Valentine's Day, and "The times they are a changing"

Valentine’s Day is for lovers.

This Valentine’s Day should be dedicated to the lovers of free speech who are living in cultures that are committing suicide.

It seems hard to believe, but it was 20 years ago today that the world was shocked to learn that some bearded cleric in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, could issue a death warrant against an author in Britain, Salman Rushdie, that would cause that writer to go into hiding and receive police protection for the next decade. Because the alleged offense was dressed up in the guise of insulting a religion, the leaders of other religions rushed to condemn the author for causing the trouble.

What have we learned from this?

Considering the history of the conflict between Islam and western liberal-democracies since that day, I would have to conclude very little.

Each time somebody raises their head to say or write or cartoon something about Islam, out come the religious fanatics in terrifying displays of violence and threats. But more frightening than this is the reaction of the authorities in western societies. They have taken their cue from the “leadership” displayed by the Christian and Jewish clergy towards Rushdie and have applied it to those who question either Islam or the wisdom of permitting large scale immigration from Muslim countries.

I saw Kathy Shaidle on TVO’s public affairs program, The Agenda, this week, making a point that the decline of Christianity as a popular religion has “caused” its replacement by Islam in western Europe. Not exactly. Large scale immigration of young Muslims contributes to this phenomenon, as well as aging, non-reproducing Europeans.

In Britain, it is the mouthing of the Christian clergy suggesting that Sharia law should be incorporated into Britain’s legal system that is contributing to the robustness of the Islamic project. The Christian and Jewish clergy continue to be an obstacle to understanding the threats to liberal democracy with all their nattering on about “the commonality of the faiths” and their inter-faith dialogues.

To parapharase the old Bob Dylan anthem:

Come priests, rabbis
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside raging
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a changin’

In Sweden, Belgium, France, Britain, Spain, Germany and especially the Netherlands, the “troublemakers” are suppressed to appease the angry Muslims. Muslims parade through the streets of European cities with posters and banners calling for the downfall of western societies and the replacement of their liberal-democracies with Islam and the odious Sharia law -- these would be the non-troublemakers, by the way, if you forgot to buy a program before the parade.

Politicians who speak on behalf of their constituents against this rising tide of Islamic hegemony are beaten by police or criminally charged with “disturbing the harmony” of the community. Their homes are invaded by police without warrants to remove symbols Muslims claim are offensive. At least one Dutch politician, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, fled to the United States when the state turned on her for raising issues that affected Muslim women in the Netherlands. Another, Geert Wilders, has been denied entry to a fellow member state of the EU, Britain.

Publishers in Britain have been forced to shred books about Muslims that might subject them to financially ruinous lawsuits from wealthy Arabs. One American publisher refused to print a novel about one of the wives of Mohammed for fear of reprisal by Muslims.

In Canada, the shameful human rights tribunals have been turned into state-supported fatwa-issuing organs for Islamic activists. Even reform-minded Muslims have been threatened with death by Muslim extremists (to date, nobody charged with the crime) and told to tone it down so that “harmony” will prevail. Despite the increasing boldness of Islamic advocates to choke off any rational discussion of Islam, Barbara Hall, Ontario’s Human Rights Commissioner, foolishly proposes even more legislation to provide better tools for Islamists to crush free speech.

Internationally, the Organization of Islamic Countries (57 members) has promulgated its own human rights code that declares the supremacy of Sharia law, notwithstanding their members prior agreement to the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. As well, the OIC has obtained a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly to criminalize criticism of religion.

This step has enabled the state of Jordan to issue a warrant for the arrest of Geert Wilders for insulting Islam should he travel outside the territory of the Netherlands.

The mainstream media has been generally unhelpful to the cause of free speech. In Canada, they woke up very late in the game when the charade conducted by human rights tribunals against Mark Steyn and Maclean's magazine was well underway. The blogosphere was ahead of the curve on that one, and remains ahead of it.

When the MSM are not asleep at the switch they are thoughtlessly dismissing Islamic critics as a bunch of Islamophobes (bigots) – a term coined by Islamists as an aid to the politically correct police to further stifle commentary about Islam.

And they wonder why they are losing market share!

