Haiku (Some Ulster Protestants) Poem by Raymond Farrell

A while back I received the following comment 'this is hate speech you bigotted bastard' in response to this Haiku. I was busy at the time here at the university with research proposals, so didn't have time to delve into this matter. But the other day, I decided to look into the notion of this being so-called hate speech, and in order to dot the Is and cross the Ts, I fired off an email to a chap I went to school with, who is a lawyer dealing with such matters. Long story short, this is not hate speech and I shall now give the gist of the matter. To begin with I refer to Canadian Law (given the man who wrote the comment and I are both permanent residents of Ontario) which defines hate speech as statements 'which create an unreasonable risk that an identifiable group will be exposed to violence or hatred on which constitute an unreasonable effront to the human dignity of a person belonging to an identifiable group'. The Haiku itself is not hate speech because it is merely a toned down reiteration of the basic stump speech delivered by Ulster Protestant politicians like Paisley and Robinson for years. Back in the 1960s Paisley gave speech after speech and was jailed for illegal marches because he was against granting Civil Rights to the Catholic community because he felt it would lead to the loss of Protestant rights and the eventual take over of the province by Dublin and the Papacy. Given that I am merely stating what these people have already said themselves it is not hate speech After the Good Friday Agreement was signed Paisley and the DU party rejected it and campaigned against it for the same reason I give in the Haiku, and won a majority of the Protestant vote. It is true that he softened his stance and accepted the agreement in time, but the sad thing about all that is had there been an agreement like the Good Friday accord accepted by the Protestant community in the 1960s in all probability the IRA would not have been revived and all the years of blood shed and misery could have been avoided! ! ! In regard the specifics as to the matter, I have not advocated violence towards anyone or any group (I do not believe in violence) and me writing a Haiku in China and putting it on a website in the USA is not going to stir up a problem in relation to a group of people in Northern Ireland who are merely hearing what they already believe (some of them anyway) to be true in the first place. Nor have I made any degrading comments per se towards anyone. Clearly, this is not hate speech but as my legal friend pointed out, it is curious that a man would falsely accuse me of hate speech and in the same sentence engage in defamation of my character which is illegal. The least surprising in all this is that the man making the accusations is a retired teacher. His unwillingness or incapability to present a reasoned argument to back up his claim but rather resorting to defamation, speaks volumes as to why the product of the Ontario school system when submitted to international testing is a dismal failure.