Nothing in any nanny-state society is as insidious as thought control. It puts the lie to any platitudes mouthed by politicians about freedom. The Quebec Press Council’s latest decisions are cause for serious concern, The Council, like much of the “Quebec Model”, should be relegated to the dustbin of history.

 

The very fact of a society organizing a body overseeing expression and opinion is in and of itself offensive to any standards of liberty. It reflects a Stalinist mindset and little else. There are sufficient protections afforded in our libel and slander laws to make such a body totally unwarranted.

 

But when that body adopts as its primary goal the protection of the collective from any criticism by the individual, and condemns opinions as being outside of accepted “parametres”, we have the beginning of totalitarianism. It matters little that the Council has no enforcement powers. Or that it is set up by media organizations as a self-regulating body. That makes it all the worse. For a free press must not be regulated. That very regulation encourages nothing less than self-censorship. It promotes a rigid and stifling political correctness. Worst of all it affects people’s perceptions. And as the old political saw says, “Perception is everything.”

 

The public discourse in our society is too characterized by demonization. The Press Council adds to that. And the perception of demonization makes make citizens accept the most prejudiced orthodox biases merely to avoid government oversight. That fear affects journalists too. And with that comes the erosion of a vigourous fourth estate. A liberal society’s lifeblood is the free battleground of ideas. Free from any compulsion or coercion. A society that is afraid to let its people judge truth and falsehood for themselves is a society that is afraid of its people. It will inevitably seek to control action, association and expression.

Some six weeks ago the Council condemned an article by the National Post’s Barbara Kay that criticized the participation of political and union leaders in a rally in August of 2006 that turned into a pro-Hezbollah demonstration. Look at the Kafkaesque words in the Council’s decision. It said that Kay’s conclusions aroused "undue provocation" and made "generalizations suitable to perpetuate prejudices". All this because she dared question the motivations of civil society leaders who led a hate-filled march and encouraged it with their own words. Former PQ leader André Boisclair and FTQ President Henri Massé were seen standing, smiling, in front of a defiled Jewish prayer shawl. Addressing the crowd, replete with Hezbollah flags, Boisclair said, “The Quebec I see marching in front of me is the Quebec that inspires me.” But not a word from the Council on those provocations that truly perpetuate prejudices. After all, Boisclair and Massé are pillars of the “pure laine” Quebec model. The Council went on to state that Kay did not put the facts in “context” and used them to support her point of view. Questioning “contexts” are the very heart of opinion in a free press! The point of a free press must always be to challenge interests not balance them. Competing views precisely on contexts must be fought out without restraint of societal pressure. But not in Quebec! Here collectives define the “context”.

Last week the Council took to task another non-francophone journalist using roughly the same language. It condemned the Globe and Mail’s Jan Wong for an opinion piece she wrote that suggested the reasons for the Dawson College shootings carried out by Kimveer Gill and Valery Fabrikant’s Concordia rampage as well as Marc Lépine’s (Gamil Gharbi was his real name) Polytechnique massacre might have been due to alienation felt by Quebec immigrants because of the failures of integration into the “pure laine” world. Once again the Council objected to a journalist’s formulation of an opinion, based on her interpretation of the facts, because it painted Quebec society in a negative light. It upheld the complaint of Montreal’s Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste that Ms. Wong left the impression that Quebec society was pre-occupied with “racial purity”.

Interestingly the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste was also a complainant in the Kay affair. In both decisions the Press Council took pains to protect the public impression of the Quebec “collective”. Indeed in the Kay decision the Council used convoluted phrasing to warn against the “raising of contempt against a category of people for discriminatory reasons”. Yet it should not be the role of members of the fourth estate to limit opinion. Limiting free expression is a slippery slope. Freedom must remain indivisible and short of outright incitement to violence there should be no restriction on opinion. If a category of people were discriminatory would they not be worthy of contempt? But if the Council’s guidelines are followed to their logical conclusion there would be none left to condemn them. Everyone would be silenced but the hate-mongers.

