Barrel Strength

Every conservative should be concerned about an over-reaching state. So should every liberal. Bad law, sloppy drafting, and over-reaching objectives abound. Combine badly-written law with zealous prosecutions and you end up with Leroy Smickle, the fellow who was caught in his underwear holding a handgun as the police charged in looking for his cousin.

The Globe reports:

“When police broke down the apartment door, Mr. Smickle was reclining on a sofa operating a webcam. He had the gun in one hand and his laptop computer in the other.”

Madame Justice Anne Molloy refused to imprison Smickle  for three years for the crime of being caught with a loaded restricted weapon posing before his Internet camera in his apartment, as police charged through looking for his cousin.

The kind of people who are outraged at the Liberals for their gun-storage laws should be outraged by the Conservatives and their mandatory minimum-sentence for gun crime. If we rise in wrath about zealous leftie prosecutors seeking to make it impossible to locate, unlock, load, and use a firearm in time to save oneself from housebreakers, can we be indifferent to the likelihood that those same prosecutors will use the gun-crime laws to persecute legitimate gun usage further?

The Globe continues:

The judge noted that bad drafting was partially to blame for the legal straitjacket she found herself in. She took issue with a discrepancy in the firearms law, passed in 2008, which allows a judge to impose a more lenient sentence should the Crown choose to proceed summarily with a charge – an option that includes no jury and swifter resolution.

She said that if the Crown instead proceeds by indictment, as it did in Mr. Smickle’s case, the minimum sentence automatically becomes three years.

The discrepancy created by the two sentence ranges is so “irrational and arbitrary” that it would shock the community were she to impose the mandatory sentence on Mr. Smickle, Judge Molloy said.

In case you think this is just a question of the Conservatives being wrong, or not, contemplate the source of this next quote:

McGuinty on Tuesday reiterated his support for mandatory minimums for all gun offences.

“The message that we’re sending to all Ontarians is that we treat gun crimes very seriously here,” he said.

When the Conservatives show signs of letting people defend their homes with firearms without fear of prosecution, nanny statists like McGuinty want to use new federal legislation to make it impossible. Connect the dots between “unsafe storage” and “gun crime”.

For “religion”, substitute “anthropogenic global warming”, “Islam”, “hate speech”, or governmental concern with unwholesome diets.

[Jefferson was writing about the degree of religious toleration in Virginia in 1781, as one of many subjects gathered in what came to be called “Notes on Virginia”, to the Marquis de Marbois, Secretary of the French legation at Philadelphia. The American Revolution was then in progress, and Jefferson living at Monticello, his estate in Virginia].

Notes on Virginia

By Thomas Jefferson

Query XVII

The Different religions received into that State?

“….The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as acts of the body, are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have no authority over such natural rights, only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable to them to our God. The legitimate acts of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. If it be said, his testimony in a court of justice cannot be relied upon, reject it then, and be the stigma upon him. Constraint may make him worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will never make him a truer man. It may fix him obstinately in his errors, but it will not cure them.

Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only…. If [free inquiry] be restrained now, the present corruptions will be protected, and new ones encouraged.

Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. …

Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before them. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men: men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face or stature.

Introduce the bed of Procrustes then, and as there s the danger that the large men may beat the small, make us all of a size, by lopping the former and stretching the latter. Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion.  The several sects perform the office of a censor morum over such other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined imprisoned; yet we have no advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth….

Our sister States of Pennsylvania and New York…have made the happy discovery, that the way to silence religious disputes, is to take no notice of them. Let us too give this experiment fair play, and get rid, while we may, of those tyrannical laws.”

Ron Cohen, the outgoing National Chair of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, was heard soon after the event decrying the Conservative majority election of May 12th as the occasion for the death of civil liberties in Canada. He was afraid for the country. Like many Liberals, he had drunk the Kool-Aid. Perhaps he had said once too often: “Harper: scary, scary”.

I wish he were right. I wish the Left had genuine cause to fear that their legal and thought regime would soon come to an end. Yet it is still strong and proud, chipping away at your right to free speech, your right to use a gun in the defence of your life and property, your right to say obviously true things about Islam and the threat it constitutes to rational discourse, women’s rights, political life, parliamentary government, Christians, Jews, atheists, secular humanists, and everything else.

Take, for example, the recent CBSC decision in CITS-TV re Sid Roth’s It’s Supernatural. The presiding panel consisted of Hanni Hassan (Vice Chair), Jennifer David, a Cree activist,  Michael Harris (from Corus Entertainment),  and Mark Oldfield, a retired broadcast journalist.

