Catgate: The Comeuppance of Warren Kinsella
Catgate, the scandal erupting after an extraordinary posting in late January by Warren Kinsella, shows what a grim, humourless, fanatical politically correct land we've become. It's hard not to smirk just a little as the revolution eats one of its own. Warren Kinsella has been an outspoken anti-racist and proponent of the new order of "diversity" and "multicult" with its attendant regime of repression of free speech and dissent.
In 1994, Kinsella authored Web of Hate: Inside Canada's Far Right Network. One chapter alone, said former Toronto Sun columnist Bill Dunphy who'd reported widely on the Heritage Front in early 1990s, contained 36 factual errors. Kinsella has had to settle at least one defamation suit stemming from his heavy breathing attack on populist dissent in Canada. Earlier he had written Unholy Alliances, a book purporting to see sinister Libyan connections in Canada. While promoting Web of Hate in 1994, Kinsella let it be known that he and his wife checked into hotels under assumed names as they had to be careful of possible violence or assassination by violent neo-Nazis or agents of Libya. Was this a serious danger? Well, some 15 years later. Kinsella, who has often had a high public profile as a Liberal campaign operative and self-designated "attack dog", has still not been found by the hapless Libyan or "neo-Nazi" gunmen. [The plot that never was?] 
Kinsella has had key roles in a number of Liberal Party campaigns, especially the 2000 one, where he savaged Opposition leader Stockwell Day by appearing on CTV's Canada AM waving a purple Barney dinosaur to mock Day's creationist religious beliefs. He recorded some of these experiences in a 2001 book entitled Kicking Ass in Canadian Politics. A long-time Chretien partisan, Kinsella backed Allan Rock for Liberal Party leader and antagonized the followers of Paul Martin by tossing the term "racism" at them during
some disputed delegate selection meetings.
So, no one would challenge Kinsella's credentials as an outspoken "anti-racist" with connections. For instance, in Web of Hate, he thanked Bernie Farber, now CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, "who has given me his time, his support and even a bed to sleep on." (That's what he says.) This year, Kinsella and the CBC faced a trial in Ottawa, January 12-22, as the result of a defamation action brought by former Canadian diplomat and author Ian V. Macdonald. Appearing as a witness for Warren Kinsella was former CSIS agent and agent provocateur Grant Bristow, who apparently had never met Kinsella but "Bristow told the court that Bernie Farber, the CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, was a mutual friend." (Vancouver Sun, January 16, 2009) Farber has gotten Bristow to call Kinsella. On February 10, 2008, Kinsella announced on his blog: "...And I have been offered, and accepted, a position on the legal affairs committee of the Canadian Jewish Congress."
All of this must be understood as background to Catgate. On his visit to Ottawa for his libel trial, Kinsella wrote on his blog: "Back in the Big Owe [?/sic] for a couple of weeks. So, what better way to kick things off than enjoy some BBQ cat and rice at the__ hangout of our youth." Kinsella also shot a short video showing the restaurant and naming it and saying that as students at Carleton University, he and his friends would go there "for a bowl of soup and rice for about two bucks and they'd put some pork in it . The pork would closely resemble cat but we didn't mind so much as we didn't have much to eat." [As Kinsella offers no evidence that this restaurant ever did or does serve cat, we feel to name it might well be libellous.]
First off, you have to wonder just what got into Kinsella. He snoops and searches for dirt on political opponents. Words are his tools. What could he have been thinking to make such a remark, even as a joke? Kinsella quickly took the posting down. The tone seems typical smart-ass Kinsella. It is definitely not phrased as nor is the tone that of an expose of a restaurant serving Morris the Cat or dicey or uninspected food. The uproar was immediate. "A Conservative Richmond MP ... demanded Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff fire his top campaign aide after Warren Kinsella made a comment on his blog the member of Parliament says is racist. Alice Wong told the House of Commons Friday that Kinsella joked that Chinese restaurants serve 'barbecue cat.'" (Vancouver Sun, January 31, 2009)
Note the grim political correctness. The penalty for a joke or smart alec comment must be the loss of one's job. But that's the curse of Puritanical, prune-faced political correctness. In 1991, I heckled Rodney Bobiwash, a native Indian big mouth with something called Klan Watch. He'd been rattling off a list of repressive measures he wanted the Toronto Mayor's Committee on Community and Race Relations to support. I called out: "Scalp em?" as in: How far would you go? When I refused to apologize, I was tossed out of the meeting, and, within a few days, there were calls, especially from Jewish groups that I be fired as an English teacher, not that I had made my comments at school or to students, but on my own time as a director of CAFE.
