Juno News - Media and politicians blame Israel for failed Palestinian rocket

00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true

00:01:20.460 north hello and welcome to you all another live edition of canada's most irreverent talk show

00:01:30.800 this is the andrew lawton show on true north on this wednesday october 18th 2023 we are coming

00:01:38.480 to you live in the midst of a bit of a strange standoff between israel and hamas and i'm not

00:01:45.820 talking about the conflict that has taken several lives now, instigated by Hamas and its brutal

00:01:52.180 attacks on Israeli civilians a week and a half ago. But I'm talking about this, he said, she said,

00:01:58.840 about who was responsible for this massive attack, an airstrike on a hospital in Gaza. Now,

00:02:08.420 targeting civilians, targeting a hospital is illegal. It is incredibly wrong morally,

00:02:14.160 forgetting about norms and standards in international law.

00:02:17.960 And as you saw from some of the headlines,

00:02:19.900 an Israeli attack on the Al-Ali Baptist Hospital claimed 500 lives.

00:02:25.860 Now, this was a narrative that took hold.

00:02:28.300 You very quickly saw condemnations of this from people all over the place,

00:02:32.840 including in Canada and certainly including the media.

00:02:36.960 And it was interesting, for example,

00:02:38.900 this is CBC's original headline on this whole thing.

00:02:42.980 hundreds killed in Israeli airstrike on Gaza City Hospital,

00:02:47.480 Palestinian health ministry in Gaza says.

00:02:50.520 Now, they're attributing to the claim,

00:02:52.040 but when they credit the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza,

00:02:55.420 they're crediting Hamas.

00:02:57.760 Anytime someone quotes a so-called official in Gaza

00:03:00.780 at any department of government, they are quoting Hamas.

00:03:03.680 So the media, which would normally be skeptical about things,

00:03:06.620 or at least should be, was taking Hamas at face value.

00:03:09.980 Notably, the very serious claim that an Israeli airstrike killed hundreds at a hospital in Gaza.

00:03:17.860 The New York Times also went for this.

00:03:19.880 Now, in their case, they went through several iterations of this,

00:03:22.800 in which at first they took the claim at face value in the same way that CBC did,

00:03:27.820 and then they walked back a little bit more, and then they walked back beyond that.

00:03:32.200 Oh, yeah, you get the whole before, after, and after that.

00:03:35.320 Israeli strike kills hundreds in hospital, Palestinians say.

00:03:39.380 At least 500 dead in strike on Gaza Hospital, Palestinians say.

00:03:44.020 And at least 500 dead in blast at Gaza Hospital, Palestinians say.

00:03:49.240 So by the time you get to the end of it, it was just a blast that took place.

00:03:52.460 It wasn't an Israeli airstrike or an airstrike at all.

00:03:55.700 It's not something we can lay at Israel's feet.

00:03:59.120 Now, let's talk about the facts of this.

00:04:01.380 Because yesterday we heard a condemnation from Justin Trudeau

00:04:04.600 that was very deliberately, I think, nondescript about what it was he was actually condemning.

00:04:10.880 Take a look.

00:04:12.840 The news coming out of Gaza is horrific and absolutely unacceptable.

00:04:20.140 International humanitarian and international law needs to be respected in this and in all cases.

00:04:27.840 There are rules around wars and it's not acceptable.

00:04:30.480 His rhetoric suggests this was an act of war, not just a byproduct of war.

00:04:38.460 Again, very notable there.

00:04:40.160 Melanie Jolie, who is Canada's foreign affairs minister, at least purportedly, had this to say on Twitter.

00:04:47.280 Bombing a hospital is an unthinkable act and there is no doubt that doing so is absolutely illegal.

00:04:54.140 At the risk of getting too hell-bent on semantics, bombing a hospital.

00:04:58.720 This refers to an act that is, one might argue in her framing of it, deliberate or at the very least active rather than accidental.

00:05:07.460 A caveat I put in there for a very particular reason.

00:05:11.020 Now, some people are not as measured with their words.

00:05:13.840 The National Council of Canadian Muslims came out guns blazing in its rhetoric on this.

00:05:19.640 If you look at the tweet from the NCCM yesterday, a Canadian Muslim advocacy group,

00:05:24.980 What you are watching here is a heinous act of ethnic cleansing by the Israeli military.

00:05:30.940 500 people killed in a single airstrike on Al-Ali Hospital in Gaza City.

00:05:36.440 Will every Canadian politician clearly condemn this horrific act of violence?

00:05:43.340 There is a very serious and very deliberate and very specific allegation there.

00:05:50.140 Now that was in the evening.

00:05:51.480 We have a bit more daylight today in Gaza and in Israel.

00:05:56.360 We can see very clearly what happened and where it happened.

00:06:01.640 Let's look at this tweet from Elliot Higgins.

00:06:06.740 That is the parking lot adjacent to the hospital,

00:06:11.060 which has cars still very much in it, I might add,

00:06:15.280 in the aftermath of this so-called Israeli airstrike on the hospital.

00:06:20.680 Let's look at Visegrad 24, which has this picture of the wreckage and carnage.

00:06:28.320 I have seen potholes bigger than that.

00:06:32.320 I have seen potholes on my city streets, which have never been to my knowledge subject to an Israeli airstrike,

00:06:37.980 than that so-called crater that Gaza has tried to say is an Israeli airstrike on a hospital that killed 500 people.

00:06:48.120 Now, the facts of this suggest, and the IDF, which obviously is a belligerent in this conflict,

00:06:53.540 but the IDF shared intercepted audio of two Hamas officials in which one of them learns from the other

00:06:59.120 that it was their own rocket.

