S
Sophia
Guest
9
cafe@canadafirst.com
Dear Free Speech Supporter:
The recent spate of so-called anti-Semitic vandalism and harassment, at least one of which incidents(the e-mailings in Thornhill calling certain Jewish youth "anti-Semitic" names) now turns out to have been perpetrated by a J*w, has unleashed an amazing hysteria.
The vandalism is, of course, denounced as a "hate" crime, although there have been as yet no trials or convictions. In our minority-ridden land, a "hate" crime is a crime motivated by dislike or opposition to a privileged group and is punished far more harshly. Thus, to spray paint "f*ck off" on your neighbour's garage -- a silly act
of vandalism -- is deemed not nearly as bad as doing similar damage with your spray can on your other neighbour's garage door with the slogan "damn J*w"! The law, of course, should punish
r
the
crime and that's vandalism. You should keep your spray can and
it's art work off your neighbour's property.
In the rant below, Alan Young -- and he's a lawyer! -- decides that torture and brainwashing are needed to rehabilitate the "hate" criminal. He starts with the conclusion that hate is stupid and irrational. "Hate" is an inflammatory label for a strong opinion and not all strong opinions are irrational.
For instance, the April 5 arson at the library of a Montreal Jewish school was accompanied by a letter making reference to the Israeli assassination of Sheik Yassin. Outrage at Israeli invasion of sovereign Palestinian territory and the coldblooded murder of a crippled nearly blind old man is scarcely stupid or irrational. As usual we mushroo
ms haven't been privileged to know the full content of the note. For propaganda purposes, it's far better just to dismiss it as "anti-Semitic" hate.
Now, while outrage at cer
tai
n behaviour
s or trends is neither stupid nor irrational, we can still insist that people with strong opinions not resort
to violence.
Alan Young comes across as a chilling fanatic. He seeks to criminalize opinion. To differ from him means you're insane. "I don't think coercive persuasion or deprogramming is
necessarily cruel, but as a state sanction it is unusual," he writes. That's pure Stalinism where dissidents were often flung into insane asylums. After all, communism billed itself as "scientific socialism" and, therefore, rational. To be against communism was to be irrational and, therefore, "insane." Young apparently wishes he could inflict dungeon, fire and sword to purge dissidents of their independent thoughts just as the Torquemadas of yesteryea
r did.
Paul Fromm
Director
CANADIAN ASSOCIATION FOR FREE EXPRESSION
Hate criminal needs deprogramming (TORONTO STAR, March 28, 2004)
ALAN YOUNG
REASONABLE DOUBT<
br>
Many afternoons whi
le walking home from Hebrew day school, my best
friend and I would have rock fights with some of the local kids. Before
I even knew what anti-Semitism meant
, our opponents would be throwing
rocks while screaming anti-Jewish slogans. It was all very biblical. At
the ripe age of six or seven we had no clue that our battles had deeper,
more sinister implications. We were just playing a version of cops and
robbers, with the J*ws always cast in the role of robber. The rock
throwing was fun, but we never seemed to have any clever names or
slogans to throw back at our opponents. Our rocks were simply
accompanied by ethnically neutral slurs like dirty, smelly and stupid.
Turns out we were partly right. Toronto has descended into the ugly
world of hate a
nd bigotry with a recent flurry of anti-Semitic vandalism
and graveyard desecration. The police, the politicians and the media
commentators have been describing these J*w-hati
ng criminal
s as
cowardly, evil, lo
w-life and cruel, but I think their descriptions miss
the mark.
The hate criminal is unique. The defining feature of the hate
criminal is stupidity. It is a crime born
of intellectual deficiency.
Anyone who resorts to generalizations about the moral worth of every
member of a particular ethnic, racial or religious group is an imbecile.
These people turn off their brains and pay homage to half-baked
philosophies based on nothing more than their own inadequacies and
insecurities.
The racist deliberately short-circuits his brain to
massage a crippling and neurotic need to hate. They really hate
themselves but they project the hatred on to historically
well-recognized scapegoats. The psychological solace gained by
projecting hatred o
utward comes at a great price -- the destruction of
the gift of rationality. Hitler was not an evil genius: he was stupid. If
his neurotic hatred of the Jewish people
did not consume
his rationality
he might have
won his quest for European domination.
William Pierce, founder of the white supremacist group the National Alliance,
may have been a physics professor, but being able to understand the splitting
of
the atom does not necessarily mean that the genius understands the
visible world. Once it is understood that the defining feature of
bigotry of any sort is stupidity, then the administration of criminal
justice faces real problems.
In response to the recent wave of anti-Semitic vandalism, the
Attorney General of Ontario has pledged rigorous enforcement of the law.
