The Forgotten Rachels

Israeli commandos fought it out with Islamists on board a vessel called the Rachel Corrie a week ago. It is named after an American pro-Palestinian activist who died while trying to stop an Israeli bulldozer from demolishing a structure believed to have been hiding a smuggling tunnel in Gaza.

A Spectator journalist, Tom Gross penned a piece called The Forgotten Rachels about all the women named Rachel who have been murdered by Palestinians and whose names are not celebrated on the stage in London, or painted on the sides of ships.

Here is a link to the article.

Thanks to Mark Steyn for bringing it to my attention.

Correction:The Rachel Corrie was not the vessel involved in the shootout, it was one of the vessels in the flotilla that docked at the Israeli port. The battle occurred on the Mavi Marmara.

Oh, Ann. Say it ain't so.

Word is circulating that American conservative political commentator, Ann Coulter, is considering making a complaint to the Canada Human Rights Commission because she was “threatened” by a letter from the Provost of the University of Ottawa.

Coulter is on a three-University speaking tour. She spoke at the University of Western Ontario without a lot of fuss and she was supposed to speak at Ottawa yesterday, but her appearance was cancelled because about 2,000 protestors showed up to try to prevent her from speaking. They succeeded.

The Provost sent her a letter prior to her travels to Canada lecturing her on responsible speech and advising her to bone-up on Canadian free speech limitations and libel law before she opens her mouth. Some people think the disclosure of this letter in the media and blogosphere probably encouraged the protestors to go out and close her down.

Coulter is now claiming she is a victim of discrimination and abuse because of this letter.

My advice to Coulter is to nix the complaint.

I didn’t read the letter as threatening in any way. It was stupid, no doubt about that. And maybe the real complaint should be why the taxpayers are expected to fund Ontario universities when they employ people of the limited intellectual caliber of this Provost. But, that is not Ann’s issue.

The reason I would advise against proceeding in this manner is that she will just act to legitimize the HRCs. Mssrs. Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn have spent a lot of time “de-normalizing” (Levant’s conceit) these PC monsters and by submitting to their jurisdiction, Coulter gives them license to once more try to stifle free speech.

I think the Provost was perfectly entitled to express his opinions, just as Coulter was. She should not be an agent acting to prevent his right to free speech by resorting to the government to enshrine her “victimhood”.

The larger issue, which we need to consider, is how we prevent mobs from shutting down free speech on our campuses. Clearly, it is a problem the universities are unable to solve. We have to solve it for them. No longer should we view them as these private enclaves of entitlement governed solely by their own rules.

ADDENDUM: When I wrote the foregoing, I was unaware that Allan Rock was the President of the University of Ottawa. Now the scales have fallen from my eyes and I understand why this whole event got completely out of hand.

The breezes are beginning to blow the other way

Sometimes it is hard to spot differences between Americans and Canadians, but sometimes not so much.

In the United States something called “the race card” is often played to settle an argument before anybody can dissect the real issue too closely. We saw it happen when Johnny Cochran played it in the O.J. Simpson murder trial to discredit a police officer’s testimony. A more recent example involved Professor Gates in Cambridge, Mass., screaming both race discrimination and privilege at the same time as he was being hauled off by a pissed-off policeman.

In fact, under President Obama, the race card seems to have risen to new heights, but that is for another posting.

In Canada, it does not have the same resonance. What plays well here, however, is “the victim card”. We seem to be a society obsessed with finding victims, and usually victims in a collective identity rather than an individual one. If you are aboriginal, a Jew, a Muslim, a black, a Hindu, a gay, a woman, handicapped, homeless, etc., you will at one time or another been identified as a victim because of that status. Naturally, following such identification are the suggested public policy solutions to either sustain your victimhood (the homeless) or to rectify it (gays).

Clever political operatives always know how and when to play the victim card to their advantage.

In an earlier posting, June 23, I cautioned Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn about the danger of playing into Jennifer Lynch’s public relations campaign to portray herself and her Canadian Human Rights agency as the victims of the likes of Messrs. Steyn and Levant:

My suggestion to Levant and Steyn is to cool the sophomoric name-calling you regularly employ. No more “Commissar Lynch” or “Queen of the censors.” This only plays to her position that you folks are unreasonable and “unbalanced”, and that she is the real victim.

And stop attacking her about her spending habits and making her out to be a ninny. She has both inertia and an uninformed parliament on her side, and even if they are informed, there are enough of the bleeding-heart liberals to tip the balance to keep CHRC exactly as it is, or, worse make it bigger and more powerful. It happened in the bastion of conservatism, Alberta, and it could happen in Ottawa.

You keep up the personal attacks and you may be, as they say, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Since neither one obviously reads my utterings, or if they do, simply dismiss them because I am not one of the fully-fledged members of their cheerleading squad, they continued, bull-in-china shop fashion, to personally attack Ms. Lynch.

Well, according to this posting by Levant, the breezes are beginning to blow the other way. A former free speech supporter of Levant’s, an influential westerner, and, importantly, according to Levant, one of the card-carrying liberal left he waxed on about getting onside, Janet Keeping, has broken ranks and has attacked Levant for his personal broadsides against Lynch.

What does Levant do? Of course, he now attacks the credibility of his attacker, accusing her of that new philosophical no-no, “false moral relevance.”

Keeping’s column may open the doors to other journalists, editors and other opinion shapers who have to date held their noses by siding with obnoxious Levant on free speech. If Keeping has the balls to break ranks to defend the victim Lynch, how can others be so crass as to not rise to the occasion and balance out the personal attacks?

And, if they do, it will not be possible for politicians to safely dismantle the CHRC.

Cream pies and free speech in Canada

Richard Warman mocks Ickes

We have heard a great deal over the last year from Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn about free speech, the craven media, and the activities of Jewish award winner, Richard Warman, a former Canadian Human Rights Commission investigator who appears to have made a handsome financial return from the human rights industry in Canada by posting racist comments on websites and then complaining about how he was offended by postings on those websites.

This link takes you to a fascinating British documentary on a fellow named David Ickes who has a worldview not in keeping with the norm. He may be a kook, but, in my view, he is entitled to say what he thinks. The video is 50 minutes in length, and the last half is devoted to Ickes’s reception in Vancouver, where a coalition of Jewish activists tried to shut him down.

