In a nutshell: a former senior aide to Ontario Progressive “Conservative” Premiers Mike Harris and Ernie Eves, Rob Mitchell says in his Toronto Star column this week that if you’re against Henry Morgentaler’s Order of Canada award, you’re either an anti-semite, or part of a Catholic conspiracy to kill women by forcing them into coathanger abortions. Or both. Yet another example of why so many far-left radical positions - from unlimited free abortions, to socialist health care, to same-sex marriage, to a ban on capital punishment - become so easily imposed on well-meaning populations: if you resist, you’re labeled an anti-semite, a homophobe, a sexist, a racist, an Islamophobe, or someone who’s against the poor. Idealogues know that these dishonest attacks are the easiest way to shut people up - and they even have a whole system of justice (the HRCs) to back them up.

Mitchell also quotes Dalton McGuinty - the nothing-between-the-ears politician who pretends he’s a Catholic, but calls parochial education “divisive”, tried to ban the Lord’s Prayer, and protects taxpayer-funded abortions - as the source of all wisdom on the issue.

This is the state of the conservative movement in Ontario. Lord help us all.

Bonokoski’s column is a little long and plodding, but it is worth reading for its review of the history of the Khadr family, going right back to PM Jean Chretien’s personal intervention to have Papa Bear Khadr released from Pakistani custody back in 1996 so he could take his family to re-join Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Coren, as always, is pithy in his devastating condemnation of Omar Khadr:

If there has been any abuse over the years it is clearly at the hands of Khadr’s own kin. As the highly respected clinical psychologist Dr. Marty McKay told the Children’s Aid Society back in 2004 when Omar’s mother, Maha Elsamnah Khadr, came to Canada, “I am sure that you would agree that counselling one’s child to become suicidal or homicidal constitutes emotional child abuse, leading to physical abuse when the child acts upon these feelings.”

And this is precisely what the good woman has done, often and in public.

She has also, of course, loudly expressed her hatred for western culture and condemned Canada as a vile place where all children are drug addicts or homosexuals. She said she did not want such a fate for Omar or for her other son Karim, who suffered spinal damage after a firefight with the Pakistani soldiers who killed her terrorist husband.

The man may have suffered a different fate if the invincibly naive Jean Chretien had not, in 1995, personally pleaded with the late Benazir Bhutto, then Pakistani prime minister, to release Ahmed Khadr from prison and allow him to come to Canada. He didn’t stay long — there was work to be done with international Islamic murder gangs.

In 2004 the Khadr matriarch was brought back to Canada even though the family had lost several Canadian passports. Hey, it happens. They were flown business class from Pakistan. Hey, it happens. On public money. Hey, it happens.

Well, it happens to some people. Especially if they have friends within special interest groups and can convince credulous liberals who hate America more than they love truth and justice.

Omar Khadr is a tenuous Canadian at best, unlike most newcomers to the country who love it with pride and passion. If we feel sorry for him and his family, consider the family of the young medic smashed beyond recognition that horrible day six years ago. Good Lord, most people don’t even know his name. But they know the name of Omar Khadr.

Fact is, Khadr was captured fighting FOR Canada’s enemy, AGAINST Canada’s greatest friend and ally. Whether or not he was mis-raised by his parents is beside the point. We have no business interfering in this case, which represents: 1) Justice for Christopher Speer; and 2) Protection of America from the deranged psychos who hoped that 9/11 was only the first of many civilian mass-murders of its citizens. Sorry, Omar, but you’re getting what you deserve.

(On a related note: MR. DITHERS IS BACK! Paul Martin, Liberal PM (2003-2005) to Harper: BRING KHADR HOME! The audacity of hypocricy…this guy can’t be for real.)

Leave it to Charles Krauthammer to clearly articulate in a 700-word column all that anyone needs to know about Barak Obama: that he is a narcissistic dilettante. From today’s Washington Post, “The Audacity of Vanity”:

Americans are beginning to notice Obama’s elevated opinion of himself. There’s nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history — “generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment” — when, among other wonders, “the rise of the oceans began to slow.” As Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, “Moses made the waters recede, but he had help.” Obama apparently works alone.

