Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Manipulating Democratic Freedoms

One supposes it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that Islamic and Arab groups purporting to represent the majority opinion and needs of Muslims living in liberal democracies like Canada have recognized that the tools to corrupt the guaranteed freedom of expression are available to them through the subversion of the original designs of Canada’s Human Rights Commissions.

Those quasi-legal bodies whose original function was to protect the civic, legal entitlements of visible minorities in situations of discrimination in the workplace and in social settings such as denial of accommodation due to racial prejudice.

Canada has in place a set of legal hate-law guarantees through which charges can be made when required, and a legal suit brought against promoters of discriminatory hate against minorities in a court of law. It should be recognized as being beyond the mandate of Human Rights Commissions to investigate and present determinations with respect to the promulgation of hate against visible minorities.

Yet various Muslim and Arab organizations have taken it upon themselves to register complaints with federal and provincial commissions because it costs them nothing. And in the process the reputations of people and entities accused of hate-mongering are deleteriously impacted upon, their lives disrupted, and they must pick up any costs associated with defending themselves whereas the complainants have a free ride, courtesy of the Canadian taxpayer.

The organized Islamic groups taking umbrage at perceived slights against their religion feel fully justified in manipulating the right to freedom of expression under the apprehension that they can, so they do. They also support the isolation of the Canadian Muslim society from the rest of society in their ongoing complaints about Islamophobia and their harsh criticisms of anyone who questions their fundamentalist Islamic ideals.

Not all Muslims feel complacent about this appropriation of their voice by groups who claim to represent their best interests. Canadian Muslims like Tarek Fatah, who co-founded the reformist Muslim Canadian Congress, regularly criticize groups like the Canadian Islamic Congress, and their anti-Canadian agendas at their peril. Yet they do continue to criticize the oppositional direction and the trajectory taken by these fundamentalist groups.

With the full understanding that the Islamists in the Canadian population are using western values and guarantees of freedom for their own purposes; taking the direction of attacking those values in the pretense that they’re inimical to the well-being and comfort of groups such as themselves, claiming to be the targets of hate crimes. Tarek Fatah points out his utter exasperation at the situation whereby Islamist groups have been partially successful in muffling the voices of free speech.

He is vocal in criticizing the lax attitude of Canadian politicians, loathe to defend traditional Canadian freedoms of expression in the very real fear of being labelled racist themselves. Bending backwards to ensure they don’t offend the prickly pretensions of the fundamentalist Muslim groups, they permit themselves to be silenced, blackmailed into compliance.

Critics of Islam who are not Muslim are awarded the nomenclature of Islamophobes, while Muslims critical of the offensive backwardness of Islamists are labelled apostates. Which, Mr. Fatah points out, is the equivalent of issuing a fatwah, having the decided effect of issuing a “hidden death threat”. He should know, he’s received them, and he’s been on the receiving end of physical violence as well for his forthright outspokenness.

Canadian Muslim groups have taken a page out of the success of such international organizations as the Organization of the Islamic Conference, in its successful manipulation of United Nations institutions, to ensure that their message is on track and that their aggressive labelling of a singular nation as a racist entity is approved and echoed through the auspices of the UN Human Rights Commissions.

Anti-Semitism successfully practised through an highly visible and ostensibly legitimate creation of the United Nations, set up for the purpose of defending human rights; completely suborned to the racist and belligerent needs of Islamic groups. How's that for the ultimate manipulation and corruption of a human-rights-representative body? If it works, repeat it elsewhere.

Turn it around and use it as a defence. It's past time that Liberal MP Keith Martin's private member bill to eliminate Canada's human rights commissions, or at the very least, take away their self-entitled mandate to accept all accusations of hate speech as part of their purpose for existence. Should they be kept intact and insist on hearing and investigating such cases, some signal changes should take place.

The accused should be given all the information available to the commissions, including the names of their accusers. Enabling them to defend themselves. Costs associated with lodging complaints should not be borne by the taxpayer, but should be billed to the accuser. Defendants who succeed in defending themselves should have their costs restored. If commissions insist on pursuing these avenues, they should be tasked with doing so with due process under the law.

That might just persuade accusers to refrain from launching their flimsy and self-serving civil-rights complaints and investigations at no cost to themselves. They have the right, under Canadian law, to launch formal criminal prosecutions, to hire lawyers and underwrite the costs associated with legal proceedings in a Canadian court of law. They might then, re-evaluate the substance of their complaints.

Which are undeniably unsubstantive in true measure, and amount to deliberately nasty mischief.

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