He was kicked out of Canada’s largest book chain when he went to a book signing that he had been invited to and he was booted from a radio station that had invited him to a morning talk show. He did manage to appear on television, but the host started the questioning with an on-the-street university professor who pronounced Ikes a kind of a nutter. Normally, you would ask your studio guest to elaborate his theory before turning to others to challenge him.

Altogether, it was a very poor showing from the Canadian media establishment and Canada’s Jewish establishment, particularly since Ikes never says anything that is anti-Jewish. The Jews are persecuting him for a perceived metaphor.

However, what becomes clear, as he progresses through Vancouver, is the general good sense of the ordinary Canadians who clearly recognize the value of free speech and discount the efforts of the establishment and the elites to muzzle Ickes.

Watch for Warman to equate an attempt to throw a pie in the Icke’s face, intended to interrupt, humiliate and discredit him, with an exercise in free speech. Lost on Warman is the idea that Ickes should be free to speak without a pie in the face.

Unfortunately for Canada, I think the intellectually-warped Warman mentality prevails amongst the establishment and the elites.

Health care complaints

I read Mark Steyn quite a bit because I am sympatico with his free speech crusade and some of his views about Islam. However, I am tired of his tirades against a government-run, single-payer health care system as we have in Canada.

Steyn is Belgian born, raised in Canada and, by choice, lives in New Hampshire, U.S.A. where the state slogan, he tells us proudly, is “Live free or die.” When it comes to health care, Steyn is all for pocketbook health care. He who has the biggest wallet gets the best care. He who has little, well, just sucks it up.

I have been reading this guff from him for quite some time. Then I came across this eyebrow-raiser from a blog, called “The Corner”, which he carries on his website. This is Steyn writing about his personal situation after a description of a woman who died from a bedsore in a hospital in England.

When we quote stories like these at NRO, we get a lot of e-mail saying these are just "anecdotes." And yes, if you look on yourself as being part of a government health system of millions of people, getting a bedsore and dying in hideous pain is no big deal in the scheme of things. But I look on myself as being part of the Mark Steyn health system. So if I get a bedsore and die, as far as I'm concerned, that's a 100% systemic failure. The difference between government health care and a private system is that, under the latter, you're free to say, "This dump's filthy. I'm going to the state-of-the-art joint five miles up the road." You may have to get out your checkbook, but ultimately the decisions are yours.
In a government system, the decisions are the bureaucrats', and that's that. My father is currently ill, and the health "system" is doing its best to ensure it's fatal. When an ambulance has to be called, they take him to a different hospital according to the determinations of the bed-availability bureaucrats and which facility hasn't had to be quarantined for an infection outbreak. At the first hospital, he picked up C Difficile. At the second, MRSA. At the third, like the lady above, he got septicaemia. He's lying there now, enjoying the socialized health care jackpot — C Diff, MRSA, septicaemia. None of these ailments are what he went in to be treated for. They were given to him by the medical system.

So, best-selling author, ubiquitous media guy, has a sick father that he leaves to the attention of the health care system he claims is terrible and he blames that system for his father’s additional medical woes.

What are we to make of this?

If his father was in a U.S. hospital he wouldn’t get hospital-induced diseases?

Nonsense.

Well, perhaps less likely if dear old dad was in some super-expensive private clinic. So why doesn’t Steyn have him in one of these preferred settings? Doesn’t he like him that much, or is pop not as trusting of the U.S. medical system as his son is?

Oh, right, it is those drawbacks. You know. You have to pay for it, either directly or through some outrageous insurance premiums. Doubtful that Steyn would have a policy that covered his father, so it is out of pocket for him. He talks about it, but doesn't mention actually doing it.

Now, I don’t know about the great man’s personal financial situation, although I imagine he is not doing that badly, but I would venture that the sight of the doctors pulling into the clinic’s parking lots in their new Ferraris, kissing their buxom trophy wives goodbye, and lugging their new Callaway golf clubs into the physicians’ locker room for an early start on the fairway after a short stint of warm-up surgery caused a sharp guy like Steyn to consider how that lifestyle gets financed and just how many hundreds of guest gigs he would have to do on the Rush Limbaugh show to keep those patient-first docs happy enough to attend to dad.

Much better to continue to let people like me pay for his father’s care and then write nasty columns about what a fool I am supporting such a system.

Well, don’t worry yourself, Mark, I don’t mind in the slightest paying for your Dad, and I hope he suffers no further set-backs and gets better soon.

I am going to go out on a limb here and make a little wager. Our Mr. Steyn frequently comes back to Canada for speaking engagements and such. I bet you he takes the opportunity to pop into doctors' offices here for health check-ups, because it costs him nothing. I would be very surprised if he did not continue to carry a Canadian health card with him just for that reason. I know a number of ex-pat Canadians who shit all over Canada and then pull this stunt.

I wonder why Steyn thinks there is some difference between a U.S. hospital administrator and a Canadian one. Is there really that much to choose between a government bureaucrat and an insurance company one? Would it be the ties?

In Canada, his father was taken to several hospitals. In the U.S., if he had a health insurance policy, it would likely have dictated which hospital he could use if he wanted the insurance company to foot the bills.

I recall watching a television documentary on The Learning Channel called Misdiagnosis. It related the experience of several Americans who were allegedly misdiagnosed by American doctors.

I say alleged because one of the stories concerned a self-employed man of 42 years of age. He was married with children and his wife had a job with a company that provided its employees with health coverage through a third party insurance company.

The man started to have an unusual number of bowel movements each day and his stool was bloody. He sought medical attention under the terms of the policy and a battery of tests was performed and medicines were prescribed. Nothing cured the problem for two years. Then his wife got a new job with new medical insurance and it covered a colonoscopy (not covered in the previous plan). He had the colonoscopy and found that he had colon cancer. He was living for two years with colon cancer because of inadequate health insurance coverage.

That was not a case of misdiagnosis; that was purely non-diagnosis.

In Canada, colonoscopies are routine examinations performed as part of normal physicals for people of a certain age and are readily available for anyone else who has suspicious symptoms. They are covered under the government paid health plan.