Even today, you will see pundits and columnists writing stuff like this: “Well, I don’t much like or agree with Mark Steyn or Geert Wilders, but I do support free speech.”

Why the Pontius Pilate posturing of washing your hands before making the statement about free speech? Can’t you just say that they are being unfairly targeted for their opinions, which, in a free liberal democracy they are supposed to be able to voice, without this politically correct preamble? What are you afraid of – Islamic retribution – other people in society who think there shouldn’t be free speech (people you should be shunning anyway) -- Barbara Hall?

Hmmm. On reflection, perhaps you should be afraid of Barbara Hall.

I see no silver lining.

Professor Moon in the Amethyst Room with a self-interest

I see that Professor Richard Moon is all over the news and blogosphere today. He is a University of Windsor law professor who was paid to write a report for the federal Human Rights Commission concerning the controversy brought on by the CHRC’s administration of Article 13 of the Canada Human Rights Code. This is the one that allows identifiable groups; e.g. gays, Muslims, etc. to bankrupt individuals or corporations if members of the groups can say they were offended by the comments of the individuals or the corporations.

I first met Professor Moon in a Green Room at a television studio, last spring, a short time after it was announced he had this CHRC gig.

The Professor and I were invited guests on a talk show to debate the impact of religion on politics, but, having been following and contributing to the raging free speech debate, I was more interested in sounding him out on the subject. He was understandably not that forthcoming, since he had not started to write it. However, when I suggested that I didn’t think that HRCs need necessarily be abolished he seemed both agitated and surprised that such an idea would even be considered. In fact, I got the impression it was the first time anyone had suggested such a thing to him.

He casually remarked that Ezra Levant had been bombarding him with questions, which led me to believe that he wasn’t really paying attention to Levant who has made it quite clear that he thinks HRCs should go.

The other thing that struck me from Moon’s telephoned testimony to the MPPs yesterday was his comment that the poor Muslims had no platform to rebut Steyn’s “glib” and “juvenile” writing. He claims he would not censor Steyn, but Steyn's views should not go unanswered.

The Professor, who professes to want to go back to hiding under a rock, is more than disingenuous with this.

First, he cannot be so dissociated from the real world not to know that Elmasry and the sock puppets got more international ink and air time to counter Steyn and Mclean’s than any allegedly offended group in history. The fact that they wasted their 15 seconds of fame trying to claim Mclean’s was unfair for not turning itself into an Islamic rag, instead of doing the right thing and defending Islam, is not Steyn’s or Mclean’s fault.

Second, he sounds very much like Ontario HRC Commissioner, Barbara Hall, in making these kinds of comments, which leads me to the next observation.

Any university professor who can augment his annual salary with a special report in his area of expertise for $50,000 would be remiss if he didn’t make the same noises as the person who hands out these contracts (Hall) and if he didn’t defend the very institutions that would be most likely to send another one his way (HRCs).

In short, his testimony was a very opportune free advertisement for his services to HRCs, courtesy of the Ontario taxpayers. He admitted that he wasn’t much interested in testifying until he learned that the centre ring attraction, Mark Steyn, would be there. To get the same advertising for his services would have cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Steyn should consider sending him a bill for marketing services, since Steyn traveled there on his own dime.

The Barbara Hall Project and the right to hate

The two strongest human emotions are love and hate. These are natural emotions. By natural, I mean we are born with the capacity to feel either of them, or both of them. They are what make us human.

We learn early on from our parents, teachers and our own life experience that love is a positive but often painful force, while hatred can be destructive. Both can instrumental in motivating humans to do extraordinary things.

Our moral training helps us to understand how to channel these forces so that they do not overwhelm us. Some take to this training better than others. In fact, it is probably safe to say that the vast majority of people learn their lessons or our societies would simply not function as social orders.

What is it that we mean when we talk about a basic human right? We mean that as individuals we have a right to our own conscience, however it may be informed, for good or for ill. If my conscience leads me down paths that are destructive, then society provides remedies to protect others from me, in the interests of social order.

These remedies are a curbing of my behaviour. They leave my conscience free to learn what lessons it may from my experiences with these social remedies. In short, I have a right to hate, just not a right to harm somebody with my hate.

