Newsletter

April 2008

Free Speech Has To Be For Everyone

Clive Seligman

University of Toronto president David Naylor confesses that this isn’t his
favourite time of year.”It is the consistently worst week of a president’s
life,” he sighs. Yes, it’s Israel Apartheid Week – the annual Israel-bashing
fest with the usual small band of activists and crackpots, and speakers from
that champion of universal justice, the Canadian Union of Public Employees.

Needless to say, many, many rich and influential alumni do not like Israel
Apartheid Week, which, although neither sponsored nor condoned by the school, is
organized by students who are allowed to use the campus.”The e-mails that one
receives cause a pretty serious degree of unhappiness,” Dr. Naylor masterfully
understates.

Despite the pain, the president is standing firm. The university even ran a
full-page newspaper ad in response to objections from Friends of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.”We do, in fact, recognize that the
term ‘Israeli Apartheid’ is upsetting to many people,” reads the statement,
signed by Dr. Naylor.”We also recognize that, in every society, universities
have a unique role to provide a safe venue for highly charged discourse.” Dr.
Naylor is absolutely right. Unless people are prepared to put up with obnoxious
(even hateful) speech, they have no leg to stand on when they denounce the
Muslim law students who have taken Maclean’s magazine to various human rights
commissions for printing a piece they didn’t like. They have no grounds to
denounce the human-rights commissions either, or the Montreal university that
cancelled appearances by two Israeli politicians because of “safety” concerns.
Free speech is a two-way street.

The
truth is, we are a nation of cowerers and wimps. We’d rather censor speech than
allow feelings to be hurt. We live in fear that a few obscure bigots will incite
an orgy of violence and send an entire civil society crashing to its knees.

Why
are we wasting time and money dragging disgraced native leader David Ahenakew
through the courts? Back in 2002, he likened Jews to a “disease” and was
immediately ostracized from polite society.

That should have been enough. Instead, he was tried and convicted in the courts
on a charge of willfully promoting hatred. The verdict was overturned because it
wasn’t clear whether he was being willful, simply deranged or drunk. So now,
we’re going to try him all over again.

Are
anti-Semites a threat to public safety? Here in North America, the answer is
surely no, so long as they don’t go round firebombing synagogues. Are
anti-homosexuals? No again, so long as they’re not physically engaged in
gay-bashing. So long as equality before the law is the law of the land, we don’t
need hate-speech laws to protect people. And no matter how words hurt, there’s a
difference between words and blows.

This distinction appears to have been lost on Alberta’s Human Rights Commission,
which recently ruled against a conservative Christian who’d written a letter to
the Red Deer Advocate in which he called gays “immoral.” The commission ruled
that his letter was “likely to expose homosexuals to hatred and/or contempt,”
and even linked it to the beating of a gay teenager, acknowledging the link was
“circumstantial.” But now, the Christians are claiming equal rights.

A
tiny group called Concerned Christians Canada is vowing to take the Alberta
Conservatives to the commission for refusing to endorse two of its nominated
candidates, which they claim encourages Christian-bashing and is “reflective of
wartime Germany.” There’s another problem with prosecuting hate talk. It gives
the haters notoriety.”The sad reality is that were we to cancel this event or
refuse a booking, it would turn a relatively small event into a cause celebre,”
Dr. Naylor says. Besides, universities (unlike rights commissions) are supposed
to value free speech. What a concept! Maybe this country should give it a try.

Globe and Mail,February 12, 2008, p. A21.