This spring I had an occasion to talk about health insurance with a technician who fixed my air conditioning in my Florida house. He was 45 years of age, married and had two children. He had no health insurance. He didn't think it was that big a deal and then he said that his wife was run down by a car and taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital, where, in addition to her cuts and bruises being patched, she was given an MRI.

I suggested that that was as far as it went because then they discovered she had no medical insurance and so she got no follow-up treatment. He kind of stepped back for a moment at that and it dawned on him that I was right. She was handed a copy of the MRI and summarily shown to the door. In Canada, she would have been kept in the hospital overnight to ensure that nothing was missed. And contrary to all the crap about misuse or non-use of MRI's in Canada, if one were available she would have had it right away for a car accident. We do use triage here.

Speaking of misdiagnoses, a few years ago in Florida my arm suddenly swelled up with painful inflammation. I checked into the nearest hospital. I used my credit card at the front door when I registered in. I was shown into a waiting room. After a while, I was ushered into an examination room. Shortly thereafter, a doctor came to see me. He diagnosed bursitis. I thought I had been bitten by an insect from the appearance of the swelling (a bright red dot in the centre where it was most painful) and the suddenness of the appearance of the condition.

Nope. Absolutely bursitis says the doc, laughing at my insect diagnosis, and sells me an arm sling for ten bucks and writes a prescription for a common anti-inflammatory drug.

I go to a pharmacy and discover that the medication costs more than twice what it would cost in Canada, so I don’t bother with it. After a few days, the swelling subsides. I confer with my mother who suffered for years from bursitis. That is not bursitis says she. Then a termite inspector walks through the house and notes that I have a nest of black widow spiders in the corner of the ceiling of my bedroom.

Eventually I get a detailed bill from the hospital. It was not outrageous but it also was not cheap. What caught my eye were the line-items. I was charged so much per hour for my wait in the waiting room. Then I was charged at a different rate for the time I spent in the examination room. There was a charge for the consultation with the doctor and a charge for the writing of the prescription.

If I were a hospital administrator using this kind of a billing system and if I wanted to boost my hospital’s income, I would be making sure that people waited a little longer before a doctor appeared on the scene, and if I did that, I would be just like Canadian hospital administrators (or bureaucrats as Mr. Steyn prefers).

Why do our courts of justice enforce pure politics?

There is an interesting story in today’s National Post about the efforts of Jennifer Lynch, the head of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, to “re-normalize” (to paraphrase a conceit of Ezra Levant) the mandate of the CHRC, and by extension that of all the other HRCs in Canada, in the matter of the pursuit of hate speech. Lynch has been all over the media in the last week or so after the tabling of a report to the Parliament of Canada, delivering very much the same message.

This is what she had to say:

“Canadians are uninformed and deliberately misinformed about the hate speech provisions of human rights law, and are engaged in a debate that is "completely unbalanced."

To people like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant this utterance would be open season for snorting down their noses. They think they have the upper hand and have this woman on the run. I think they are misreading the situation and are in danger of being outflanked by a wily fox. I think she is getting some pretty good PR advice that, no doubt, we are paying for.

When Ezra Levant published his book, Shakedown, I had an occasion to speak about it at an annual meeting in Toronto of a volunteer association made up of some very knowledgeable, well-educated and socially active people, about 40 in number. These are the kind of people one would normally expect to be up on news and current affairs and they represented a broad section of the community in ethnicity, gender and age.

I was making a proposal regarding Levant’s book and was met by blank stares, followed by a moment of silence. Then a U of T professor of science, with Phds up the ying-yang, put up her hand and asked, “Who is Ezra Levant?” There were only two people in that room who knew the Levant story and I was one of them.

So, when Lynch says that Canadians are uninformed, don’t be dismissive. I think she is right about that. And the other woman who would agree is Christine Elliott, a Whitby lawyer, a member of the Ontario provincial legislature, and current contender for the leadership of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party.

She has poo-poohed a couple of her rivals who want to dismantle the Ontario Human Rights Commission, claiming that this would be a no-win policy platform, much like the ill-fated campaign of former leader, John Tory, to fund faith-based schooling. It would only be a no-win if the electorate are not up to speed on the whole hate speech debacle. She senses they are not.

One thing that might be informing this opinion is accusations that increasingly appear by leftie supporters of HRCs, like lawyer, Mary Cornish, who frames the discussion this way: “The conservatives are against human rights.” That mud could stick in an election campaign.

Of course, the second part of Lynch’s comment contradicts the first assertion. If Canadians are uninformed, then how can they be engaged in a debate? But, leaving aside the logic, it is the accusations she continues to make that her enemies are engaged in a misinformation campaign that is most troublesome.

How does she handle this misinformation problem? She sends the issue to Parliament, where she says,

"We welcome this debate. We want it to be an informed debate in the right forum, a place where people can have an informed dialogue. [That place is] Parliament, and parliamentary committees. This why we did a special report to Parliament [last week]. That's the appropriate forum."

Many people would agree with that. So, it isn’t necessary for her to appear opposite Ezra Levant on a split screen to debate point by point every little unsettling matter concerning the CHRC, because the real debate, as far CHRC is concerned, will be held by parliamentarians.

Levant can splutter and fulminate all he likes, but she has finessed the public debate and need only appear in the media to spread her propaganda.

Clearly, she has staked out the victim territory and intends to defend it. We all know that being able to portray yourself as a bigger victim than the next guy plays well in Canada. So far Steyn and Levant have come as far as they have by pointing to their victimhood and telling Canadians “this too could be you.”

Now Lynch is saying that the whole defense of human rights will be sacrificed by these media bully types; in code, “conservatives want to get rid of human rights”. The valiant human rights defenders are the real victims, and she is biggest victim of all.

“We have experienced 16 months of invective hurled at us, and at any time when anybody has tried to speak up and correct misinformation, gross distortions, characterizations, then the very next day there's been some full-frontal assault through the blogs, through mainstream media. I have a file. I'm sure I have 1,200, certainly several hundred of these things," she said.
"There is an agenda out there, and I’m a public servant responsible for giving effect to the principle that 'individuals should have the right equal to others to make for themselves a life they are able and wish to have,' and I'm going to do it. I'm not going to sit by. Others are afraid to speak out because they know they're going to be attacked. If you Google my name today you'll see how I've been attacked."

