CANADA: Even Muslims hate the Left’s new Anti-Hate Crime Bill C-9, designed to prosecute people who say things that other people find offensive (especially Muslims)

Despite repeatedly calling for this kind of legislation, Muslims are afraid they will be arrested for their very public hate-filled demonstrations advocating elimination of the state of Israel as well as all its Jewish inhabitants.

JCCF (h/t Marvin W)  Canadian Bill C-9, the government’s new hate crime legislation now being debated in the House of Commons, is fixated on further criminalizing feelings of hatred, despite the fact that defining hate is virtually impossible, as evidenced whenever politicians and judges try to do so.

Bill C-9 states: “For greater certainty, the communication of a statement does not incite or promote hatred … solely because it discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends.” The bill allows Canadians to express “disdain” and “dislike” without worrying about facing criminal charges, yet Canadians must be careful not to possess illegal emotions that involve “detestation” or “vilification.” It’s not “hate” to discredit, humiliate, hurt, offend, and dislike people; it is “hate” to detest and vilify people. Are we clear?

Bill C-9 creates new legislation to punish the emotion of hate. This ignores the reality that Canada’s judges are already empowered to impose more severe penalties on hate-fuelled criminals. Bill C-9 increases the maximum penalty that a judge can impose on citizens convicted of crimes, if the judge decides that the convicted person’s emotions crossed from the legal territory of “disdain” and “dislike” into the crime of feeling “detestation” or “vilification.”

For a minor crime where the maximum penalty is two years of jail time, possessing this mysterious “hate” can get the convicted person up to five years in jail, instead of two.

Bill C-9 makes existing laws worse by empowering police to use the Criminal Code to impose their own subjective beliefs about what a police officer personally feels is “hateful.” The bill does this by repealing an important safeguard that protects the free speech of all Canadians, namely the requirement that the attorney general consent to any prosecution for hate speech offences. As Justice Minister Sean Fraser explains it: “By removing this step, law enforcement would be able to act quickly.”

Under Bill C-9, it will not be illegal for Canadians to display the communist hammer-and-sickle, the symbol proudly used by Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian communists when murdering tens of millions of people. Following this “tolerant” logic of Bill C-9, Canadians should understand that killing people for belonging to the wrong class or social group is far less evil than killing people for belonging to the wrong race or ethnic group.

When announcing Bill C-9, Fraser mentioned “rising Islamophobia, antisemitism, homophobia and transphobia” but said nothing about the burnings of dozens of Catholic churches in Canada, or the vandalism perpetrated against dozens more. Anti-Catholic hate is obviously not on the minister’s radar. If it was, he would have mentioned it when introducing the Combatting Hate Act. It goes to show how Bill C-9 is primarily about politics and appearances, even while undermining free expression in Canada.