The show in question concerned Biblical prophecy. One of the issues before the panel concerned

the guest’s statement that “Muslims believe it is their divine call to eliminate the Jewish people.”  While that statement is, strictly speaking, an opinion, it is a pointed, barbed accusation that all Muslims consider that it is a divine or sacred responsibility to kill every Jew, even when there are no more than a “few Jews left hiding behind a tree or a rock.”  Even if that were a solid, uncontradicted principle established by one or another of the learned texts that are cornerstones of the Islamic religion, the Panel considers that such an accusation directed in such general terms against, in effect, all Muslims is an abusive or unduly discriminatory comment that violates the proscription against such comments in the Human Rights Clauses of the CAB Code of Ethics and the Equitable Portrayal Code.”

So, if, in general, Christians believe in the resurrection of Christ, the fact that some Christians might not believe in the Resurrection, would apparently render  it impossible to say on the airwaves, unless you used the formula, “most Christians believe”, if by so doing you offended the speech codes.

Okay, so most orthodox Muslims believe in the need to exterminate the Jews. Does that make it better? If I said maybe most orthodox Muslims believe in the necessity to exterminate the Jews, is that abusive?

Even if that were “a solid, uncontradicted principle established by one or another of the learned texts that are cornerstones of the Islamic religion”, it is abusive to say that Muslims believe the contents of the Koran, no matter how repellent?

Is it abusive to say that most orthodox Muslims believe it?

Is it abusive to say that Muslims believe what the divinely-authored Koran tells them to do?

Apparently so. Dhimmitude is upon us in the name of non-discrimination.

I have a proposal to make to the broadcasters of this country.

Since the broadcasters are paying for this vast speech-controlling contraption, under the aegis and with the authority of the CRTC, would it not be opportune to cease to pay for the entire CBSC? This would leave the free speech issues with the CRTC, and force the Harper government to confront what is done in its name. In that way, speech controls would become overtly governmental, and more exposed to public scrutiny.

I notice that those most content for power to be wielded in secret recoil in horror at the thought that the responsibility for speech controls should become overt.

Hanny Hassan, a public Adjudicator, is a structural engineer and the President and Principal Engineer for a Toronto-based consulting engineering practice. A member of the Professional Engineers of Ontario, he holds corresponding professional affiliations in Ohio and Florida. Mr. Hassanhas also been President of the Council of Muslim Communities of Canada (CMCC) since 1993. He has a long and distinguished career in community service, including significant contributions to the Muslim and Arab communities, of which he is a member, but also with respect to equity and multicultural issues. Mr. Hassan is a frequent speaker and lecturer to schools, universities, church groups, service organizations and the business community of Islam and Arab issues. He has also focused his publicly-oriented energies and commitments on interfaith and multicultural issues and is currently, among other things, Co-chair of the National Muslim-Christian Liaison Committee, a member of the Toronto Chapter of the World Conference on Religion and Peace, a member of the Advisory Committee to the Secretary of State on the impacts of anti-terrorism legislation and public backlash on the Muslim and Arab communities, the CMCC representative on the Canadian Ethnocultural Council, and the Muslim Convenor in the Jewish-Christian-Muslim Interfaith Dialogue Series. A London native, Mr. Hassan holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the University of Western Ontario and a Master of Engineering degree from Dalhousie University.

You have all read by now the acquittal of Geert Wilders on hate-speech. Some of the commentary upon the acquittal  shows, better than anything conservatives could say, that the left believes that Europeans should

a) cease to exist as culturally dominant majorities in their own countries; and

b) should be punished by law for any attempt to resist that wave of immigration.

On the subject of Wilders acquittal, see here in Vlad Tepes, here in Robert Sibley’s excellent Ottawa Citizen blog; here in the Daily Mail.

For wet hand-wringing on the subject of Wilders, there is no lack. See Tom Rawstorne in the Daily Mail of 2009 (”Is he about to engulf Britain in a holy war?”).

