Combien on paye pour ces universités ?

My name is Lucas and I am a student of Community, Public Affairs and Policy Studies at Concordia University. As such, I spend a few hours a week monitoring hate sites in Quebec, mostly to do with Quebec nationalists.

One of the more petulant and virulent among these is www.imperatif-francais.org, and while I am not surprised they took issue with a McGill Tribune article by Ben Lemieux entitled "Quebec's Apartheid Politics" (30.10.07), I am surprised that such a base and illegitimate site would be used for propaganda by a McGill student.

The outraged submission titled "McGill insults the Quebecois" was from a Zoé Gagnon-Paquin who apparently works for the paper "Le Délit" - the only Francophone paper at McGill, as she puts it. Zoé is clearly attempting to orchestrate a name and shame campaign by nationalists and exploit the prevailing bigotry and neurosis in Quebec by providing sensationalist excerpts from the article and naming Tiffany Choy and Jake Itzkowitz among others.

The very idea of a student from an institution as prestigious as McGill turning to such degenerate persons and tactics is obscene. This attempt to impose the nationalist taboo and the blood-cult mythology of the mystical Quebecois "nation", above criticism of course, even at McGill, is a call to arms.

The Tribune should take this Zoé to task for such repugnant aims and company and McGill should either rid itself of someone who obviously does not merit an education there or send Zoé on exchange to see the world through something other than the ignorant and supremacist lens of Imperatif Francais.

Furthermore, the very fact that Zoé preferred to appeal to such vulgar, ethnocentric populism to "diffuse these unacceptable facts outside of campus" and presumably punish Mr. Lemieux, The Tribune and McGill itself instead of writing a letter in opposition is telling. The reality is that such an attempt to punish and silence dissenting voices via ethnic bullying is a perfect illustration of the sacrifice of reason to passion and tyranny of the majority which feed the neo-fascism in modern Quebec to which Mr.Lemieux made reference in his article.

I would like to end by thanking you for supporting free speech and diversity of opinion in the dysfunctional and inane public debate of this province.


Letters to the editor: Lemieux story has really Ben around the block, Lucas Kilravey, 13 novembre 2007

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