scaramouche

Monday, 02 November 2009

Still searching for scary Nazis in the age of “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!”: Welcome to the CJC’s redesigned website. And don’t forget to click on the “Hate Speech” link, so you can get a fix on where the Ceej’s head is at, censorship-wise (i.e. lodged firmly up its backside):

Conclusion

As of this writing, the matter has not yet been resolved, but Canadian Jewish Congress has always maintained that the importance of section 13 lies in its ability to condemn formally expressions of hatred and to prevent their spread, rather than financially punishing the person who makes such statements.

Finally, there are those who observe, with seeming seriousness, that pre-Hitler Germany also had strict laws against hate speech but that these laws were insufficient to prevent the Holocaust. Thus, according to their reasoning, hate speech laws are useless and should be revoked. This is poor logic and poor history.

John Bookbinder, in his study of Weimar Germany, observes that “anti-Socialist or antisemitic violence, or for that matter inflammatory speech or writing, was dealt with harshly by the police and the judiciary” during the Wilhelmine era. We need to recognize that it was only during the post-war period of Weimar when German society – brutalized by the slaughter of the war, shocked by the unexpected defeat in the field, angered by the (perceived) punitive imposition of Versailles, abandoned by its Imperial traditions, and left unprotected by the collapse of the fragile democracy – plunged into social chaos. In the violence of the period that preceded the rise of Nazism, the legal system itself was a victim. To compare the situation of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to present-day Canada is ludicrous.

Hateful speech has shown itself to be a necessary, if not sufficient precursor to acts of genocide and to the creation of systems of human misery that have spanned continents and generations.

The discourse of intolerance, repeated over generations, caused slavery to be seen as a normal state of affairs. Indeed, in the United States, it took war, not rational argument, to end it.

As for the Nazis, it took generations of repetition and elaboration of antisemitic tropes before they became self-evident.

As Alexander Tsesis has observed, “the ideology was so deeply entrenched that it seemed logical to them to round up Jews, put them in concentration camps and eventually try to exterminate them.” How is it that ideas that seem abhorrent today were the conventional wisdom of a few decades ago?

We cannot – and dare not – be insensitive to the power of language and its ability to shape our thoughts and behaviours. We ignore the power of language at our peril.

The problem with this line of thinking, of course, is that while “Nazi” language may be verboten in Pierre’s Trudeaupia, craven and/or clueless authorities have already signalled that it’s hands off when it comes to Islamic “antisemitic tropes”--and those are the ones that actually imperil us.

Kind of hard to make a case for censorship on that basis.

Update: What the...? The old site has made a stunning reappearance. Is the new one being rejigged in light of the Tsesis screw-up, perchance?

Update: Lucky a quick-thinking kitty took a screenshot for posterity.

Update: It's ba-ack with the hate speech spiel intact.

Update: Along with eradicating hate via HRCs and criminal "hate speech" laws, the Ceej wants the government to do away with poverty. Like, completely.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:42 | link | comments (5)

Comments:

#1 02 November 2009 - 12:02

Ha Ha "Specious Tsesis" was debunked by professor Anuj Desai, http://ezralevant.com/2008/05/tsesis-thesis-torn-to-pieces.html

Anonymous

#2 02 November 2009 - 12:14

I'd call the Ceej's entire analysis "specious." Also short-sighted bordering on the demented. Can't anyone at the Ceej see the bigger picture--resurgent Islam in its OIC guise working hard to snuff out free speech worldwide? The Ceej's obsession with swastikas and Nanaimo Nazis amounts to a hill of beans in this crazy world.