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Doug Ford’s first new position as Ontario’s premier-to-be is that he’ll stop the annual anti-Israel protests called “Al-Quds Day.”
“Our government will take action to ensure that events like Al-Quds Day, which calls for the killing of an entire civilian population in Israel, are no longer part of the landscape in Ontario,” the Progressive Conservative premier-designate tweeted on Sunday.
Our government will take action to ensure that events like Al Quds Day, which calls for the killing of an entire civilian population in Israel, are no longer part of the landscape in Ontario.
— Doug Ford (@fordnation) June 10, 2018
How this squares with Ford’s campaign pledge to hold Ontario universities to hard standards in support of free speech, or even exactly what power he’d use to stop future Al-Quds Day observations, isn’t obvious. Asked to elaborate on both points Monday — what action? — his people didn’t respond. Maybe they don’t know.
Al-Quds Day started in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, which says a fair bit right there. “Al-Quds” is the Arabic for “Jerusalem,” and Al-Quds Day is a conscious response to Israel’s Jerusalem Day, a national holiday to mark Israel’s taking of the city in the 1967 Six-Day War. Always on a Friday at the end of Ramadan, the observance links Muslim religious obligation to support for Iran’s political aspirations in the Middle East. Specifically, its demonization of Israel and determination to evict Jews from East Jerusalem.
Even if Al-Quds Day is packaged as criticism of Israeli government policy, organizers would have to take immense care to keep speakers from spilling over into anti-Semitism. Historically, they have not taken that care.
The speeches vary from year to year but there’s a record of Holocaust denial and warnings about how death comes to all oppressors amid the chants to end Israeli Apartheid, just like Hamas and Hezbollah banners are mixed in with the Palestine flags.
Hate speech is criminal in Canada and B’nai Brith in Toronto says it’s filed a police complaint against a speaker who said he prays for “justice throughout the world” through “the eradication of the unjust powers, such as the American empire, such as the Israelis and Zionists, in the same way that we saw the British empire wither away.” The sun eventually set on the British empire, said Kitchener’s Shafiq Huda in a recording B’nai Brith posted, and God willing the sun will set on “the Zionist empire, the American empire” as well.
Parsing whether that’s legally hate speech — let alone a call to genocide — might take some doing. I mean, it’s not nice, but that’s not the standard. Even if it is criminal hate speech, we punish people after they commit crimes, not before. Unpopular political views get the constitution’s most thorough cover from censorship.
Compare a ban on Al-Quds Day protests to how several provinces, recently including Ontario, have handled aggressive protests outside abortion clinics. Faced with evidence that those protests are sometimes used as cover to physically confront particular women going into those clinics, governments have said you can still protest abortion, still call abortion doctors baby-murderers, still demand changes to the law. You just have to do it half a block away.
Toronto’s Al-Quds Day thing drew about 500 people this year; Ottawa’s, maybe a few dozen. The Toronto protest typically travels from Queen’s Park to the American consulate-general a few blocks south, interfering some with traffic and taking up some public space.
Ford talks about forbidding these things not just in Toronto or on the grounds of the legislature but everywhere in Ontario. Ottawa’s was so small hardly anybody noticed it. Both of them burned themselves out pretty quickly, as protests usually do. Police kept an eye on Toronto’s but didn’t interfere, because what’s the point. Everyone gets tired and goes home.
One way to bring a lot more attention and energy to the demonstrations is to turn them into annual showdowns over free speech.
Student groups are quite good at this. So many right-wing cranks have been “de-platformed” by left-wing cranks now that the newly elected government promises to create an investigative agency to assess how hard universities fight to defend minority views not just in classes but in the use of their facilities — and to take away funding if they aren’t vigorous enough in making sure the crank of the month gets to talk when a campus club wants to bring him or her in.
(Maybe Al-Quds Day protests would be best held at the University of Toronto and University of Ottawa, where the province would … insist they be allowed? That doesn’t sound right.)
If what we’re after is endless escalations, arguments that the other guys said something worse first, politicians interfering with protests in advance and police officers deciding on the spot what’s legitimate speech and what isn’t, this is all off to a good start.