Particulalry hideous is the reaction to the acquittal from Ubaldus de Vries in the Guardian. De Vries,a lecturer in legal theory at the University of Utrecht,  says that though Wilders is technically innocent, we all know he is guilty of thoughtcrime:

“In doing so, Wilders adopts nationalism as a mode to gather momentum, support and power. It feeds on fear and abuses this fear. Whether the fear is real or imaginary is irrelevant. Fear is a powerful and explosive instrument of power. Many “indigenous” Dutch are threatened and frustrated by developments in the globalised world that they do not want but cannot control, such as immigration, and Wilders talks about “a tsunami of an alien culture that increasingly dominates local culture”. The feeding of this fear is an attempt to increase the existing polarisation and segregation of Dutch society, potentially leading to banlieue-type unrest. Unless we all start realising the futility of the attempt – and the court should have given just such a signal.”

Shall we parse that piece of nonsense for a moment?

1) “Whether the fear is real or imaginary is irrelevant.”

So, rational apprehension of risk is not relevant. To what, pray tell? Or to whom? The difference in all kinds of situations rests on the valid apprehension of risk or danger. Distinguishing the direction of a car towards a toddler’s pram will determine whether you will be exonerated for ramming that car with your own, if you were under a valid apprehension of imminent danger to the child. And if you were wrong, you probably face jail time, rather than a favourable review on the local press.

The left constantly wants Europeans not to face the concrete reality of what Islam is: a jurisprudential system called shari’a, which governs every – I mean every – aspect of life, based on a flawed revelation and backed up by a complete refusal to engage in philosphical discussion. It is a totalitarian political ideology as much as a religion. But that is irrelevant, apparently.

Whether the car is heading for the pram is not relevant?

2) “Many “indigenous” Dutch are threatened and frustrated by developments in the globalised world that they do not want but cannot control, such as immigration.”

Since when was it determined that the natives of Europe have no right to determine the ethnic composition of their societies? Note that Ubaidus de Vries does not even bother to pretend that the native population of Holland has any right to deterrmine this question.

3) “Unless we all start realising the futility of the attempt” ….to do what? To stop “a tsunami of an alien culture that increasingly dominates local culture”.

What can one say to the naked proposal that the Court ought to have signalled that any attempt, no matter how rational, to stop the immersion of white europeans in an unstoppable tide of Muslim immigration will be met with jail, fines, and public humiliation?

…that book should be Robert Reilly’s “The Closing of the Muslim Mind”. It is precise, well-written, soundly justified, and terrifying. He says in essence, that the Arab world needs Aristotle even more than it needs Jesus because, until you can think straight, you cannot perceive your problems accurately. Until you are enabled to think, you are lost. Philosophy is the answer. Turn your back on it, and intellectual decline is inevitable. Which is the case of the islamic world for the past thousand years.

When the Muslims took over the better part of the eastern Mediterranean, they inherited the Greek-speaking portion of what remianed of the Roman Empire. The major seats of Christianity included Alexandria in Egypt, Antioch in what is now Turkey, Byzantium, and Rome. The world they inherited was both prosperous and infused with Greek thought, which was based in the thought of Plato and Aristotle. Antioch and Alexandria, two of the four major patriarchates of Christianity fell to Islam, to be joined later by Byzantium in 1453AD.

Around the year 1000AD, a school of thought arose in Islam called the Mu’tazilites. They were Islam’s response to this Greek (Hellene) philosophical tradition. They sought to subject the Quran to the kind of dissection that rational minds engage in. Was the Quran coeval with Allah, as the theologians pretended? Had it existed before all time in the Mind of God? Questions such as these and others were asked and answered, and the theologians were not amused. Fortunately for the philosphers, they had the support of the then Caliph.

Against this philosophizing tendency – which tends to subject revelation to the rules of evidence and reason- arose the great analyst and philosopher Al-Ghazali, who rejected every premise of philosophy in his magisterial work, “The Incoherence of Philosophy”. His influence throughout the Islamic world was as pervasive and powerful in its way as Aristotle has been on ours, and it was wholly negative.

 Essentially al-Ghazali denounced Aristotle and Plato as un-Islamic, and advanced a theory of causality which eliminated all secondary causes. What this meant was that God was directly responsible for everything. By everything I mean every thing, action, appearance, event and manifestation was directly caused by God. No secondary causes exist.  No law of gravity. No three laws of thermodynamics. Nothing. God maintains the world not by law, but by his habit, and nothing constrains him to sustain it or from destroying at any given pico-second.

Thus an arrow shot from a bow did not move according to laws of gravity and aerodynamics, but by God’s absolute will.

Al-Ghazali argued that our reason could not know the world and that God was not reason. God was will, absolutely separate from his creation. God’s absolute independence of his creation could not be diminished in any way. Thus, in the Islamic doctrine, God implanted no part of Himself in human nature, whereas the Jews and Christians believe that they were made in God’s image. The reason we can know the universe or anything in it is that we partake somehow and somewhat of this divine nature. Western science, which is an outgrowth of Christianity,  rests on the belief that the laws of nature exist and are rationally apprehensible.

