What do you expece ftom someone named after a fish? :)

So, we no longer have the freedom of speech?
Funny, after 9/11, no one seemed bothered by people saying (and still saying) that we should, "Nuke `em all, let Allah sort them out".
Ah, but when a muslim says that he thinks it's ok for muslims to kill invaders from the west, we get in a tizzy.
I'm not condoning his words ,or saying I agree, although, the west (mostly the US/Israel) is doing a fine job of killing thousands, if not millions of innocent muslims who are NOT military.
He and anyone else should be able to say whatever they want.
Remember this, when some idiot says, "ah, they're just a buncha' religious, towel-headed, religious nut-jobs and we should just kill all of them".

heh I knew using the "P" word would bring David out blazing...

anyway... "a well-written synthesis"? Give me a break. All it says is your reporter read something somewhere, here's a piece of it, and something somewhere else, here's a piece of it, and oh here's what your reporter gleaned from another source and, by way of providing his own opinion, he agree with the subject's mother. So there isn't really any original material here at all. It's just a 'synthesis'. Come ON! Bring something new to the table. If you're going to bother writing about something, at least _try_ to add to the discussion. Where's the *ist royal "we" in this article? Oh, right... chasing Rosie DiManno and screaming blue murder of the plagiarising of a list.

I agree with Bigdaddyhame... cutting and pasting a few links here and there isn't journalism, you young'uns! Blogging is the electronic equivalent of "broken telephone," where a bunch of people sit in a circle and one whispers the message to the next until you get some gobbeldygook at the end. Let's see if the story meets the standards (yes David, there ARE standards) for real journalism:

1. Is it accurate, fair and balanced?
2. Does the information come from at least three verified sources?
3. Is the reporting unique to the piece (did the reporter(s) actually interview subjects for the story?

What's the punishment for wanting to give John Baird a flushie?

WannaBinToranna nailed it.

Sure! Meet you at Innis?

Ha! I enjoy the always reliable "you don't know anything about journalism! nah nah nah nah nah!" argument. The Toronto blogging world is lovely.

Hey Solex, there's this white guy:

link

WannaB the biggest complaint I had, while serving in the Army in the Middle East, was how easy Haji rolled off everyone's tongue. The sad part is that many of the people who were being called Haji were neither Arabic, Muslim, from the MIddle East, or to truly earn the title, make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Afterwards, I started viewing Haji as equivalent to ni#$er. It really pissed me off when I was in Iraq and heard soldiers saying this in front of the very people we're trying to help and protect. I began to see why some of the locals didn't like us too much.

Yes, the comments were geared more to Amerikans than Canada. Yes, more people are against the war now, but the time to be against it was 5 years ago. At which point did people decide? "Well, I was for it before, but now someone I know someone who died in it, so I'm against it." or, "well, at a thousand casualties, I thought, OK, but four thousand is too many, I'm against it now".

For Americans, it's been going on 7 years since 9/11 and this country doesn't know any more about Islam or the middle east (and US/Israel policy and it's effect) than it did pre-9/11, and amazingly, it doesn't WANT to know. if we think of Muslims/Islam as "uncivilized" or "beneath us" it's easier to bomb them, if we start learning more about them as people and their cutlure/religion....well, the government can't have that. 3,000 people died on 9/11. Right now there are 2 mil homeless and almost a million dead. Fair trade?

oh, I hate the Swiss, with their beady little eyes, "Ohhhh, you're gonna buy my chicken".

Oh wait, that's the colonel.: -)

Its funny that this got to comment 22 without mention of the fact that, contrary to WannaBtheUnabomber, you would and do get the same attention, dragged in front of human rights commissions and/or prosecuted for making similar comments about muslims. There are currently two prominent examples in the Ezra Levant fisasco for publishing the infamous anti-Muslim cartoons in the Western Standard and MacLeans magazine for reprinting an excerpt of Mark Stein's book.

Any amount of fact obfuscation or self-loathing won't change the fact that, in Canada, we have hate laws which have been applied irrespective of the target of the hate. And as long as those laws are still on the books, what the young man in the article is purported to have said/published qualifies as such, no matter the global casualty count in whatever conflicts you deem germane to your arguments.

"Only a bloody Dutchman!"

I know I'm a bit late to this party but I might as well try to clarify my sentiments.

I absolutely agree that comments that denigrate Islam or exhort violence against Muslims are reprehensible and have no place in civilized society. Having personally been on the receiving end of anti-Islamic invective (I'm not Muslim but, heck, to some people that doesn't really matter) I am very aware that Muslims in the West face an incredible amount of unfairly-directed malice.

Ultimately, though, I think Mr. Hossain's comments have to be judged on their own "merits", and just as I personally can't abide horrendous slurs against Muslims I am equally appalled by any comments calling for the death of Western soldiers and Jews. There has to be a reasonable and objective standard of behaviour to which all people in our country have to be held.

I think trying to excuse or mitigate the severity of his comments because of the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan is as inappropriate as trying to excuse the commentary of those people who advocate violence towards Muslims because of 9/11.

x_the_x - I pointed that out back at comment 9, really.

Not a bad point, rek, but I think the examples flesh it out a bit more. I hope the editors don't gut me for plagiarising.

W-B-Una, I didn't miss your point. You are changing it. Read your first comment which suggests that anti-muslim commentary is permitted because it accords with US military objectives.

I could talk about actions (no need for capitals, I can read just fine without you highlighting the important bits). For instance, does Salman's piece seek to incite violence, which is one of the criteria that needs to be met for speech to be deemed hateful? I think so.

Surely even from your hovel you cannot deny that certain groups have organized around the principles of violence against the west and have carried out their objectives against civilians?