查看原文...
“Our government will take action to ensure that events like Al-Quds Day, which calls for the killing of an entire civilian population in Israel, are no longer part of the landscape in Ontario,” the Progressive Conservative premier-designate tweeted on Sunday.
Our government will take action to ensure that events like Al Quds Day, which calls for the killing of an entire civilian population in Israel, are no longer part of the landscape in Ontario.
— Doug Ford (@fordnation) June 10, 2018
How this squares with Ford’s campaign pledge to hold Ontario universities to hard standards in support of free speech, or even exactly what power he’d use to stop future Al-Quds Day observations, isn’t obvious. Asked to elaborate on both points Monday — what action? — his people didn’t respond. Maybe they don’t know.
Al-Quds Day started in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, which says a fair bit right there. “Al-Quds” is the Arabic for “Jerusalem,” and Al-Quds Day is a conscious response to Israel’s Jerusalem Day, a national holiday to mark Israel’s taking of the city in the 1967 Six-Day War. Always on a Friday at the end of Ramadan, the observance links Muslim religious obligation to support for Iran’s political aspirations in the Middle East. Specifically, its demonization of Israel and determination to evict Jews from East Jerusalem.
Even if Al-Quds Day is packaged as criticism of Israeli government policy, organizers would have to take immense care to keep speakers from spilling over into anti-Semitism. Historically, they have not taken that care.
The speeches vary from year to year but there’s a record of Holocaust denial and warnings about how death comes to all oppressors amid the chants to end Israeli Apartheid, just like Hamas and Hezbollah banners are mixed in with the Palestine flags.
Hate speech is criminal in Canada and B’nai Brith in Toronto says it’s filed a police complaint against a speaker who said he prays for “justice throughout the world” through “the eradication of the unjust powers, such as the American empire, such as the Israelis and Zionists, in the same way that we saw the British empire wither away.” The sun eventually set on the British empire, said Kitchener’s Shafiq Huda in a recording B’nai Brith posted, and God willing the sun will set on “the Zionist empire, the American empire” as well.
Parsing whether that’s legally hate speech — let alone a call to genocide — might take some doing. I mean, it’s not nice, but that’s not the standard. Even if it is criminal hate speech, we punish people after they commit crimes, not before. Unpopular political views get the constitution’s most thorough cover from censorship.
Compare a ban on Al-Quds Day protests to how several provinces, recently including Ontario, have handled aggressive protests outside abortion clinics. Faced with evidence that those protests are sometimes used as cover to physically confront particular women going into those clinics, governments have said you can still protest abortion, still call abortion doctors baby-murderers, still demand changes to the law. You just have to do it half a block away.
Toronto’s Al-Quds Day thing drew about 500 people this year; Ottawa’s, maybe a few dozen. The Toronto protest typically travels from Queen’s Park to the American consulate-general a few blocks south, interfering some with traffic and taking up some public space.
Ford talks about forbidding these things not just in Toronto or on the grounds of the legislature but everywhere in Ontario. Ottawa’s was so small hardly anybody noticed it. Both of them burned themselves out pretty quickly, as protests usually do. Police kept an eye on Toronto’s but didn’t interfere, because what’s the point. Everyone gets tired and goes home.
One way to bring a lot more attention and energy to the demonstrations is to turn them into annual showdowns over free speech.
Student groups are quite good at this. So many right-wing cranks have been “de-platformed” by left-wing cranks now that the newly elected government promises to create an investigative agency to assess how hard universities fight to defend minority views not just in classes but in the use of their facilities — and to take away funding if they aren’t vigorous enough in making sure the crank of the month gets to talk when a campus club wants to bring him or her in.
(Maybe Al-Quds Day protests would be best held at the University of Toronto and University of Ottawa, where the province would … insist they be allowed? That doesn’t sound right.)
If what we’re after is endless escalations, arguments that the other guys said something worse first, politicians interfering with protests in advance and police officers deciding on the spot what’s legitimate speech and what isn’t, this is all off to a good start.
查看原文...
