Canadian Freedom of Speech

The international community is aghast at the carnage that Islamists wreaked in Paris in the past several days. From the commando-style attack on the news offices of Charlie Hebdo, to the murders of several police officers, to the hostage-taking at the kosher supermarket, a total of some twenty innocent people were killed, one a Muslim police officer; journalists, cartoonists, innocent bystanders and of course in the end, the Islamist jihadis were themselves martyred as per their wishes.

The Charlie Hebdo attack was the result of the virulent offence that fundamentalist Islamists and not-so-fundamentalist Muslims alike take when they view their sacred symbols being mocked. They need not, in fact, be made objects of scorn to begin with, the very notion that one could sketch a likeness of Prophet Mohammed is enough to send Muslims into paroxysms of mindless rage and violence.

The second attack in Paris was by a collaborative pair of Muslims, colleagues of the pair of French-born Muslims of Algerian extraction who had conducted the atrocity at the news office, and their target was representative of Islamist hatred for Jews. Islamists are bidden through their Salafist fanaticism and their Wahhabist clerics to hate just about anything that isn't pure Islam, and anyone who doesn't worship as they do, including other Muslims.

It seems obvious enough that the most basic value held dear in Western democratic liberal societies is that of free speech, signifying the kind of liberty that is unknown in countries dominated by Islamic tyrannies. In the West free speech is held up as the banner under which democratic values are demonstrated leading to all the other freedoms we value as our cultural heritage and social contract guaranteeing our human rights.

Still, free speech goes only so far before we pull back and declare it to slip the forbidden boundary into hate speech. The trajectory from free speech to hate speech is not all that well defined; but we do recognize it when we hear or see it and to qualify as hate speech it has to be really hateful; not questioning but condemning in the most explicit and denigrating terms. We are so proud of our upholding of free speech that we use it as a symbol of all that makes us superior in our freedoms to those people living under oppressive tyrannies.

Eric Brazau was handed a one year jail term for denouncing the Koran on a Toronto subway   YouTube

Yet in Toronto, a man who is considered a social crank with an agenda, but perhaps is not, who publicly condemns Islam, and who took it upon himself to launch what he termed a 'social experiment' by enlisting the aid of two acquaintances to harangue people using the Toronto subway has been convicted of hate speech, and imprisoned. His intention, this man whose name is Eric Brazau, to provoke among subway passengers a debate about Islam.

Needless to say, among those peopling the subway station there were Muslims as well as non-Muslims, and a young Muslim student approached Mr. Brazau to protest that he had come to Canada to escape that kind of controversy; he "left my country to come to a peaceful place". The peaceful place that is Canada has been somewhat less peaceful with the entrance of Muslims on quite the populous scale, some of whom have intrigued to jihad, planning atrocities that were apprehended.

Which appears to be Mr. Brazau's point; he engaged with people in loud, argumentative conversations relating to how he perceived the Koran, Islam, and Muslims. Annoying subway passengers hugely, no doubt. He was charged, his experiment to provoke debate among riders come to an end. The Israeli colours and Israeli flag he and his friends were decked out in, while denouncing Islam and the Koran concluded by authorities.

Ontario Court Judge Gerald Lapkin convicted Mr. Brazau of breach of the peace, causing a disturbance and breaching probation on an earlier hate-mongering conviction. "You had a ticket to ride", said the justice, "Not a pass to harass". Sounds like the judge was a bit of a smart-ass himself, in fact. Amazingly, the judge handed down a total sentence of 20 months for the three convictions, leaving this man behind bars for a year since he had already served time in pre-trial custody.

So much for civil guarantees of freedom of expression. Social pests pay dearly for their transgressions within society, harassing subway riders. Particularly with the no-go subject of Islamism, because these are people, this demographic that we embrace, that are emphatically sensitive about being linked with the Islam that dominates the terrorist conversation at home and abroad.