FREE  SPEECH:  (PART  3)

 

The text that has a white background is merely an anomaly in the printing.

 

Arthur Topham, a 65-year-old miner from Quesnel, British Columbia, Canada is facing hate-speech charges following years of complaints over his website, which refers to those of Jewish faith as snakes and Zionists. Zionism is a form of nationalism of Jews and Jewish culture that supports a Jewish nation state in territory defined as the Land of Israel so being called a Zionist is not necessary evil however,  using the word for a derogatory purpose is a crime.

 

On May 16, 2012, Topham was arrested while on his way to work by Detective-Constable Terry Wilson and members of the British Columbia Hate Crime Team. They were accompanied by some local RCMP officers who assisted in the arrest. He was charged with one count of willful promotion of hatred promoting hatred against an identifiable group (the Jews) following a six-month criminal investigation into the content on his website, Radical Press. He was charged under section 318 of the Criminal Code of Canada which forbids hate propaganda.

 

He was then handcuffed and taken to Quesnel’s RCMP jail where he was incarcerated for twelve hours. The RCMP (a federal police force) handles all police duties in small towns in British Columbia.

 

Complaints against Topham’s Radical Press first surfaced in 2007 when Harry Abrams of Victoria, B.C., and Ottawa lawyer Richard Warman (who regularly files complaints about racist websites.) filed a grievance against Topham with the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

 

The complaint originally ended up getting bogged down in uncertainty over the law, so the police began investigating the case last spring. The Police assumed sole responsibility for investigating hate crimes complaints about websites after the federal government voted in June 2012 to repeal a law that had previously allowed the rights commission to deal with such matters.

 

Abrams, a volunteer with the Jewish advocacy group B’nai B’rith Canada, said, “There’s a place for opinion and a place for discourse. When you have hate propaganda, it’s generally a one-sided thing that cannot be answered to.” Topham’s lawyer, Doug Christie (who in the past has represented similar defendants) told the TV show, 24 hours that Canada’s hate-speech laws are “instruments of oppression” and there’s no evidence to support the idea that anything someone says promotes violence.

 

I take issue with that last remark. Two white supremacists arrested in the fall of 2008 for plotting a racist shooting spree and assassination attempt on Barack Obama were reportedly introduced to each other by a mutual friend on a social networking website.

 

Hate mongers are finding new and creative ways to spread their message. Many online newspapers allow readers to post hate comments after some of their articles have been published. Extremists are taking advantage of these open online venues to post anti-Semitic and racist comments, often completely unrelated to the articles to which they are attached.

 

Doug Christie says that nobody has to look up Mr. Topham’s website unless they want to go out of their way to be offended. That is another silly statement. People can inadvertently come across such a website when they go to Google and type in certain words in hopes of finding another website they are actually looking for. Further, the real danger is that young people who are easily influenced may be swayed by the writings of hate mongers they find in such websites.

 

In his website, Topham has posted references to conspiracy theory themes such as the Biological Jew and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

The Biological Jew book depicts Jews as parasites that suck the blood from their “host” societies while the Protocols book is a silly book that purports to describe a conspiracy for worldwide Jewish domination.

Warman has correctly said, “When you’ve got that kind of just rabid attack against the Jewish community I think it’s incumbent on people to stand up in society.”

When the police arrested Topham and questioned him on May 16, according to a transcript of his police interview that was posted online, he asked the investigating officer, Det. Const. Terry Wilson of the B.C. Hate Crime Team, whether he had been trained in Tel Aviv or whether Mossad had come to Canada to train him. He then lectured the officer about how Jews “control what you’re doing” and said they had “created the unit you’re working for.” He even asked the officer if he was a Christian and scolded him for what he was doing.

 

Read this incredibly stupid statement that spewed from this jerk’s mouth when he said to the officer, “These guys have spent the last 2,000 years trying to destroy our religion, and you like a Judas are out here like a, like one of their dogs chasing down people who are trying to defend the Christian religion.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

Doug Christie, Mr. Topham’s defence lawyer, asked if he wanted to comment, responded: “Opposition to Zionism should not be illegal.”

But what Topham had written in his website isn’t protected by free speech legislation that actually gives him the right to object publicly about the politics behind Israel’s decisions. He is referring instead to age-old canards that intend to raise our concerns about Jews per se so as to spread hatred towards Jews in general.

Mr. Topham announced after he had been charged by portraying himself on his website as a defender of free speech and then he asked for donations. He then followed up that request by presenting to his readers his the asinine statement in his website; “Judging from the wording of this indictment it looks like it’s going to be a battle between the Christians and the Jews.” There is no battle going on between the Christians and Jews. Admittedly, there appears to be an ongoing confrontation between Moslems in some countries and Jews but a battle between Christians and Jews? Give me a break. 

Extremists have taken advantage of the open forums and venues on the Internet, as well as new technologies, to promote their bigoted ideology. Whereas hate mongers once had to stand on street corners and hand out mimeographed leaflets to passersby, the Internet has allowed extremists to access a potential audience of millions — including impressionable youth. It has even facilitated communication among like-minded bigots across borders and oceans, anonymously. During the period between the years 2005-2008; white supremacists spread their hate messages and recruited new members through the use of social networking on mainstream sites. Thousands of white supremacists have flocked to these sites, which allow them to link to other individuals much more easily than web-based forums or discussion groups. This is where the danger lies.