00:07:01.780 It was a misfire of a Hamas rocket fired from behind the hospital,

00:07:07.100 fired from a cemetery, by the way, which to Hamas is completely fair game to use as a rocket launching pad

00:07:13.600 that misfired and fell flat in the hospital parking lot. Thankfully, there were no 500

00:07:19.120 casualties, there were no hospital bombings, there were no strikes, and there was certainly

00:07:22.940 nothing of the allegations of Israel's conflict and complicity in this that was at all to blame.

00:07:30.360 It was a misfired rocket by Hamas that created a pothole in a parking lot that the media and

00:07:37.440 the political class ran with as being some evidence of Israeli war crimes. Now, I mentioned

00:07:43.880 the comments yesterday from Justin Trudeau and from Melanie Jolie. Even this morning,

00:07:49.200 Liberal cabinet ministers were not exactly being circumspect in their remarks. This was a tweet

00:07:53.880 from Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, who says,

00:07:57.640 The attack on the Al-Ali Arab Hospital in Gaza is horrifying and against international

00:08:03.580 humanitarian law. My thoughts are with the victims and their loved ones. Let's be clear,

00:08:09.520 there can be no justification to strike a hospital nor civilians. That was at 6.51 a.m. this morning

00:08:17.200 Eastern Time. Hours and hours after, it became abundantly clear that the airstrike on this

00:08:22.240 hospital simply did not exist, and any inflicted damage was actually the consequence of Hamas,

00:08:28.460 which deliberately puts its civilians in harm's way, but it was their own actions and nothing by

00:08:36.020 the state of Israel that was to blame for this. Now to go back to the CBC and the New York Times

00:08:42.940 and the Toronto Star is no exception to this, they all come out with the explosive allegation

00:08:47.980 and then the edits take place a little bit more subtly and quietly after the fact. Maybe they

00:08:52.900 append an editor's note on the story, but that is the extent of it. I received yesterday push

00:08:58.820 notifications alerting me to this horrific act, and only this morning I got one push notification,

00:09:05.140 to its credit, from the Toronto Star, acknowledging that they had made an error or at least had

00:09:11.480 clarified their previous reporting on this, had clarified their headline. We saw lots of public

00:09:18.520 proclamations from the Liberal government, from Conservatives, even from some New Democrats,

00:09:23.680 from journalists, calling out Hamas's brutality a week and a half ago. Because when we were

00:09:29.300 confronted with the actions of Hamas kidnapping hostages, killing seniors and babies, raping

00:09:35.940 women and teenagers, it was easy for everyone to stand up, you'd think, and say Hamas is absolutely

00:09:42.380 in the wrong here. But as time goes on and as the story shifts from those initial attacks into a

00:09:48.500 conflict that appears on the surface to be a more conventional war, the benefit of the doubt that

00:09:55.220 Israel was given by people in those first couple of days has been eroded. And I'm not to say there

00:10:00.360 aren't legitimate criticisms we can make about Israel and its response to things like this. I

00:10:05.460 am not at all going to give the IDF carte blanche because Israelis were targeted by horrific acts

00:10:11.680 of violence. There are still rules pertaining to proportionality, and there are still laws which

00:10:17.340 are not in an international context as authoritative as people might think, but they nevertheless

00:10:22.620 do exist. But what's missing from the story every time this comes up is all of the efforts through

00:10:29.400 which Israel goes to be proportional, to urge citizens to evacuate or to be evacuated rather,

00:10:37.800 to urge entire parts of this territory to evacuate. This is what Israel goes out of its way to do.

00:10:44.640 It's Hamas that tells people, no, stay put, do not leave, because Hamas is the one that wants dead Palestinians more than Israel does.

00:10:51.940 In fact, that is Hamas's entire MO, to have more dead Gazans so that they can turn around and point to Israel as being the enemy,

00:10:59.560 rather than the Hamas terrorist thugs who put their young, their women, their children, all of them, directly in harm's way.

00:11:08.580 So it's particularly disgusting when you see people in Western leadership positions that

00:11:13.440 should know this full well, that start to drink the Kool-Aid, even if they attempt to

00:11:18.600 measure their words, which is not a reactive, not a relative product of them having a nuanced

00:11:24.020 position, but is in fact a byproduct of them wanting to pretend to have a nuanced and non-extreme

00:11:32.080 position. I will draw your attention to this comment by NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. And I should

00:11:38.360 point out, I always, always, always have to caution whenever we talk about Jagmeet Singh to say that I

00:11:43.080 don't want to mistake him for being relevant. But it was noteworthy and revealing when he said this

00:11:48.180 about the conflict in the Middle East right now. International law must be upheld and respected.

00:11:56.460 Make no mistake, collective punishment is a violation of this law.

00:12:03.780 Canada must insist that all those who broke these laws are held accountable,

00:12:09.440 even those nations we have called friends.

00:12:12.400 Canada must call for a ceasefire to end the killing of innocent civilians in Gaza immediately.

00:12:19.140 We cannot allow for the continuing dehumanization of an entire population.

00:12:28.540 When we stop seeing each other as humans, when we stop believing that each life has value,

00:12:36.560 this is when the seeds of genocide take hold.

00:12:41.640 The seeds of genocide take hold.

00:12:45.540 Now, if you listen very carefully, he's not coming out and making any accusation about anyone.

00:12:52.240 He's not talking about Israel. He's not talking about Gaza. He's not talking about Hamas.

00:12:56.360 He's just saying generally, he's just throwing it out there.

