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You might not think so from reading
the mainstream media, but it is so.
After wasting two years of public
money on peering into whether Bernard
Klatt of Oliver had been spreading
“hatred” as an Internet server, the
guardians of our political morality have
decided they had nothing on him.
“We consulted with the experts in
the industry, both public and private,
to ensure we had exhausted every
possible avenue,” said the
appropriately named Corporal Grant
Learned of the RCMP in announcing that
the cops and Klatt’s Jewish accusers
had scored no goals.
Sol Littman of the “Nazi-hunting”
Simon Wiesenthal Centre was the one who
started this caper. In
1998 he captured the hearts and minds of
the media by claiming that Oliver was
“the hate capital of Canada”.
Littman has made many other
excursions into falsehood. In
1984 he claimed that Dr. Josef Mengele,
he of of Auschwitz, had applied to come
to Canada as a landed immigrant and
might have arrived.
That piece of fiction led to the
Deschene Commission on war criminals
that cost millions, plus a useless and
even more costly hunt for them. But a
government that can waste a billion
bucks in handing out grants to friends
and phonies would never worry about such
small stuff. It is more interested in
pleasing the pressure group paradiddlers.
Threatened
with a lawsuit, Littman withdrew his
statement while claiming in a kind of
conjuring trick that he had never said
it. The guy makes more claims than were
made during the Klondike gold rush.
Hot on the hate trail, the media went
into a feeding frenzy when it was known
that Klatt was organizing a “hands
off the Internet” meeting in Oliver
City Hall. Paul Fromm of the Canadian
Association for Free Expression and
I agreed to speak in defence of
Klatt’s rights. I had never seen any
of the material Littman was bitching
about but I recognize a censor when I
see one.
“Oliver awaits the hate,” was the
Vancouver Sun’s headline. Much the
same garbage was carried in the public
prints in Oliver and the rest of the
Okanagan. Mayor Linda Larson and her
council got the shakes and cancelled
Klatt’s meeting room.
Whereupon
we extremists decided that the event
would be held on the city hall steps.
More press fever. “Racists
challenge the decent people of
Oliver,” was the fatuous editorial
headline in the Sun. “B.C. town gives
the boot to far right,” gloated the
Globe. |
The
cops were there in force. So were the
commies and their liberal accomplices.
Meanwhile, members of the wayward media
almost outnumbered our modest gathering
— modest because a lot of people who
intended to come either thought the
meeting had been cancelled or were
scared off.
I
spoke for 25 minutes, giving a
review of the attacks on free speech in
this happy land of ours. Paul
Fromm spoke on the same theme.
Dangerous stuff!
Predictably, not a word of what we
had to say in our speeches was reported,
and if any public person had anything to
say in favor of free expression it must
have been lost in cyberspace.
In these enlightened times, you see,
“free speech” equals hate speech.
That’s why the term always appears in
inverted commas.
As was to be expected, the CBC
was tops in slanting the story.
Half way through my dull but detailed
peroration a demented woman started
screaming something about blacks and
other victims of our vicious society. I
had to stop talking for a few minutes
while she hyperventilated. And when the
Oliver story was run on CBC Newsworld,
she was featured prominently, with
reporter Terry Milewski turning to the
camera and saying:
“She’s talking about Doug
Collins, who says the Holocaust was
Jewish propaganda.”
I had not even mentioned the
Holocaust. And in fact I have never said
any such thing. What I had said, in my
1994 column, which has been the subject
of two human wrongs tribunals, was that
the never-ending stream of Hollywood
movies on the Holocaust was propaganda.
Which is a different matter.
I complained to the CBC Ombudsman
about that piece of gross reporting and
six months later he
found in my favor. “Your complaint
is justified,” he declared. As well he
might.
Why did it take him so long? Because
CBC News and its pressure group
accomplices had put under a microscope
everything I had said or written since
the mid-1980s without coming up with
such a quote.
Attorney General Ujjal Dosanjh — my
friend — chose to get in on the act.
On the same day that the Oliver meeting
took place he organized a demonstration
in Surrey, attended by a couple of
hundred of his fellow East Indians, plus
a number of white dupes.
“Give us stronger hate laws,” was
Democrat Dosanjh’s theme. “Bring
them into the 21st Century.”
As I say, another hate balloon has
gone pop. Not that you would know it
from the Vancouver Sun, the Globe &
Mail, or CBC TV news. Unless it was
hidden in the truss ads, that is. |