Also, x_the_x, if you want to drop this down to tossing personal remarks back and forth (ie. "WannaBUnaBomber", and "from your hovel")
as I've seen you do in previous comments on this site...
I will more than happily reply in kind.
Interesting that you are engaging in personal attacks while criticizing someone else for "hate speech" as you put it.

Hate speech is a recognized category of speech under Canadian law. It is not what I call it. It is what Canadian law calls it.

I have read a lot of your posts on here and your worldview is strikingly similar to the unabomber's. I think its funny. Pointing out the similarities of your worldview with the unabomber's isn't hate speech, it isn't even ad hominem, it is fair comment on the views you have made publically known.

yeah, i've been reading around here a while and i don't see the sort of similarities you claim to see between wannabintoranna and ted kaczynski's views. have you even read 'industrial society and its future,' x the x? or do you just like to throw the word unabomber on anyway who expresses views you disagree with/you perhaps find (for whatever reason) to be radical?

A sample (I was going to mix Una quotes with I-W-Una quotes so we could play a "porn star or my little pony" type game, but the archive of your posts doesn't go back far enough for variety):

- industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems. And a considerable proportion of the system's economic and environmental problems result from the way human beings behave.

- They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the
leftist's real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.

- We aren't the first to mention that the world today seems to be going crazy. This sort of thing is not normal for human societies. There is good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern man is. It is true that not all was sweetness and light in primitive societies. Abuse of women and common among the Australian aborigines, transexuality was fairly common among some of the American Indian tribes. But is does appear that GENERALLY SPEAKING the kinds of problems that we have listed in the preceding paragraph were far less common among primitive peoples than they are in modern society.

- We contend that the most important cause of social and psychological problems in modern society is the fact that people have insufficient opportunity to go through the power process in a normal way. We don't mean to say that modern society is the only one in which the power process has been disrupted. Probably most if not all civilized societies have interfered with the power process to a greater or lesser extent. But in modern industrial society the problem has become particularly acute.

- Control is often exercised through indirect
coercion or through psychological pressure or manipulation, and by organizations other than the government, or by the system as a whole. Most large organizations use some form of propaganda [14] to manipulate public attitudes or behavior. Propaganda is not limited to "commercials" and advertisements, and sometimes it is not even
consciously intended as propaganda by the people who make it. For instance, the content of entertainment programming is a powerful form
of propaganda. An example of indirect coercion: There is no law that says we have to go to work every day and follow our employer's orders.
Legally there is nothing to prevent us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little wild country left, and there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business owners.
Hence most of us can survive only as someone else's employee.

- People vary in their susceptibility to advertising and marketing techniques. Some people are so susceptible that, even if they make a
great deal of money, they cannot satisfy their constant craving for the shiny new toys that the marketing industry dangles before their eyes. So they always feel hard-pressed financially even if their income is large, and their cravings are frustrated.

(1) pulling quotes from kaczynski that are vaguely similar to things other people have said, and gleefully yelling 'haha, look at this crazy shit, you're the new unabomber!!!!

Please point me to the spot where I did that. All I said is that his views (expressed regularly on this page, not simply this thread) resemble those of the unabomber's. Others challenged me to illustrate - I pulled some quotes that I think, if you are paying attention, reflect arguments that are made here all the time. I didnt match them to W-B-Una's for the reasons I highlighted at the beginning of my post. Really, it is just a personal response - when I have read his comments, I often think to myself, "this guy sounds like the unabomber". If I had said "this guy sounds like J.S. Mill" (he doesn't) everyone would have granted the point. We are of course free to debate the validity or invalidity of any ideas, but I don't think its easily avoidable, as you do, that the unabomber's ideas - horribly derivative and unfortunately common as they are - led to or was a symptom of his mania and therefore cannot be separated from his violent actions.

(2) I was hoping someone would draw a distinction between the Unabomber's words and actions, since that is exactly germane to the post here and to the argument I was having with W-B-Una. W-B-Una's view is that Salman's breach is minor because it is merely words (which is not true at all - see pull quote 2 from the manifesto - W-B-Una chooses to ignore that Salman is apeing the words and images chosen by, variously, Al Queda and anti-semetic movements, both of which preach violence against civilians). To him, what matters is that the west has words and actions, and the actions put paid to the words. You would disagree - you can separate the unabomber's words from the horrific acts that followed. I think the distinction is a bit silly. How do you separate incitement to violence from violent acts themselves, especially when both are commited by the same person? Are we to believe that the unabomber was altogether a lucid, clear-thinking and insightful guy except when he was wiring mailbombs and sending the anonymously across the US for 15 years?

Again, hate speech is a recognized category of speech under Canadian law. We know with some precision what is an isn't, and none of your examples - war protesters, the Beatles, Taxi Driver, etc. - qualify.

No, I have never said something in "the heat of the moment" that could be qualified as hate speech. I lose my temper sometimes but I haven't yet advocated genocide, attacks on civilian targets, vilified religious and ethnic groups.

You seem to believe that because we categorize certain speech as hateful, we don't have a commitment to freedom of speech. This is a good debate - currently one that Canada is engaging in through the Ezra Levant incident I mentioned above. The Canadian judgement is that some speech is so devoid of value that it doesn't deserve the protection accorded to other speech, and therefore can be subject to criminal sanction.

(I of course did pull quotes. I didn't implicate that the similarities in your thought with the unabomber makes you a "crazy shit". You see, in order to observe the point you have to read the whole sentence.)

If the unabomber is such a sober source of political thought, similar to Chomsky, wouldn't you see my comparison of the two of your as flattering? You can call me whatever you want - I look forward to pull quotes from Vlad the Impaler.