She could win this with this strategy.

My suggestion to Levant and Steyn is to cool the sophomoric name-calling you regularly employ. No more “Commissar Lynch” or “Queen of the censors.” This only plays to her position that you folks are unreasonable and “unbalanced”, and that she is the real victim.

And stop attacking her about her spending habits and making her out to be a ninny. She has both inertia and an uninformed parliament on her side, and even if they are informed, there are enough of the bleeding-heart liberals to tip the balance to keep CHRC exactly as it is, or, worse make it bigger and more powerful. It happened in the bastion of conservatism, Alberta, and it could happen in Ottawa.

You keep up the personal attacks and you may be, as they say, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Keep you arguments focused on the evil; i.e. the suppression of free expression.

The thing she said that really did make me laugh out loud, however, was this gem:

"The Criminal Code plays a very valid role. However, when we look at the statistics, we find that there aren't a lot of specialized [police] hate teams across the country. To cede, to remove our jurisdiction, would leave a gap that might persist for years or a lifetime because it would require numerous jurisdictions to step into a gap, and they may or may not be willing to resource that, etcetera, etcetera. So [the hate speech provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act] is an important section. It does serve a purpose."

So the reason why you don’t see many prosecutions under the hate speech provisions of the Criminal Code is because the police forces don’t have hate speech specialists?

I don’t suppose the requirements of the criminal justice system that the prosecutor prove “beyond reasonable doubt” the elements of the crime, the presumption of innocence of the accused, the onus on the prosecutor to prove the case, including the intention of the accused, proof of harm rather than “likely to cause offense” standard, the defenses available to the accused of truth and the honest belief in the truth of the statements made, have anything to do with the paucity of hate crime prosecutions.

Of course, like the MO of the HRCs, if you reverse all of that and make the accused responsible for proving their innocence, eliminating intention as an element of the offense, and removing truth and the honest belief in truth as defenses, you very likely will get a larger number of prosecutions

But you won’t get justice. And that is the precious commodity in a liberal democracy you don’t get from the HRCs.

A few weeks ago on the TV Ontario current affairs program, The Agenda, a panel of lawyers, all of whom, in one way or another feed at the trough of the human rights industry, vigorously defended the role of the Ontario HRC.

Hmmm. I wonder why?

Some of them made the point that the HRC should be viewed as a specialist agency like the Ontario Labour Relations Board or the Ontario Workmens’ Insurance Board, where the staff is specialists. Specialists in what? Well, in discrimination, for one thing, and in Jennifer Lynch’s world it would be in hate speech.

Consider the following assertions:

Homosexuals
• Homosexuality is a "perversion"
• Homosexuals "spread disorder on earth"
• Homosexuals and lesbians should be "exterminated in this life"
• "Homosexuals caught performing sodomy are beheaded"
Infidels
• Most Infidels “live like animals”
• "they are evil people, they love perversity", and "they are our enemies"
• "sending our sons and daughters to the schools of the Infidels has devastating effects on their beliefs, their behavior and their character. For the children of Infidels are the most pervert children. At a very early age, they adopt the behavior of their parents "
• "Moreover, attending schools with Infidels may lead to friendship in their heart for Infidel children, which contradicts the foundations of Islam. Because Islam prohibits befriending even the closest relatives if they are Infidels"
• "there is no doubt that it is not permissible for a Muslim to love or to take as friend whoever follows a religion other than Islam"
• "Infidels say they are open-minded, but in reality they have opened their mind to garbage and filth, and closed it to all that is pure and right !"
Men are superior to women
• "men are superior to women and better than them". In general, "men have a more complete intellect and memory than women"
• "Infidels acknowledge this reality, but they do not want to accept the truth because they are blinded by their passions"
Muslim women are superior to Infidel women
• "The veiled Muslim woman is a light in the darkness of the 20th century, she carries the torch of modesty, of chastity and of Islamic values"
• "She brings the liberating message of "LA ILAHA ILLALLAH" to the poor western woman who has lost her femininity, her dignity and her honor and who is now crying for her savior"
• The consequences of immodesty are "rape, venereal diseases, AIDS, herpes, single-parent families, crime, poverty, ignorance and many others"
• "Infidels will never admit that these social problems are the result of their refusal to submit to Allah, because they are consumed with pride"
• "... male Infidels wanted to liberate women only for economic reasons (cheap labor) and to sexually exploit them"
• “male Infidels will not be happy with us until our women are in their beds, in their magazines and in their dancing clubs !”
• "If a Muslim woman marries a non-Muslim man ... their marriage is invalid, in fact it is adultery"
Ethnic groups are not equal• "Can we doubt the superiority of Islamic principles over the corrupt principles of Eastern and Western cultures ? Culture is based on the beliefs of a nation. The superior culture is the one closest to the revelation of Allah !"
• "This is the reason why ethnic groups are not equal"
Muslims are superior to Infidels
• "... a Muslim must never put his brother in Islam at the same level as an Infidel. In fact, to place Infidels at equality with Muslims is one of the greatest form of ignorance and injustice"
• "The rule is that the most disobedient among Muslims is better than the most virtuous, the most polite, the most honest and the most loyal among the Infidels"
• "The Muslim nation is actually the most balanced and the most righteous"
Christianity
• "It is because of this religion of lies, which goes against human nature, that the West is now full of perversity, corruption and adultery"
Jews
• Jews "spread corruption and chaos on earth"
• Most Jews "seek only material goods and money, apart from that, they have nothing"
• Jews "unjustly occupy" Palestine for the sole purpose of "filling this land with corruption and transgress the laws of Allah in the name of secularism"
Slavery
• "owning slaves is not prohibited"
• "Allah has allowed men to marry two, three or four women, but one who fears he will not be fair can marry only one or have slaves."
Democracy is contrary to Islam. Jihad is a duty of sedition• "Democracy is a system in total contradiction with Islam"
• "... freedom is unknown in Islam, it contradicts Islam, therefore it is a false concept"
• "[freedom] serves to justify corruption" and "stooping to the lowest levels of bestiality"
• "Freedom of conscience is actually freedom to leave Islam !"
• “Anyone who leaves Islam, cut his neck”
• "no matter how it is understood and applied ... secularism is a pure negation of Islam"
• "If Muslims are strong and they have the ability to fight the Infidel ruler, to overthrow him from power and replace him with a Muslim ruler, it is mandatory for them to do so. This is part of Jihad in the path of Allah"
• "injustice will never disappear from the face of the earth before Islam and Sharia are properly applied throughout the world"
• "Islam commands us to destroy all idols", i.e. "democracy, human rights, secularism, freedom, equality, and modernity"
• in an Islamic state, Christians and Jews can keep their religion but they must pay a sum of money, the Jizyah. "The purpose of the Jizyah is to humiliate and punish Infidels to encourage them to accept Islam." The other Infidels (Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, etc.) have no options but to accept Islam or “be killed"

