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Old March 10th, 2008 #21
Alex Linder
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[Another jew writing about free speech. Which becomes a concern for jews only when the laws jews put in place against free speech are used against jews. Jews didn't care about anti-speech laws until they were used against jews Levant and Steyn.]

Jonathan Kay: The new rule on campus: Free speech for Israel-bashers — but censorship for pro-lifers

March 06, 2008

I've been writing a lot lately about free speech. My view on the subject is pretty basic: You have to tolerate the speech you hate in order to guarantee protection for the speech you love. Once you go down the road of ideologically motivated censorship, it never stops: Government hate-speech laws that are designed to shut up neo-Nazis eventually get used to harass legitimate commentators like Mark Steyn. [Remember all those jew Kay columns about CRITICS of jews being sued and silenced? Me either. Not a word until Muslims go after jew Levant and jew Steyn.]

Of course, censorious activists and lawmakers never actually concede they are engaged in "censorship." Invariably, they try to argue that the speech they are targeting is so offensive as to not even constitute legitimate expression. Consider, for instance, what has been going on at York University, in Toronto. Here's a snippet from a March 5 news item in The Excalibur, a York University newspaper:

"A planned debate on abortion rights at York University’s Student Centre was canceled less than three hours before it was scheduled to begin. At an emergency meeting on Feb. 28, members of the Student Centre Board of Directors ... voted unanimously to cancel the debate that was to be held later that day ... Student Centre vice-chair Kelly Holloway said the debate was cancelled because it was an equal rights issue. 'The reason is that it’s an equity concern for the Student Centre. Having a debate over whether or not women should be able to choose what to do with their own bodies is tantamount to having a debate about whether or not a man should be able to beat his wife,' Holloway said. 'The issue is violence against women, and women in this country have a right to choose what they do with their bodies. They have a right to have an abortion, and we don’t want to validate a debate that wants to threaten that right.'"

According to Holloway, in other words, the millions of pro-life Canadians who would presume to voice their objection to abortion do not have "valid" viewpoints. They deserve to be shut up because all they're doing is expressing de-facto threats against women, akin to urging spousal violence.

What's interesting is that, on another issue dear to her left-wing heart, Halloway is quite capable of sounding like a free-speech purist. Just two weeks ago, Holloway signed her name to a Feb. 21, 2008 letter complaining that the university's decision to ban anti-Zionist "Israeli Apartheid" activities on campus is "a blatant violations of democratic freedoms of speech and dissent." The letter also goes on about the "democratic context of the public university" and asserts that "universities are places where discussions and debates about difficult geo-political questions should be promoted, not stifled."

So what is the confused Ms. Holloway — a censor or a free-speech champion? Both and neither. Rather, she is a symbol of the basic human instinct to permit speech we agree with while shutting up one's opponents — and then finding some tortured logical argument to reconcile the two. The only thing unusual about Holloway is her public hypocrisy. She is a perfect example of why vesting the power to censor in politically correct mandarins — be they from Ottawa or a student government — is always a bad idea.

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http://network.nationalpost.com/np/b...ro-lifers.aspx