Note that the angry Alice Wong doesn't say Kinsella is wrong. She doesn't seem to deny that some Chinese restaurants might have served cat. It's just that Kinsella shouldn't have said such a thing. Truth doesn't seem to matter.
It got better. The Vancouver Sun story continued: "The Chinese Canadian Conservative Association promptly issued a statement demanding Ignatieff distance himself from Kinsella's remarks. 'Our community is deeply concerned with Mr. Kinsella's comments,' said Alex Yuan, the association's chair. 'Kinsella repeats the most vulgar and offensive stereotypes by associating the meat served by Chinese restaurants to cat meat. He has hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and disrespected the Chinese culture.'"
You have to love the cloying correctness of Alex Yuan's title -- the chair. Were the couch and the stool also on the executive? Anyway, Yuan doesn't say that no Chinese restaurants serve cat. He doesn't even specifically deny that the one Kinsella named ever did. Instead, he terms the cat meat comment "a vulgar and offensive stereotype." Now, a "stereotype" is a generalization based on statistical evidence. For instance, it would be a stereotype to say that many middle aged White men begin to go bald while very few White women do. A look around a middle aged crowd at, say, a community gathering will quickly show many bald men and no bald women. The stereotype doesn't mean that ALL middle aged men go bald. Stereotypes are generalizations that are usually true, but not in every individual instance.
Perhaps, Alex Yuan would rather just huff and puff about "stereotypes" than deal with reality. Cats are eaten in China and there are documented reports in Canada of well, non-traditional food being served in Chinese restaurants. The issue should be discussible and not simply hissed into silence as a "stereotype."
"The gray tabby cat with hazel eyes and a white nose scrunched at the bottom of a stack of metal cages filled with rabbits, quail, pigeons and ducks, across the aisle from the buckets of turtles and scorpions in a narrow shop with as many live animals as a petting zoo. If it was male or female, young or old, nobody seemed to know or care. All that mattered was its weight, 6 1/2 pounds. After a few calculations, the shopkeeper offered to sell the cat for $1.32 per pound, about $9. 'We'll cut it up right here in back for you,' the shopkeeper suggested, gesturing toward a blood-stained room. ...
Although Cantonese cooking is known abroad for dim sum and won ton soup, it is also recognized as the most exotic of the Chinese cuisines, serving up a veritable Noah's ark of species on the dinner plate. As a popular saying goes, the Cantonese will eat anything that walks, crawls, hops or flies. But now fellow Chinese are drawing the line. Eating cat, they say - that is just too disgusting. 'Cats are your friends, not food,' read the banners carried at a demonstration last month at Guangzhou train station, where protesters were trying to intercept a shipment of cats. 'Shame on Guangdong!' they chanted at another demonstration, held at the Beijing offices of the Guangdong provincial government. ....
'Cat meat is good for women. You can eat it in the summer or winter. It is very light. Men usually prefer dog. It is like yin and yang. Cat is yin and dog is yang,' said Jiang Changlin, a customer who works for the local government. He recommended that visitors try one of Guongdong's most famous recipes, 'Dragon Fighting Tiger,' a dish made with snake and cat, its distinctiveness coming from the competing power of the ingredients. (Los Angeles Times, January 11, 2009) Finger lickin' good!
So, cat is widely eaten in China, especially in Guangdong -- the province from which most of the Chinese in Canada hail! Eating cat is becoming controversial in China, especially in regions other than Guangdong.
Political correctness makes rational discussion on topics pertaining to privileged minorities almost impossible. Facts don't matter: It's all about feelings. Or, as Alex "the chair" Yuan put it: "He has hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and disrespected the Chinese culture."
Kinsella, being a political pitbull, didn't actually deal with the matter of truth either. He didn't offer any evidence that the particular restaurant had served cat. Instead he slammed Wong and hinted darkly that the Tories had in their ranks people who disliked East Asians. He posted a link criticizing Wong because she was strongly opposed to abortion and same sex marriage.
While the mainline Canadian press treated the issue as a one day wonder, the huge Chinese media in Canada and in China feasted on it (the story, not the cat) for days and focussed more on Kinsella's boss Michael Ignatieff than on the former punk band (The Nasties) musician Kinsella and his ill thought out joke.