If I published a book in Canada with those kinds of statements would you not think they would be viewed as expressions “likely” to cause some people to be held in contempt or to stir feelings of hatred towards them? Do you not think the Canadian Human Rights Commission, with its specialists in hate speech, would be all over this?

Well, you would be wrong on all counts. Such a book was published by a Saudi-trained Montreal imam, and a formal complaint was lodged with the CHRC, and was summarily rejected as being without merit. See this website for fuller details.

Just how much expertise in hate speech does one need to be employed on the public dime?

The problem this Montreal decision highlights is that what HRCs adjudicate is politics, not justice. HRC orders are filed in real courts and are enforceable under our justice system.

So the big policy question: why do we permit the justice system to enforce politics?

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.

Religion versus free speech versus the faithful versus free speech

Our good Islamic apologist, Haroon Siddiqui, has penned an ambiguous column in the Toronto Star about free speech versus religion. He says he is agnostic, not in the sense of a person who claims that he does not know whether God exists or not, but in the meaning that he is undecided about whether free speech trumps the sacred when it comes to religion; i.e., whether religion should be off-limits for critical analysis.

He lives in a secular state that nominally stands for free speech. He is most concerned with alleged Islamophobia, being cognizant that free speech advocates are very vocal and visible when it is Islamists that try to shut down free speech, but invisible when it is others attacking Islam.

In the normal course, one would expect this where the majority religion, as in this country, is Christian and the minority religion, by a long shot, is Islam. But he is right on the scales of fairness and justice, this is not right. What is sauce for the goose must also apply to the gander.

What is convoluting the problem, in my view, is that many people (and I think Mr. Siddiqui is one of them) fail to distinguish between a religion and the people who adhere to the religion. Islam is the religion and Muslims are the people who follow the religion.

In our society, you are perfectly free to be a Muslim (however you define Muslimism). Nobody is entitled to criticize you for your choice of belief system, and would be considered a bigot if they did so. But that is not the same as saying that your religion is exempt from scrutiny. I can say anything I like about Islam and you, as a Muslim, have nothing to complain about (at least in Canada). I don’t think that Muslims understand that because it is an axiom of Islam that the religion is beyond criticism.

Likewise, you can criticize religions such as Christianity and Judaism, but you cannot criticize Christians and Jews; i.e., the people who have chosen their paths of belief. This is the problem that the Khalid mosque experienced; it did not criticize Judaism, it attacked Jews.

This is a free country, and that is what it means – you can believe any nonsense that strikes your fancy. It doesn’t mean that the fancy that strikes you is beyond analysis and criticism.

Here is the difficulty: if you say a religion is nuts, then you are, by implication, however unintended, saying a person who believes the dogma of that religion is nuts. The belief system and its tenets are wrapped up in the psyche of the individual believer. They cannot distinguish between an intellectual dissection of their belief system and their own self-worth.

This is the underpinning of the problem with section 13 of the Canada Human Rights Act. Muslims have taken the language that protects them from criticism and attempted to stop criticism of Islam. Neo-Nazis rain contempt on Jews, not on Judaism. Mark Steyn criticizes the political aspect of Islam and its political activists, not Muslims as a whole – there is a difference.

In a rational society dedicated to reason and skeptical argument it should be perfectly acceptable to question a belief system without personalizing it for those who accept it.

We seem to be a long way from being a rational society. But we should not make the mistake that is implicit in the resolutions of the United Nations to make the scrutiny of religion off-limits. I don’t how Mr. Siddiqui could be ambivalent about that.

Remembrance Day spoilers

Today is Remembrance Day in Canada. It coincides with the official end of WW1 on November the eleventh, 1918. All across the country, wreaths are laid at cenotaphs, in cities towns and villages, and ceremonies are conducting honouring those who fell while defending us in Canada's wars.

There is one city in this country, however, where the war dead are not honoured. It is Disneyland on the Rideau, otherwise known as Ottawa, the nation's capital, which just happens to have one the grandest memorials to the war dead I have seen. Here it is cachet to be a public servant, say the head of a human rights commission, and lay a wreath to honour the 60th anniversary of the U.N. universal declaration of human rights, which has nearly no connection to Canada at war, and diverts attention from the real purpose of Remembrance Day.

As Mark Steyn points out in his incisive dissection of this sacriligious nonsense, it would be nice if the Canadian human rights commission would actually adopt the standards set out in the U.N. declaration it is making a show of publicly honouring.

Some people make you embarrassed to be called a Canadian.

Editorial on free speech worth reproducing

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal has concluded that the excerpt from Mark Steyn's book, America Alone, reproduced in a Maclean's Magazine article did not violate human rights legislation in the province; i.e., it was not hate speech. The editorial in today's National Post about this case is worth reading:

Freedom of speech does not include the right to have one's views published or broadcast. Nor does freedom of the press carry with it an obligation to give space to views opposed to those held by the press' owners or their editors.

Indeed, the only way that a right to have one's views aired could exist is if the government restricted the freedom of the press, forcing media outlets to publish or broadcast material that was deemed otherwise unworthy.

In other words, such a "right" would exist only if the state assumed the power to regulate public discourse, which would be anathema to our democratic ideals.

