February 2017 Bits and Bites

We were out of the country for a couple of days and missed a few stories that would have been mentioned on the blog earlier.

First, Arthur Topham, who was convicted on hate crime charges back in 2015 and who later filed an appeal, has lost that appeal:

B.C. man convicted of promoting hatred against Jews loses constitutional challenge 

A B.C. man convicted of wilfully promoting hatred against people of the Jewish religion has lost a constitutional fight over the same issue in court. 

Arthur Topham's lawyer argued in B.C. Supreme Court in Quesnel that his client's communication on his website was justified in a free and democratic society and that in this Internet age, the same viewpoints are available in many places. 

The Crown noted that the arguments were based on an erroneous assumption that Topham only republished material written by others on his website — which wasn't the evidence put before the jury during his trial in November....

Topham is set to be sentenced on March 10.

So far we haven't heard is Topham is going to throw a Hail Mary pass and try to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, but we wouldn't be surprised if this was his next (and last) effort to have the charge against him quashed.

Interestingly, Paulie has yet to offer his $0.02, perhaps because he is, like some others, trying to capitalize on the M-103 motion before Parliament. Paulie spent this past Monday protesting in front of MP Iqra Khalid's constituency office in Mississauga with thousands of others:

Did I write thousands?

Sorry, I meant Paulie and four other protesters, including the person taking the picture.

And because Paulie is Paulie, there has to be a self-serving commentary written in the third person to accompany the photo:

And the comments are as one would expect:

On that note however, we thought we would provide the following that was sent to us yesterday:

You may be aware already, but if not, the Coalition of Concerned Canadians (a collection of "proud patriots" and Islamophobes) is planning a "March for Freedom" at city halls across the country on Saturday, March 4th. Seems similar to the recent action in Toronto that you reported on. There are public facebook event pages for pretty much all major cities. It might be worth making a post about so that counter-protests can be planned.

We do know that there are a number of counter-protests that are occurring in many of the cities where the Islamophobic protests are taking place (though in some cases we take the claims of the Coalition of Concerned Canadians with a grain of salt), including Winnipeg where the "Nazi Mom" was among the organizers of that particular anti-Muslim protest:

The Winnipeg anti-Muslim protest page appears to be down now, but as of February 20 there were 12 committed to participating and 25 people who were interested in attending. By contrast, here are the numbers for the counter-protest:

If even half of those "going" appear, that would likely swamp the number of Islamophobes who may attend should their event actually proceed.

Of course as we covered here there was an anti-Muslim event that took place last weekend. There appears to have been some interesting fallout as reported by Stewart Bell of the "National Post":

TORONTO — A half-dozen Facebook pages were offline Tuesday following a complaint by Ottawa lawyer Richard Warman, who had raised concerns they were engaged in hate speech against Muslims. 

Among them was “Canadians Against Islamization.” Banners bearing the same name were displayed by protesters at a small anti-Muslim demonstration Friday outside a downtown Toronto mosque.

.... 

Facebook has “taken action on those that qualify as hate speech,” a company spokeswoman said Tuesday. While some of the pages were removed, others remained up but specific posts were deleted.

The Facebook group, "Canadians Against Islamization" was certainly taken down along with a number of Soldiers of Odin pages (including the British Columbia page UPDATE: Nope, it is still there), however some of the sites listed in Mr. Stewart's article actually are still available online including "Canadians Against Justin Trudeau" and Cultural Action Party of BC. This might be because those sites are actually secret and only members can access them; those not members will see an error message which might suggest to some that the pages have been taken down. As we found though that isn't yet the case.

Mr. Stewart also made the noted the following:

But most of the links Warman had complained about were not taken down, despite having provocative names such as the Worldwide Coalition Against Islam and the Canadian Anti Islamic Force.

And these are some of the more recent posts and comments made by members of the Canadian Anti Islamic Force and Worldwide Coalition Against Islam which the administrators of Facebook don't seem to have a problem with:

Perhaps our the folks at Facebook need to be further encouraged to look to see if these people are violating their vaunted community standards code.

I mean, calling for the death of people because of the religion they are a member of must be a minor infraction when compared to the offensiveness of a photo of a mother breastfeeding her infant, but perhaps they might consider the celebration of murder and assaults to be something they could consider looking into when they have the time.