Freedom-To-Be-Antisemitic Week In Vancouver: The City Librarian Explains Why

It started with my essay in yesterday's Vancouver Sun about the Vancouver Public Library's decision to showcase the notorious, Jew-obsessed conspiracy-mongerer Greg Felton, author of The Host and the Parasite: How Israel's Fifth Column Consumed America, as the library's featured author for its upcoming Freedom To Read Week.

City Librarian Paul Whitney has now weighed in with a response to my essay, also in the pages of The Vancouver Sun. His response raises some unsettling and wholly unexpected questions.

Whitney's version of events has now put him in the dodgy position of having to approve or deny a written request from Vancouver doctor Joel Shapiro to go the extra mile during Freedom To Read Week for two more library events - one about the "Mohammed cartoons" controversy (which refuses to go away) and another about the bloodcurdling tally of racism and genocide in Islamic states.

And Howard Rotberg, author of Second Generation Radical: The Struggle Against The Second Holocaust, has also written to Whitney with a convincing case that the library would be wise to showcase some other authors and "banned" books, concurrently with Felton, to get out of the mess it's made with some semblance of dignity.

Which means this is all going to start getting very interesting, very soon. But back to some troubling aspects of Whitney's account.

To begin with, it just doesn't quite fit with the straightforward explanation I was provided by the library officials more directly involved in the decision to showcase Felton. Senior library staff told me that when they were approached by Felton, they were unaware of the black propaganda for which he is best known, and that none of them had read anything but an excerpt of his book. Indeed, the library hadn't yet acquired a single copy for The Host and the Parasite for its own shelves.

So how to explain Whitney's version, which is that in reviewing Felton's request for a venue at the library, his book was found to be, well, legal, but also "provocative but not hateful"? Whitney had read it, but the other library staff had not? Did Whitney have some role in the decision?

And what's all this about a library's responsibility to provide its patrons with all manner of books, "including those that may be considered unconventional, unpopular or unacceptable"? Isn't this the same Paul Whitney whose free-speech timidity earned a rebuke from the British Columbia Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee, when he was the boss librarian in the City of Burnaby, Vancouver's neighbour? Ah, yes, so it is. The very same Paul Whitney.

Back then, Whitney refused to allow library patrons to read Diana Russell's Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm. A "provocative" book, I gather, but not hateful. And legal, as well. Topical. Maybe even controversial.

So why was it wrong to merely allow people to read a book like Russell's, but it's right, and indeed righteous, to provide a free, public platform to an apologist for the book-banning regime in Tehran whose Islamic propaganda agency is behind a newspaper Felton writes a column for? Before Whitney's letter, Felton's invitation was more or less an honest mistake. Now, Whitney would have us believe that something rather more exalted is going on. Something about "intellectual freedom."

And what does Whitney mean when he says that my essay was "a spirited condemnation of Greg Felton's views and his book"? In what way?

I didn't write about the contents of Felton's book, and I never claimed to. It's the product of a crank publishing house that's situated somewhere in the bleak Arizona desert and is almost wholly concerned with spacemen and thought control. I've read excerpts of Felton's book. I'm fully conversant with its thesis. I've read Felton's slanders against the Jews on white-supremacist websites, and I' quite familiar with the Medieval legends that Felton persists in reporting as fact. This is "intellectual"? These are his "views"?

I've spent far too much time reading through Felton's voluminous ouvre to insult anyone's intelligence by stooping to mount a condemnation, spirited or otherwise, of anything he writes. Facts alone condemn Felton. They need no help from me.

My essay was about words, and specifically the way words can be made to hide meaning rather than reveal it. I observed that this is a way that lies are made. I asked a simple question about the polemics Felton and his kind engage in: If it isn't antisemitism, then what is it? And I deferred to the British novelist Martin Amis, whose answer is, yes, it is a kind of antisemitism.

That's about the only "spirited" opinion I offered. In my essay, I actually didn't express much of a clear opinion on the virtue of the Vancouver Public Library's decision to provide Felton with this exalted platform. You want a spirited opinion? Okay. Here it is.