Apparently, Khurrum Awan doesn't have much respect for those ideals. A recent graduate of Osgoode Hall law school in Toronto, Mr. Awan has put his name to various human-rights complaints against Maclean's magazine and writer Mark Steyn, whom the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) accuses of Islamophobia. Mr. Awan and his coplaintiffs demand that the magazine provide a pro-Islamist writer with space equal to the amount devoted to Mr. Steyn's work.

At a conference over the weekend, Mr. Awan betrayed just how thoroughly he and his fellow travellers misunderstand the concept of freedom of speech. He told the Canadian Arab Federation that Muslims must "demand [the] right to participate" in national media. "And we have to tell them, you know what, if you're not going to allow us to do that, there will be consequences. You will be taken to the human rights commission, you will be taken to the press council, and you know what? If you manage to get rid of the human rights code provisions [on hate speech], we will then take you to the civil courts system. And you know what? Some judge out there might just think that perhaps it's time to have a tort of group defamation, and you might be liable for a few million dollars."

That someone who graduated from law school would issue forth with this hostile jumble of threats is a sad reflection of our rights-mad age. Apparently, Mr. Awan sees freedom of speech and freedom of the press as petty concepts to be brushed aside in the service of identity politics. In his world, the repository of expressive rights is not the individual, but rather ethnic and religious collectives, whose members must bully taxpayers and media owners into disseminating their propaganda.

Look at his insistence that "you're not going to allow us" — Muslim Canadians — to have access to national media. Who, exactly, is stopping them? Indeed, through his vexatious complaints against Maclean's, Mr. Awan has garnered for himself, his cause and the CIC an extraordinary amount of press coverage. Nor is anyone attempting to stop Mr. Awan from starting his own magazine or newspaper — or taking advantage of low-cost Internet alternatives such as blogs and podcasts to get his message out.

Perhaps what truly irks Mr. Awan is that the CIC's position — pro-censorship, pro-Islamist, anti-free speech — has been so roundly disparaged in the mainstream media. He doesn't just want his ideas floated in the general Canadian marketplace of ideas: He wants uncritical acceptance.

Sorry, but that's not the way things work in Canada — or any other democracy: People with bad ideas are mocked, ignored or refuted. You have no "human right" to get your bad ideas taken seriously.

What Mr. Awan and his benefactors at the CIC want is all the power of the press with none of the risk or cost. They want the government to help them leverage someone else's presses for their personal views.

Oh yes, and while they're at it, they would like to silence and punish those who disagree with them by having an activist judge create causes of action with penalties of "a few million dollars."

One of the reasons this newspaper believes that the powers wielded by human-rights tribunals should be scaled back is that Canada has become such a tolerant nation: We have come to accept that our Canadian identity is compatible with immigrant cultures. Now along comes the CIC and Mr. Awan, telling us that this is actually wrong — that we must renounce core Canadian values such as free speech and freedom of the press — at risk of a hysterical multi-million dollar legal campaign launched by Muslim and Arab plaintiffs.

If someone were actively seeking to stir up the worst stereotypes Canadians hold in regard to the repressive political cultures being imported into Canada by Arab and Muslim immigrants, it's hard to imagine anyone doing a better job than Khurrum Awan.

The absurdity of Canada

Yesterday the Canadian Human Rights Commission dismissed the complaint of Islamophobia against Maclean’s Magazine for publishing an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s book, America Alone. The charge had been brought by the Canadian Islamic Congress under the leadership of Mohamed Elmasry.

The CHRC is not forthcoming in its reasons, but the only reasonable ground, short of naked political survival instincts, is that the charge lacked sufficient evidence to sustain it. One would normally think that. However, as we have learned about this human rights agency racket, anything can, and does, pass for evidence.

Still, the decision leaves Canadians, not just Muslims, puzzled about human rights in this country. If CHRC doesn’t think the piece would likely cause Muslims to be held in contempt, what are we to make of the statement of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, courtesy of Barbara Hall, which also did not process the claim, but left no doubt that the articles complained about were indeed hateful, and except for a flaw in OHRC’s mandate, likely would have been actionable?

Is the Canadian decision applicable to everyplace in the country except Ontario?

Is it now up to British Columbia to clarify our human rights?

This is so stupid it should cause people to remove the little maple leaf pin from their backpacks when they travel abroad, lest foreign folk take them to be Canadians.

Canada owes one to Dr. Elmasry

Now that the “court” action in the Canadian Islamic Congress v. Maclean’s Magazine is over in British Columbia, there are three things that didn’t happen that I think were mistakes.

I suppose it looks rather silly for this blogger to be suggesting to high-priced and experienced legal counsel (Maclean’s lawyers) that they might have done something differently. After all, my legal status is best painted by former Ontario Premier, Bill Davis, who always puckishly referred to himself as “just a B student at law school”.

However, this law school B student would have asked the head sock puppet on cross-examination why he and his colleagues didn’t do what any other reasonable persons in their position would have done. When people are aggrieved at things they see in the media they write letters to the editor or they produce their own op-ed pieces and try to get them published. These whiners ran all over the media complaining that Maclean’s would not submit to their editorial demands. But they never produced the counter-Steyn article and submitted it for publication, either through Maclean’s or through other media outlets.

I think the fact that they didn’t do that goes to the heart of this dispute. It’s possible this course of events was never about getting a counter piece published. It was about forcing the issue into a human rights complaint and obtaining a fatwa. Dr. Elmasry, head of the CIC, is on record as having previously complained that the anti-hate legislation in this country is useless. Such a line of cross-examination might have unearthed that intent.

The second thing I would have done differently is to get down in the muck with the lawyer for the complainants.

Maclean’s chose to go the high road, not offering any evidence of it’s own, simply challenging the admissibility of the complainant’s evidence (about a 50% success rate) and confining itself to cross-examination of witnesses.

Maclean’s should have produced evidence on the importance of the right of free speech and how that is exercised in this country through vigorous debate in a free media. Never assume that “judges” have that understanding – especially when the ones in this case were viewed so negatively by those who are horrified by these proceedings.

Besides, if the real strategy is to get an adverse ruling that one can take to a real court on appeal, it is favourable to the appeal to be able to say that such evidence was presented at the trial court and was inappropriately and mistakenly dismissed by that tribunal.