But criminal justice actually can do very little to combat stupidity.
In assessing the constitutionality of hate literature law in 1990,
the Supreme Court of Canada struggled <
br>with the knowledge that pre-Nazi Germany also had hate literature
crimes. We know that law can rarely change the way a person thinks,
especially when thinki
ng is all mixed up
with delusion, and in trying to
use th
e law as a tool of coercive persuasion there is always the danger
we will elevate the stupid into the role of martyr for other stupid
people.
Although criminal justice is an ineffective response, we still
need t
he symbolic denunciation of this hurtful irrationality of bigotry
by invoking the criminal law. When we prosecute those responsible for
the recent vandalism, it would be a mistake to think that a fine or
imprisonment can address the problem of hate-driven criminality.
The hate criminal probably needs rigorous deprogramming like the extreme
measures taken by parents to counter the brainwashing of children by
lunatic cults. It is bizarre that criminal justice officials try to do
more to change the belief and behaviour of john
s charged with
prostitution than they do with the Ernst Zundels and Jim Keegstras of
the world. We send the consumers of prostitution to "john scho
ol."
We send the bigot to jail to sit and stew, and the
suffering is just used
by the bigot to reinforce the righteousness of delusional views. Just as
some cancers require invasive surgery, the hate crime needs intrusive
measures. The usual out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach to modern
punishment ju
st won't work in this case. For crimes of supreme stupidity
we need Clockwork Orange justice -- strapping the hate criminal into a
chair for an interminable period, and keeping his eyes wide-open with
metal clamps so he cannot escape from an onslaught of cinematic imagery
carefully designed to break his neurotic attachment to self-induced
intellectual impairment.
In the context of hate crime, I do have some
regrets that we have a constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual
punis
hment. I don't think coercive persuasion or deprogramming is
necessarily cruel, but as a state sanction it is unusual. However, if
the crime
is unique the sanction sh
ould be also. Simply dishing out more
prison time or a
larger fine is a dead-end. We need a punishment that
can kick-start a brain.Regrettably when it comes to punishment, our
system rarely exhibits ingenuity, audacity and courage.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alan Young is a law
professor, criminal lawyer and author of Justice
Defiled: Perverts, Potheads, Serial Killers & Lawyers (Key
Porter).http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Co...le&cid=1080342612826&call_pageid=991479973472
cafe@canadafirst.com
Dear Free Speech Supporter:
The recent spate of so-called anti-Semitic vandalism and harassment, at least one of which incidents(the e-mailings in Thornhill calling certain Jewish youth "anti-Semitic" names) now turns out to have been perpetrated by a J*w, has unleashed an amazing hysteria.
The vandalism is, of course, denounced as a "hate" crime, although there have been as yet no trials or convictions. In our minority-ridden land, a "hate" crime is a crime motivated by dislike or opposition to a privileged group and is punished far more harshly. Thus, to spray paint "f*ck off" on your neighbour's garage -- a silly act
of vandalism -- is deemed not nearly as bad as doing similar damage with your spray can on your other neighbour's garage door with the slogan "damn J*w"! The law, of course, should punish
r
the
crime and that's vandalism. You should keep your spray can and
it's art work off your neighbour's property.
In the rant below, Alan Young -- and he's a lawyer! -- decides that torture and brainwashing are needed to rehabilitate the "hate" criminal. He starts with the conclusion that hate is stupid and irrational. "Hate" is an inflammatory label for a strong opinion and not all strong opinions are irrational.
For instance, the April 5 arson at the library of a Montreal Jewish school was accompanied by a letter making reference to the Israeli assassination of Sheik Yassin. Outrage at Israeli invasion of sovereign Palestinian territory and the coldblooded murder of a crippled nearly blind old man is scarcely stupid or irrational. As usual we mushroo
ms haven't been privileged to know the full content of the note. For propaganda purposes, it's far better just to dismiss it as "anti-Semitic" hate.
Now, while outrage at cer
tai
n behaviour
s or trends is neither stupid nor irrational, we can still insist that people with strong opinions not resort
to violence.
Alan Young comes across as a chilling fanatic. He seeks to criminalize opinion. To differ from him means you're insane. "I don't think coercive persuasion or deprogramming is
necessarily cruel, but as a state sanction it is unusual," he writes. That's pure Stalinism where dissidents were often flung into insane asylums. After all, communism billed itself as "scientific socialism" and, therefore, rational. To be against communism was to be irrational and, therefore, "insane." Young apparently wishes he could inflict dungeon, fire and sword to purge dissidents of their independent thoughts just as the Torquemadas of yesteryea
r did.
