Poor Mojo's Two Minute Hate

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress say the magazine, Maclean’s, Canada’s leading newsweekly, violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up hatred against Muslims. They say the magazine should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their “dignity, feelings and self-respect.”

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of hearings on those questions here last week, will soon rule on whether Maclean’s violated the law.

What makes New Orleans so different that fellow Americans have no qualms about ignoring pleas and/or mocking the plight of the ravaged city?

In his State of the Union Address on Jan. 23, George W. Bush made not one comment on the still-ongoing effort to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I noted this on my blog yesterday, receiving the following comment in response:

As a Tamil, Shetty has certainly had to deal with discrimination at home in suburban Mumbai. Her only motive for parading in front of the other women in the house with whitener on her face was to show what utter hicks they are, how little they understand of her complex reality or of a billion people in the subcontinent who all want to have wheat-coloured skin. I bet thousands of brown-skinned girls in Southall fell off the sofa laughing when she did that.

While it's important to accept the rights of smokers to carry on smoking, it also needs to be recognised that being a smoker is not a matter of free choice; they're gripped by an addiction fuelled by the tobacco industry and they need support to give up.

I’d turn myself in if they’d take me, but, according to my lawyers, I have yet to break a law. Yet it was my action that caused all this mess. I should be put to trial – crimes against humanity – and forced to walk the crossroads till I find repentance.

It began several years ago when a bicycle-riding 12 year old almost ran over a middle-aged woman on 6th and Market. “Watch out, kid!” I yelled at him.

“Fuck you, bitch,” he yelled back. Then more, then more.

I kept walking, but he swerved back my way, taunting me then hocking a lugubrious wad of saliva in my direction. The bulbous loogie hung in the air for a brief second before landing on my back, hating its way through my brand new shirt I had bought at the Gap.

I chased the boy, ready to hate him with more words – club words that would make him bruise. I even called a cop. The peace officer hated the boy with a precise swat to the Achilles tendon with the old nightstick on their way to the squad car.

Unfortunately, members of the Church have not always followed Christ as closely as they should with respect to the treatment of women, and this lends credence to the accusations. As Pope John Paul II confessed, many members of the Church, including some in the hierarchy, have acted—and sometimes still act—in ways that fail to express the equality of man and woman. As John Paul wrote:

Also, the main culture prefers focusing on the kind of racism that doesn't call the system into question. Instead, we examine a particular person caught in an awkward or compromised position, as if they are some archiac exception to our wonderful, people-loving democracy. This is especially the case with Richards, whose racist outburst at LA's Laugh Factory is still being talked about and denounced, with Richards assuming the role of the country's main bigot, or at least the present symbol of white contempt for The Other....

Thanks to Richards, there is a renewed drive to get everyone, white and black, to cease saying "nigger," regardless of context. The Laugh Factory has banned the word, which is not surprising, given the bad publicity the club has received. But how does a ban on that or any other racial or sexual epithet change matters? Easy -- it doesn't. It does, however, give many people a false sense of comfort, for if one does not hear or read "nigger," then racism is on the run, yes?

Uh, no....

I get that Hillary is some sort of symbol for bitchy women, but I don’t quite know what she’s actually done to earn that reputation, particularly since her personal life offers a good deal of evidence to the contrary. Can somebody clue me in?

So said one of a group of nine gay Palestinian-Americans who had travelled to Jerusalem to attend World Pride. They didn't get to march in the end.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that they were driven from their hostel by knife-wielding thugs, one of whom said they were from the Waqf Muslim religious authority.

Later, when one of their group returned to the hostel to retrieve their posessions, he was ambushed. The attackers asked if he was with 'the homos' and then started beating him. The man who said he was from the Wagf beat him unconscious.

Last year, three men were injured when they were attached by a knife-wielding orthadox Jew.

Was I ever in the position to choose what parents I was born to? No.

The family I was born into? No.

The genes I was born with? No.

The school I was sent to? No.

The native language I was first exposed to? No.

Therefore it seems kind of stupid to me that anyone should ever hate me, personally, the responsible, decision-making, can-steer-the-direction-in-which-his-life-is-heading me, for not being born deaf, for not having deaf parents, and for not having attended a residental state school for the deaf my whole life, and for not having generation upon generation of deaf relatives....

If you hate me because I won’t get an implant and rarely wear my hearing aids, nonetheless I don’t block you from getting one or wearing yours, then why should you hate me?