Give the entire spot-on column a whirl.

The code has been cracked! Global Warming/Climate Change believers use the issue to fulfill one of three main purposes. Thanks to Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal for articulating it so beautifully in his July 1 op-ed, “Global Warming as Mass Neurosis”:

1) a Vehicle of Ideological Convenience (advancing the cause of internationalist socialism - the Al Gore/UN/World Economic Forum jet-setting elite set);

2) a new theology (fulfilling the need of secular atheists to have belonging and meaning);

3) a punishment for the evils of a corpulent modern Western culture (the harsh, painful, anti-modern “cures” are seen as the penance that is due to clear the conscience).

Stephens’ conclusion hits it right on the head:

In “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined, “morbid-minded” religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled religion.

So 550 tons of yellowcake uranium - which, if refined to weapons-grade, could have been used to produce as many as 140 nuclear bombs - was removed from Iraq over the past year, and and arrived last week in the Port of Montreal, on the way to its ultimate destination, the Cameco uranium processing plant in Blind River, Ontario (a small outpost town on the shores of the Lake Huron narrows, about a five-hour drive from either Detroit or Toronto), to be converted to fuel for the province’s nuclear power plants. The world’s press yawns. Any story that, in any way, supports President Bush’s decision to take out the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003, is certain to be buried far behind, say, the latest update on whether or not the Obamas are going to buy a dog.

The most confounding aspect of this story is the fact that knowledge of Saddam’s nuclear ambitions, and his massive stockpile of Uranium, has always been common knowledge to those who wanted to know! Randall Hoven writes a brilliant column on the topic at American Thinker: “The 500 Tons of Yellowcake”, discussing the great danger such a stockpile poses to its handlers, the potential for its weaponization, and the nonsensical attacks by the “Bush Lied, No WMDs” crowd that should know better. Hoven correctly states that little comfort should be taken in the fact that the Uranium was “monitored” by the UN from the conclusion of the 1991 Gulf War, until the inspectors were kicked out in 2003:

…even Charles Duelfer concluded that Saddam had every intention of getting back into the WMD business as soon as he could end the sanctions regime, which he was busy doing with oil-for-food bribes.

I think it neither illogical nor bizarre to think Saddam had WMD or WMD programs in 2003.  I still believe he did, in a “preponderance of the evidence” sense.  And I believe, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he would have been back in the WMD business by now, if not by 2004, had we not invaded.

That he sat on 550 metric tons of yellowcake under UN “safeguard” is about as comforting to me as knowing the convicted child rapist next door has a case of duct tape (dual use, by the way) that the police check up on every week.

In the now week-old debate over whether “Dr.” Henry Morgentaler should have been honoured with the Order of Canada medal, the pro-abortion crowd has taken a PR beating in its attempt to stifle any dissent against the status quo. Light has been shone on the fact that Canada “leads” the world by having not a single restriction on the destruction of in-utero life. Light has been shone on the far-left partisanship of the Order’s selection committee, starting with the chief justice of the Supreme Court herself. And the abortion debate has been reopened again, as pro-life and pro-”choice” sides go at it across the country. For more on this line of inquiry, read Father Raymond de Souza’s fine column from today’s National Post, “Abortion isn’t the settled issue it was supposed to be”.

Three of the most compelling arguments, though, that helped turn me from agnostic on the topic to strongly anti-abortion (except in the less-than-one-percent cases of rape, incest, fatal abnormalities, and legitimate fatal threat to physical life of mother), have scarcely been mentioned by the media, and, as far as I can tell, have not been brought up by even the most staunch opponents of Morgentaler:

1) The proven negative impacts of abortion on the mental and physical health of women, always derided, minimized, or simply ignored by ideological proponents of “choice”. For links to the scientific research on the links between abortion and breast cancer, decreased fertility, birth defects, miscarriage risk, and various mental health issues, check out this page at Heartbeat International.

