Human Rights Discussion (CBC Style)

On the recent edition of CBC radio's Sunday Edition program there was a long discussion about "Human Rights". I felt compelled to send them this letter:

While I found the thoughts of your two guests informative, it wasn't a very balanced discussion. Adding someone like Mark Steyn onto your panel would have made it a lot more interesting.

The basic flaw with the arguments your guests put forward is that they assume that the major human rights violators are just "friends waiting for their grievances to be resolved".

Does anyone REALLY think that dialogue and offers of friendship will ever resolve things with al Qaeda, Kim Jong-il in North Korea, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, or Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe?

The truth is that in most cases these men must be imprisoned or killed before anything can actually change. Denying this basic fact has provided gainful lifetime employment for thousands in the UN but has also DIRECTLY resulted in the murders of millions of people and the ongoing oppression of millions of others.


Update: I just received this response from to my e-mail:

Thank you for your comments. They have been received by the program.

Reynold Gonsalves
Associate Producer
CBC Radio One, The Sunday Edition

Please note that emails sent to the program may be read onair as part of our Mail segment.

For more information about the program, you can check our website at:

http://cbc.ca/thesundayedition

And to it I responded with this:

Dear Reynold,

I certainly hope that letters such as mine will be read on-air. Being immersed in the trees of the CBC, as you are, I wonder if you're able to fully appreciate the forest that constitutes all Canadians in 2007. When right-of-centre people, even mildly right-of-centre people like me hear discussions on CBC Radio, you have no idea how many times we feel like pulling our hair out, frustrated that there's most often no one in the discussion that remotely represents anything other than a left or ultra-left viewpoint. If you were a private broadcaster then it's no one's business what's heard on-air but you are a public broadcaster, on-air through the tax dollars of everyone, and thus clearly should represent the public at large.

I'd love to be a a fly on the wall if you were to read my previous paragraph to your colleagues at the CBC. My guess is that many would laugh or scoff at it. This would speak volumes of exactly what I'm talking about.