A crucially important piece of legislation, Bill 59, is currently being considered by the provincial Assembly in Quebec. It isn’t getting much attention outside of Canada, but if it passes, it will effectively empower the Quebec Human Rights Commission to implement UN Resolution 16/18 in the province. At that point Quebec will fall into line with a number of Western European countries, who have already passed laws that enforce sharia rules against Islamic blasphemy.

Below is the testimony against Bill 59 given before the Commission des Institutions at the National Assembly in Quebec City by Marc Lebuis of Point de Bascule. Many thanks to the Counterjihad Collective for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

The following video shows the remarks by Jacques Frémont, as referenced by Mr. Lebuis in his testimony. Mr. Frémont was speaking as the president of the Quebec Human Rights Commission, but he also happens to be — why are we not surprised? — the former director of a George Soros’ Open Society Foundations group.

Many thanks to CB Sashenka for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

To help get you up to speed, Vlad has additional material on the legal jihad now underway in Quebec.

[From Vlad]

Quebec’s bill 59. Canada’s French province runs screaming from the Enlightenment.

For the past couple of days, a Quebec law professor and former director of a George Soros funded ‘progressive-leftist’ group called Open Society Foundations, has been arguing in the Quebec legislature that criticism of islam should not just be illegal but punishable by massive fines for a first offense and life-destroying ones for a second.

The National Post editorial puts it this way:

National Post View: Quebec hate speech bill would re-establish bureaucratic despotism

Strong stuff for a national newspaper. But potentially an understatement.

As this site has argued since its inception, the most problematic aspect of any lever of power like Bill 59 is the fact that it will be selectively enforced. In this case it would be a safe wager that it will be enforced using the guidelines of UN Resolution 16/18 making it a criminal act to criticize Islam, but not stopping Islam from calling for the genocide of non-believers under their right to religious freedom.

Back to the Post:

Bill 59 assigns new powers to the Quebec Human Rights Commission (QHRC) to combat hate speech, as well as a variety of other provisions meant to protect against extremism, by censoring speech that promotes “fear of the other.” Ominously, the bill would allow the QHRC to pursue websites that in its estimation describe and denounce Islamism.

The bill takes its inspiration from recommendations made public by the QHRC in November 2014. Jacques Frémont, the commission’s president, explained that he planned to use the requested powers to sue those critical of certain ideas, “people who would write against … the Islamic religion … on a website or on a Facebook page.”

Let’s let that sink in for a moment before we move forward.

The Quebec Government is contemplating a bill that seems, even overtly, to criminalize and punish anyone who criticizes a political/religious ideology. Even if islam was not a threat doctrine, this bill is an outrageous affront to the most core principles of democracy. One cannot make an informed choice without information.

So who is this Jacques Frémont?

Below is a short video [actually, it’s above here at GoV — BB] with a couple of tiny excerpts from an hour long speech in French where he seems to tip his hand a little bit. In all fairness, I do not speak French, so I cannot be certain that these short excerpts which were sent to us properly represent his point of view. So here is a link to the entire video. Anyone wishing to and who can speak French may want to check it out and make sure these quotes are fairly taken. They are at 12:11-16:39 and the first cut is within the first 3 minutes. It’s only one line.

[…]

The Montreal Gazette covered yesterday’s hearings on Bill 59:

Quebec hate-speech bill prompts strong opinions at public hearings

But the most heated debates took place at the end of the day with the Association des musulmans et des arabes pour la laïcité au Québec (the Association of Muslims and Arabs for a secular Quebec).

Bill 59 was one of a slew of initiatives presented June 10 by the Quebec government to combat radicalization leading to violence, as it pledged to work with the city of Montreal on a deradicalization centre — their concerted response to terrorist attacks last October and the phenomenon of youths leaving Quebec to join terrorist ranks.

But it was also an answer to how to deal with the growing problem of Islamophobia, and on both counts AMAL-Québec welcomed the initiative.

“It is obvious that when the call to hate, demonize, and dehumanize certain groups becomes commonplace, it has the effect of accentuating attitudes filled with prejudice and stereotypes,” said AMAL president Haroun Bouazzi, before the Commission des institutions at the National Assembly in Quebec City.

For anyone uncertain about what “the call to hate, demonize, and dehumanize certain groups” means, just read a koran, the hadith and the Sunna, or book of the life of Islam’s founder, Mohammed. Alternativly, sit in for a week or so at any mosque and listen to the sermons. Maybe bring a tape recorder so you can have the Arabic bits translated later.

One might wonder if this particular pernicious individual is so dangerous to real liberty and the Enlightenment if he had caught the notice of any of the Counter-Jihadists before?

There’s more at Vlad’ place.

