January 2011
The
University of Waterloo is inadequately and belatedly trying to make up for the
shabby treatment afforded Christie Blatchford at the renowned institution. It
has apologized for the hijacking of her talk by self-ordained (they always are)
"anti-racism" activists — five ignoramuses who took the stage before her,
chanted "racist, racist, racist" at her, denied her right to speak and denied
the audience who came to hear her their right to hear her. The apology at least
recognizes the insult done to Blatchford, and to the people who came to hear
her. A knot of intellectually vacant hooligans, whether united neck to neck with
bike locks or not, should never be allotted the power to say who speaks and who
does not speak at a university. (Or anywhere else for that matter.) Waterloo has
also promised to reschedule the event.
However, the apology only became necessary because the university — she was
there at the invitation of its bookstore — didn’t toss the smug nuisances from
the stage in the first place. Nor does the apology — which wears the whiff of
"damage control" — quite measure up to a real acknowledgment of the ugliness
Blatchford endured that evening. As the Post editorialized on Thursday, the
shutting down or abridgement of free speech at universities — especially by
"progressive’ protesters" — is growing so commonplace that we fail to notice
how aggressive and mean the actions and words of the protests leading to the
shutdowns actually are.
The
Waterloo clowns smeared Christie Blatchford horrendously: She is, by their
description, a "hack" and a "bigot" who preaches "racism" and "hate." She’s a
"Fascist"; she has "no right to speak"; she "dishonours" Waterloo by being
invited to speak there. If you listen to or read the words of Don Kellar, the
putative leader of the vile and petty coup, Christie Blatchford is all of these
things — but wait Kellar has more. She’s also a modern instance of one of the
most despicable human beings in history — Julius Streicher, the notorious Jew
baiter and killer from Nazi days. Julius Streicher and Christie Blatchford! Now
there’s a yoking that only someone crawling slowly up the ladder to a PhD in
Geography (which is Mr. Kellar’s burden) could make.
In
any decent world, anybody who slung accusations and characterizations like this
around with such factless and vicious abandon would be seen as unfit to be
present in a university environment. These descriptions are an attempt to
slaughter Christie Blatchford’s reputation, and the University of Waterloo
should be embarrassed and ashamed that such vile, hateful words should come from
the mouths of one or more of its students. But, as I’ve said, the normalization
of thuggish protest, and the ever inflated ugliness of the language that the
"progressive" sect allows itself, has numbed everyone to the sense of how feral
and nasty some of these so-called activists have become.
Let
me also make a somewhat incidental point. It is mainly through her writings that
I know Christie Blatchford, but they alone allow me to say that she is, in the
fundamental moral sense of the term, 10 times the anti-racist that Kellar is, 10
times more informed than he is and has 10 times his courage to boot. She would
have been willing to do what he and his kitetail of smug pretenders didn’t have
the nerve to do: debate the matters in question.
It
was also extremely interesting to note that in some of the online comments that
appeared when the story was written up in the Waterloo Record, someone
identifying himself as Dan Kellar dismissed the part of the audience that
opposed the protesters as "old white men" and "old white ladies." So apparently
it’s the "anti-racists" who take skin colour into account when making their
judgments, and "white" is obviously deemed second-class and unworthy. Activism
works some strange transmutations. Anti-racism, meet racism: You are slopebrowed
twins.
The
University of Waterloo lost something on the night the anti-racists were allowed
to pose, instead of Blatchford getting to speak — something the university’s
apology only begins to repair. The preening self-righteousness and the hyper
arrogance of the protesters put a blot on the university’s reputation, dented
the exercise of free speech in Canada and gave the rest of the country one more
ugly example of "progressive" intolerance.
Finally, the most chilling and obnoxious statement of an evening rich in them
came from one of the protesters: "Our goal was to not let her speak; we
accomplished that." If we were looking for a sequence of words that would
ornament the lips of a real fascist, "Our goal was to not let her speak …"
would be as perfect a set as under the visiting moon we are allowed to hope for.
National Post, November 20, 2010.
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