2) Easy access to unlimited, unquestioned abortions in free private clinics like Morgentaler’s butcheries has made it nearly impossible for thousands of stable, loving, but infertile couples from finding healthy North American newborns to adopt. With the popular culture, and the Planned Parenthood-led “crisis pregnancy counselling” machine driving the vast majority of “accidental” pregnancies to the vacuum suction table, the supply of up-for-adoption babies in North America has virtually dried up. The costs of adoption are obscene due to this scarcity, and the choice is often limited to the offspring of the mentally ill homeless and the addicted, or the residents of third-world orphanages. (Do these children deserve a loving, caring family? Yes. Are most adoptive parents willing or able to deal with their associated problems? No, unfortunately, not.)

3) Eugenics as the driving ideology behind unlimited-abortion extremists. Question: what was completely whitewashed by the media on July 2, 2008? Answer: Morgentaler’s opening statement to the media in reaction to the news that he received the Order of Canada, exposing his eugenicist agenda. A transcription: “I wrote this statement, which is not long. I want to say thank you, and I’m genuinely honoured. In addition, I’m proud on my behalf, but also because we now know that 20 years after unwanted pregnancies become less common, violent crime becomes much rarer. In other words, because there are fewer unwanted pregnancies, there are people alive today who would otherwise have been murdered, and that makes me very happy indeed.” Not a single journalist, far as I can tell, challenged the veracity of this statement in print.

UPDATE 07/02 - Link to Barbara Kay’s column, perfectly articulating my position on abortion and Morgentaler, added at end of post.

Those who defend Canada’s eugenicist-in-chief, Henry Morgentaler, almost always begin with the title that suits him far better than Doctor - Holocaust Survivor. Just like media lefties relentlessly reminded us that unhinged socialist-pacifist agitator Cindy Sheehan was a Grieving Mother, the Holocaust Survivor title is intended to place Morgentaler on a supposedly unshakeable moral high ground, to inocculate him from criticism.

Surviving the Nazi death camps does not make you a good person, any more than dying in the firebombing of Dresden made you a bad Nazi.

I am in no way minimizing the experiences of a Polish Jew who experienced hell on earth in his youth. I am a Jew whose ancestors lost entire branches of the family tree to the Nazi death machine. But some survivors went on to start businesses, raise families, build societies, and become great philanthropists. Morgentaler chose to toss his Hipocratic Oath into the garbage and, through both activism and his own dastardly hands, ensured the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of children who, at the very least, could have been adopted out, with the chance to grow up and start businesses, raise families, build societies, and become great philanthropists.

We are a debased country thanks to Henry Morgentaler. My alma mater, the University of Western Ontario, is a debased institution thanks to the honourary degree granted to Morgentaler in 2005 (and I let them know about it with every bloody fund raising call). And the Order of Canada is now thoroughly disgraced.

I don’t hang around with radical leftists. But most of my friends and family are soft-liberal supporters of “choice”. And every single one will admit that they do not “like” abortion, nor would they ever want a loved one to resort to it. Yet Morgentaler and his ilk not only like abortion, they profit from it, they promote it, they cover up the associated health risks and effects on future fertility, and they elevate its macabre practice to a virtue. It takes a diseased mind to press a philosphy of death on a society, and those diseased minds have now been validated by our Governor-General and her panel of warped CBC elites.

Enjoy that award, Morgentaler. It will look great right up there next to your 1989 Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger award. Yes, that Margaret Sanger.

UPDATE 07/02 - Barbara Kay perfectly captures my opinion on abortion, and Morgentaler, in her column from today’s National Post.

It’s a question that has plagued the residents of North America north of America for more than a century and a quarter, since a tipsy lawyer named Macdonald cobbled together a coalition of provincial pols and created a political union proclaimed as “One Dominion under the name of Canada” - what is the Canadian identity?

Most countries have some elements of a unique culture - culinary, musical, artistic, linguistic, religious, etc. - but identity needs to be deeper than just culture. It also should be defined in the positive - most University-educated Canadians’ descriptions of our identity end up boiling down to some form of “not American”. Ideally, a national identity should be: a set of values, as shaped by history and culture, that brings unity to a people in times of distress, and strength to a nation as it progresses through time.