00:12:59.380 And if anyone did anything like this, then, well, that should be condemned.

00:13:03.800 When he talks about collective punishment, he's not actually condemning Hamas's decision to collectively punish Israelis.

00:13:10.540 he's condemning Israel's decision to cut off power and water supply to Gaza for a time.

00:13:18.040 So he's directing his scorn towards Israel, not towards the Hamas terrorist thugs.

00:13:23.640 When he talks about sowing the seeds of genocide, I'm not in his mind,

00:13:29.780 but I do not believe he is talking about the attempted extermination of the Jewish people,

00:13:34.600 which is a stated mandate of Hamas in its charter.

00:13:37.980 They literally put in writing their goal to wage war against Jews, to take up jihad and to annihilate the state of Israel.

00:13:44.960 No, he's talking about Israel's self-defense.

00:13:47.680 That's what he believes is, quote, sowing the seeds of genocide.

00:13:52.800 The last couple of days have showed us that politicians will, when absolutely confronted with unequivocal evil, perhaps say the right thing.

00:14:01.520 But when the dust settles, when the bodies cool, when the carnage is less apparent and in your face than it is in those early days,

00:14:10.520 they go back to their natural resting position, which is an utter contempt for Israel

00:14:16.200 and an utter disregard for the realities of the ground and for Israel's right as a nation to defend itself against a people who want it destroyed,

00:14:25.740 a people who want it dead.

00:14:27.900 That is not a description of the entirety of the Palestinian people.

00:14:31.820 It is a description of the governing authority in Hamas, however.

00:14:35.560 And the country that we see defending itself will try to save those civilians

00:14:41.260 when its own so-called government wants them in jeopardy.

00:14:46.440 And I didn't have the clip for today, but there was a Liberal member of Parliament,

00:14:50.620 Samir Zubari, who is a backbencher.

00:14:53.240 But he was just, I mean, very emotional this morning on his way into the National Caucus meeting for the liberals as he speaks about if he said the exact quote here, if I was behind an artillery cannon and I knew this would fall on hospitals and schools, I would not push that trigger.

00:15:10.820 And he was, again, being very careful with his words.

00:15:14.020 He was asked, are you accusing Israel?

00:15:15.560 He's, well, I'm not saying one way or another.

00:15:19.220 But you have all of these people that are trying to pretend that Israel is the guilty party of this,

00:15:25.800 that Israel is the instigator, that Israel is the ethnic cleanser,

00:15:29.740 that Israel is the genocider of this to create a word that I wish I didn't have to.

00:15:35.920 But that is nowhere near the case.

00:15:39.660 And it is a fundamental rejection of every bit of reality.

00:15:42.760 Now, I don't have a lot of time for Joe Biden.

00:15:45.320 In fact, when I say the date at the beginning of the show, I think even that would have

00:15:48.240 lost Joe Biden.

00:15:48.980 He doesn't know where he is or what day it is at any given time.

00:15:51.760 But his government has been remarkably lucid on Israel, which I think is very important.

00:15:56.460 And the U.S. has come out and said, look, they've seen the intelligence and there is

00:16:00.360 no information supporting at all the idea that Israel was behind this strike.

00:16:05.780 We've had unequivocal denials from the IDF, from the Israeli government, and you may say, well, they're biased, we can't take them at face value.

00:16:14.260 No, but it's also going to be the case that these people are not going to say something that can be proven false by objective evidence.

00:16:21.920 And if Israel wanted to destroy that hospital, it would be leveled to the ground right now.

00:16:28.060 So who do you trust more?

00:16:29.560 I mean, even if you don't like Israel, who do you think has a more capable military force, Israel or Hamas?

00:16:35.780 It is far more plausible that Hamas accidentally misfired a rocket and blew up three square feet of a parking lot.

00:16:43.980 That is a lot more easy to believe than the fact that Israel tried to blow up a hospital and couldn't manage to get six inches below the surface of the pavement.

00:16:53.740 So that is absolutely what we're seeing here.

00:16:56.260 And again, this is all contextual here.

00:16:58.540 I've been talking about the political and media response where people, at least on the surface, believe they shouldn't be condemning Israel and defending those who want to annihilate Israel.

00:17:08.320 But if you take a walk out to your neighborhood protest, you'll find it's an entirely defensible and normal position in a lot of cities to stand up there and hold signs that celebrate death of death to the Jews and that celebrate Hamas attacks against Israel.

00:17:24.780 One of these rallies took place over the weekend.

00:17:28.320 We saw a number of them.

00:17:29.220 We also saw another one in Toronto yesterday, which my colleague Harrison Faulkner took

00:17:34.080 some time out to see here.

00:17:35.580 And he's also covered a number of these protests.

00:17:38.200 Harrison, it's good to talk to you.

00:17:39.980 I mean, what is the actual tone there?

00:17:42.160 Because I know that we all can point to the one crazy sign at a protest and try to extrapolate

00:17:47.180 from that.

00:17:47.660 But these don't seem to be outliers from all of these things that I've seen.

00:17:51.260 These seem to be relatively mainstream positions, these more extremist slogans and sentiments.

00:17:57.400 Yeah, well, I think it's safe to say, Andrew, that there is a lot of anger at these crowds.

00:18:02.400 They seem to be growing and the tone seems to be shifting.

00:18:06.500 I think when I was on the ground on the 9th, that Monday protest at Nathan Phillips Square, there was a lot of anger there.

00:18:14.500 But last night was different.

00:18:16.220 I mean, one of the things you heard was the people leading the protests saying that Justin Trudeau, Doug Ford and Olivia Chow had blood on their hands for what happened at the Gaza hospital.