And if you hate me because I won’t bother to learn to lip read, and instead ask you to write to me when you try to communicate with me (assuming you can’t sign), then why should you hate me? It seems like such a waste of energy. Simply leave me alone. You don’t have to talk to me. I don’t have to talk to you. Absolutely nothing is lost if we simply and quietly pass by each other in the hallway. If all that we have to choose between is that and hatred, I pick silence.

"If it was up to me, I would send the gay community, who insisted on celebrating in Jerusalem, to Sodom and Gomorrah," said Eli Yishai, one of Israel's deputy prime ministers and the leader of Shas, an ultra-Orthodox party that belongs to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's governing coalition.

Noting that Christian and Muslim clerics also opposed the event, Mr. Yishai told Israel radio, "If we cannot be sensitive to Jewish feelings, perhaps we can listen to those of other religions."

The restriction is part of efforts to stamp out rabies, state media said Wednesday. It follows a campaign in August in which thousands of dogs were killed in order to fight the disease.

China's capital will institute a "one dog" policy for each household in nine areas, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

"In my faith, that's what it says, and I'm a believer of that," the governor said.

Throughout much of the 90-minute service at Cornerstone Church, Mr. Perry sat on the red-carpeted stage next to the Rev. John Hagee. Mr. Perry was among about 60 mostly Republican candidates who accepted the invitation to be introduced to the megachurch's congregation of about 1,500, plus a radio and TV audience.

# 2. Sawyer. Enough already. The accent and the nicknames are more annoying now than ever. Too much screen time. Shoot him in the eye, Freckles.

# 3. The Others. Boooooo-ring.

# 4. The Tailies. I think one of them is left. Hey, thanks for stealing Season 2. You owe me 22 hours.

How much more material do you need beyond the Rev. Ted Haggard, meth, gay massage and megachurches? The jokes write themselves. "SNL" has also been asleep at the laptop on the Iraq war issue, never establishing itself as the go-to place for war jokes. Talk about your quagmire. We should all be ashamed that our national political situation isn't far easier fare for most comics and that what we're left with is asinine pop culture references that were only funny a few minutes after they happened on YouTube.

Proposal 2 will pass by a large margin tomorrow despite a recent poll showing the ballot proposal trailing by 10 percentage points among Michigan voters, said Mark Grebner, founder of Lansing-based Practical Political Consulting, in an interview with Inside Michigan Politics....

In an attempt to recreate the environment voters face, Grebner has developed his own technique for polling ballot questions. Instead of conducting phone polls, Grebner mails dummy ballots to targeted areas around the state and lets his subjects fill them out in their own homes. Under this method, the voters are under no pressure to avoid sounding racist like they would on the phone, because the dummy ballots are anonymous....

"You need to let people be as bigoted as they really are," he said.

Student members of the university's Black Students Union protested the Sigma Chi fraternity party that was shut down by a university official early Sunday morning. The party was closed down after the students produced photographs of a skeleton pirate dangling from a rope noose on the roof of the fraternity's house on the 200 block of 33rd Street.

Holding up signs such as "Lynching is not a joke" and "Ban Sigma Chi," more than 30 students stood on Charles Street today holding up photographs from the party and distributing copies of an invitation to the party. The invitation posted on the Web site Facebook described Baltimore as "the hiv pit" and encouraged attendees to wear "regional clothing from our locale" such as "bling bling ice ice, grills," and "hoochie hoops."

What I didn't know was the history of Halloween. It has deplorable, ugly elements. I would deck the house full out in Halloween decoration -- but it was my kids who came home years ago and said. "hey ma, they use to kill Jews on Halloween. It's a pagan holiday." Apparently Halloween was a night when many pogroms would occur against Jews.

A new documentary, “Shut Up and Sing,” which opens this week chronicles the backlash and how this country band from Dallas still feels the heat from that 12 word remark.

"To think that they are prominent up here as opposed to down South, no one thinks that," Bro. Chan-Williams said. "But now one must ask the question, how prominent are they up here?"

The answer is simple, no longer satisfied with practicing the unspeakable perverse sexual pleasures that their hearts seek in private bedrooms, they wish to be able to do so in public. They are also suffering from such immense guilt over the actions of their sexual behaviors because they know inherently that the actions they perform are in fact unhealthy - that they will go to any means necessary to try and shut down the voices in their heads that tell them it is wrong.