Freedom IS in danger ROFESSOR PHILIP PINKUS of West Van- couver is on the war path again, searching out sins committed by the Beast of B.C. (your humble servant) and pronouncing anathema on him. If the prof goes on at this rate, someone’s going to hire him as a devil-chaser. Pinkus’s latest preachment appeared in this paper on Fri- day. I recommend that you read it. It is a text-book ex- ample of the hate literature he pretends to abhor, and he manages to call me a racist six umes (six, count ’em, Six). The fellow is frenetic, and should take some pills. if you came in in the mid- dle of this show you might need a httle background. My column of September 2 dealt with A.R. Butz’s book The Hoax of the Twentieth Cen- tury’’, which disputes that 6,000,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis in World War Two. I wrote the column because the book had been banned by a bureaucrat in Customs — at the request of the Jewish Organization B’nai B’rith. 1 do not Ike _ book- banning. Hitler did, and so does Pinkus. In any event, the man came back with a blast in which he managed to suggest inter alia (as they say in academe) that | might have been a traitor and a coward between 1939 and 1945. | kindly ran this in full on September 9, together with a short reply. Pinkus then came back with more much. The issue is simple. Do you want B'nai B'rith, the Cana- dian Jewish Congress, Pinkus, or anyone else deciding what books you will read? And do you wish to be prosecuted for being ‘‘anti- Semitic’’ in questioning what happened or did not happen during the war? All else in Pinkus’s argu- ment is piffle. And the threat is real. People are being pro- secuted right now in this free country for their opinions. Only two weeks ago the cops seized two copies of Hoax from the library of the University of Calgary. (Pinkus'’s fellow-academics Please note ) But there has been little fuss, the media and the polincians piddling their pants for tear of being labell. ed “'ants Semttic’’ of “racist” As a4) professor, Pinkus disappoints As a professor of baghsh. he disappoimes gnievously, and | suggest thal he read Lowler on style in calhng me oa racist in sex Cuplet, for instamee, he os simply being stupidly repetitive and wasting space our original BRUNCH BAR is back Call us get this Stral ht : oy Doug Collins Ee that might better be devoted to discussing the issue. As a logician, he would make a good sanitary engineer. Consider his rav- ings on the law, and how it's all right to ban Hoax because it was done lawfully. He should remember that people were put into concentration camps lawfully, and it was called ‘‘protective custody’’. In Quebec, the Jehovah's Witnesses were persecuted under the lawfully legislated Padlock Laws. In the U.S., the greatest democracy of all, a law was passed in the war fever of 1918 known as the Sedition Act. [It was just the kind of thing our brilliant prof would approve of, permitting pro- secutions as it did for expres- sions of opinion that were ‘‘disloyal, profane, scur- rilous or abusive of the American form of govern- ment.’’ Later, Americans were charged under this Act for criticizing the Red Cross, the YMCA and even the budget. Pinkus teaches English but has a poor vocabulary. Freedom of speech are words missing from it. He is also too dim to understand that freedom has many faces, and that the measure of freedom is the degree to which the un- popular and unorthodox are permitted. It may be that Professor Butz 1s guilty of ‘“‘malicious les’’, as Pro- fessor Pinkus mauintains. Butz, on the other hand, maintains that the Holocaust story 1s a malicious he. “What is truth?” Pontius Pilate. as ked A9 - Sunday, September 16, 1984 - North Shore News i mailbox ~<] Raps ‘Penthouse Dear Editor: Enclosed are copies of your newspaper which | am returning. (Ed’s note: copies received) For your information, I am not a member of any Women’s Lib group in any community, so you know that the return of these Papers is not as a result of any of their involvement. It is as a result of my disgust at the selection of photographs printed by your paper of the Sunshine Girl, which look like Penthouse Pinups. I have written previously to you on this subject with no response from you either in The American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes held that the best test of truth was the power of thought to get itself accepted in the market, and | recommend that Professor Pinkus get some education by reading about that in Schenk versus the United States, 7979. It should be in the UBC library — 1f the cops haven't taken wt away for being hate literature. Meanwhile it is of interest’ that publishers in Toronto are organizing a ‘‘Freedom to Read’’ week. the paper or in writing. Many people, men and women find the type of photographs which yeu put in the paper, are gross and unnecessary for a local fami- ly oriented newspaper. Pinups’ 1 will continue to return these newspapers, and if at all possible, no longer wish them delivered to this address. Connie Vitcoe West Vancouver Learn computers for adults & children Study Skills Seminars Computer Literacy Word Processing Computer Typing LOGO Arithmetic Skills Tutorials Remedial Instruction Assessments Consultation and Counseling North West Computer Learning & Educational Therapy Call: 985-0338 . . . in Brass or Coloured PTT hil bh FURNITURE & APPLIANCES Beds, glorious Beds - —— rt | ¢