What troubles me about the Ontario Human Rights Commission is what I would call the Barbara Hall Project, the change in the OHRC's mandate to one of "education" (or perhaps, more accurately, like the Mao's cultural revolution, re-education), anti-racist advocacy and prosection. Barbara Hall is the head honcho of the OHRC and the BHP is an attempt to use the open-ended powers of a government agency, not just to curb bad behaviour that harms others, but to remake humankind into a hate-free brave new world, to try to excise from conscience the right to hate (like the Gobblers excising the daemons from children in the Golden Compass).

It is not about wielding a shield as much as it is slashing about, hither and thither, with a sword.

Consider the following quotes from a National Post interview with Ms. Hall, April 20, 2008:

"I think that part of freedom of speech is being able to say things and another part of it is being able to be critical of things that are said," she said. "I don't view it as a chill. I view it as responsibility."

According to Ms. Hall, complaints that are frivolous, vexatious or simply doomed to failure make up a "small" portion of the 60,000 inquiries and 2,500 formal complaints her staff process each year.

It is the complaints that are not made that give her more concern.

"I would say that for a province as large and as diverse as Ontario, to have 2,500 formal complaints a year, that that's a very low level," the activist lawyer and former mayor of Toronto said. In the long term she would like to see human rights complaints decrease, but in the interim they "may have to spike."

So what exactly is she trying to convey? There are not enough complaints and they have to go up before they go down. Given the annual population increase in the province of Ontario, which is in the tens of thousands, one might expect that, on a percentage basis, complaints would increase, but never decrease.

May have to spike? How would they spike?

This is not a description of the outcome of demographic increase; it is a prescription for something else. It is not about protecting people from harm, it is about doing harm to people because of their naïve belief that they have a right to their own conscience.

Consider these statements found on the OHRC’s website concerning racism and religion.

On race being a “social construct” rather than a biologically determined expression:

There is no legitimate scientific basis for racial classification. Genetic science now tells us that physical characteristics and genetic profiles correlate more strongly between “races” than among them. It is now recognized that notions of race are primarily centred on social processes that seek to construct differences among groups with the effect of marginalizing some in society.

While biological notions of race have been discredited, the social construction of race remains a potent force in society. The process of social construction of race is termed racialization.

Racialization extends to people in general but also to specific traits and attributes, which are connected in some way to racialized people and are deemed to be “abnormal” and of less worth. Individuals may have prejudices related to various racialized characteristics. In addition to physical features, characteristics of people that are commonly racialized include (inter alia):

· beliefs and practices

With respect to religion, there is apparently a qualified protection:

Religion includes the practices, beliefs and observances that are part of a faith or religion. It does not include personal moral, ethical or political views. Nor does it include religions that promote violence or hate towards others, or that violate criminal law.

If there is any doubt that the BHP is dangerous, a thoughtful comparison of these contradictory notions ought to set that to right. Remember that the BHP is informed by these insightful “philosophical principles”.

Let’s take the viewpoint that radical Islam, and those who promote it and support it, are inferior to the rest of us. Let’s just say we hate them, to keep it short.

According to the OHRC we would be accused of being racist, because we have “racialized” an identifiable group of people on the basis of their “beliefs and practices”. However, since the issue is one of religion and politics and it involves Islamic hatred towards others, and in some cases violence or breach of criminal laws, then it would be permissible to racialize those folks because that is not considered to be religious practice.

Or was the OHRC thinking about the Toronto mosque that last October carried advice on its website telling Muslims that they should avoid participating in the “evil” practices of those who celebrated Halloween and Christmas? Were we who celebrate those festivities being racialized? Is it all right to do that because that would be considered a normal religious practice; i.e. identifying evil and warning the faithful against it? No harm, no foul.

Sometime between now and the June 30 launch of the BHP missile, it would good if the OHRC gave this conundrum more thought and clarified the behaviour to be punished.

As a final thrust, all three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam contain passages that racialize and call for violence or contempt for non-believers, meaning non-believers of their dogma. You don’t have to go further than the holy books to find divinely sanctioned and authoritative racialization, which are taught to millions of people.

Look for the BHP police coming to a pulpit near you -- or not.