By Klaus Rohrich
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
It's a scene that's become so commonplace in our society that most of us no longer see the irony: someone espousing right-wing views gets invited to a university for a "debate" and then gets uninvited after the university realizes the person's views are at odds with "the mainstream" or worse, the person is assailed by masked radicals who threaten physical violence. Most recently this scene played itself out at Dalhousie University in Halifax, as Jared Taylor, an alleged "white supremacist" was invited to debate multiculturalism with David Devine of Dalhousie's Black Studies department.
Taylor, who has degrees from Yale University and has studied at the institute for Political Sciences in Paris, appears to have opinions that are at odds with accepted orthodoxy and has thus earned the epithet of "racist" by those who espouse a firm belief in the multicultural model. Despite being disinvited by Dalhousie University, Taylor showed up in Halifax, anyway, as his non-refundable plane ticket was purchased prior to the cancellation of the debate and decided to give a lecture in a rented hall after learning of the cancellation.
On the evening of the lecture Taylor entered the hall to find it filled with anti-racist protesters wearing masks or Kaffayehs pulled over their faces to hide their identities. Taylor was jeered, jostled and threatened with violence, as the protesters did their usual song and dance.
Why is it necessary to physically stop those with whom we disagree from voicing their disagreement in public? If our orthodox belief system is so superior, then why do we need to threaten censure, violence or worse to shut the mouths of those who disagree with us?
The Halifax incident is by no means an isolated example of intolerance by those who urge us to be tolerant of others at all costs. The same happened at Concordia University when former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to speak there and then uninvited because of threats of violence against Netanyahu and the school.
Interestingly some of the press accounts of the Dalhousie incident refer to Klansmen, skinheads and neo-Nazis in describing those who tended to agree with Taylor, yet described the thugs who assailed Taylor in terms much more benign.
This trend is alarming in that totalitarian tendencies are not the sole purlieu of the right, despite the media's non-recognition of this fact. Recently Heidi Cullen, host of a weekly program on The Weather Channel, advocated that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) decertify broadcast meteorologists who disagreed with the concept of man-made global warming. Cullen featured Dave Roberts of Grist magazine as an eco-expert on manmade climate change. Roberts is the nut bar who is advocating Nuremberg-style trials for meteorologists who do not agree that the current global warming trend is the result of man's activities. Many defendants of the Nuremberg trials were hanged as the result of a guilty verdict; is that the outcome Roberts is looking for?
CBS News' Scott Pelley has taken to comparing skeptics about manmade global warming to holocaust deniers by referring to them as "Global Warming Deniers", as has former Vice President Al Gore, whose shlockumentary about manmade global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth" fails to include a few inconvenient facts, such as the fact that agreement on the cause of global climate change is by no means universal with as many scientists believing that the current warming trend is a cyclical phenomenon due to solar activity, as there are scientists who believe man has caused it.
These trends are frightening in that those who purport to be in favor of human rights think that it's perfectly okay to deprive others who disagree with their points of view of their human right to voice that disagreement. Forcibly denying the rights of those who do not agree with us has become the norm, rather than the exception. It betrays the dangerous conceit that self-proclaimed arbiters of correct thinking must regulate our ideas. Trends such as these tend to be short-lived as eventually they collapse under their own paradoxes, but the damage they do to individuals in the meantime is often irreparable.
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