Hate Propaganda

"Here in Canada when we're talking about hate speech, it's a balance between freedom of speech and our hate propaganda laws. So the threshold for hate was very, very high.
"It actually doesn't even come close to meeting the threshold for promoting hate. Certain language is offensive, or could be considered offensive, but police are not about censoring language. We have to deal with the law."
Eric Levesque, hate crimes co-ordinator, Calgary Police Service

Fair enough. And we do, after all, as a civil and civilized society value our freedom to speak our mind, to discuss matters that seem often unpleasant to others, to air our views about multitudinous subjects, some innocuous enough, and others controversial and certain to upset some groups because it assaults their sensibilities to hear of attitudes and beliefs that are clearly pejorative in nature, affecting them intimately.

In the instance of the muslimsofcalgary.ca website and the sometimes slanderous bent their conversations take, it is just as well to remember that they are preaching, as it were, to the convinced. Who else would make use of a website that denigrates another ethnic and religious group? If statements like the one asserting a long-standing connection between Jews and Freemasons representing a global conspiracy to destroy world religions don't disgust the reader, they confirm what they already believe.

Or would like to believe. There is, after all, the authority of reading it on a readily-accessible website. Those who read such trash and make haste to clasp it close to their bosom of understanding about how the world turns, are prepared to believe it because it repeats a slander that fits right in with their world - or in this case, religious - view. In other words, a very specific and very committed audience.

In responding to a complaint by the ever-vigilant B'nai Brith, the Calgary Police Service did what they are tasked to do; they entered the portals of the website to peruse its contents and made their expert peace-and-security diagnostic revelation that the offending contents merely represent an example of free speech at work.

The use of common sense is valuable here; if you see trash, you ignore it. If it is trash it won't have a wide acceptance.

People with fastidious minds and attitudes, respectful of others and comfortable living in a multi-ethnic-religious-heritage pluralistic society as equals have no use for such garbage; no one of moderate intelligence would want to make use of such social offal. Mind, it would be difficult to have any kind of respect for a religious group that on their site make the claim that Jews are debauched and "immoral".

In posting such sentiments they demonstrate their credentials as morons. That The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has pride of place on the website is simply a glaring representation of their general lack of discriminating intelligence.

"All we want at this point is to raise awareness about this kind of rhetoric in this kind of climate. We feel there needs to be renewed vigilance ... we know where this path leads", explained Anita Bromberg, national director of legal affairs for B'nai Brith. Understandably, Jews are particularly sensitive to any and all indications of anti-Semitism.

And it is a human affliction that is none too rare. Leading to conditions that may veer its adherents to other, more harmful and sometimes lethally destructive avenues of working out their morbid unreasoning hatred. Ms. Bromberg, however, can consider her work well done.

We are alerted.