and Farber would lock horns on this subject and while Worthington always got the better of Farber the latter never retreated one iota from his position. In 2012, when Stephen Harper’s Immigration Minister Jason Kenney stripped Oberlander of his citizenship – one of many reasons why I have nothing but contempt for the present premier of Alberta – Farber told the Globe and Mail “It matters not if he was a translator or a cook – they were all part of the pirate ship and they helped oil the wheels of genocide.” Earlier this year, when the Federal Court of Appeal dismissed the 95 year old Oberlander’s motion to have the fourth (!) revocation of his citizenship overturned, Farber was again all over the news gloating and saying that he hoped the Liberal government would quickly deport him.
My point, if it is not obvious, is that someone who cannot tell the difference between the Nazi thugs who tortured and murdered civilians and kids who were forced by these same thugs to do their bidding, should not be taken seriously when he poses as an expert on Nazis and Nazism. Someone who for over twenty years acts as the head of the cheerleading squad while governments, Liberal and Conservative alike, try repeatedly to denaturalize and deport an elderly man, who has been a law-abiding subject of Her Majesty for his entire adult life, because the unit that he had been forced to serve by the invaders of his country of birth when he was still a teenager were responsible for war crimes, caring neither about the aforementioned difference nor the trauma being inflicted upon this man’s family, has absolutely no business whatsoever lecturing the rest of us about “hate.” When he throws a silly conniption about a government minister quoting the leading American aerospace engineer we should pay him no heed.
Good luck with the Nobel Prize, Bernie, but you can take your silly posturing and blow it out your ear!
One of the great contributions of President Donald Trump is to undermine and expose what he calls the lying media or the “fake news” media. Much of North America’s media is in the control of the Cultural Marxists or minority special interest groups. News, as I have argued for years, is not really news — that is,. the facts about what is happening, like the scores of last night’s hockey game — but, in fact, a soap opera, where there are good guys and bad guys and few in betweens. And, guess what, we in the nationalist or pro-freedom or populist movement are always the bad guys. Whatever the specific story might be, through labels and selective presentation of details, our side is presented as evil The reader or viewer is not presented with objective facts from which he or she can then form an opinion.
Here is a textbook example of soap opera false news journalism — a recent smear on me by the HAMILTON SPECTATOR, which, I would more properly dub as the EXPECTORATOR.
On March 19, THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR printed an article by Teviah Moro entitled “Paul Fromm investigated for posting of New Zealand shooter’s manifesto.”
The entire article is defamatory, misleading to the point of falsehood and utterly unprofessional. I demand a complete retraction.
The article has three elements: I posted Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto; there was a complaint about this; the Hamilton Police “hate crimes unit” is investigating.
I am the main focus of this article. Many details are given about me, all of a negative nature. However, I was never interviewed or asked to comment.
The headline itself clearly suggests that I agree with the shooter. Otherwise why would I post the manifesto.
The opening paragraph strengthens that impression by labelling me a “White supremacist”, The accused shooter has also been widely identified as a “White supremacist.” Interestingly, when one accesses this story on the SPECTATOR’S website, there is a link to an article announcing my candidacy for mayor last year correctly identifying me as a “White nationalist” (“Self proclaimed White nationalist Paul Fromm running for Mayor of Hamilton”). There is a profound difference. A nationalist wants to promote the interests of his people, in this case, the European people. A supremacist seeks to rule over or dominate others. I emphatically reject the “‘White Supremacist” label, as your reporter would have learned had she contacted me.
What is missing in the story is the vital information that I wrote an introduction before posting the manifesto and made it quite clear that I reject violence. I largely agreed with Tarant that European people are being replaced in their own countries by massive Third World immigration and that this is a bad thing. I urged peaceful discussion but pointed out that, in many Western nations, we are restricted by “hate laws” and other legal barriers. I warned that, when you silence the man of the pen, you must deal with the man of the sword. I attach the introduction as it appears on the CAFE website.
