I was alarmed last Tuesday to learn of Irwin Cotler's proposed Internet Censorship Bill:

The federal government is preparing to introduce a sweeping round of legislation that would combat the "explosion" of hate sites on the Internet and outlaw human trafficking, "the new global slave trade," Justice Minister Irwin Cotler says. He also wants to encourage more police departments across Canada to set up their own special hate crimes squads and for those squads to work together more closely and better coordinate their efforts. "We have to send out the message unequivocally, as a government and as part of our shared citizenship and shared values, that our Canada is one in which there will be no sanctuary for hate and no refuge for bigotry," he said in an interview.  "We will use all the panoply of remedies to bring that about.  Legal remedies, intercultural dialogue, promotion of multiculturalism, anti-discrimination law and policy.  A national action plan against racism." This year has seen an increase in "both the incidence and intensity of hate crimes," said Cotler, including the firebombing of the Talmud Torah Jewish day school in Montreal and the torching of a mosque near Toronto. While Cotler says Canada has "the most comprehensive legal regime to combat hate of any comparable democracy," he says Canada can do more � particularly when it comes to the Internet. "Where in 1995 you had one hate site, today in 2004, 10 years later, we have 5,000 hate sites. You have had an explosion of hate on the Internet." Traditionally, Canadian legislators have been reluctant to tackle Internet content because the web's international nature makes it difficult for any country to enforce its laws. Canada must work in conjunction with other nations, the minister says. In addition to adopting domestic legislation to fight "cyber hate," Cotler said Canada has to ratify the Council of Europe convention on cyber crime as well as its optional protocol with respect to combatting hate.  Countries who adhere to the convention enter a framework agreement concerning information sharing and law enforcement creating what Cotler describes as "a culture of human rights to combat a culture of hate." Elizabeth Thompson, "Feds to fight hate on web, says Cotler," Calgary Herald, 12-Oct-2004 www.canada.com/calgary/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=bf0215d8-8077-4c29-8fc8-419006f561eb

The information missing from the above report, and that Canadians might wish you to supply, is which web sites in particular it is that your government intends to suppress.  I ask this because it seems to me that the web site that your government has the strongest interest in suppressing is the Ukrainian Archive (UKAR) at www.ukar.org, for the reason that it contains material either underemphasized, or wholly unavailable, elsewhere, and that is damaging to your government, and most particularly damaging to your Government's Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Irwin Cotler.  An illustrative, but far from exhaustive, list of UKAR documents that one may hypothesize Irwin Cotler particularly wishes to suppress by means of his Internet Censorship Bill are the following:

1. Paul Martin: Irwin Cotler collaboration with Steven Rambam  www.ukar.org/martin/martin05.html
   Your Justice Minister and Attorney General, Irwin Cotler, collaborated with violence-prone psychopath and convicted terrorist-bomber Steven Rambam to foist on the Canadian public the Canadian Jewish Congress Fifty-Confessions Hoax.
   
   
2. Paul Martin: Irwin Cotler Leadership in the Deschenes Commission Witch Hunt  www.ukar.org/martin/martin07.html
   Your Justice Minister, Irwin Cotler, played a leading role in the Deschenes Commission witch hunt which served primarily as a conduit of hate propaganda directed at Ukrainians.
   
   
3. Irwin Cotler: Please address the issue of Jewish men trafficking Ukrainian women  www.ukar.org/cotler/cotler02.html
   Your Justice Minister, Irwin Cotler, affects concern over the trafficking of women, but overlooks that this tends to be disproportionately the trafficking of Ukrainian women by Jewish men.
   
   
4. Paul Martin: Does Irwin Cotler reach out to women?  www.ukar.org/martin/martin12.html
   Your Justice Minister, Irwin Cotler, tries to project the image of reaching out to women, and yet has nothing to say on behalf of the women oppressed in the most misogynistic country that claims to share Western values � Israel.
   
   
5. The Trawniki Identification Card  www.ukar.org/dersho09.html
   Your Justice Minister, Irwin Cotler, is a "close personal friend" of Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a rabid hater of Ukrainians whose publicity favoring the John Demjanjuk persecution led to Lubomyr Prytulak addressing him with the words, "perhaps it is the case that when you saw a lynch mob passing by, you paused only long enough to notice that the mob was Jewish, and that its intended victim was Ukrainian, before yourself grabbing a torch, and leaping to the front of the mob."
   
