Jennifer Lynch's Dublin whine tour

I have been one of those "sensitive souls" that has resisted personalizing my criticism of human rights commissions by focusing on Canadian Human Rights Commission chief commisar Jennifer Lynch. But sometimes she says and does things that make it impossible to ignore her behavior.

Did my tax dollars pay for her to go to Dublin to address the Canadian Bar Association's annual meeting in Dublin so that she could enlist the Canadian legal establishment in her fight to censor and punish dissident opinion? And does the Prime Minister know that Jennifer Lynch is engaging in mission creep by defending not only her own discredited bureau but the egregious provincial bodies as well?

Canwest reports (my bolds):

Earlier Saturday, Jennifer Lynch, head of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, urged Canada’s legal community to help her defend federal, provincial and territorial human rights commissions and tribunals which she said are under attack by conservative critics. [This is terrifying. Is she going to enlist the Canadian legal establishment to help crush conservative critics who only have their publishing platforms and nothing else, no budget in the millions, no levers of state power to coerce anyone to agree with them? Is the Canadian legal establishment as engaged in "group think" and default liberalism that she assumes they will be on her side? Is she right?]

She told the gathering that opponents of rights bodies have successfully created a “chill” that makes it difficult for anyone to defend those bodies without also becoming a target. [Yet Jennifer Lynch has boasted of keeping a file on her critics. She's got the power, folks. Not us opponents. And yes, I am an opponent of human rights "bodies" that are about anything but real human rights.]

Lynch, saying some criticisms have been “troubling” and “at times scary,” also read out a graphic anonymous letter she received stating that she should be shot dead. [Considering the antics of some of the people in her employ, joining white supremacist online groups under secret identities and posting hate against Jews and gays, it leaves me wondering whether one of her operatives under deep cover sent her that missive. Maybe she'd like to look at some of the real hate mail that someone like Mark Steyn gets, partially because of human rights "bodies" that deemed him to be Islamophobic.]

“I’m here to ask for your help,” Lynch told CBA members.

She urged them to write “letters to correct misinformation,” encourage other experts to participate in the debate and promote public education of the role of rights commissions and tribunals in the justice system.

She said rights bodies have been under attack since 2007 after the Canadian Islamic Congress filed complaints over an essay published in Maclean’s magazine by conservative commentator Mark Steyn.

The complaints filed to the Canadian, Ontario and B.C. rights commissions were all eventually dismissed, though criticisms by those commissions against Steyn’s published views about Islam prompted accusations that his right to free speech was being violated.

Steyn, fellow conservative commentator Ezra Levant, various other bloggers, and politicians such as B.C. Conservative MP Russ Hiebert and retired former Tory cabinet minister Monte Solberg have all expressed harsh criticisms of rights commissions and tribunals.

Many of the critics have argued that Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which prohibits the spreading of “hate messages” on the telephone and Internet, violates the right to free speech. Some have argued that hate crimes should be dealt with by police relying on the Criminal Code. [It would be nice if the reporter also mentioned that truth is no defense before these commissions and tribunals only the impact of the "offensive" speech on vulnerable groups; nor is there any need for evidence of any impact other than a subjective "likely to expose" vagueness that is impossible to prove. Or that the normal rules of evidence do not apply. ]

Lynch told the CBA that rights commissions are important components of the justice system, giving society’s “most vulnerable” minority groups access to a mechanism to deal with alleged rights violations. [Once upon a time, human rights commissions were designed to help people who had experienced job or housing discrimination on the basis of race to solve their problem through an inexpensive form of administrative mediation. One of those typical good-intentioned ideas that has had unfortunate largely unforeseen consequences. Now those same commissions have morphed into ideological fronts for identity politics and Marxist social engineering that are driving out the principles of western civilization and replacing them with something illiberal and Animal Farmish. Those with progressive views about diversity and who see racism as structural are more equal than those who happen to have a Judeo-Christian moral foundation and believe that all races are capable of racism.]

Critics are trying “to destroy our investigators’ and litigators’ reputations and credibility with untrue accusations,” Lynch said during her appeal for help from Canadian lawyers and academics. [This woman's gall is breathtaking. List one untrue accusation. Give us the footnotes or the URL. And dollars to donuts, one of us will show you the legal transcript where your employees have admitted under oath to activities we find loathsome and unCanadian, or a human rights tribunal decision that is an affront to our 800-year legal tradition.]

“For the moment the obligation to defend our existence monopolizes our energy.”

Cry me a freakin' river, Jennifer. You said it. This is all about defending your jobs, not about defending "vulnerable minorities."

Her total lack of ability to put herself in the shoes of those bodies like hers have persecuted is astonishing. She thinks she's David when she's Goliath.

First of all, the triple jeopardy of three similar complaints filed against Maclean's Magazine and Mark Steyn. What about that travesty of justice? What about the million dollar legal bill? We're supposed to say, well, the complaints were dismissed so the process worked?

And while I hope that one day Jennifer Lynch is out of a job as cens0r-in-chief, she will still be able to practice as a lawyer with her fancy Q.C. title. But had even one of those commissions ruled against Mark Steyn, he could have been under a lifetime ban on writing about certain topics and would probably no longer be able to earn a livelihood in Canada. Sure Mark could survive that. But the Stephen Boissoins and other little nobodies that have been persecuted by these bodies do not have his international reputation.

Mark has already weighed in:

You picked this fight, lady. Not me. And you expected Ken Whyte and Ezra and me just to lie there and take it.

Ezra Levant has more:

But back to the Canadian Bar Association, the left wing of the federal Liberal Party. If you skim through their self-righteous press releases, you'll see a pattern: they overwhelmingly condemn the United States for "human rights" violations, and are notably silent about such violations from villian states like China, Iran and Russia. (I acknowledge that, since Barack Obama became president, they have denounced Guantanamo Bay with less frequency and venom than when George Bush ran that same institution. Funny how that works.)

Anyways, the CBA was meeting in Dublin, Ireland (huh?) and, true to form, their keynote speaker was Mary Robinson, the bigot who oversaw the anti-Semitic hate-fest at Durban. That fits about right with the CBA's foreign policy: praise terrorists like Khadr and denounce the Jewish state. No surprise that Jennifer Lynch, the chief commissar of the Canadian Human Rights Commission was there. I wonder if she swapped tips with Robinson on anti-Semitism -- Lynch being the proud employer of seven members of neo-Nazi groups.

I'll talk more about Lynch's laughable comments later, but for now the point is the CBA's predictable demand that the Conservative government accede to the Federal Court of Appeal's "direction" to welcome back Khadr.

I look forward to Ezra's commentary on Lynch's laughable comments.

But I also find it highly disturbing that she wants to sic the progressive legal establishment on her critics to bolster the state power she already has.