Thirdly, it would not have hurt to present evidence from the blogosphere in support of free speech and to show that the very fact a human rights commission would even entertain this case is upsetting to many, many people. If the BC HRC had declined to admit irrelevant blogging evidence on behalf of the complainants, then maybe not, but since it did, then fight fire with fire. Don't be so prissy, legally correct and dainty about the fight. If there are no rules then make up your own.

The choice was to attorn to the jurisdiction or not. Once you accept the challenge in that forum, then go all the way and play the game the way it is intended to be played. You are either in the fray or you are not, but you are never above it.

Finally, Canada owes a debt of gratitude to Dr. Elmasry and the CIC for turning over this human rights rock and exposing the bugs hiding in the shadows, nooks, crannies and crevices to the sunlight of international exposure and the court of public opinion.

Letter to A-G re: Freedom of Speech

This is a copy of an e-mail I sent today to the Attorney-General of Canada. It would be nice if the Conservatives were in front of this issue instead of reacting to a Liberal MP.

Dear Mr. Nicholson:

For some months I have been following the unfolding drama of the human rights complaints against Maclean’s magazine, Ezra Levant and by implication, Mark Steyn.

The guiding case in this matter is a 4 to 3 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, John Ross Taylor et al. v. Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Attorney General of Canada , 1990.

The key weakness in the majority decision is the following Polyanna utterance supporting the court’s opinion that section 13 is a reasonable limit on the free expression guarantee of section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

“

The phrase "hatred or contempt" in the context of s. 13(1) refers only to unusually strong and deep‑felt emotions of detestation, calumny and vilification and, as long as human rights tribunals continue to be well aware of the purpose of s. 13(1) and pay heed to the ardent and extreme nature of feeling described in that phrase, there is little danger that subjective opinion as to offensiveness will supplant the proper meaning of the section.”

I have read Mr. Steyn’s book, America Alone, an excerpt of which in Maclean’s prompted these human rights complaints. I did not find him expressing “deep-felt emotions of detestation, calumny and vilification”, unless one were to take exception to the truthful information he provided about the potential of Islam overtaking European societies; in short, if one doesn’t like the fit of the shoe when one tries it on.

We have now been treated to the spectacle of the Ontario Human Rights Commission declining to pursue the complaint but issuing a condemnation of Maclean’s in any event, without calling any evidence. Further, Barbara Hall, head of the OHRC has opined that, with only 2,500 complaints a year, there must be a lot more hatred in Ontario that has be rooted out. My own experience is that Canadians are generally not a hateful people and the thought that someone operating an intrusive government agency with that mindset bothers me. It should bother all of us who believe as I do.

When we look at some of the disgraceful conduct of the Canadian Human Right Commission, apparently relying on pro-active entrapment procedures by employees and ex-employees, and the testimony of one employee that he pays no attention to free speech (the most fundamental of human rights!) because that is some “American concept”, one begins to wonder what HRCs in what country the SCC had in mind when it said “as long as human rights tribunals continue to be well aware of the purpose … and pay heed to the ardent and extreme nature of the feeling described.”

Now, I recognize that these are two different matters; what the HRCs are delving into, and how they do it. But, these are related in the sense that they are evidence of a systemic breakdown in the protection of human rights, specifically free speech, which needs to be addressed.

Some wish to abolish Section 13 altogether. Some wish to abolish Human Rights Commissions. Perhaps there is a compromise option. Why not simply build into Section 13 the normal defenses one would have in a court of law: presumption of innocence, fair commentary on matters of public interest, truthful statements, reasonable belief in the truth of the statements, etc.? I would also be inclined to remove the word “likely” from the qualifications for causing harm. It is far too subjective.

The idea behind HRCs was to give quick and simple redress for discrimination in housing and employment, and there may still be validity to keeping them around for that purpose. However, this business of restriction on free speech and public comment affects a far broader constituency (everybody) and goes to the heart of our liberal democracy. It deserves a better and fairer airing than these “make up the rules as they go along “HRCs are prepared to give it.

Finally, I would urge you to consider the opinion of the dissenting judges in John Ross Taylor. I find their reasoning far more compelling, and, as events are now unfolding, almost prescient.

An unusual Agenda on TVO

I watched the Agenda on TVO with the confrontation between Mark Steyn and three of the Muslim laws students who are calling him Islamophobic. It was an unusual program for this very good public affairs show.

The normal format is for the host, Steve Paikin, to interview the "headliner" for 15 minutes and then adjourn to another part of the studio to moderate a panel discussion that normally does not include the headliner. The headliner in this case was Mark Steyn who used the occasion to bait the students into a face on debate. They were clearly uncomfortable and wanted Paikin's assurance that Steyn wouldn't shout at them.

Bear in mind that these are law students who have entered their articling period which means that within a year or so they will be unleased on the public to be able to represent them in court. One would think they would embrace the opportunity to deal with somebody who would shout at them just to get that experience under their belts.

Most of the program was taken up with their complaints that Macleans magazine would not surrender editorial control so that they could publish a pro-Islam article. One wonders why they would not have just submitted an article to Macleans for publication. If Macleans wouldn't publish it, then they might have a stronger argument. If Macleans did publish it, then I guess their 15 minutes of fame is up.

Two of the students were women. One was born in Canada and one came here as a baby from India. The male had been born in Pakistan and had lived in Britain where he grew up before he emigrated to Canada. All of them were in western dress and had they not said they were Muslims there would be nothing about their appearance that would have tipped you off.

At one point, Paikin offered that if all Muslims were like them Canadians would have no problems. I have no idea what he meant, but as one Canadian I would like to exempt myself from his list. I have problems with them.

In numerous articles Steyn has been calling them "sock puppets" for reasons that escaped me. However, I have since learned that sock puppets are people who are put up to putting out some party line or propaganda. In that sense, I would agree with Steyn's depiction.

What bothered me was that they wanted to talk about the issue of Islamophobic media (specifically Mcleans) but not about Islamophobia itself. Try as he might, and he did try valiantly, Paikin could not steer them on to that discussion. Every time Steyn pointed out that he had simply been reporting the claims religious spokespersons were making for Islam, the students tried to suggest that these people he was quoting were obscure, and irrelevant, like Ayatollah Khomeini. Huh!