00:18:28.700 And I think in general for their support of Israel, they also would go through the list of all world leaders in the West and saying that they have blood on their hands for what's happening to Palestinians right now in Gaza.

00:18:40.500 So I think you're right to point out, Andrew, that the tone is shifting at these protests.

00:18:44.940 And what we saw last night in Toronto was something that we saw in other parts all over the world yesterday.

00:18:51.520 So it is something worth noting.

00:18:54.080 Yeah, and I think that's really the point here.

00:18:56.740 I mean, I'm sympathetic to the idea that we don't want to import very hotly contested conflicts from other countries.

00:19:03.240 I mean, you've covered the India file well.

00:19:05.220 I mean, that's one of the biggest failures of Canadian multiculturalism is that we take conflicts from elsewhere and we bring them into Canada.

00:19:11.400 In this particular case, Israel is a very different situation.

00:19:15.140 It is a country in which the global picture matters a great deal because we're talking about countries that recognize Israel's rights under international law or countries that don't.

00:19:25.280 And in Canada, it is weird how we're seeing that, as you say, that tone shift where, you know, Saturday, Sunday, Monday of last week, every politician, even, you know, ones that don't like Israel knew what they had to say, which was, you know, we condemn Hamas's violence.

00:19:39.780 We support Israel. And now that is shifting for them a lot.

00:19:44.520 And I think these protests are very concerning because it shows that there is a large contingent here that is going to be calling up its members of parliament's offices, calling up the premier, the prime minister, and saying, you know what, I'm not going to vote for you if you support Israel.

00:19:57.500 And I don't know who outnumbers whom in this case.

00:20:01.400 Yeah, I think it is also worth noting that, yeah, these protests are going to happen again tonight.

00:20:08.860 They had said publicly that they're going to be there every night as long as they can go.

00:20:12.880 and of course, Andrew, you know, these people want to show that they have the public on their

00:20:21.180 side, that they have the majority showing up to these protests. And I think whether we like it

00:20:26.520 or not, protests do have that ability to, I guess, get in the heads of local politicians.

00:20:33.400 Politicians want to be on the side of the public. And I think that's what we're going to see.

00:20:37.460 One thing we did have last night that was worth mentioning, since you brought up the politician

00:20:41.820 element was you had what was described as a local first responder wearing what looked like a lab

00:20:47.860 coat addressing the crowd last night at Bloor & Young from standing on top of scaffolding,

00:20:53.940 telling everyone there that they had to write to their MPs and local politicians to get them to

00:20:58.640 condemn Israel for the bombing of the Gaza hospital. We're not going to get into the

00:21:03.680 different elements of that, but that is what they're trying to get at. They were there last

00:21:08.100 night in response to what happened in Gaza, and they are there trying to get politicians to

00:21:13.580 condemn Israel for this. So there is definitely a politics element to this, of course. The hospital

00:21:19.860 situation is a really useful example of why this is so difficult. I mean, here we have,

00:21:26.000 and I just spent the first 15 minutes of the show going over it. We've got tons of evidence that

00:21:30.280 shows this was misreported, that the media that took Hamas's claims at face value, the politicians

00:21:35.180 who then took the media's reporting at face value yesterday were wrong, but there are still people

00:21:40.300 that will refuse to let this change their preconceived notions in the same way that last

00:21:45.700 week, the big source of controversy was whether infants were beheaded by Hamas. And you had people

00:21:50.540 that just said, you know, in spite of the reporting and the evidence, no, there's no way I won't

00:21:54.760 believe it. I can't believe it. And that's happening here. And, and it is bizarre in a way,

00:22:00.040 yet unsurprising that we see in real time just this complete rejection of truth in support of

00:22:06.960 the narrative. And I mean, Al Jazeera, which is obviously not a pro-Israel publication by any

00:22:12.260 stretch, had, and I'm going to pull up the headline here because I think it's revealing,

00:22:16.180 what is Israel's narrative on the Gaza hospital explosion? So right there, they're saying anything

00:22:22.400 Israel says is just propaganda, but anything Hamas says is apparently fine. Yeah, it's obviously,

00:22:28.780 this is this is something that we didn't we it's not first time we're seeing this of course at the

00:22:32.960 beginning of the ukraine-russia war we saw things like this happening all over the place all

00:22:37.640 throughout social media everybody i think would be very wise to understand that we're watching a war

00:22:43.800 take place here involving belligerents who are trying to take the moral high ground for themselves

00:22:49.820 we have to be aware of what's of what's happening here and recognize that of course the messaging

00:22:55.160 we get from either side is not going to be exactly what they want uh what they want to come

00:23:00.180 out and what the other side wants people should be uh should be reasonable when they look at this

00:23:05.480 and recognize we're watching a war information that we get from the ground is never going to

00:23:10.320 be exactly accurate um and and and that is what we're going to see here so because of this as they

00:23:16.480 said yesterday night at the protest in toronto i imagine we're going to see again another protest

00:23:21.280 tonight outside of the Israeli consulate, right at Yonge and Bloor, and likely in Mississauga as

00:23:25.840 well. This is going to keep going on because really what we're watching are two sides trying

00:23:31.180 to take the moral high ground from one another. And that's just, I think, part of this war we

00:23:36.380 have to be aware of. Yeah. No, very well said. Harrison Faulkner, you can catch Ratioed Mondays

00:23:41.780 and Thursdays at True North. So always good to check in with you, Harrison. Thanks for coming on.

00:23:46.880 Thank you.

