…and I was forced to help subsidize it.
Gavin Boby, a British nutbar who campaigns against the building of mosques because, he says, they attract Muslims, spoke at the Ottawa Public Library last night—a place I help to keep afloat with my municipal taxes. He was invited by a previously unheard-of group of bigots calling themselves ACT! For Canada.
Not for my Canada, bubbas.
Anyone who can manage to make the likes of right-wing stalwarts Salim Mansur and Fred Litwin appear moderate and humane should have decent folks worried. (Fred’s apostasy has been noticed, by the way.)
The Chair of the library board, Jan Harder, said it was all about free speech. But Jan herself is an outspoken racist who, as a city councillor, decried “non-whites” coming into her ward, earning herself the enthusiastic support of the neo-Nazi website Stormfront, the white nationalist VDARE crowd, and of course the Free Dominion gang. (No links here: just Google “Jan Harder” and “non-white.”)
Harder also fussed out loud about the Asian presence in Ottawa, and lashed out against City of Ottawa bilingualism policies, referring to French speakers as “less than desirable”. She’s not exactly, you know, neutral on this sort of thing.
Boby, the self-proclaimed “mosque-buster,” who apparently didn’t run into any problems with Canadian Border Security, had to sign an undertaking that he would not violate Canadian hate speech laws, and his rant was monitored by police officers from the Hate Crimes Unit. But those laws appear to be a dead letter anyway—even in blatant cases, police run “investigations” that proceed at a glacial pace, if they proceed at all.
The long and the short of it? The bigots prevailed in my city, including a foreign demagogue who came here expressly to stir up hatred against fellow members of our community, on our nickel, too. And this being Stephen Harper’s Canada, no one could do a damn thing to stop it.