Letters to the editors

New principal’s ‘blind spots’

Dear Editors,

Re: “Queen’s appoints new principal.” (Journal, Jan. 29, 2009)

Daniel Woolf stated on CBC Radio that he supports diversity and inclusion. In the very next sentence he noted that he can see the increase in international students when he walks through campus. Does our Governor General or her predecessor look “foreign” to him? He assumes that people who look different (i.e. not European) are not Canadian. The Human Rights Office or the Kingston Area Race Relations Association—groups that daily negotiate the complex, fluid and sometimes invisible strands of diversity—should work with Dr. Woolf so that he, and the community he is about to represent, can better see their blind spots and thus move beyond phatic and empty platitudes when it comes to understanding diversity.

George Fogarasi

ArtSci ’89

Hate crime or thought crime?

Dear Editors,

The announcement that Dutch MP Geert Wilders will be prosecuted for “incitement to hatred and discrimination” against Islam is yet another demonstration of the threat that hate crime legislation poses to free speech.

“Hate crime” is merely a euphemism for thought crime. When a criminal’s ideological motivation for committing a crime is considered to be a pertinent question in sentencing decisions, the scope of the law is being expanded from criminal action to “criminal thought.” Remember that genuine violations of individual rights—i.e., attacks on person or property, or conspiracy to that end—are already against the law and do not need to be placed under a special class of crimes when directed at certain minorities.

Once it is accepted that a man convicted of an actual crime can be sentenced to extra time in prison merely because of his ideas, it is only a small step to prosecuting someone solely on the basis of his ideas. Indeed, many Western countries are already prosecuting people like Geert Wilders (merely the latest on a long list) for no other crime than expressing politically incorrect ideas.

Lest anyone think that this phenomenon is confined to the Netherlands or Europe, remember that Canada’s Orwellian Human Rights Commission became internationally infamous over the past year for its persecution of Ezra Levant, Mark Steyn, and Maclean’s magazine for the same “offence” as Geert Wilders. All of them stand accused of purely political crimes—a category generally thought in the past to be confined to dictatorships.

It is shameful that critics of Islam in the West must live in fear, not only of the jihadist thugs who threaten to kill them (and sometimes succeed), but of their own governments, which should be protecting their right to free speech rather than trying to silence them when they exercise it.

Once the government is able to criminalize the expression of ideas it finds ideologically unpalatable, the death knell of a free society has sounded.

Douglas Treilhard

ArtSci ’10

All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s)-in-Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be contacted, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to journal_editors@ams.queensu.ca.

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