I confess to some discomfort and some sympathy

Update: Mark Steyn shares my discomfort. He writes:

Deborah Gyapong has two good posts today, as she does most days. The first examines certain aspects of Joe Brean's front-page story in The National Post; the second confesses to "some discomfort" about "the whole cast of characters from the Ernst Zundel case suddenly converging on Ottawa this Tuesday".

I agree with that. Unlike Richard Warman and Dean Steacy, I don't spend my time hanging out on white-supremacist websites, and I get a little queasy at some of the e-mail correspondence I wake up to in the morning. Nonetheless, bad laws usually start out being applied to unsympathetic characters on the fringes of society, and then work their way inwards. That's why it's best to stop them at the outset.

I wish the Mar. 25 Human Rights Tribunal hearing did not involve a white supremacist. I don't like the fact that the presence of mainstream journalists and conservative columnists and bloggers can be and perhaps have already been used as coattails supremacists and Holocaust deniers can try to grasp to gain respectability.

I don't like the fact that the whole cast of characters from the Ernst Zundel case will suddenly converge on Ottawa this Tuesday. Yet Marc Lemire deserves a fair hearing. He deserves to be considered innocent until proven guilty. He deserves a legal system that does not engage in planting evidence or entrapment. He deserves a legal system where the rules are clear and not made up as we go along.

I have some sympathy for the quandary the Canadian Jewish Congress and B'nai Brith find themselves in. The very apparatus they helped create to protect their community from defamation is now in danger of being co-opted by groups more virulently anti-Jewish (and far more numerous) than the Holocaust deniers and skinheads they hoped to silence.

As someone deeply sympathetic with the Jewish people, I have great concern that anti-Semitism is becoming fashionable again---on the Left, masquerading as anti-Zionism and anti-racism.

History is in the making. The future of Canada is at stake. Upon what do we base our notions of human rights? Do we revive the civil rights tradition grounded in Western Civilization, in Athens, Jerusalem and Rome? Do we revive the Magna Carta and other developments that are based on a notion of human rights as inherent and God-given?

Or do we succumb to materialist notions of human rights that dismiss the idea of human freedom, even the existence of the soul? God forbid we do that.

The problem with trying to silence false ideas and odious speech is that tyrannies will rush in to silence the truth first of all. Note how in most repressive regimes, that's how Internet firewalls are used.

I think it is no coincidence that the Chinese firewall suppressing information about the Tibetan uprising is happening on the eve of the Lemire case.

Can we tolerate some white supremacism in order to make sure our journalists are free to report on real scandal involving government bodies? Can we tolerate criticism of religions so that people are free to proclaim their faith in the public square?

We need a huge, national discussion about this, free from partisanship, employing the best philosophically grounded legal minds we have. Nothing short of a Royal Commission . . .and a government prepared to follow through with its recommendations....will do.