Paul Fromm
Director
CANADIAN ASSOCIATION FOR FREE EXPRESSION
Hate criminal needs deprogramming (TORONTO STAR, March 28, 2004)
ALAN YOUNG
REASONABLE DOUBT<
br>
Many afternoons whi
le walking home from Hebrew day school, my best
friend and I would have rock fights with some of the local kids. Before
I even knew what anti-Semitism meant
, our opponents would be throwing
rocks while screaming anti-Jewish slogans. It was all very biblical. At
the ripe age of six or seven we had no clue that our battles had deeper,
more sinister implications. We were just playing a version of cops and
robbers, with the J*ws always cast in the role of robber. The rock
throwing was fun, but we never seemed to have any clever names or
slogans to throw back at our opponents. Our rocks were simply
accompanied by ethnically neutral slurs like dirty, smelly and stupid.
Turns out we were partly right. Toronto has descended into the ugly
world of hate a
nd bigotry with a recent flurry of anti-Semitic vandalism
and graveyard desecration. The police, the politicians and the media
commentators have been describing these J*w-hati
ng criminal
s as
cowardly, evil, lo
w-life and cruel, but I think their descriptions miss
the mark.
The hate criminal is unique. The defining feature of the hate
criminal is stupidity. It is a crime born
of intellectual deficiency.
Anyone who resorts to generalizations about the moral worth of every
member of a particular ethnic, racial or religious group is an imbecile.
These people turn off their brains and pay homage to half-baked
philosophies based on nothing more than their own inadequacies and
insecurities.
The racist deliberately short-circuits his brain to
massage a crippling and neurotic need to hate. They really hate
themselves but they project the hatred on to historically
well-recognized scapegoats. The psychological solace gained by
projecting hatred o
utward comes at a great price -- the destruction of
the gift of rationality. Hitler was not an evil genius: he was stupid. If
his neurotic hatred of the Jewish people
did not consume
his rationality
he might have
won his quest for European domination.
William Pierce, founder of the white supremacist group the National Alliance,
may have been a physics professor, but being able to understand the splitting
of
the atom does not necessarily mean that the genius understands the
visible world. Once it is understood that the defining feature of
bigotry of any sort is stupidity, then the administration of criminal
justice faces real problems.
In response to the recent wave of anti-Semitic vandalism, the
Attorney General of Ontario has pledged rigorous enforcement of the law.
But criminal justice actually can do very little to combat stupidity.
In assessing the constitutionality of hate literature law in 1990,
the Supreme Court of Canada struggled <
br>with the knowledge that pre-Nazi Germany also had hate literature
crimes. We know that law can rarely change the way a person thinks,
especially when thinki
ng is all mixed up
with delusion, and in trying to
use th
e law as a tool of coercive persuasion there is always the danger
we will elevate the stupid into the role of martyr for other stupid
people.
Although criminal justice is an ineffective response, we still
need t
he symbolic denunciation of this hurtful irrationality of bigotry
by invoking the criminal law. When we prosecute those responsible for
the recent vandalism, it would be a mistake to think that a fine or
imprisonment can address the problem of hate-driven criminality.
The hate criminal probably needs rigorous deprogramming like the extreme
measures taken by parents to counter the brainwashing of children by
lunatic cults. It is bizarre that criminal justice officials try to do
more to change the belief and behaviour of john
s charged with
prostitution than they do with the Ernst Zundels and Jim Keegstras of
the world. We send the consumers of prostitution to "john scho
ol."
We send the bigot to jail to sit and stew, and the
suffering is just used
by the bigot to reinforce the righteousness of delusional views. Just as
some cancers require invasive surgery, the hate crime needs intrusive
measures. The usual out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach to modern
punishment ju
st won't work in this case. For crimes of supreme stupidity
we need Clockwork Orange justice -- strapping the hate criminal into a
chair for an interminable period, and keeping his eyes wide-open with
metal clamps so he cannot escape from an onslaught of cinematic imagery
carefully designed to break his neurotic attachment to self-induced
intellectual impairment.
In the context of hate crime, I do have some
regrets that we have a constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual
punis
hment. I don't think coercive persuasion or deprogramming is
necessarily cruel, but as a state sanction it is unusual. However, if
the crime
is unique the sanction sh
ould be also. Simply dishing out more
prison time or a
larger fine is a dead-end. We need a punishment that
can kick-start a brain.Regrettably when it comes to punishment, our
system rarely exhibits ingenuity, audacity and courage.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alan Young is a law
professor, criminal lawyer and author of Justice
Defiled: Perverts, Potheads, Serial Killers & Lawyers (Key
Porter).http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Co...le&cid=1080342612826&call_pageid=991479973472