00:23:47.920 One of the things I will point out about this, I mean, look, if someone wants to protest at

00:23:52.500 the Israeli consulate, that's their right in Canada.

00:23:55.120 And I have always been unequivocally in support of free speech.

00:23:59.120 But one thing I'll point out that I find a little bit interesting here is that there

00:24:03.100 was also, I mentioned yesterday, a big giant conference on anti-Semitism in Ottawa, hosted

00:24:08.180 by SEJA, the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs.

00:24:11.720 SEJA has had this on the books for quite some time, not knowing they were going to have

00:24:16.120 this backdrop against which to have this conference of the conflict in the Middle East.

00:24:21.500 But why this is interesting is that this is still an unobjectionable, uncontroversial

00:24:26.480 idea that we need to stand up for, well, stand up against anti-Semitism.

00:24:32.120 And I should say that when Islamophobia was the discussion we were all having a few years

00:24:37.100 ago around M103, most of the Jewish groups stood up and said, yes, absolutely, let's

00:24:41.820 condemn Islamophobia as long as you guys condemn anti-Semitism.

00:24:44.800 And they all just held hands and said, great, we're friends.

00:24:47.460 And all of those voices that were standing up for the fight against Islamophobia four

00:24:53.480 or five years ago have curiously been silent in the face of anti-Semitism that is running

00:24:59.960 rampant and is always the most pervasive form of hatred in this country.

00:25:04.840 And I would point out a few different aspects of this.

00:25:08.060 One is that the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, I believe, has so far reached day 13 of the

00:25:14.800 its silence in the face of these attacks. Day 13. No, maybe it's day 12. My apologies. I've

00:25:22.340 already gotten to Thursday here. But the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, which gets huge amounts of

00:25:27.160 money from the federal government to be the primary spokesperson and advocate against hate

00:25:32.040 founded by Bernie Farber, has had zero to say about the Israel-Hamas conflict. It's had nothing

00:25:38.120 to say about the nasty death to the Jews signs we see at rallies. It has had nothing to say about

00:25:45.160 any of that. Where are the anti-hate voices? Amira El-Gawabi, formerly the head of the National

00:25:51.340 Council of Canadian Muslims. I've met her and she's a very lovely woman in person, but she has,

00:25:56.580 when I last checked yesterday, been silent. Her Twitter account has been dormant since this all

00:26:02.400 happen. Now, she is Canada's special envoy on the issue of Islamophobia. You might think that if

00:26:08.580 fighting against hate is something everyone is doing in the trenches together, that she would

00:26:13.020 be there to stand in allyship with Jews that are facing anti-Semitism when they stood in allyship

00:26:19.140 with her and the NCCM and Muslim voices when Islamophobia was the discussion. Now, I'm going

00:26:26.640 to put some caveats there in the sense that I do not like the false equivalents of Islamophobia and

00:26:32.200 anti-Semitism because while there are examples of horrific bigoted attacks on Muslims, it does not

00:26:38.160 exist in the same way that anti-Semitism has existed and always will exist unless something

00:26:46.080 significant changes. And by that, I think in the geopolitical context here, we see countries which

00:26:52.400 want to annihilate the Jewish state. We do not have countries that want to annihilate the Arab

00:26:58.200 world. And you can, you know, take whatever jokes you're going to take about, you know,

00:27:01.860 American foreign policy. But the reality is anti-Semitism is systemic and institutionalized

00:27:07.300 in a way that so-called Islamophobia is not. But again, if we are going to take the anti-hate

00:27:13.760 approach, we should condemn all hate equally. And that is not anything that's being done by

00:27:19.340 the official voices against hating Canada, people who make a great deal of money from the government

00:27:24.160 in doing this. And this sort of forms a natural segue into a discussion I started yesterday,

00:27:30.100 which was about the federal government's goals of re, I don't want to use the word criminalizing

00:27:35.360 because criminal codes are different, but of re-outlawing so-called online hate speech and

00:27:42.960 doing so through human rights law. Now, the one prevailing sense that we all need to get here,

00:27:49.040 that we all need to realize is that if something is illegal offline, it is illegal online. And the

00:27:56.260 government tries to pretend this isn't the case. If it is illegal for you to disseminate child

00:28:00.820 pornography, you can't do that on a computer or on the internet. If it's illegal for you to

00:28:05.560 threaten violence against someone, you can't do that on the internet. If it's illegal for you to

00:28:09.540 share non-consensual sexual images of someone, you cannot do that using the internet. So when

00:28:15.660 the government talks about regulating so-called online harms, what they're talking about doing

00:28:21.340 is regulating a different aspect of things that in most cases are already illegal. And why that's

00:28:28.600 so dangerous in the context of its attack on hate speech is that we already have a criminal code

00:28:35.340 definition of hate speech, which has a very, very high bar because we realize that free speech is

00:28:41.040 supposed to be expansive and liberal and cover contentious, offensive, difficult, and even

00:28:46.540 emotionally hateful things. So when the government is talking about regulating and banning hate

00:28:52.560 speech, they're actually talking about lowering that threshold. And that brings us to this online

00:28:57.980 harms bill. Now the caveat here, we have not yet seen the bill itself. We haven't seen the text of

00:29:03.420 it, but we have seen former versions of this and we know where the government has drawn its

00:29:08.800 inspiration from. And the line they used when they tried to reintroduce Section 13 of the

00:29:14.020 Canadian Human Rights Act in 2019 or 2021, it was rather, was that speech that is fomenting

00:29:22.060 detestation or vilification. Now, they try to say this doesn't mean we're tackling free speech. It

00:29:29.300 doesn't mean we're censoring. It just means if you're purveying speech that's doing that,