In the Christian tradition God was the Logos itself – the reason behind the world’s appearances. You may recall the opening of the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was that Word. All things were made by it, and without it was nothing made that was made.” “Word” is the inadequate translation of the Greek Logos, which connotes inner logical order.

And further on in the same paragraph, John records: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt aomong us, and we saw the glory of it”.

These two ideas, of man being made in God’s image, and that God was Logos itself, are so deeply embedded in our thought that it is difficult for us to see how they operate. In that sense, Islam gives us clearest picture of what happens to society when different ideas of God, nature and the human capacity for knowledge prevail.

The argument made by Robert Reilly is that al-Ghazali was altogether too influential. For whatever reason, al-Ghazali’s ideas on the incoherence of philosophy, the inadequacy of human reason to understand the world, and the unknowability of God except through revelation, have had a huge, continuing and debilitating effect on Islamic society.

If nature depends immediately on God’s will, why inquire into anything? Indeed, inquiry verges on heresy, disrespect for the Almighty. Everything is “Inshallah” – as God wills. Inquiry is either blasphemous, heretical, or both.

And we ourselves become playthings, motes of dust in the divine whirlwind, rather than actors with moral responsibility. If God directs everything, then there is no standpoint from which man can act independently of God’s will. We cannot reproach God with anything, nor can we act independently of God’s will, and so have things for which we should repent. We are not actors. We are phantasms.

If God is pure will, rather than reason and love, then when humans model themselves on the divine attribute, they model the behaviour that is seen as divine. In the Islamic case, that is pure willfulness, that aspect of man that is like the Divine Essence.

In 2006 I coined the term Allah’s holodeck. This was my intuitive realization that, for the devout Muslim, they experienced themselves as directly moved by God. Thus,  if they robbed a bank and killed the guards, that was as God willed. The only religious  issue was whether they would still be sweating from exertion or fear when they thanked God after the bank robbery, and that issue  of propriety would be decided by shari’a, not by any innate moral sense or reasoning from first principles.

Reilly’s indictment of the baneful effect of Ghazali deserves your attention. He draws direct links between the disparagement of reason by al-Ghazali and the increasing stultification of the Muslim mind, which has been going on for a thousand years.

The UN’s human development report of 2002, written by Arabs themselves, shows the truly dreadful lack of education, publishing, translation, economic development, patents, and intellectual life generally in Arab Islamic lands. The fact that 4 million Finns produce more goods and services than 80 million Arabs is the consequence of the disparagement of reason that al-Ghazali justified.

The  full text of the Arab Human Development Report of 2002 is here.

Reilly cites an expert on Islam who says that “Islamic fundamentalism is not a solution, it is the cry of despair that that the lack of solution is no longer tolerable”.

Reilly’s argument, which I find wholly persuasive, is that the root of  Sunni Islamic problems in the present day is theological and epistemological: meaning, ideas about God and the capacity for knowledge.  They are deep rooted in the triumph of a philosopher who renounced philosophy a thousand years ago, and the society that accepted his views as definitive.

Armed with the facts I set out in my previous blog posting, “Everyone delusional”, I want you to read this article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the full flavour of its insanity and mendacity. Kennedy cannot even get the name of the statute right. I suspect that, where such blatant disregard of facts is concerned, there must be wilful ignorance or deliberate lying for what he believes is a higher cause. I have never seen such a complete departure from reality in reporting. Obviously I don’t get out much. I thought that kind of stuff was something that only George Orwell wrote about in Homage to Catalonia.

 Whose interests are protected when the cops cannot act on their prejudices, if their prejudices are evidence-based?

The great stupid idea of modern times is that if one group “x”, however defined, has a propensity to certain kinds of criminal acts, call them “set Y”, then if the police act on that knowledge, the cops are wrong, not the criminals. Why?

Take the case the other day of a prosecution for pot-plant posession that failed in BC. The article reads as if the National Post was deliberately putting send-ups of political correctness rather than an actual case.

VANCOUVER • A B.C. judge has thrown out the evidence against an Asian man stopped with 57 marijuana plants in his trunk after ruling he had been a victim of racial profiling.