The Vancouver Public Library is welcoming Greg Felton as though he were an honoured son who has come home to his father's house. In so doing, the Vancouver Public Library, or at the very least City Librarian Paul Whitney, has resorted to citing "intellectual freedom" and the library's role as "a forum for an open and public exchange of contradictory views."

In so doing, the library, under the guise of free speech, no less, has afforded legitimacy, and even a sanction of decency, to what is actually a grotesque infringement of free speech. It is a demand that we either dignify people like Felton by debating with them, or shut up.

It works like this.

Nowadays, perhaps especially among the urban intellectual caste, you cannot raise your voice against even the most foul antisemite, if that same antisemite uses words such as "Israel" or "Zionist" in the same breath as his other veiled utterances of Jew-hatred. You will be told that you are equating legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

You will be told, 'This is part of a legitimate debate.' But if you say, no it isn't, you will be told, 'This is just how the Jews suppress free speech to silence criticism of Israel.' If you say, 'That sounds like one of those old antisemitic canards; show me some evidence that it is true,' you will be called a Zionist, which is one of the worst things you can call someone these days. If you talk back, you will hear someone calling you a Zionazi. You will soon hear people telling you to shut up.

In order for the kind of polemics and legends Felton disseminates to find a privileged place in Whitney's "open and public exchange of contradictory views", one must acquiesce to the demand that a veiled and nuanced Judeophobia has a proper place in "legitimate debate," and we must submit to that very specific and particular sort of demand to shut up. This is not the way lies are made. It is the way they flourish, and spread, and debase the very purpose, function and possibility of "free speech" in an open and democratic society.

And that is precisely and exactly what is going on here.

One last point.

Whitney also wrote: "We were aware of the freedom-of-expression debate surrounding Felton's departure from the Vancouver Courier, where he was a columnist, and therefore felt this reading was relevant for Freedom to Read Week."

Most of that "freedom of expression debate" unfolded on Neo-Nazi internet bulletin boards almost a decade ago, but nevermind that. What occurred back then is actually directly relevant to Whitney's predicament now.

What happened back then was an inexperienced reporter by the name of Greg Felton had gotten himself a column, and before long he was writing offensive rubbish about Israel, and about Jews. There was huge protest by the newspaper's readers.

The Courier just happened to be circulated and distributed mainly around a part of Vancouver, centred on Kerrisdale. It wasn't once called the Kerrisdale Courier for nothing, and Kerrisdale and its environs just happens to be home to a lot of Vancouver's Jews.

The newspaper owner eventually responded to his readers' protests by making a sensible business decision. He legally terminated Fenton's employment. This explains a lot, it seems to me, about Felton's lingering obsessions.

Call it a "freedom fo expression" issue if you want. I would have thought it was rather an instructive example of citizens and newspaper readers making a media company accountable to their sensibilities, and the limits of their tolerance for bullshit. Things like that should probably happen more often.

It might just be that the imbroglio at the Vancouver Public Library will be resolved by a similar democratic engagement, and a cherished and vital taxpayer-funded public institution will be held similarly accountable.

We'll see.

UPDATE: My previous post on this subject concluded with a little video, to encourage a sense of humour about all this. It was intended to illustrate the point that in the face of bigoted provocation and slander, my crowd is inclined to responses other than the "let's debate!" approach and the "let's file a human rights complaint" method. The Dohertys and the Coyles prefer one alternative response, but to illustrate another, which involves a kind of feint, as though you are simply walking away, let me now introduce you to the Thornhill, Ontario flying column of the Chaim Herzog Battalion of the Ancient Order of Hibernians:

Kazhars and Zionist Parasites: Not Antisemitism? So What Am I Allowed To Call It?

I have a few words of my own for it, but they're not words fit for a family newspaper, so I'm just asking, is all, in today's Vancouver Sun:

What is the right word for a book like Greg Felton's "The Host and the Parasite: How Israel's Fifth Column Consumed America"?

What is the right word for Felton's thesis, which is that a Zionist "junta" was at work on Sept. 11, 2001, and that al-Qaida is a mere concoction in a secret plan to subvert the American Constitution, demonize Muslims and commit mass murder?