00:29:35.640 it's going to fall under this banner. Now, we have a bunch of history from the Canadian Human

00:29:41.220 Rights Commission of going after speech that any reasonable person should look at as being worth

00:29:47.500 protecting, not because we agree with it, but because we agree with the fundamental and

00:29:52.340 inalienable, we're supposed to believe anyway, principle of free speech and in the Canadian

00:29:57.740 legal context and terminology, freedom of expression. So let's talk about this in a bit

00:30:03.320 more detail. John Carpe is the president of the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms and

00:30:08.740 joins me now. And I should just clarify for those tuning in, I am on the board of the JCCF, although

00:30:14.760 that has no bearing on my decision to invite John, who I have had on the show many times before he

00:30:19.560 worked for me, which I guess is technically true, but not really. John, always good to talk to you.

00:30:23.960 Thanks for coming on today. Glad to be with you, Andrew. So this is an example, again, put the

00:30:28.500 necessary, you know, caveats out of the way. We haven't yet seen the bill, but we've heard the

00:30:32.700 government describe it and we know what the government wants to do here and for a civil

00:30:37.860 liberties organization you must be looking at that saying this is the ball game right it it sounds

00:30:44.660 like a step in the wrong direction as you pointed out just a minute ago uh it is already illegal to

00:30:50.800 willfully promote hatred online as it is with a hard copy pamphlet brochure newspaper what have

00:30:57.520 you so it's already a criminal offense to willfully promote hatred against a group

00:31:01.800 based on race, religion, ancestry, ethnic origin,

00:31:06.760 sexual orientation, gender expression, and so on and so forth.

00:31:12.140 And that was upheld very narrowly by the Supreme Court of Canada.

00:31:16.400 It was a 4-3 split decision.

00:31:18.340 So that's already illegal.

00:31:19.620 So what I see here is the government stepping towards,

00:31:23.700 it's a small step towards becoming a repressive regime.

00:31:27.720 And one of the hallmarks of repressive regimes,

00:31:30.900 whether it's today's communist China, communist North Korea, whether it's Germany, Italy, Spain

00:31:36.540 in the 1930s, whether it's the theocracies that are running Iran and Saudi Arabia, one thing they

00:31:43.280 all have in common is they all censor, and the governments take it upon themselves to determine

00:31:48.360 what is true or false, right or wrong, good or evil, and they will censor in the name of the

00:31:54.100 public interest and the common good, because politicians never violate your rights and

00:32:00.220 freedoms without offering some pretext. They're going to tell you it's national security, it's

00:32:05.620 fighting communism, it's fighting fascism, it's the environment, it's fighting a virus.

00:32:12.760 There's always a pretext for taking away our rights and freedoms. So this really looks like

00:32:16.960 a step in the wrong direction. One of the things I want to, not to put you on the spot here, but I'm

00:32:23.080 curious about your take on it because the government has said in the past that its

00:32:26.380 definition of hate speech is going to be informed by the Watcott Supreme Court decision from some

00:32:32.160 years back, which we don't need to get into the details of the case. But the Supreme Court has

00:32:37.440 not in Canada always taken the strongest view on freedom of expression. And I want to read a line

00:32:42.680 from this particular Supreme Court decision. Truthful statements can be presented in a manner

00:32:49.060 that would meet the definition of hate speech. And not all truthful statements must be free

00:32:54.580 from restriction. That is a very dangerous line that the government is embedding in its approach

00:33:00.580 to freedom of expression, which is that something can be true, but you aren't allowed to say it.

00:33:05.760 Well, the WhatCott decision weakened prior Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence on free speech that

00:33:12.980 was better. It was not a good decision. It could have been a lot worse. The problem with hate

00:33:19.920 speech regulation or even laws against it is that hate is an emotion that is in the human heart

00:33:28.240 it is subjective it is not necessarily a bad thing if it's directed against injustice or

00:33:34.640 oppression or falsehoods you know if you hate injustice then hatred can be a good thing but

00:33:39.920 the problem with with laws or regulations trying to govern hate is simply the fact that it's very

00:33:45.360 subjective. I could be listening to somebody. I could suspect that they might have hatred in their

00:33:52.000 heart. I really don't know. You or I could be giving a speech and some of your listeners might

00:33:59.200 subjectively feel that your speech is hateful. Other people listening to the exact same speech

00:34:04.640 think it's not hateful. It's just the expression of an opinion. So rightly or wrongly, we've got

00:34:10.900 the law on the books to criminalize willful promotion of hatred. We shouldn't go any further

00:34:16.900 down the road of having governments regulate the internet and take away from the right of Canadians

00:34:22.820 to have full access to information and to a diversity of viewpoints. Well, and that exchange

00:34:29.160 is so paramount. I mean, just to use a contemporary example, I started off the show by talking about

00:34:34.400 this back and forth between Israel and Hamas about what happened in this hospital attack

00:34:39.920 yesterday. And, you know, a bunch of people that are very sympathetic to the Hamas cause are saying

00:34:44.280 one thing happened. It's only through the exchange of these conflicts that we can interrogate and

00:34:49.800 find out what the truth is. And I'd say in that case, I mean, I would even say false statements

00:34:54.440 are protected free speech in some context because it is through the falsity that you can then

00:34:59.420 establish the truth oftentimes. And it's really dangerous to me that government is trying to take

00:35:05.940 that decision and take that process out of the hands of free people, because that's really what

00:35:11.160 they're doing here. They're making the Canadian Human Rights Commission the arbiter of what you

00:35:15.680 can and cannot say, and by extension, deputizing tech companies to do that, because that's the

00:35:20.560 other part of regulating online harms, is that it provides a vehicle for government to go to

00:35:25.220 Facebook and say, you shouldn't allow so-and-so to say that. You shouldn't allow so-and-so to post

00:35:29.400 that. Well, we've seen in the last three and a half years that governments are very, very effective

00:35:34.140 at getting millions of private actors, of private citizens to enforce government laws.