In the interests of full disclosure let me say that personally I agree with Barbara Kay on this and many other issues and disagree with Jan Wong. But that’s not the point. The only way to make sure people you agree with are heard is to support the rights of people you don’t agree with. The Council would silence all. As draconian as its existence has been from the beginning, the Council seems to have gone completely out of control. And Quebec - without putting too fine a point on it - already has experience in language control with Bill 101. We’ve lived through Duplessis’ infamous Padlock Law that was used, amongst others, against Jehovah’s Witnesses until it was struck down after a seven year battle in the Roncarelli case. One can imagine that decisions like this from the Council – particularly in Quebec’s current xenophobia over accommodation - could mushroom into calls for legislative restrictions that would mirror Turkey’s notorious Article 301.

The Quebec Press Council’s message is clear. Any attack on “Quebecness”- particularly by non-francophones - will be condemned. Turkey has such an actual law in place. It is Article 301 of its Penal Code that makes it a criminal offence to attack “Turkishness”. Just this past Friday Turkey’s largest telecommunications services provider, Turk Telekom, blocked access to YouTube, following a court decision deeming that videos appearing on the site were insulting to the father of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, and to the Turkish people.

Article 301/1 of the Turkish Penal Code, generally called the “Insulting Turkishness” Law, took effect in June 2005. The law states “A person who explicitly insults being a Turk, the Republic or the Turkish Grand National Assembly, shall be imposed to a penalty of imprisonment for a term of six months to three years. Where insulting being a Turk is committed by a Turkish citizen in a foreign country, the penalty to be imposed shall be increased by one third.” 

The law was pushed through by the nationalist “Unity of Jurists” group. According to PEN International more than 70 writers, publishers, and journalists are currently under indictment or standing trial under this law.

Notable cases include that of Fatih Tas, a publisher defending himself from charges stemming from his publication of a book by Noam Chomsky; five journalists charged for their criticism of official attempts to ban a conference focusing on the Armenian massacres; Abdullah Yilmaz, the editor in chief of a publishing house, who was charged for issuing a Turkish edition of Greek writer Mara Meimaridi's best-selling novel “The Witches of Smyrna”; world-renowned author Orhan Pamuk charged with “insulting Turkishness” for stating in an interview in Germany that “thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.”; Turkish-born American Professor Elif Şafak who came to Turkey on principle, while pregnant, to face an Article 301 prosecution because of the fictitious characters she created in her novel, “The Bastard of İstanbul”; and İpek Çalişlar who is facing prosecutors because she wrote in a biography of Mustafa Kemal's wife Latife that Atatürk had once fled disguised as a woman.

But the most notorious case was that of crusading journalist Hrant Dink who was murdered after he was found guilty of violating Article 301 because as editor of the Armenian language newspaper Agos he published articles in 2004 – before the passage of the law – entitled “the Armenian Identity”.

As troubling as the law itself, is the public atmosphere of hate it stirs up. As I wrote earlier, perception is everything. As easily as Turkish passions are aroused to protect secularism, so too those passions are aroused to extreme nationalism. Stirring up mob mentality is far too easy. Orhan Pamuk and a number of international observers were harassed and jostled by a crowd outside his hearing, and the courtroom was jammed with supporters of the prosecution. When Hrant Dink appeared at his hearing, members of the prosecution harangued the defendants, their lawyers, and even the judge. Pro-prosecution crowds threatened and spat on the defendants and journalists as they entered the courthouse and threw coins and other objects at them from the public gallery during the proceedings. At one point, those inside were unable to leave for around an hour until police were able to escort them out. One of those trapped in the courtroom described the scene as an “attempted lynching.” 

We know about mob mentalities in Quebec as well. The Quebec Press Council does nothing but inflame extreme nationalist fervour and threaten dissent. But perhaps its most grievous insult to Quebecers is that it does not trust us with the ability to chose. We are to be educated like children on the “right path”. Mao would be proud. Perhaps it is time for the Council to look to France for direction instead. Let it heed the words of newly-elected President Nicolas Sarkozy who said at the time of the Mohammed cartoon riots, “I prefer an excess of caricature to an excess of censorship.” In the final analysis liberty, in its most basic sense, lays in the inalienable right of the people to choose.

Beryl Wajsman is president of the Institute for Public Affairs of Montreal www.iapm.ca
 publisher of BARRICADES Magazine www.barricades.ca
 and host of Corus Radio’s "The Last Angry Man" on the New 940Montreal.
He can be reached at: info@iapm.ca and at letters@canadafreepress.com