Transcript of the Marc Lebuis video:

00:19		Thank you. Good afternoon, Madame Minister.
00:22		Good afternoon, members of the National Assembly.
00:25		My name is Marc Lebuis and I am the Director of Point de Bascule.
00:30		Point de Bascule manages an independent and nonpartisan website
00:33		describing the methods and the means used by Islamist organizations
00:36		and their leaders to implement their program in Canada.
00:40		Ten persons or so are involved in what we are doing at one level or another.
00:44		We are all involved in Point de Bascule on a volunteer basis.
00:47		Point de Bascule started its activities in the fall of 2006,
00:50		and the website was opened in the spring of 2007.
00:54		Aside from maintaining the website, we have organized activities
00:58		with Muslims who worry about the Islamist threat in Canada.
01:02		According to our research, Canada is not only facing a terrorist threat,
01:07		but also much more insidious and non-violent efforts that aim at
01:12		misleading government agencies, police services, the media, etc., on
01:17		radical Islam’s ambitions of conquest in Canada and in the West in general.
01:22		There are many formulations of this plan of conquest.
01:27		In the early 2000s, Jamal Badawi, one of the main leaders of
01:31		the Muslim Brotherhood infrastructure in Canada,
01:33		said that, at that time, Muslims should accept becoming judges
01:38		and civil servants in Canada even though the country
01:40		was not ruled by sharia, the Islamic law.
01:45		He declared that these judges and these civil servants should
01:48		take advantage of their positions of influence to stop
01:50		applying current legal provisions that are not compatible with sharia.
01:56		In 2004, in an interview with Egypt Today, Tariq Ramadan went in
02:01		the same direction, when he encouraged Islamists operating in Canada
02:05		to use the Canadian legal framework, which he referred to as
02:09		“one of the most open in the world,” to subtly and gradually introduce
02:15		rules of sharia in Canada. At the time, Tariq Ramadan strongly
02:20		urged his supporters NOT to openly mention their commitment to sharia:
02:26		“The term sharia in itself is laden with negative connotations in the
02:31		Western mind,” Ramadan said. “ There is no need to stress that. […]
02:34		For the time being this is not how we want to be perceived,” he added.
02:39		This statement to the effect that Islamist lobbies supported from abroad
02:43		want to implement sharia law in Canada is not new. It was part of the
02:48		presentation of the motion against Islamic tribunals in Ontario that was
02:52		adopted by the Quebec National Assembly on May 26, 2005.
02:56		Today in 2015, those who want to implement sharia in Canada
03:01		have put on their agenda the adoption of measures banning
03:05		references to Islamic concepts when describing the threat facing Canada.
03:09		This is what led us to ask for a hearing by this Commission studying Bill 59.
03:17		If Bill 59 is adopted, it will make it very risky to talk about the ambitions of
03:22		Islamists to implement sharia in Canada. In 2005, if the provisions of Bill 59
03:28		had been in operation, those who were publicly criticizing the
03:32		introduction of Islamic tribunals in Ontario would have been at risk
03:37		of being sued for ‘hate speech.’ On December 2, 2014, when the
03:42		Quebec Human Rights Commission President, Jacques Fremont,
03:45		explained on Radio-Canada the recommendations of his
03:51		organization that led to what is now Bill 59, he pointed out that he
03:56		intended to use the new powers he was asking for to initiate lawsuits
04:01		against “people who would write against […] the Islamic religion
04:09		[…] on a website or on a Facebook page.”
04:15		We can never repeat it enough: the role of the State is to protect
04:19		individual freedom of expression: that is the freedom of individuals
04:24		to criticize ideas, and NOT to protect ideas from the criticism of individuals.
04:32		A second point that is very troubling in regard to the QHRC’s project,
04:36		now part of Bill 59, is that the QHRC president justifies it by invoking
04:43		United Nations resolutions supporting the same goal. What Mr. Frémont
04:50		did not tell Radio-Canada when he alluded to these UN resolutions
04:55		on December 2, 2014 is that they originated with the
04:57		Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the OIC, that claims
05:01		equivalence between blasphemy, criticism of Islam, defamation
05:05		of religions and hate speech.
05:07		Saudi Arabia, one of the OIC’s most important members, invoked
05:13		the same kind of provisions to sentence Raif Badawi to 1,000 lashes
05:16		for having criticized certain aspects of Islam on his blog. Quebecers
05:18		strongly expressed their support for Raif Badawi in recent weeks.
05:28		The OIC is an association of 56 Muslim countries
05:31		(with the Palestinian Authority).
05:34		It constitutes the most important bloc of countries taking part in UN votes.
05:38		In 1990, displeased with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
05:43		that Saudi Arabia did not approve in 1948, the OIC
05:45		adopted its own Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam that affirms
05:52		the primacy of sharia and that is incompatible with freedom of expression.
05:56		OIC members regularly present resolutions at the UN and in other
06:00		international forums to criminalize the criticism of Islam. In 1999,
06:02		Pakistan presented the first resolution to this effect. The first version of this
06:06		resolution specifically asked for the condemnation of ‘defamation of Islam.’
06:10		Subsequent versions referred more generally to ‘defamation of religions.’
06:19		At the United Nations, under both the Liberal and Conservative governments,
06:23		Canada has consistently voted against the censorship proposals
06:26		proposals brought forward by the OIC since 1999. These proposals
06:31		are behind the UN resolutions referred to by Mr. Frémont to support
06:34		the recommendations that have been included in Bill 59.
06:38		A third reason for opposing Bill 59 is that the Quebec Human Rights
06:44		Commission that would apply the provisions regarding ‘hate speech’
06:47		has a double mandate whose two facets are incompatible in a society
06:53		based on the rule of law. In a speech he gave at the
06:56		Université de Montréal on March 25, 2015, the QHRC President,
07:00		Mr. Frémont, described the QHRC’s activist role as follows: he stated
07:05		that the QHRC’s mandate is “seeking changes in people’s attitude”
07:11		“provoking a social change”, and “making the law” by choosing to
07:17		prosecute difficult cases. When Mr. Frémont explained what he meant
07:21		by “making the law,” he indicated that the QHRC should initiate lawsuits
07:24		without the absolute certainty of winning in court, and that the QHRC should
07:30		take risks” to see how far judges are willing to go to accommodate
07:35		the changes that the QHRC wants to bring in society.
07:39		In a society based on the rule of law, the mandate of government
07:43		bodies is not to attempt to accomplish indirectly
07:45		what they do not have the mandate to accomplish directly.
07:48		Salman Rushdie, in an interview to the French magazine L’Express,
07:53		and several groups of Canadian anti-sharia Muslims, in a full page
07:56		they published in the National Post on July 30, 2015, pointed out that
08:00		we must “stop referring to this taboo of so-called Islamophobia.”
08:06		Rushdie asked: “Why can’t we debate about Islam? It is possible to
08:13		respect individuals to protect them from intolerance while demonstrating
08:17		skepticism towards their ideas and even by criticizing them vigorously.”
08:22		My last criticism of ‘hate speech’ legal suits is that,
08:26		contrary to libel suits, they are much vaguer, much more arbitrary
08:32		and the defenses almost nonexistent. The notion of ‘hate speech’ is not
08:37		defined in Bill 59, but, even if it were, it would be problematic,
08:42		because this notion of ‘hate speech’ is based solely on what the persons
08:46		targeted by litigious statements have been made to feel or even
08:51		what they COULD feel, given that Article 6 of Bill 59 would enable
08:56		the QHRC to initiate lawsuits without any complaints from the public.
09:01		Contrary to libel suits, the public interest of raising an issue that could
09:06		be perceived as offensive is not taken into account with ‘hate speech.’
09:12		In a recent Point de Bascule article, we have highlighted that the leader
09:15		of an organization that has been invited at Bill 59 public hearings had
09:20		in 2003 in La Presse justified the killing of Salman Rushdie
09:25		‘for having offended the Prophet.’
09:27		If we were being sued for defamation for bringing up this fact, we could
09:30		stress that it is of public interest to raise this issue since this organization
09:34		represents 70 Islamic institutions in Montreal. In a ‘hate speech’ lawsuit,
09:41		this defense would be worthless since the focus is exclusively on the
09:45		feeling of the person that was targeted by the litigious statements.
09:50		In closing, I would like to highlight that it would be a tremendous step
09:54		backwards if Quebec, which probably was the first North American
09:58		jurisdiction to adopt an anti-sharia resolution in 2005, and which
10:02		supported Raif Badawi against censorship and persecution by
10:08		Saudi Arabia, were to give in to pressure and restrict Quebecers’
10:11		freedom of expression, notably when they want to describe
10:13		and resist the Islamist threat.
10:16		For all these reasons, I urge you not to adopt Bill 59.
10:22		I thank you for your attention.