00:35:40.640 You saw that with the lockdowns and the vaccine passports where the government didn't need

00:35:45.460 to hire, although they probably did hire a lot more people, but they didn't need to

00:35:49.240 necessarily hire thousands of health inspectors because every movie theater owner, every gym

00:35:55.400 operator, every restaurant manager was an enforcement tool for the government to enforce

00:36:00.020 these rules. And so this is what the government seems to be moving towards is to regulate these

00:36:06.440 big platforms. And then they don't have to spend time, effort or energy trying to shut down the

00:36:11.480 Andrew Lawton show or the weekly Justice with John podcast, because these big entities will do it

00:36:17.420 for the government. You mentioned even false speech should be protected. And there's Supreme

00:36:23.020 Court authority on that. Yes. Part of that, one aspect of that is we don't even know if a statement

00:36:29.280 is true or false until after it's been investigated and debated and you've got two or three or four

00:36:35.880 different opinions and they clash and we look at the evidence. So even a law that says, you know,

00:36:40.900 we're making false statements illegal, that we did have a law in the criminal code that was struck

00:36:46.000 down in the Zundel decision. It was illegal in Canada, criminal code offense to spread false

00:36:52.360 news. And the Supreme Court struck that down and said, no, we don't even know what's false

00:36:58.180 until after we've had the debate.

00:37:01.900 Another interesting point is that,

00:37:04.600 and this is troublesome from Watcott,

00:37:06.920 from that decision where even a true statement

00:37:09.460 could be hateful and could be illegal.

00:37:11.480 The Criminal Code of Canada in criminalizing

00:37:14.280 the willful promotion of hatred says expressly

00:37:17.420 that truth is a defense.

00:37:20.340 So if you made some nasty comment about some group

00:37:23.160 based on skin color, gender, whatever,

00:37:26.080 if that you know if that statement happened to be true that would actually be a defense in a

00:37:33.160 criminal prosecution uh sounds like it's not going to be a defense when the human rights bodies get

00:37:38.840 involved yeah and that that's the big danger is all of a sudden we're taking a lower evidentiary

00:37:43.840 threshold and and also it's a civil proceeding so then you add uh the burden of proof aspect

00:37:49.240 changes from from criminal as well and the stakes are very high uh for people who will get their

00:37:54.340 lives drag through the ringer. We've seen what happens when these human rights commissions have

00:37:58.080 had free reign, like the Alberta Human Rights Commission going after Ezra Levant and the BC

00:38:02.640 Tribunal going after Mark Stein. And, you know, to go back to something I've talked about on the

00:38:07.720 show in the past, but kind of just was swept in very quietly in Canada. And I think it was the

00:38:12.840 last federal budget or two years ago, they reintroduced a criminal provision banning

00:38:17.920 Holocaust denial. And I think this is probably the perfect example of where the free speech

00:38:23.900 discussions go off the rails. Because I will say on principled free speech grounds, I oppose this.

00:38:29.360 I find Holocaust denial to be deplorable and wrong, but I do not think it should be illegal.

00:38:35.140 But the government will often use the emotional reactions people have to certain speech

00:38:40.420 as a way to really, as a cudgel, to justify banning it in the same way as that Mike Ward

00:38:46.440 case in Quebec, where, you know, yes, it's difficult to stand up and say, I defend making

00:38:51.880 fun of disabled 12 year olds, but it's not that I defend the act of doing it as I defend the right

00:38:57.440 to do it. Yeah. Well, that's, that's where, that's where the rubber hits the road. Incidentally, I,

00:39:03.760 like you, I find the Holocaust denial to be vile, vile speech. It disgusts me and it outrages me.

00:39:12.340 And I actually testified at a parliamentary committee to not amend the criminal code

00:39:18.760 regarding Holocaust denial, and the only reason for that is because the government should not be

00:39:23.380 in the business of determining historical truth or falsehood, period. It's not the role of the

00:39:29.560 state, and once you have the government doing that on one issue, it grows like a cancer.

00:39:37.780 The other interesting thing is that the groups lining up so far, this is from a CBC story that

00:39:43.260 i read the other day uh the center for israeli and jewish affairs and the national council of

00:39:48.500 muslim uh canadian muslims and the chinese canadian national council according to this story

00:39:55.100 want legislation to uh to regulate and then arguably punish if you violate the regulation

00:40:03.040 to regulate and punish websites and new emerging platforms and if we go down this road if we take

00:40:09.900 any step here, the number of groups lining up, what's going to happen is instead of just engaging

00:40:17.200 in debate and explaining, you know, based using facts and logic and evidence, instead of making

00:40:23.120 your case and trying to persuade people, instead of engaging in debate, you're going to see more

00:40:26.860 and more groups lining up, going to government and trying to get the government to shut up their

00:40:31.900 opponents. And that's fascism in practice. Yeah. And that's the other part of this is that even

00:40:38.300 if you fundamentally agree, which I don't, and I don't gather you do as well, that there should be

00:40:43.220 a limit to protect against hateful speech that is lower than the threshold now. The logical question

00:40:50.220 is, who do you trust to be the authority to determine that? And that is where we get, I mean,

00:40:56.000 this is a government, and I don't like going back to this, but this is a government that froze its

00:41:00.080 political protesters' bank accounts. Like, this is not a government that I trust with the switch

00:41:05.740 to censor people's opinions

00:41:08.060 and to censor people's expression of those opinions.

