In my hometown of Hamilton, late in 2017, Yosif Al Hasnawi was shot and killed just outside an Islamic Mosque on Main St. East by one Dale King. Both men were 19 at the time. Al Hasnawi, a university student with dreams of becoming a doctor, had apparently come to the aid of an elderly gentleman being harassed by King. The latter, an Indigenous man and known meth dealer with several assault convictions on his record, had apparently just been involved in a robbery!
The judge at the ensuing trial ruled that the prosecution could not invoke King’s criminal past as it would unfairly feed into those racial stereotypes about Indians no doubt shared by his presumably White jurors. Simple common sense, of course, would suggest those jurors had every right to be fully apprised of his character in assessing the credibility of his testimony. Deprived of such information, they accepted his insistence that he had acted in self-defense and he was fully exonerated.
As far as I can ascertain, Al Hasnawi was not armed, yet no eye-witnesses could be found to contradict King’s suspicious contention that his life had been in jeopardy. Feeling the presiding judge’s ruling on King’s criminal past had kept his jury from reaching a rational conclusion, Ontario’s Crown Prosecutors asked the province’s Court of Appeal to reconsider that ruling. As reported in the National Post of Oct. 9, that court upheld the original decision, declaring it was perfectly legitimate to exclude the introduction of an Indigenous person’s criminal past, however incriminating, on the grounds that such facts must inevitably exacerbate the systemic racism that apparently pervades Canadian society.
Of course it is racist to assume anything about an individual on the basis of Ethnicity. But is it racist to assume that an Indigenous drug dealer convicted of multiple acts of violence is in fact a drug dealer with a propensity for violence? Or is it simple common sense? Does exonerating such an individual because of injustices imposed upon his people in the past, not literally remove the issue of Morality from Canada’s legal system? Are the woke given to this bizarre accommodation not the ones responsible for the death of the seemingly decent Al Hasnawi and indeed the 10 people recently murdered in Saskatchewan by an Indigenous man who had been arrested 59 times? Is it not they who have turned Portland, L.A., San Fransisco, etc., into enclaves of criminality? Indeed is it not such absurd “progressive” policies that led Naomi Wolf, Tulsi Gabbard, Bill Maher, etc., etc., to abandon the Left on the grounds that it has clearly lost its mind?