Zai Chong Huang was pulled over in January 2009 as he travelled along a road in 100 Mile House, B.C., about 430 kilometres northeast of Vancouver. A search of his truck turned up the potted plants, a timer, a bottle of liquid fertilizer and 150 empty plant pots. Mr. Huang was charged with possession of marijuana for the purpose of trafficking.

The officer, identified in court documents only as Constable Berze, said he had pulled Mr. Huang over for swerving twice in his own lane. However, after reviewing circumstantial evidence, Provincial Court Judge Elizabeth Bayliff decided Const. Berze did so only because of his own prejudice against Asian people.

The most damning evidence came in an interview between Const. Berze and Mr. Huang on the night of the incident.

“You must be guilty as s–t,” Const. Berze is quoted as saying in an interview transcript. “You’re probably a gang member, aren’t you? An Asian gang from Surrey, right? Well, you’re not saying anything so it must be true.… If I were the Canadian government, I’d kick your ass right out of Canada is what I’d do.

“You come into my country and you start trafficking dope around. That’s bulls–t. My wife and kids live here in 100 Mile House, and pieces of s–t like you are gonna come in. And if they are trafficking drugs in my hometown, I do not like it at all.”

Mr. Huang, whose first language is Cantonese, only gave short replies, indicating he did not understand.

Judge Bayliff called the outburst a display of Const. Berze’s own anger.

“[Berze] demonstrates that he is personally very angry at a particular group of people of Asian extraction — those who are associated with organized crime, particularly the production and trafficking of marijuana and other drugs,” she said. “He demonstrates enmity to that group of people. Further, he assumes that Mr. Huang is part of that group.”

About the same t i me Const. Berze pulled Mr. Huang over, Const. Berze’s colleague, a Constable Manseau, stopped another Asian man, whose vehicle also contained marijuana plants, a few kilometres behind. That man turned out to be Mr. Huang’s twin brother, Zai Qing.

Const. Manseau said he, too, pulled the man over for swerving in his lane. Judge Bayliff noted the coincidence might not mean anything on its own, but “it is the whole of the evidence and all of the circumstances that must be considered.”

She said she found it “more probable than not” that Const. Berze saw Mr. Huang, and perhaps his brother, at a gas station earlier on and followed Mr. Huang’s vehicle, looking for a reason to pull it over.

Judge Bayliff said the principle issue is that it is a fundamental liberty for people to be able to move about the country freely without improper police interference.

Even if they are transporting pot plants, corpses, or kidnap victims?

This is self-evidently a wrong legal and moral position for the Hon. Madame Justice  Elizaebeth Bayliff to take. She seems more concerned that the constable might be angry than that a criminal gang activity is allowed to proceed unhampered. Angry white males are more dangerous to public safety, as we all know, than Asian gangs. So it seems in the mind of our politically correct oh-so deluded Provincial Court Judge.

Will some adult in the government please appeal this idiocy to a higher court?

 This from the CTV site:

In her decision, Bayliff wrote that the tirade was more than a professional tactic — it was an outlet for Berze’s personal anger about Asian gangs involved in the drug trade.

“It may be that there could be an evidentiary basis for linking race with a particular type of criminal conduct in the 100 Mile House area at this point in our history. However, Const. Berze denied that these considerations were present in his mind at the time he stopped Mr. Huang,” Bayliff wrote.

While the judge acknowledged that the evidence against Huang indeed suggests he was involved in an illegal drug operation, his personal freedom is too important to ignore.

“When I balance the public interest in seeing this prosecution proceed against the Charter value at issue, I conclude that to admit the evidence would bring the administration of justice into disrepute,” she wrote.

“He, like everyone else, has the right to move freely about this country free from improper police interference. This is an important liberty.”

So, Catch-22. The constable, being the good little boy that the PC courts want him to be, denies any racial motive in his arrest, even though the judge is ready to admit  that “there is evidentiary basis for linking race with a particular type of criminal conduct”. What could he have said? “Yes I saw a Chinese guy near 100 Mile House, and as we all know the only Chinese around there are growing dope”.

The administration of justice has been brought into disrepute by the judge, not the cop.

The telephone number for the Williams Lake Provincial Court office, where Madame Justice Elizabeth Bayliff presides,  is given as 250 398-4310. The offices of the judge in question are at the Williams Lake provincial court house, listed as: 

Madame Justice Elizabeth Bayliff

Williams Lake Provincial Courthouse

540 Borland Street, Williams Lake, British Columbia, V2G 1R8

250-398-4301

Perhaps a polite but scathing letter is merited.