   
6. Irving Abella: Irving Abella SS-Tattoo Hoax  www.ukar.org/abella08.html
   Your Justice Minister, Irwin Cotler, is a close associate of York University professor and Canadian Jewish Congress functionary Irving Abella, whose hatred of Canada manifests itself in inventing the canard that the SS blood-type tattoo had at one time served as a sufficient qualification for admission to Canada, and whose hatred of Canada manifests itself further in his ardent support of the above-mentioned Steven Rambam, despite Rambam's repeated public dissemination of such of his prized opinions as that "The Canadians are scum."
   
   
7. Paul Martin: Canadian Jewish Congress Criminal Conspiracy Under The Competition Act  www.ukar.org/martin/martin17.html
   Your government fails to investigate the Canadian Jewish Congress (of which your Justice Minister, Irwin Cotler, has served as president) for what appears to be its criminal conspiracy under the Competition Act to defraud Canadian consumers of possibly hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and to disburse the proceeds to incite religious and ethnic hatred, and to promote Canadian disunity and instability.
   
   
8. Paul Martin: Please amend the Canadian Human Rights Act  www.ukar.org/martin/martin18.html
   You have failed to clarify for the Canadian Human Rights Commission and Tribunal that they are forbidden to disallow the truth defense in prosecutions for hate messaging.
   
   
9. Paul Martin: Will you continue Jean Chretien's legacy of disenfranchising Ukrainians, Germans, and Lithuanians?  www.ukar.org/martin/martin06.html
   Anne McLellan serves in your government as an emissary of the Canadian Jewish Congress, and is deaf to Ukrainian pleas for equality before the law.
   
   
10. Leonard Asper: Do you wage war on Ukrainians?  www.ukar.org/lasper/lasper01.html
    The Liberal government has permitted Zionists to seize control of Canadian conduits of information, among whose effects has been the damping of criticism of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the blocking of Ukrainian attempts to defend against hate propaganda, the above letter to Leonard Asper documenting an instance of the latter.
    
    
11. Canadian Guinea Pigs in an American Experiment  www.ukar.org/mmt/mmt01.html
    The Liberal government under Jean Chretien is responsible for making Canada the only country in the world which today is being blanketed by the neurotoxin manganese found in the gasoline additive MMT.
    
    
12. $700-million Bronfman tax break  www.ukar.org/bronfm12.html
    In meetings at which no minutes were kept, Jean Chretien's Liberal government overruled officials in the revenue and finance departments by permitting the Bronfman family to move more than $2 billion worth of Seagram Co. stock to the United States without paying a capital gains tax of $700 million.
    
    
13. Still more Jewish war crimes  www.ukar.org/martin/martin04.html
    Your government flouts the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantee of equality before the law by directing your war crimes unit to exempt many nationalities from prosecution for their egregious war crimes, and instead to dedicate itself to prosecuting the conjectured half-century-old immigration infractions of Ukrainians.
    
    
14. The biggest cemetery of Polish Jewry  www.ukar.org/arad02.html
    World's leading Jewish-holocaust expert, Yitzhak Arad, testifying at the 1987 Jerusalem trial of John Demjanjuk, demonstrates that even authoritative and official accounts of the Jewish holocaust can be fabrications � which Arad does demonstrate by testifying that the liberation by the Soviet army of the three "death camps" Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec consisted not in Soviet soldiers coming upon the camp infrastructure and there discovering emaciated prisoners behind barbed wire, heaped bodies, mass graves, gas chambers, crematoria, and so on, but consisted rather in the Soviet army in each case coming across a tranquil farm, indistinguishable from any other farm in the region, and in whose locations no forensic evidence of any camp having existed has ever been discovered.
    
    
15. Stage I of the CJC attempt to suppress UKAR (Steven Rambam in Los Angeles)  www.ukar.org/temp/bc271433.html
    Stage I in the attempt to suppress the Ukrainian Archive took place in the Los Angeles Superior Court, which for two years was persuaded to take no interest in the question of why violence-prone psychopath, convicted terrorist bomber, and CJC protégé Steven Rambam had trekked from New York to Los Angeles to complain of a Canadian web site.  The above link takes the reader to documentation which tracks the Lubomyr Prytulak defeat of Stage I.
    
