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THE COLLINS COLUMN, February 9, 2001
ON RIGHTS AND BLIGHTS by Doug Collins "THE world has grown so bad that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch." - Richard III.
DICK the King had it right. But things are worse now, seeing that speech can be trimmed when it is "demonstrably justifiable" to do so, which is to say at the whim of politicians and pressure groups. It is enough to make any decent eagle apply for refugee status in the U.S. Nevertheless, it is possible that here in the Sikh-led Republic of British Columbia the eagles are about to rebel. For, wonder of wonders, the human rights critic in the Opposition Liberal Party has just denounced the rights maniacs for their "goofy decisions". "There is," says Geoff Plant, who is likely to become attorney general when the NDP wrens get their deserts in the coming election, "a long string of human rights [tribunal] decisions that diminishes the idea of human rights rather than elevates it." The goofiest of all was made recently by tribunalist Tom Patch, who awarded a guy $30,000 because the poor chap said that putting poinsettias in the front of the store at Christmas was against his religion, and that in being told to do so he was being discriminated against. I am not making this up. The complainant was a Jehovah's Witness and the Witnesses do not observe Christmas. He left his job, and Patch gave him the thirty grand for "hurt feelings" and lost wages. In un-British Columbia there is no appeal against such decisions. So the store owner has to pay up. Accustomed though I am to the frolics of the human rights gang and their kangaroo courts, this one made even me blink. But blinking in this neck of the woods is as common as colds. In another case, a professor was fined $13,000 for creating a "sexual environment". His sin was to put on a dinner complete with candles, etc. for a multicult student who came to his house to discuss her course work. Her credibility was not exactly great and he was not accused of sticking his tongue in her mouth or anything juicy like that. Then there was the guy who weighed 300 pounds, was hired by phone, but was then told he was too big for the job. He was awarded $3,500 for those hurt feelings and $7,750 for lost wages and expenses. Not to mention the transsexual who got compensation for being denied access to the ladies' loo! There are myriad similar awards, hurt feelings having replaced heart attacks as our most popular disease. But they are the very stuff of "human rights". As Stephen Harper, the former Reform Party MP has pointed out, "Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of democratic society. It is in fact totalitarianism, and I find this very scary stuff." ON account of having written the wrong opinions, I have been the target of two complaints by Organized Jewry, the most famous or infamous of which was a critique of the movie Schindler's List (I called it Swindler's List). Heretic that I am, I said that the story of the six million Jewish deaths in Germany was vastly exaggerated and that it was being used to pump money out of anyone who can be fingered. Jewish author Norman Finkelstein has recently put it in even stronger terms, calling it blackmail and an outright racket. I also pointed out that Hollywood is controlled by Jews, hence the never-ending stream of Holocaust propaganda films. The first complaint was dismissed. The second, which included the original column along with three others, found me in the stocks. The North Shore News, in which the pieces apeared, was fined $2,000 and ordered to print the decision in full, an attack on freedom of the press unheard of in the history of Canada. I was also instructed to be politically correct in future, an injunction that I have ignored. Ever out of step, I put the offending items in a compendium of columns in book form, and am now trying to fight this Republic's rights law in court. Needless to say, Premier Ujjal Dosanjh and his lot are fighting tooth and nail to keep it out of court. Will the B.C. Liberal Party really do something? I am not holding my breath. If it does, well and good. If it doesn't, the legal battle for free expression goes on. It is encouraging that word about these blights on the body politic is getting around. The Liberal statement got front page news in The Vancouver Sun, complete with a picture of the unhappy looking lesbian who heads the Human Rights Commission. It also gave some examples of goofy decisions under the headline "B.C. human rights process faces uncertain future". Even though my case involves freedom of the press, it was not mentioned, a fact which, being perhaps of paranoid propensities, I put down to my not being a hero to David Radler, the Jewish gent who controls Pacific Press. Onward and upward. | |
write to David Irving |
Then
there was the guy who weighed 300 pounds, was hired
by phone, but was then told he was too big for the
job. He was awarded $3,500 for those hurt feelings
and $7,750 for lost wages and
expenses.
