New hate trial for First Nations leader

Reuters is reporting that David Ahenakew, the former chief of the Canadian Assembly of First Nations, will get a new trial for promoting hate speech. In 2002, Ahenakew compared Jews to a ‘disease’ which he blamed for starting the Second World War, and said that Hitler was justified when he ‘fried up six million of those guys’ because if he hadn’t, ‘Jews would have owned the goddamned world.’ Ahenakew was stripped of his Order of Canada and fined a thousand dollars. But today, the Saskatchewan Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that Ahenakew’s trial did not concern itself with whether Ahenakew ‘intended to promote hatred’, which in this context means that Ahenakew could get away with it because the comments were uttered during a heated exchange with a newspaper reporter. I simply don’t see how that’s a defence for this sort of thing: not being able to control your outbursts does not excuse them when they are uttered.

In my last post I came down rather strongly on the side of free speech, and in this post I am endorsing the punishment of a hate speech targeted against ethnic groups. La kashya—there is no contradiction. The previous post is about protecting the essence of free speech exactly by holding people responsible for what they say, not by holding others responsible in their place. In this case, it would be as if the Saskatoon StarPhoenix were being sued for hate speech when they had merely printed what someone said to them in an interview. The point is that if democracy and free speech are concepts that are to have any meaning, people must be held responsible for their own speech, not others’.