What do you call it when the Vancouver Public Library decides to present Felton, an apologist for the book-banning, journalist-jailing Iranian theocracy, as the featured author on the evening of Feb. 25, and as the library's contribution to national Freedom to Read Week?

What are we allowed to call Felton, who traces his Zionist plot back to the 1940s, when these same Zionists made "common cause" with the Nazis to rid Europe of its Jews, and participated in the herding of Jews into Hitler's gas chambers?

Greg Felton's pathological delusion requires him to trace Zionist swindles and trickery back through time and across Europe to a Medieval legend about a massive deception with its roots in the Caucasus Mountains about 1,000 years ago - a legend he then reports as fact.

His work appears frequently in certain of the darker corners of the Arab press, in countries neighbouring Israel - countries where there is no free press - where Felton's propaganda is presented as the work of an award-winning journalist and Middle-East specialist.

Do not tell me he should not be held accountable for this. Do not tell me, either, that there is a suitable, simple, legalistic way to hold him accountable, or that the "marketplace of ideas" is sufficient. It's not.

And that is the knot at the middle of the national tangle currently unraveling in the matter of L'Affaire Steyn, and the Ezra Levant extravaganza, and the events that have now caused the National Post to lose Warren Kinsella, one of that newspaper's best columnists.

In this strangely Canadian manifestation of the worldwide struggles for free speech - which should also be understood as a worldwide struggle against the unchecked dissemination of lies and black propaganda - I tend to side with Alan Borovoy. I also know that Ezra Levant's circumstances are of no more immediate significance than a visit from the health inspector.

But I've also been belatedly convinced of the merit of some his arguments, and the arguments I hear from people well to my right. It's not just that the Canadian front actually does matter. It's that the current trespasses of human rights tribunals upon free speech could very well lead to free-speech suppression of a magnitude none of us would tolerate.

But being a democracy, we can revoke laws that we do not tolerate. Democracy is a complex and elaborate dynamic of negotiated arrangements, however, and it can be very, very fragile. And this is where Warren Kinsella and the Canadian Jewish Congress and the rest are perhaps more right, in the matter of free speech, than even they know.

The thing is, the mediated, arbitrated, and judicially-adjudicated resolution of conflict arising from the exercise of our right to free speech is not, and never was, merely a nanny-state intrusion brought about as an alternative to the marketplace of ideas.

It's just not true, any more than it's true to say labour relations panels, workers' compensation boards and employment standards codes were brought in to distort the market in goods and services and coddle workers and unduly restrain the magic power of free enterprise.

These laws were enacted so that workers could get out from under yellow-dog contracts. They were brought in so that bosses' houses would not be going up in flames in the middle of the night, and so that cruel plant managers and corrupt union porkchoppers would not be found dangling from the lamp-posts of our cities in the morning.

And in all the rumpus-making about the hopeless speech-patrol function of human-rights tribunals, that's the part of the "free speech" story that you rarely hear about.

If you really want to stoop to debating with characters like Greg Felton, be my guest. See what good it will do. The "marketplace of ideas" is not the only alternative to all these draconian and repressive intrusions upon free speech that the state, it is now fashionable to say, has quietly foisted upon us while we were not looking.

Take it to its conclusion. The truly chic posture on the blame for the predicament we are in - all these government intrusions as would interfere with, say, the persistent and public reiteration of holocaust denial - is to lay it at the feet of the Jews.

And fair enough, I suppose. For years, Canadian Jewish leaders were at the forefront of building up the precedents by pursuing civil and non-violent remedies to Neo-Nazi propaganda and incitement in this country.

But do remember that other alternative, is all I ask. Imagine the result if the likes of Greg Felton were to come after the people of my tribe, say, with the same kind of lurid slander and provocation he utters in his deranged obsession with the Jews. Now take that to its conclusion.

You've got keep a sense of humour about things, am I right?

Good.