Did you reporter even look at the online post? If so, she’d have seen the story changing introduction: I do not support violence. If she didn’t look at the post, she’s incompetent and should be fired. If she did, she’s a deliberate liar by suppressing vital information and should be fired. Another media outlet, Global did interview me and got the story essentially correct,
The article is about me but never quotes me once. Whatever views I might have are explained by hostile sources. A paragraph in the version of this article that appeared in the Toronto Star quotes an American group, the Southern Poverty Law Centre. This group is discredited and notorious. It raises hundreds of millions of dollars from liberal donors by spreading hyperventilating accusations of “hate” against many people and groups on the right of the political spectrum. It has been successfully sued by its victims on a number of occasions. It recently fired its co-founder and longtime board member Morris Dees for persistent sexual harassment of Centre employees. Yet, the Star version of the article quotes the SPLC as saying the Canadian Association for Free Expression of which I am the Director defends “anti-Semites, racists and Holocaust deniers.” Yes, we support anyone whose rights to free speech are being impinged. Over the years, we’ve also defended Little Sisters bookstore in Vancouver which was being harassed by Canada Customs for importing homosexual and lesbian publications. We opposed efforts by pro-censorship groups to keep Minister Lewis Farrakhan out of Canada for a series of talks, some years ago. Again, fairness involving an interview with me would have provided a different perspective.
The article reeks of bias. I am described and defined only through the words of mortal enemies of free speech.
The only details about me in the article are those calculated to be negative, with no balance provided by a reaction or explanation I might have made, had I been asked.
The article is a defamatory hatchet job. It is utterly unfair to me and misleading to the HAMILTONSPECTATOR’s readers.
I demand a retraction and want to hear from you by week’s end.
Sincerely yours,
Paul Fromm
INTRODUCTION TO BRENTON TERRANT’S NEW ZEALAND MANIFESTO PUBLISHED ON THE CAFE WEBSITE]
[For years, I have warned human rights tribunals and others: “When you silence the men of the word, you will have to deal with the men of the sword.” When debate and dissent are silenced by “hate laws” you make violence almost inevitable. Sadly, that seems to be what happened in New Zealand with the alleged shooter’s killing of some 49 Moslems at two Christ Church area mosques.
Such repression has choked immigration and historical debate in almost all West European nations and, of course, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Canada has its notorious “”hate law” — Sec. 319 of the Criminal Code, which saw Don Andrews, an immigration critic, jailed in the 1970s. Brad Love got 18 months for writing fierce but non-threatening letters to 20 MPs and other public officials. Most recently, a humourless Toronto judge in the fine Puritan tradition of banned in Boston, found Dr. James Sears and Leroy St. Germaine guilty for satire targetting Jews and radical feminists. This vile hate law was enacted after years of Jewish lobby pressure. Jewish lobby groups have stoutly supported it and other anti-free speech measures in Canada. I have seen the human wreckage caused by Richard Warman’s use a decade ago of SEC. 13 (Internet censorship) of the Canadian Human Rights Act — fines, bank accounts looted, lifetime gags and even jail time. Oh, yes, and truth in such “human rights” cases was no defence — only the feelings or perceived possible hatred or contempt directed at privileged minorities.
Many European countries, especially Germany, have laws criminalizing criticism of the Hollywood version of World War II — or the new secular religion of holocaust. Dissent from Islam in Saudi Arabia and you can get lashed and/or imprisoned; dissent from the new religion of holocaust in Germany and you can be beggared and jailed.
Here is the manifesto of Brenton Terrant, the alleged shooter in New Zealand. His analysis of the crisis we face is cogent. In Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, we ARE being invaded and replaced by Third World aliens. This is not the result of having lost a war. It is the result of the cold blooded, White-hating policies of our political elites. The European indigenous people of Europe and the European founding/settler people of North America, Australia and New Zealand are being replaced by policy. This is planned genocide and will see its fulfillment before the end of this century. Hate laws in Canada have made this mortal threat to us as a people hard even to discuss. Critics of our genocidal immigration policies have been marginalized. Our trust fund kid prime minister who has never passed a Gay Pride Parade without participating refused to meet with a truck convoy of protesters in February because they included some members of the Yellow Vest movement which had criticized our immigration policies. One of several reasons Trudeau reneged on his 2015 election promise to change our electoral system to the more representative proportional representation model was the far of having some White nationalists elected to Parliament. Thus, a significant segment of Canadian political opinion is silenced, marginalized and unrepresented BY POLICY.
When you silence dissent, you invite violence.
I disagree with the violence indulged in by the shooter. It is not the way to go, but our vile elites have made it all but inevitable
BREAKING: The far-left smear factory Southern Poverty Law Center is laying off staff, according to its union. The move comes one week after SPLC smeared a record number of mainstream conservatives as “hate” and “antigovernment extremist” groups.
https://t.co/buYLyxvxnR pic.twitter.com/rWZDsAUidM
