National Affairs by Claire Hoy — Upside down at what’s important

April 18, 2016 · 0 Comments

This, so it seems, is the kind of world we live in.
A nondescript Tory MPP makes a crude sexist joke about a female Liberal MP at a cancer fundraising stag a few months ago and it suddenly becomes front-page news, with the requisite outraged editorials and public demands (and compliance) for a groveling apology.
Blue Jays manager John Gibbons, ticked off because his team lost a baseball game because of the interpretation of a new (and certainly misplaced) sliding rule, and quips that he’ll soon have to send the boys out wearing dresses, a comment which, once again, provoked the usual storm of outrage and cries about violence against women, etc., etc., etc.
Both incidents, such as they were, received wide coverage in all the media and no doubt will be used time and again by the professional grievance class as examples of what neanderthals men are as a class.
Then there are these events:
A Toronto woman, a co-founder of our local Black Lives Matter (as if most Canadians think they don’t, for heaven’s sake) tweets a menacing message from her festival of indignation asking for divine guidance to stop her from killing white people.
So, does this make the front pages? Is this as serious as a failed joke from a Tory MPP? Does Premier Kathleen Wynne call it “completely unacceptable” as she did the bad joke? Ah, no. Indeed, with a few rare (and apparently sadly misguided) exceptions, the mainstream media rushes to rationalize what would provoke calls for an inquiry if a white activist tweeted something like that about black people.
Indeed, the Toronto Star, not surprisingly, published columns not just from their own in-house black activist but the woman herself explaining why a tweet talking about killing white people isn’t really a tweet about killing white people. Instead, we’re told, it’s a call for love in the midst of what seems to be an epidemic of hate in our society, an epidemic which no doubt is real in the minds of these radicals but totally unsubstantiated by any reasonable compilation of data and example.
And then, the clincher.
The National Post — in a story ignored by both The Globe and Mail and Toronto Star, as far as I could see — publishes an extraordinarily disturbing story from the Quebec courts about Judge Guy Lambert sentencing an aboriginal man to 15 months after he repeatedly burned a five-year-old girl with a cigarette, leaving permanent scars on her face, arms, legs and genitalia.
Why only 15 months, you may well ask?
You may think the abused little girl here is the real victim in this unspeakable crime. Well, according to the judge, you’d be wrong. He says Bellemare, an Atikamekw from Wemotaci, about 270 kilometres north of Montreal, is himself among the “collateral victims of residential schools and of the cultural genocide that the Atikamekws of Wemotaci experienced.”
How’s that? Setting aside the historical fact that residential schools were never about “cultural genocide” — and indeed, at the time were advocated by native leaders as well as non-native leaders, did Bellemare actually go to a residential school? No, he did not. Well then, did his parents go to residential schools? No, they did not.
So how does he become a “collateral victim,” you may wonder. Isn’t it obvious, deems the judge. His grandparents went to residential schools. So therefore, the fact that this little girl suffered 27 third-degree burns — 25 from a cigarette and two from a lighter — isn’t really his fault at all.
In a world not turned upside down about what is important — protection of helpless children, for example — and what isn’t — stupid jokes by a dull man about another politician — you would think this sentencing would provoke a public outrage.
Apparently not. No sign of the prime minister or the premier, or justice ministers, or media editorials, or child advocates, or anybody rising up to protest this horrendous miscarriage of justice by this Quebec judge.
But then, you can’t get exorcised about everything. And right now the usual suspects are to busy making excuses for a tweeter talking about killing white people and turning a stupid joke and offhand baseball quip into universal examples of racism and misogyny.
And that, dear hearts, is the world we inhabit. hoy