Be assured that none of my crowd, being "noyce feckin payple," will send letters from their solicitors inviting you to appear before a human rights tribunal if you're found referring to us pikeys as "blackguards" or "slags" or any such thing. A simpler and more summary resolution would obtain. You would simply be introduced to the Dohertys and the Coyles.

UPDATE: Our fair sister Yvonne Ridley, a rank Mosleyite - has taken great exception to the too-charitable and delicate way I described her in today's newspaper. Editor Fazil Mihlar - not a scary Jewish name, that - has written her back to suggest she take a long walk down a short road.

UPDATE 2: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? David Berner knows: "Felton is obsessed with his hatred for Jews. I know this because I worked with him for 8 months as we entered the 21st century. He is incapable of maintaining a human conversation for longer than 4 minutes without beginning his rant against Jews."

Neither The Marketplace Nor The Tribunal: When 'Intellectual Freedom' Is Betrayed

In today's Ottawa Citizen, I take another look at the Vancouver Public Library's decision to present the morbidly anti-Israel conspiracy theorist Greg Felton as its featured author for Freedom To Read Week. I'm saying there's something dangerous going on here, but it's probably not what you think:

It is not harmless in Iran, where Felton's column appears in the Tehran Times, a propaganda front for a regime that has banned hundreds of books, just in recent months, and has shut down as many as 150 publications last year, throwing perhaps 1,000 journalists out in the street.

Neither is it harmless when Felton's writings appear in the newspapers of Arab countries where there is no free press, and no "marketplace of ideas" to sort things out, and the Khazar legend has lately returned to animate the hatreds of Israel's less literate enemies.

There is no remedy available from any Canadian human rights tribunal that can hold anyone adequately accountable for this. And to accept Felton's obsessions into the "marketplace of ideas" merely grants intellectual legitimacy to historical fiction and antisemitic legend, which debases the very purpose of free speech.

In the uproar that followed the library's decision, chief librarian Paul Whitney said it was all a matter of "intellectual freedom." It isn't.

I'm saying truth matters. I'm not claiming any special insight into the truth, but what I am prepared to claim is that if our public institutions settle into a way of thinking that regards transgressive gesture as intellectual courage, and grants legitimacy to any old version of the truth, then one version will ultimately prevail, and it will be the one proclaimed by men in shiny boots.

Michel Foucault made that mistake, and nowadays, in Iran, free speech invites the lash, and puts you in a dungeon.

The problem isn't Felton at all. It's that conception of "free speech" where black propaganda is tolerated, accepted, and even welcomed. Like Ophelia Benson says, it's people "who think it’s far more important to be sensitive and respectful than it is to think clearly or tell the unfluffy truth. I don’t know what to do about them other than keep repeating, monotonously and without subtlety, that they are wrong and deluded and fatuous."

Greg Felton: An Amazon Taxonomy

As part of my occasional briefing notes (i.e. here and here) on the proper taxonomical classification for Vancouver's upcoming Freedom-To-Read Week (What's its family, its genus, its species? What is the proper taxonomic nomenclature?), we will now look at other specimens that occupy the same ecological niche, and exhibit the same habits of mind, as Mr. Felton.

By a crude but illustrative methodology, proposed by our comrade Hak Mao (in a British laboratory), the Canadian (i.e. Amazon.ca) results, as of this morning, are instructive.

"Customers who bought this item" (i.e. Felton's The Host and the Parasite: How Israel's Fifth Column Consumed America also bought Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made The Third Reich, as well as The Synagogue of Satan: The Secret History of Jewish World Domination, along with The Power of Israel in The United States.

The author of The Power of Israel is James Petras, a senior figure at the venerable Canadian Dimension magazine and also author of Rulers and Ruled in the U.S. Empire: Bankers, Zionists, Militants. My readers might remember Petras. I introduced some time ago (see towards the bottom of this column). Petras says the Mohammed Cartoons eruption, with all its murders and burning embassies, was really a Mossad operation.

The author of the The Synagogue of Satan, also authored Secret Signs, Mysterious Symbols, and Hidden Codes of the Illuminati. The Amazon taxonomy places his The Synagogue with one related subspecies, Daniel Estulin's The True Story of the Bilderberg Group.