    
16. Stage II of the CJC attempt to suppress UKAR (Canadian Jewish Congress in Ottawa)  www.ukar.org/chrc/gusell07.html
    The second, and ongoing, attempt to suppress UKAR � utilizing the hate-messaging arm of the Canadian Human Rights Commission � began precisely at the time that you elevated former Canadian Jewish Congress president Irwin Cotler to the rank of Justice Minister and Attorney General of Canada.  Stage II has already discredited itself by relying on the same heavy-handed techniques of document spoliation and denial of the right to be heard that had been the hallmark of Steven Rambam's failed Stage I attempt in Los Angeles.
    
    

Irwin Cotler has not as yet disclosed which web sites are to be the particular targets of his Internet Censorhip Bill, but it can be doubted that any web site concerns him more than the Ukrainian Archive, and until clarification indicating otherwise is forthcoming, the Irwin Cotler Internet Censorship Bill might more appropriately be recognized as the Irwin Cotler Ukrainian Archive Bill.  By means of this Bill, Irwin Cotler hopes primarily to implement Stage III in the Canadian Jewish Congress campaign to suppress what it is unable to refute, to silence the Ukrainian invitation to a dialogue in which the CJC recognizes it can find nothing to say.

However, it cannot be hidden from the Canadian public that Irwin Cotler adding to his posts that of Federal Censor would be a deviation from the Canadian tradition of free speech and open debate, and would be a step toward authoritarian rule and totalitarian thought control.  Many people, including myself, live in Canada today only because we succeeded in fleeing one step ahead of an engulfing wave of tyranny.  Our experience has sensitized us to tyranny's early manifestations, and we see these early manifestations in the activity of Irwin Cotler, and we are committed to nipping tyranny in the bud using words and votes rather than letting it grow strong and having to flee it a second time.

Your government is not to regard Canadians as mindless children readily aroused to passion and prejudice by literature from which wise politicians have failed to shield their gaze.  Rather, your government would do well to credit Canadians with enough wisdom to reject foolishness on their own, and to understand that the blindfolds that politicians try to place over their eyes are an impertinance and an insult, and palpably not for the benefit of the blindfolded, but for the benefit of the blindfolder.  The Canadian people do not need the paternal intervention of Ottawa to recognize and reject falsehood; they understand that when Ottawa usurps this function, it does so to suppress not falsehood which is self-evident but truth which as yet remains undisclosed.  Just as Pierre Trudeau had the good sense to take government out of the nation's bedrooms, so your administration should have the good sense to take government out of the business of thought control.  The assumption on which democracy is based is that the people collectively are wiser than their politicians, such that it is not the politicians' role to keep the people from falling into error, but rather it is the people's role to keep politicians from falling into error.  If there were a choice between politicians deciding what the people are allowed to read and the people deciding what politicians are allowed to read, then the latter is the less dangerous alternative.  And even if it were the case that the people are unable to distinguish truth from falsehood, and are easily swayed to passion and prejudice, then it would follow that they elect fallible and incompetent governments which, therefore, are not to be trusted to control the flow of information.

Irwin Cotler asks Canadians to place censorhip power in his hands, and asks Canadians to trust that his censorship will be applied benevolently in the interests of "human rights."  However, while asking for Canadians' trust, Irwin Cotler himself does not trust Canadians enough to disclose to them exactly which Internet web sites he has targetted for demolition.  As Canadians come to recognize that the Ukrainian Archive is the foremost repository of information damaging to Irwin Cotler and to your administration, you might expect them to increasingly enquire of you whether Irwin Cotler's Internet Censorship Bill purporting to aim at the good of all is in reality only his Ukrainian Archive Bill aiming primarily at the protection of himself.





Lubomyr Prytulak

cc:

Hon. Irwin COTLER, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, 284 Wellington Street, Ottawa ON  K1A 0H8
Hon. Anne MCLELLAN, Hill Office, House of Commons, Ottawa ON  K1A 0A6