Transcript of the Jacques Frémont video (from two clips patched together):

00:00		…It’s precisely to seek changes in people’s attitudes.
00:02		Obviously, the fundamental question that faces…
00:06		all Human Rights Commissions, all National Human Rights Commissions,
00:10		is the eternal question that you are studying,
00:13		that I have also studied at the university, at the faculty,
00:17		is how to provoke social change,
00:19		and how to provoke changes of mentality,
00:23		and what role the law and its institutions play regarding this.
		[second section]
00:00		…there are many groups saying:
00:04		there are many cases that you should take and that you don’t take.
00:08		You are not taking risks. You tend to take cases…
00:12		that will be won before the courts, and you…
00:16		won’t make the law with easy cases. You will make the law with difficult cases
00:20		risky cases. I am very sensitive to these issues.
00:49		In many cases,
00:53		interventions made by the QHRC, we have made the law. We have defined…
00:57		systemic discrimination. Last January, we were at the Supreme Court
01:01		in the Latif v. Bombardier case for racial profiling.
01:05		The first case that went before the Supreme Court for racial profiling, etc. So,
01:09		we made the law, but almost by accident. It’s rare
01:14		that there is a file; It happened the other day. A file came in…
01:18		the person, it’s an advocacy group, had warned me that they would do it.
01:22		They brought the file in, and “fast tracked” it. Regarding the file,
01:26		I said: We won’t settle, we won’t offer mediation. We’re going to court.
01:30		The complainant wants to go to court, it’s against the government. We must settle this issue
01:34		once and for all before the court. So, we’re trying to transform
01:38		our culture from a random culture of litigation…
01:42		to a much more strategic culture of litigation, or a culture of
01:46		strategic litigation.