Day: February 14, 2008

Superdelegate Bidding: Barack’s Got His Hand up.

Everyone is wondering if Bill and Hillary will pull out a super-delegate trump-card prior to the convention, but the bidding war is already on and Barrack has his hand up as you can see here.

So what’s a super-delegate? They are un-elected and comprise one fifth of the total Democratic convention vote – they are the swing vote on who the candidate will be.

Of course there’s always the possibility that Hillary will Hsu some votes into her corner before the convention….

h/t Yenta

Nobody Ever Expects the Saudi Inquisition

After the Saudi religious police (mutaween) beat an illiterate woman into the hospital to extract a confession to witchcraft that she couldn’t read the judge handed down a sentence of death. Sound like Medieval or early Renaissance times? Wrong. It’s Saudi Arabia here and now. Story at ABC 

A leading human rights group appealed to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah on Thursday to stop the execution of a woman accused of witchcraft and performing supernatural acts.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement that the kingdom’s religious police who arrested and interrogated Fawza Falih, and the judges who tried her in the northern town of Quraiyat never gave her the opportunity to prove her innocence in the face of “absurd charges that have no basis in law.”

Falih’s case underscores shortcomings in Saudi Arabia’s Islamic legal system in which rules of evidence are shaky, lawyers are not always present and sentences often depend on the whim of judges.

Freedom of Speech in Canada; Radical Muslim Backs Down

As it is, the bounds were exceeded by the commission pursuing the case and that needs to be looked into by either the regular courts or by the legislative bodies in Canada. In my humble opinion Ezra must take this further by filing suit against the CHRC, and by finding a legislative ally willing to call for review or censure of the commission.

Update: It’s not often that a rights cases become international news  from a free, democratic country, but this one has. That’s because a fundamental freedom of individuals is being trampled by the state, and Canada has been greatly embarrassed by it’s Human Rights Commission’s pursual of this case. In the wake of the charges being dropped the commission investigator has resigned.

Original article:

By now you’ve probably heard that the case against Ezra Levant at the Canadian Human Rights Commission has been dropped by the claimant. The reason is transparent — the case was too widely publicized and likely to fail due to massive public pressure against the CRHC.

I can’t speak for Ezra, but I almost wish the case had proceded — it would have exposed the assault on freedom that the petite-tyrants in the CHRC represent, and it would have done so fully.

As it is, the bounds were exceeded by the commission pursuing the case and that needs to be looked into by either the regular courts or by the legislative bodies in Canada. In my humble opinion Ezra must take this further by filing suit against the CHRC, and by finding a legislative ally willing to call for review or censure of the commission.

Here’s what Ezra has to say about it at his blog:

A word about the actual content of the clip. My favourite part was when Syed Soharwardy explained that he quit his complaint when:

“people were looking at Ezra Levant as a martyr of the freedom of his speech” … “taking this into a different direction that I did not want.”

Well then! I’m sorry to have been so uncooperative, by saying things that he “did not want” me to say, such as that I (and he) live in Canada, not Saudi Arabia.

Time to take one more look at Soharwardy’s complaint. Look at section F. It’s not even about the fact that I published the cartoons — it’s that I dared to try to defend that decision. It wasn’t the deed that bothered him the most, it was my unwillingness to back down. The bulk of the complaint is about me daring to speak my mind. He complains that I:

  • am “constantly advocating hatemongering cartoons in the media”;
  • “called [Soharwardy] ‘radical'”;
  • “said that the hateful cartoons are justified to be published”.

In other words, it’s not just that I published them. It’s that I didn’t submit to Soharwardy. I kept talking about my freedom. He’s still complaining about that, even now.

Sort of puts a lie to his official excuse for dropping the complaint — that he has now reconciled himself to free speech.