In the past century, wars between nations of extremely strong identities caused the world’s intellectual culture to react sharply, and promote a well-meant but ultimately destructive idea: that national identities are a cancer that, once excised, will put an end to wars, and harmony to mankind. Natan Sharansky’s latest book explores this concept in great depth. Consequently, young nations like Canada were discouraged from ever developing a proper identity. Religious identity? Forget about it, wars were fought over religion. British ancestry? Nah, the Brits are on the decline, and that would offend Quebec. New World optimism? No, we’re just as guilty of oppression as the old world, thanks to our treatment of the Natives. With deconstructionism, multiculturalism, internationalism, and other mushy “ism”s ruling the day, developing a Canadian identity has been nearly impossible.

There should be hope. We live border-to-border, sea-to-sea with the world’s strongest identity of the past hundred years - the United States of America. We could have adopted the best of America’s ideals that has granted its people the self-confidence to build the most powerful, most prosperous, most welcoming nation on earth, where people from every country in the world wish to migrate to more than anywhere else on earth. Yet, out of petty insecurity, loyalist resentment, jealousy, and ideological elitism, most Canadians reject anything “American” out-of-hand.

But where might we be if we opened ourselves to the best of America’s values? We could start by coming to terms with a few simple facts:

1) our very existence, and any material success we have achieved, comes almost exclusively from the British colonial/mercantilist system, which introduced the concept of government based on Judeo-Christian morality to the world, enshrining individual freedom into law, and proving that the elimination of slavery is the true road to riches.

2) the American revolution, while a rejection of the particular British regime of the era, was not a rejection of British ways. In fact, it had far more in common with a church schism, in which the breakaway group saw itself as perfecting the original idealism of the system. America’s concepts of free expression, individual liberty, free enterprise, local community autonomy, and proud worldwide proselytism, all come from Enlightenment England, and are simply hardened with a more rigid religious and ideological edge.

3) French culture is not incompatible with this British-inspired Judeo-Christian English idealism. One need look only at the Bayou, where expelled Acadians have survived and thrived for centuries now, deep in the American south.

4) Evil always tries to fill a vacuum, and disaster usually follows. Europe, most affected by the post-war trend towards one-world-identity idealism, is deep in the throes of a demographic nightmare that, if analysts like Mark Steyn, Bat Ye’or, and the late Oriana Fallaci are right, will have Christian and Enlightenment Europe relegated to the history books within a generation. Canada can follow Europe, or it can develop a sustaining identity like America.

How to define Canada’s identity? First, the country needs to be convinced that “not America” is childish and destructive. Then, an opportunity opens wide: the best of American values can be enshrined here, with the advantage of not having the baggage of slavery and Jim Crow as a significant blight on our history.

In the meantime, as we celebrate the holiday formerly known as Dominion Day, don’t forget where the founders got the word “Dominion” from:

Genesis 1:28-29: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

An interesting day in this Orwellian land of speech control. First came the news out of Ottawa - the third of three Human Rights compaints filed by Mohammed Elmasry’s Canadian Islamic Council was dismissed by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, leaving just the BC complaint alive. After viewing the spectacle of the BC tribunal’s hearing earlier this month, and seeing the widespread public revulsion over the kangaroo court’s actions, it seems the bureaucrats at the CHRC retreated into self-preservation mode, and decided against exposing themselves to further worldwide scrutiny and ridicule.

Further good news came out of the Supreme Court of Canada, which, in a ruling released today, reaffirmed the extremely high standards of proof and injury required to convict on a charge of defamation. In WIC Radio Ltd. v. Simpson, the court unanimously voted to overturn a BC appeals court’s ruling that pompous leftist columnist and talk show host Rafe Mair must pay damages to social activist Kari Simpson for defaming her in a 1999 radio commentary. As despicable as Mair’s commentary was - essentially calling her a Nazi, skinhead, and Klansman for campaigning against homosexuality-promoting books in BC’s schools - he should have the right to blather on as he wishes, without fear of being sued. Here’s the nonsense that Mair spewed nine years ago, that will no longer cost him any money (his entire commentary was reprinted as part of the Supreme Court’s ruling):