 

Here are some of Topham’s quotes;

 

“Hitler is no more to be blamed for this German war than was the Kaiser for the last one. Nor Bismarck before the Kaiser. These men did not originate or wage Germany’s wars against the world. They were merely the mirrors reflecting centuries-old inbred lust of the German nation for conquest and mass murder.” unquote

 

Isn’t he aware that Hitler marched into almost all of the European countries and even when he signed a treaty with Russia, he marched into Russia and then later, he declared war against the United States without just cause?

 

Is writing such a statement in one’s blog against the law? Of course it isn’t. There is no law that says that you can be charged with a crime for uttering asinine statements so long as they are not advocating a form of hatred for a race of people while advocating violence or genocide against them.

 

But this narrows the issue down to this question, “Can we be convicted for writing a statement that suggests that a particular country is worthy of everyone’s contempt?” No. For example, it is not illegal to condemn Iran, Syria, or North Korea as a nation with respect to their abuse of human rights but it would be certainly improper to condemn its people per se.  I am aware that during the Second World War, we referred to the people of Japan by calling them dirty Japs and the Germans as dirty Krauts because during those war years, we were inflamed by the actions of what their countrymen were doing to innocent persons in the nations they had subjugated. These two nations are now and have been for almost three-quarters of a century peaceful and are trading partners with us so it follows that it would be highly improper for us to use the same words against the people of those two nations nowadays that we previously had used when we were at war with them. But would it be illegal?  Apparently not.

 

Years ago, an Alberta high school teacher, James Keegstra, was charged under section 319(2) of the Canadian Criminal Code with willfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group by communicating anti-Semitic statements to his students. The matter ended up before the Supreme Court of Canada. The majority ruled by stating;

 

“Communications which wilfully promote hatred against an identifiable group are protected by section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights. When an activity conveys or attempts to convey a meaning, through a non-violent form of expression, it has expressive content and thus falls within the scope of the word "expression" as found in the guarantee. The type of meaning conveyed is irrelevant. Section 2(b) protects all content of expression.” unquote

 

But does Section 319(2) of the Code constitute a reasonable limit upon freedom of expression? Parliament's objective of preventing the harm caused by hate propaganda surely must be of sufficient importance to warrant overriding a constitutional freedom.

 

Although we can’t read the minds of the parliamentarians who passed the legislation but did they recognize the substantial harm that can flow from hate propaganda and, in trying to prevent the pain suffered by target group members and to reduce racial, ethnic and religious tension and perhaps even violence in Canada, they decided to suppress the willful promotion of hatred against identifiable groups by recognizing that such legislation would be contrary to Canada’s Charter of Rights? 

 

Section 319(2) of the Code does not unduly impair freedom of expression. This section does not suffer from vagueness; rather, the terms of the offence indicate that Section 319(2) possesses definitional limits which act as safeguards to ensure that it will capture only expressive activity which is openly hostile to Parliament's objective, and will thus attack only the harm at which the prohibition is targeted.

 

The freedom to express oneself openly and fully is of crucial importance in a free and democratic society and it has been recognized by Canadian courts prior to the enactment of the Charter and after the Charter. But surely there has to be some limitations. The freedom of expression has been seen as an essential value of Canadian parliamentary democracy. This freedom was thus protected by the Canadian judiciary to the extent possible before its entrenchment in the Charter and after the Charter and occasionally it even appeared to take on the guise of a constitutionally protected freedom.

 

Hate propaganda contributes little to the aspirations of Canadians or Canada by either the quest for truth, the promotion of individual self‑development or the protection and fostering of a vibrant democracy where the participation of all individuals is accepted and encouraged.

 

Apart from rare cases where expression is communicated in a physically violent form, the Courts have viewed the fundamental nature of the freedom of expression as ensuring that "if the activity conveys or attempts to convey a meaning, it has expressive content and prima facie falls within the scope of the guarantee. In other words, the term "expression" as used in section 2(b) of the Charter embraces all content of expression irrespective of the particular meaning or message sought to be conveyed.

 

The school board that hired Keegstra would be justified in firing him since it wouldn’t be in the best interests of the school, their students, their student’s parents and society in general for a teacher to promote hatred for an identifiable group—which is in fact what they did.  However, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in his favour. He had the right to say what he said to his students.

 

During November 2012 in the City of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the police concluded an investigation to determine if the teaching materials in madrassah’s syllabus books in an Islamic school were in conflict with the ant-hate laws in Canada. They discovered phrases on the school’s madrassah website that referred to Jews as being “treacherous” and “crafty” and it implied that Jews were no different than Nazis. The police concluded that although the phrases were inappropriate, they weren’t criminal. The president of the mosque reviewed the report and later said that the inappropriate phrases had been removed. He also said, “Our teachings embrace and celebrate the Canadian values of tolerance, understanding and harmony.”

 

Now with respect to the pending trial of Arthur Topham, it is difficult to say what the outcome will be because I don’t know exactly what he wrote that specifically necessitated him being charged under Canada’s hate law. As soon as I am apprised of the final outcome, I will place that information at the end of this article as an update. However, our courts take a long time before they hear cases so we may all have died of old age before the final outcome of his trial is finally published.