Ezra Levant reported on his blog: "Kinsella had previously issued what he passed off as an apology, but actually consisted of a political rant against his critics, including Alice Wong, a Chinese-Canadian MP. That non-apology apology only fed the news cycle, transforming the story from Kinsella's original slur to his refusal to apologize – and Ignatieff's refusal to discipline him. The story dominated Chinese Canadian newspapers and radio talk shows for over a week, and then went viral on the Internet, both in Canada and in China itself, where it appeared on some of the world's highest-traffic news websites." (February 4, 2009)
The Chinese transliteration of Kinsella's name, amusingly enough, according to Levant is "Kim Sheila."
Finally, Ignatieff disowned the comments and, on February 3, Kinsella belatedly made a full apology for his "bad joke."
In the meantime, Immigration & Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney had visited the restaurant and presented the grinning owner with a made for the occasional certificate of merit.
The multicult tomfoolery never ends.
Kinsella has been one of the few people not in the human rights industry still supportive of Sec. 13, the Internet censorship provisions of the Canadian Human Rights Act. On his January 30 blog, referring to his own case, he said: "Hate propaganda (that is, expressions of prejudice which can forseeably result in actual harm) should be against the law." Well, what if a recent patron took Kinsella's cat comment seriously and decided to retaliate against the restaurant by hurling a brick through the window? According to Kinsella, determining free speech or charges would depend on how one interprets "foreseeably."
He made his "roast cat" remarks and video on the Internet. There's no doubt about that. So, the comments fall under Sec. 13 of the pernicious Canadian Human Rights Act, the one he supports as do his sidekicks at the Canadian Jewish Congress. Saying that a Chinese restaurant serves cat meat doesn't expose Chinese people to hatred but it is "likely to expose" them to "contempt" as most Canadians find the thought of eating or serving cat meat disgusting. Kinsella doesn't argue truth, not that that is a defence under Sec. 13. He says it was all a joke. But none other than CHRC lawyer Margot Blight told the Warman v. Marc Lemire hearing in September in Oakville, that there was no "free pass" for jokes or religious views or historical arguments.
Alex "the chair" Yuan ought to file a Sec. 13 complaint against Kinsella. That would toss the censors into a tizzy. They bend over backwards for privileged minorities. So far, so good, for Alex Yuan. However, the CHRC are ideologues and only go after the "right" and poor victims. Now, Kinsella is a loud "anti-racist", and establishment fixture and certainly not poor. What will they do? It's just all too delicious. -- Paul Fromm
[This article will appear in the March, 2009 issue of the Free Speech Monitor. The Free Speech Monitor is published 10 times a year by the Canadian Association for Free Expression at the price of $15.00 Subscriptions can be order from CAFE, at P.O. Box 332, Rexdale, ON., M9W 5L3, Canada.]
Ignatieff urged to fire top aide
'Barbecue cat' comment called racist
By David Akin, Canwest News ServiceJanuary 31, 2009
Vancouver Sun / Richmond's new MP Alice Wong.
Photograph by: Ian Lindsay, Canwest News Service
A Conservative Richmond MP on Friday demanded Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff fire his top campaign aide after Warren Kinsella made a comment on his blog the member of Parliament says is racist.
Alice Wong told the House of Commons Friday that Kinsella joked that Chinese restaurants serve "barbecue cat."
The comment and the controversy it created in Canada's Chinese community received extensive coverage in the country's Chinese language press earlier this week, even pushing news of the federal budget off the front page of some Chinese-language daily newspapers in Vancouver and in Toronto.
The political brush fire is a sign of the intensity with which both Conservatives and Liberals are fighting for the allegiance of Canada's immigrant communities, a group of largely urban voters that has tended to support Liberal candidates in the last several federal elections.
Kinsella, who has written a book exposing white supremacists in Canada, removed the offending comment from his blog earlier this week and on Friday apologized for any offence before firing back at Wong, saying she holds intolerant views, and at the Conservative party, which he accused of harbouring anti-Asian racists.
Ignatieff's office did not immediately respond.
The controversy was ignited when the Toronto-based Kinsella wrote on his blog on Tuesday that he would be spending a few weeks in Ottawa and decided to celebrate "with some barbecue cat and rice" at a Chinese restaurant that was a favourite when he was a student at Carleton University here and, later, as a political staffer for Jean Chretien and David Dingwall. Kinsella was recently tapped to head the Liberal war room for the next federal election campaign.
The Chinese Canadian Conservative Association promptly issued a statement demanding Ignatieff distance himself from Kinsella's remarks.
"Our community is deeply concerned with Mr. Kinsella's comments," said Alex Yuan, the association's chair. "Kinsella repeats the most vulgar and offensive stereotypes by associating the meat served by Chinese restaurants to cat meat. He has hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and disrespected the Chinese culture."
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