Before Kari was on my colleague Bill Good’s show last Friday I listened to the tape of the parents’ meeting the night before where Kari harangued the crowd.  It took me back to my childhood when with my parents we would listen to bigots who with increasing shrillness would harangue the crowds.  For Kari’s homosexual one could easily substitute Jew.  I could see Governor Wallace — in my mind’s eye I could see Governor Wallace of Alabama standing on the steps of a schoolhouse shouting to the crowds that no Negroes would get into Alabama schools as long as he was governor.  It could have been blacks last Thursday night just as easily as gays.  Now I’m not suggesting that Kari was proposing or supporting any kind of holocaust or violence but neither really — in the speeches, when you think about it and look back — neither did Hitler or Governor Wallace or Orville Fauvis or Ross Barnett.  They were simply declaring their hostility to a minority.  Let the mob do as they wished.

 As I listened to Kari Simpson I wondered about her, but I also wondered what was the matter with those parents, and my colleague Bill Good said it all on Friday when he said he’d rather have a competent gay teacher teach his kids than a vicious gay-basher.  Don’t make any mistake on this score.  There is no distinction between condemning the rights of blacks or Jews and condemning the civil rights of homosexuals.  Whether she realizes it or not, Kari has by her actions placed herself alongside skinheads and the Ku Klux Klan.  I’m not talking the violent aspects of those groups but the philosophical parallels to other examples of intolerance.

This is the kind of demonization that makes conservatives stay home, quiet and defeated. Trying to keep the promotion of homosexuality out of schools is in no way discrimination. There’s not a single value system upon which our rich, comfortable, and just Western societies were built upon that accepts the promotion of homosexuality to children as acceptable. Comparing the righteous protection of children from indoctrination, to the genocidal actions of Nazis and Klansmen, is perverse. But in our politically-correct times, when the worst possible thing that could happen to anyone is to be called racist, sexist, or homophobic, this perversity has effectively chilled the opposition. Witness the imposition of same-sex marriage in California this month by split-decision judicial fiat - despite the fact that every poll shows a vast majority of Californians are against the idea, barely a whisper of opposition can be publicly heard.

A smart lawyer - Mr. Levant, perhaps? - should take this ruling to the Supreme Court, and use it as an argument against the speech-chilling Section 13.1 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. If you shouldn’t have to pay damages to someone for smearing them on the radio, then you shouldn’t have to be subjected to human rights tribunals for speaking your mind, either.

In a third piece of news - this one much worse - former Conservative MP Jim Pankiw was informed that his appeal to the Supreme Court has been denied, and that his persecution by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal would continue. At least Pankiw hasn’t lost his fightin’ spirit here:

By Thursday evening, Pankiw, who is now a chiropractor in Saskatoon, said he may “just tell the human rights commission to go to hell, and just ignore them.

“That would be the easiest way, is to just to say: ‘You know what? Go to hell’ — I’ve got nothing else to say, because I’m busy, I’m running a business, I employ people, I don’t need this crap,” said Pankiw.

I think more victims of the Human Rights “courts” should do what Pankiw suggests here. There are no Human Rights police. Who can force you to these tribunals? Who can enforce their rulings? To me, this is the best path toward defeating this garbage - civil disobedience, forcing these clowns to either put up or shut up.

Finally, another example of how abused and perverted the kangaroo Human Rights courts have become:

A Canadian stand-up comedian will face a human rights tribunal hearing after a woman complained she and her friends faced a “tirade of homophobic and sexist comments” while attending one of his shows.

In a decision released this week, the B. C. Human Rights Tribunal ruled there is enough evidence to hear the case of Vancouver woman Lorna Pardy against Toronto comedian Guy Earle. Zesty’s Restaurant in Vancouver, where the May 22, 2007, show took place, has also been named in the complaint.

Note to lesbians, Jews, blacks, geeks, women, men, Chinese, Albanians, postal workers, Americans, Muslims, alcoholics, and “little people” - if jokes about you offend your sensitive ears, then don’t go to comedy shows in bars. Or, on the flip-side, if you’re looking to make a spectacle of yourself and earn a little shakedown cash, go to comedy shows in bars, and take notes…