The title Conjuring Hitler, which customers of Felton's book also bought, are also shown to have bought After the Reich: The Brutal History of Allied Occupation.

This analysis isn't cladistics, but the phylogenics are fairly sound. The morphology holds up, you see certain patterns emerge, and the rest is idle chatter.

Know the enemy.

"A Forum For People Who Have Whacked-Out Views"

It's just come to my attention that the Freedom-To-Be-Antisemitic forum the Vancouver Public Library is convening on behalf of conspiracy theorist Greg Felton will be introduced by the British Columbia Library Association Intellectual Freedom Committee. Least that's what the Library Journal reports.

This is shaping up to be the most intellectually strange event in Vancouver since the Necessary Voices Series hosted 911-Truther Barrie Zwicker (about which I reported here ).

Meanwhile, in the UK, Ophelia Benson, co-author of the excellent book Why Truth Matters, looks at the VPL's justification for drawing Felton to its bosom and asks a couple of questions.

"Then does the library think its role is to provide a forum for exchange of any and all views no matter how uninformed, wrong, baseless, distorted, incompetent they are?

". . . Does the Vancouver Public Library, in short, really see no difference between upholding the right to intellectual freedom and affirmatively providing a platform for people to purvey, for instance, inaccurate history?"

In the Library Journal article I noticed two other things.

The first is that the library has responded to the uproar over the Felton invitation by offering to provide additional programming for the airing of "a different perspective." Spot the weirdness in that? Good.

The second is that the lunatic himself responded to the Library Journal by questioning its credibility and inviting its readers to telephone him directly to have a chat about things. Felton even posted his telephone number for you.

It's 778-322-1415.

My legions of fans and admirers

Among the many and varied expressions of affection that have come my way in response to a certain essay I wrote in the Vancouver Sun a while back, my favourite is an email I received from an American gentleman by the name of Curtis B. Maynard, an associate of David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Maynard reflected on the growing acceptance of antisemitism at large in the world, and then wished me well in these words: "What it all means is that the time of the Jewish media is at hand. What it is likely to mean for you in a couple of years is - pay back for all those years you've carried the kike torch."

Good news, then. I've got a couple of years left before ill luck comes my way. Today, I see I have more good news, in that at least for now I am to be spared the legal wrath of the fantasist Greg Felton, whose weird theories were tangentially related to the subject of that Vancouver Sun essay. In his latest contribution to "the Canadian Arab News" (which for all I know doesn't even exist), Mr. Felton takes me to task and goes off on another obsessive tangent about the racial origins of the Jews, specifically the Ashkenazi Jews, from whom less than half of the population of Israel can claim descent. If you're at all interested in the black arts of language abuse and obfuscation, you will find Mr. Felton's latest efforts a treat.

If you're at all interested in the story of the Khazars - a fascinating story, sadly ruined by the racist and hysterical purposes to which it has been put - read Steven Plaut's excellent essay, in which he makes the important point: "The greatest irony is that even if the entire Khazar theory of Ashkenazi Jews were correct - and virtually none of it is correct - it would be entirely irrelevant. Judaism has never defined Jews on racial grounds. Anyone from any race is welcome as a convert to Judaism as long as he or she is sincere."

If for some reason you're interested in the racial origins of the Jews - the subject that so captivates Mr. Felton - there is an intriguing explanation of the genetics involved here, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The upshot: "The results support the hypothesis that the paternal gene pools of Jewish communities from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population, and suggest that most Jewish communities have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the Diaspora."

How Vancouver Can Redeem Itself From Freedom-To-Be-Antisemitic Week

I have not and would not propose that the Vancouver Public Library respond to public disgust by simply rescinding its decision to invite the Jew-obsessed, conspiracist, Hamas-praising, Ahmedinejad-admiring, medication-needing Greg Felton as its featured author for Freedom To Read Week.

But this is an emergency, and the Vancouver Public Library can, should and must do something:

URGENT: Gunmen have attacked the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in Gaza City and blown up its library, burning thousands of books, its director says.

This is about Freedom To Read Week, which begins in ten days. There is time.

Do something.