A friend sent me this interesting blog by Jonathon Kay concerning phony racism and the industry it has spawned.  In their zeal to combat racism, some activists can’t wait for the real deal, they make it up themselves.

(Interestingly the blog has been removed from the source site, so I am posting the whole blog, not excerpts.  I verified the content by viewing the cache of a few sites and finding it posted on other blogs. )

Original source.  Reposted source.

What I find interesting is that this mirrors the observations I made a few months ago here:  Seattle Schools, where diversity = Blame whites for everything (and make some money)

Apparently, the disease is spreading to Canada.  Emphasis mine.

Jonathan Kay on Richard Warman and Canada’s phony-racism industry

Posted: February 18, 2008, 1:14 PM by Jonathan Kay

Canadians now know the precise moment when radical anti-racism became a more powerful sociological toxin than racism itself: 7:55pm EST on Sept. 5, 2003.

That is the date-stamp on a particularly vile posting, left by an anonymous user on the message board of the right-wing web site freedomsite.org, attacking Canada’s first black senator. It read as follows: “Not only is Canadian Senator Anne Cools is a Negro, she is also an immigrant! And she is also one helluva preachy c*nt. She does NOT belong in my Canada. My Anglo-Germanic people were here before there was a Canada and her kind have jumped in, polluted our race, and forced their bullshit down our throats. Time to go back to when the women *** imports knew their place … And that place was NOT in public!”

Horrible, shocking stuff. But even more shocking is the identity of the fellow whose electronic fingerprints were all over the message: famed Canadian human-rights lawyer Richard Warman.

Warman is a legend in anti-racism circles. A former member of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, he’s launched countless complaints against right-wing extremists, and won almost all of them. But during proceedings surrounding one of Warman’s 2003-era complaints against freedomsite, the respondents turned the tables. A computer expert named Bernard Klatt did some digging under freedomsite’s back office, and determined that the Cools posting had been made from a computer bearing the IP address 66.185.84.204, the very same address from which Warman had admitted to visiting freedomsite using a different alias.

Other technical details – such as the operating system and Web browser being used – also provided an exact match to Warman. Based on this evidence, Klatt concluded in a recently publicized affidavit, “Richard Warman was the poster of the message headed ‘Cools don’t belong in our Senate.’ ”

Does this mean Warman is a closet bigot? I doubt it. What seems more likely is that – like other anti-racism activists – Warman simply found himself running out of Aryan Nation types to chase around the Internet. And so, under this theory, he decided to just start typing the stuff up on his own computer – and then added these self-authored “racist” postings to his blunderbuss brief against freedomsite. (As Klatt notes, Warman has been accused of perpetrating the same sort of stunts on other right-wing Web sites.) When you’ve got profitable hate-speech cases to prosecute, why wait for some unemployed conspiracy theorist to start raving against immigrants when you can just manufacture the evidence yourself?

Bizarre as this episode may be, it is of a piece with a larger trend – symbolized, south of the border, by the shamefully trumped up case against the Duke University lacrosse team. The anti-racism industry, running out of legitimate hatemongers to go after, has gone rogue in its search for attention and relevance.

It also raises the question: How many other faux-racist frauds are out there? Thanks to Warman, it’s a question I now think about every time a Canadian hate-speech activist or blogger publicizes an email he gets from some whitepower22@*****.com or other. These poisonous messages are held up as dramatic proof that there are still plenty of Nazi types out there – and that without hate-speech laws to shut them up, the country’s gays, Jews, Black and Arabs will remain at risk of verbal assault, or worse. But if the picking are so slim that anti-racists have slid into second careers as fiction writers, what does that say about the scale of the problem? How many of the other examples of “hate” that you see out there are similarly bogus?

The anti-racism industry has become an industry like any other: As the actual need for what its peddling has diminished in this extraordinarily tolerant nation, the industry’s various profiteers and carnival barkers have created myths and exaggerated fears to prop themselves up.

As I’ve written before, this would not be so much a problem if their various speech codes were used merely to prosecute men such as David Ahenakew, Ernst Zundel, Jim Keegstra and the like. But in the post-9/11 era, radical anti-racists are also agitating to shut up sensible people saying sensible things about the war against militant Islam, the defining global struggle of our era. They’re also giving comfort to Islamists who seek to carve out sectarian taboos from our hallowed tradition of free speech.

All of this would be destructive enough on its own. When the censors start churning out the hate speech themselves – that makes them as much a farce as a menace.

Now let me qualify right now one thing.  Do I, and does (to my knowledge) Jonathon Kay believe Racism is nonexistent?

No.

The points I think he is making and that I have made previously, are that:

1. There are anti-racism activists with a financial incentive to find and denounce racism, and some of them may very well be frauds, such as Richard Warman and Glenn Singleton of Pacific Educational Group.
2. False accusations can be made when the desire to brand an incident racists is more important then the actual incident.  The Duke Lacrosse Players are a class example.
3. By creating problems where none exist they become part of the problem because they dilute the actuality of racism in our culture.   By focusing on imaginary issues, real racism is left unchecked.  Ever heard of crying wolf people?
4. By focusing on imaginary issues, real gains in racism are nullified and a false sense of pessimism over the success of racial understanding is created.

Two obvious points are readily apparent:  First, if racism was as bad as the activists claim, there would be no need to make up claims, there would be open and obvious incidents galore. 

And second, some anti-racism activists are determined to make sure racism never goes away.  Their livelihood depends on it.

Am I being unfair and cynical?  Perhaps.  But consider that the man detailed above makes a lucrative living litigating racism, and on at least one occasion he had baited the trap with his own fraudulent writings.

So in the end, Jonathon’s question is extremely valid:  How many of the other examples of “hate” that you see out there are similarly bogus?

Is that an inference that all accusations of racism are false?  Absolutely not.  While we have made great strides in this country, the fact remains that ignorance dies slowly an dracism still lurks in our society

But the fact still remains that there are clearly documented cases where the accusations were false.  (Cynthia McKinney comes to mind) Racial activists rightly point out that any racism is too much racism.  I agree.  Let’s agree that real racism is bad and should be fought and countered.

But there is nothing racist about making sure the racism is real.  After all, if one accusation is knowingly false, that is also one too many, isn’t it?

Or are a few innocent victims a price the anti-racism activists are willing to pay?

Truth matters.

  Trackposted to Faultline USA, Allie is Wired, DragonLady’s World, Right Truth, Shadowscope, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Big Dog’s Weblog, A Newt One, Dumb Ox Daily News, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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