00:41:11.180 And it's broader than that.

00:41:13.020 There's a lot of people applaud.

00:41:15.160 I remember once I saw a video clip,

00:41:17.400 Bill Watcott, very outspoken social conservative activists

00:41:21.940 who articulates his viewpoint in ways

00:41:24.360 that most social conservatives don't even like it.

00:41:26.980 But he's got his free speech rights.

00:41:28.980 I saw him get arrested and handcuffed.

00:41:30.660 This is about five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years ago.

00:41:32.840 He was at the University of Saskatchewan or University of Regina, I forget which.

00:41:37.860 And he was handing out pamphlets on campus and critical of homosexual behavior.

00:41:46.000 And he was arrested and handcuffed and taken off campus in a police car.

00:41:52.100 And the group of students applauded.

00:41:54.140 And I thought to myself, you are very short-sighted.

00:41:56.880 Because what if there is this massive religious revival in Canada

00:42:00.660 and two-thirds of Canadians are fervent,

00:42:04.260 believing, devout Muslims, Christians,

00:42:06.940 Orthodox Jews, whatever.

00:42:09.320 Would these same students want

00:42:10.900 a fundamentalist religious government

00:42:14.060 to have the power to censor their speech?

00:42:15.960 They don't think about that, but they should.

00:42:19.100 Yeah, very, very well said.

00:42:20.660 John Carpe, president of the Justice Center

00:42:22.780 for Constitutional Freedoms.

00:42:24.140 Always a pleasure, John.

00:42:25.020 Thanks for coming on today.

00:42:26.360 Thank you very much, Andrew.

00:42:27.540 Yeah, and I expect the JCCF

00:42:29.640 will be out in full force on this

00:42:31.640 because this is a fundamental free speech question.

00:42:34.660 And the government will do what it did

00:42:36.880 when it introduced the Emergencies Act.

00:42:38.700 They'll say, we're protecting your charter rights.

00:42:42.580 We're specifically protecting freedom of expression.

00:42:45.580 And all of the do-gooders out there will say,

00:42:47.160 oh, well, that nice man with the nice hair

00:42:49.640 said that they're protecting free speech.

00:42:51.700 So I guess it's fine.

00:42:52.620 And or the one you'll hear, which is so annoying,

00:42:55.480 and I apologize if you've said this,

00:42:57.220 but I don't actually apologize.

00:42:58.420 when people say, well, there's a difference between free speech and hate speech.

00:43:04.600 What is the difference?

00:43:06.840 What is the difference?

00:43:08.400 And where do you draw the line?

00:43:10.460 I could go out on the street and give, I don't know, 10 people interviews and streeters.

00:43:15.320 And maybe we'll do this when we see the text of the bill and ask them if this thing is hate speech or if it's free speech.

00:43:21.740 And we'll come up with whatever the list should be.

00:43:24.040 And I bet everyone's going to have a different line on that.

00:43:26.660 Maybe you've seen going around the internet that old PETA billboard about like a list of animals and it starts with a cat and dog and then it goes all the way to a chicken and a fish and it says, where do you draw the line?

00:43:40.340 And one cheeky guy kind of put it between horse and cow and said right there.

00:43:45.840 But the whole point is people are going to look at that and have a different line on what is meat and what is a pet.

00:43:51.760 just as people are going to look at verbal expressions or written expressions and have a

00:43:55.700 different line on what is free speech and what is hate speech. So as a society, we have an

00:44:01.600 obligation to have the most expansive parameters necessary so that as individuals, we can decide

00:44:07.360 and debate and maybe scream at each other and maybe say that position is unwelcome in civil

00:44:13.860 society, but we decide that as members of a civil society. And there is a fantastic piece written

00:44:22.040 many years ago, I think in the 1920s by Lord Moulton called The Domain of Manners. And the

00:44:28.080 domain of manners, or it might be the realm of manners, I forget which one, but basically it's

00:44:32.440 that a society's freedom is really assessed by how large the gap is between the things you can do

00:44:40.160 legally and the things you will do morally. And the whole point is that society should have a

00:44:47.520 very, very wide, wide range of things you can legally do. And then it governs itself appropriately

00:44:53.540 to have a narrower view of the things you should do. And I think the real magic of that is that we

00:45:00.840 forget that being able to do something is not the same as being required to do it. It can be legal

00:45:08.620 to deny the Holocaust, while also being morally acceptable. It can be legal to do any number of

00:45:14.700 things that we would just not ourselves want to do. And to give you an example of this, how many

00:45:19.940 of you would commit murder today if it were not illegal? Murder is not wrong because it's illegal,

00:45:26.240 it's illegal because it is wrong. And that is not to say that we shouldn't have a prohibition on

00:45:31.320 murder, absolutely. We should ban things that violate the rights and liberties of others,

00:45:36.220 which is where we should draw the narrowest possible parameters of what is legal and what

00:45:41.500 is illegal. That is it for me. We will be back tomorrow to close out the week here on The Andrew

00:45:46.300 Lawton Show. You're listening to or watching True North. Thank you, God bless, and good day to you

00:45:51.520 all. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North

00:45:57.260 at www.tnc.news.

00:46:06.220 We'll be right back.

00:46:36.220 We'll be right back.

Juno News - October 18, 2023

Media and politicians blame Israel for failed Palestinian rocket

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