B.C. B’nai Brith: Your Humble Blogger is a Hate Criminal

Kurt Nimmo
Monday May 21, 2007 

Earlier today, I received an email from Chris Cook, the assistant editor of Atlantic Free Press and host of the Gorilla Radio program in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. According to Chris, the British Columbia branch of the B’nai Brith has accused the PEJ News website of hate crimes for posting eighteen articles, including at least one your humble blogger. In my case, the B’nai Brith apparently took exception to Israel Plans Torture Center for Abducted Lebanese, an article detailing the fact, reported by Yedioth Internet, that Israel “started constructing a temporary detention center designed to hold the Lebanese prisoners” during the invasion of Lebanon last July.

Of course, it is not a hate crime for Yedioth Internet to report such things, but it is a hate crime for a blogger to write about the facts, especially when he mentions the indisputable fact Israel violated the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment during its previous invasion and occupation of Lebanon. It is also a hate crime to mention a 1999 Human Rights Watch report that stated Israel had imprisoned hundreds of Lebanese arbitrarily in the Khiam torture facility. “Many of the detainees, including women, have been tortured during interrogation and subjected to abysmal conditions of confinement,” Human Rights Watch stated in the report.

It is probably more hateful to cite Arjan El Fassed and Electronic Intifada. “Prisoners have been routinely tortured [at Khiam], three times a day. Torture included beatings, being prodded with electrical cables in sensitive parts of the body and being hung from painful positions…. Detainees were given inadequate food rations and beaten when they prayed…. Among the prisoners were Lebanese journalist Cosette Ibrahim, kidnapped while reporting in southern Lebanon.” No doubt Cosette Ibrahim is a hate criminal. “Some of the detainees were children…. Between 1987 and 1995 prisoners in Khiam were not allowed access to their families. They were denied the right of prompt judicial review of the lawfulness of their detention. A number of detainees have died in Khiam, some of them after torture, others because of lack of medical treatment.”

As well, it is a hate crime to mention the Ketziot prison in Israel. “The soldiers used bulldozers to push the dunes up like mountains around it. The sun there felt like someone was pouring fire on you. It was a place with no buildings, only tents with cells,” a Palestinian, Abed Khalil, told the Inter Press Service Newswire. “The floors of the cells at Ketziot did not sit on concrete but directly on the desert. At night when you slept, the scorpions and black snakes came in through the sand…. If you did not give information about people in your camp, the soldiers beat you. If you did give information, they said it proved you were a terrorist, so they kept you longer. And they beat you.”

Abed Khalil is not only a terrorist, but a hate criminal to boot.

However, it is especially hateful and antisemitic to write the following: “In Israel, with racist and sociopathic Zionists at the helm, it will be business as usual in regard to the Lebanese people, who are considered little more than untermenschen.”

Of course, here in America, we have our very own sociopaths, more accurately described as psychopaths, at the helm, although they are not particularly racist, as they slaughter people of all races and creeds—as millions of Iraqis, Serbs, Vietnamese, Latin Americans, and others can attest. I write about the American version of psychopath as well, but that’s not the business of B’nai Brith in British Columbia.

If you think the B’nai Brith is nothing to worry about in Canada, consider they have worked closely with the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal and played an instrumental role in the arrest and deportation of Ernst Zundel to Germany. Zundel now sits in a German prison, convicted of Holocaust denial. Another writer, the late Doug Collins of the Vancouver area North Shore News, was targeted by the B’nai Brith in 1994 for infringing “human rights”—specifically, he had criticized the film Schindler’s List—an accusation summarily dismissed by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.

In 2000, before “everything changed,” the B’nai Brith told CBC News “anti-Semitism is on the rise in Canada,” even though statistics demonstrate “there were 42 reported incidents of anti-Semitic vandalism in 1998, down a significant 28 per cent from the 58 incidents reported last year. This trend is consistent with police reports across the country and may be the result of crackdowns by the police Hate Crimes Units” of the sort B’nai Brith apparently want to sic on PEJ News for the hate crime of posting articles critical of Israel.

“I have received some pretty disgusting hate mail over the last several years,” Frank Dimant, Executive Vice President of B’nai Brith Canada, told the CBC, “but I must admit it was particularly terrifying to be the target of a death threat on the Internet.”

Join the club, Frank. I get death threats and harassing telephone calls at my place of work. One particularly violent mental case, who describes himself as a Zionist, urges his demented friends to grab their guns and execute me for “treason,” that is to say for the crime of criticizing Israel and the Bush neocons. Soon enough, no doubt, engaging in such political speech will be a punishable crime here in America, too.

In the old days, B’nai Brith going after writers and a Canadian website would not necessarily put an American writer in danger. But all of that will soon be water under the proverbial bridge, because our rulers are working steadily toward a North America Union, that is to say they are “harmonizing” not only trade but law as well. Soon enough we will be one big happy Neoliberal World Order family and thought crimes committed in what was once considered the United States will be thought crimes in what was once Canada and Mexico.

As it turns out, the government here in the United States, soon to be the middle section of the North American Union, has done a mighty fine job of selling our very own hate crime legislation. “A new Gallup poll shows an overwhelming majority of Americans support the hate-crimes bill now before Congress,” reports the homosexual website, Advocate.com. “The bill would expand federal hate-crimes law to cover crimes committed against people because of their sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity. According to the poll, conducted May 10–13, support for the bill cut across partisan, ideological, and religious lines.”

Of course, the hate crimes bill now rolling through Congress is all gussied up with the politically correct veneer of “gender identity and disability,” but this is simply sugar-coating on a bitter and destructive pill designed to gut what remains of the Bill of Rights and national sovereignty, as our rulers don’t give a whit about gender, disability, or so-called sexual orientation. Our rulers are far more determined to punish thought crime, specifically the crime of opposition to rule by the global and transnational corporate elite.

“Hate crimes legislation is really a Trojan horse,” writes Chris Stovall, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund. “Essentially, everywhere that hate crimes laws have been passed, it inevitably and eventually leads to prosecution of speech and expression. There is one interpretation in reading the bill that would allow state attorney generals to ask the federal government to come in and take over the prosecution of an alleged state hate crimes offense…. Canada has had several examples in the last couple of years of people who have been convicted or at least prosecuted and investigated under a law that criminalizes basically as hate propaganda any speech that’s critical of homosexual behavior. That can be anything from writing an editorial to a newspaper to possibly preaching a sermon.”

As PEJ News is in the process of discovering, hate crimes are not limited to speech critical of homosexuals. In the case of PEJ News and your humble blogger, it is all about the B’nai Brith and criticism of Israel.

Addendum

Chris Cook wrote while I was writing the above. As it now appears, I am a hate criminal in spades, as the B’nai Brith considers four of my posts on PEJ News site to be scurrilous and hateful.

—

Here are the additional three articles:

Christian “AIPAC” Supports Palestinian Starvation
Starving Babies and Making Lebanon Dark
London Mayor Attacked for Opposition to Islamophobia

In regard to the powers of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, consider the following, delivered by Mary Gusella, retired Chief Commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, on December 16, 2005 in Ottawa:

The Tribunal has the power to order a respondent to cease and desist from the spreading of hate messages and to not engage in similar activity in the future. Compensation of up to $20,000 can be awarded to individuals named on a hate site and civil penalties of up to $10,000 can be imposed. Most importantly, decisions of the Tribunal can be made Orders of the Federal Court. Failure to comply with a Federal Court Order can lead to a finding of contempt. On three occasions, twice with regard to [white-supremacist John Ross Taylor], contempt of court proceedings have resulted in the imprisonment of a respondent.

Opening Address: Hate on the Internet Conference

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