What impressed me was their lack of preparation (they came with some idea of a script that they would simply put out without challenge). This is not a good beginning for young lawyers. In law, preparation is everything, and thinking fast on your feet outside the script is essential.

The second thing was, despite the fact that they have come of age and were educated in Canada, specifically in the legal tradition of Canada, they still don't understand the concept of free speech. They think they are entitled to force Mcleans to simply allow them to publish whatever they want, and if they can't get it by bullying Mcleans they will get a government agency to do it for them.

This is so Muslim. If you want to accuse somebody in an Islamic country of offending Islam, you go to an Imam and get him to issue a fatwa against the offender. In effect, the human rights commissions substitute for the Imams and issue the fatwas.

They frequently complained that all Muslims in Canada were tarred with this extremist voice that rises in various parts of the Muslim community that Steyn featured in his book. But at no time did they take the opportunity to point to specific things and say as Canadian Muslims those things were wrong and those people who say them are wrong and are wrong to say them. In short, like nearly all other Muslims, they find themselves incapable of criticizing or taking issue with relious authorities. Islam is an authoritarian religion.

And this is what so-called moderate Muslims who live in western countries are not getting, even though, time and again, writers and journalists have pointed out the absence of forcefull denials of the extremists by the moderates. This was a good opportunity for these Muslims to show that kind of awareness and respond to it, and yet they sat on their hands.

I am continually left with the impression that the only thing Muslims do not want discussed in any public forum is Islam. And anyone who wants to discuss it is an Islamophobe. Unfortunately, mainy mainstream journalists think that bigotry, Islamophobia and critical discussion of Islam are all the same thing, and they aid and abet this silencing of critics.

As Mark Steyn said, from the geopolitical, social, cultural and religious perspective the impact of Islam on western societies is one of the biggest story of the 21st century and these folks don't want us to talk or write about it.

I happened to come across this quotation from George Washington, the first American President:

"If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use for us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to the slaughter."

Wise words.

Go to this site if you want to see the hour-long video of the show: http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/theagenda/

Separating politics and religion

The following is a piece I did up and shopped around to daily newspapers as an op-ed piece. I got no takers, so I thought I would stick it on the blog. Although I am seeing a separation in issues in this case, I would not like readers to assume that I do not think religion is beyond debate and discussion, I certainly feel very strongly that it is not exempt from that -- it's just that in this case, I don't think author Mark Steyn was really writing about the religion.

Canadian journalist and author Mark Steyn has been accused by the Toronto Star of writing an “Islamophobic polemic” in his book, America Alone: the end of the world as we know it. An excerpt from that book was published in Maclean’s magazine and now both parties are under investigation by the CHRC and its British Columbia counterpart. The basis for the complaints, brought by some Muslim students and the Canadian Islamic Congress, is that Muslims are likely to be held in contempt in violation of their right not to be discriminated against on the basis of their religion.

The problem this accusation poses is that Steyn did not write a book about religion. He wrote a book about politics and society.

Suppose Steyn had written a critical examination of socialism and made fun of some of the spokespeople for that socio-economic political spectrum. Would we be surprised to see socialist leaders like Jack Layton and Howard Hampton rushing off to the Canadian Human Rights Commission complaining that Steyn’s words would likely cause socialists everywhere to be held in contempt?

Yes we would, for two reasons.

The first and obvious one is that political criticisms are not grounds for complaints under the Canada Human Rights Act.

The second reason relates to why they are not included as offenses; it is because sharp debate about the principles and methods by which we organize and run our society in the court of public opinion is the lifeblood of our liberal democracy. We regularly argue about the vices and virtues of socialism, capitalism, communism, fascism and almost any political, socio-economic system in between. It is how we test our commonwealth against what it could be and how we find ways to adjust it for the better. We constantly renew ourselves in this fashion.

You certainly would not find Canadians filing complaints about attacks on fascism or communism, two highly discredited socio-economic-political systems. Why would attaching a deity to another political system somehow elevate that ideology into something sacrosanct under human rights legislation and beyond normal public analysis?

Harsh words are spoken in political dialogue. As long as they are not false, and therefore libelous, then the recourse for those who disagree is to write their rebuttals, citing arguments and marshalling evidence or examples in support of their positions. This is normal public political discourse and should always be encouraged rather than being censored.

Nowhere in the text of America Alone does Steyn evaluate and critically discuss the Five Pillars of Islam, the observance of Ramadan, the division of objects into clean or unclean, and any other significant aspect of Islam the religion as a religion. His passing references to some practices of Muslims, like women wearing headgear, or certain moral norms, are mainly cultural and not central to his theme.

One need only compare Steyn’s treatment of Islam with that of fundamentalist Christians, in American author, Chris Hedges’, recent book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, to see the difference. The U.S. Christian right working to create a Christian nation out of a constitutional secular one is something new in American society. His book also deals with how this religion informs politics, but Hedges, who claims to be a moderate Christian, is unsparing in his disdain for the divisive doctrines and misguided scriptural interpretations of the evangelical fundamentalists. Steyn does none of that.

The Judeo-Christian tradition at least recognizes the separation of church and state: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and render unto God that which is God’s.” Islam knows no such distinction and is as much a political ideology as it is a spiritual fountainhead.

Steyn concentrated his arguments on Islam as a political movement intent upon supplanting western liberal democracies with the Sharia as the operative legal system and the possibility of theocracies as the political systems. He doesn’t relish that idea. Few who are inculcated in the secular values of western liberal democracies would.

What these Muslims who are challenging Steyn and Maclean’s are really claiming is that no discussion of the political ramifications of Islamic imperialism is permitted in Canada. But, if the complainants don’t buy into the ideology then why would they not support the exposure of it rather than the censoring of it?

One hopes that if and when this matter ends up in front of a human rights tribunal the members of the panel will be able to distinguish the difference between an attack on a religion and its adherents from an attack on a political ideology, and recognize Steyn’s work as an appropriate discourse in the great tradition of liberal-democratic political debate, in violation of nobody’s human rights.

Chilling vision of the future for free speech in Canada, from Mark Steyn in Maclean's magazine

Here's a few paragraphs from a recent piece by Mark Steyn in Maclean's magazine regarding the human rights versus free speech debacle in Canada. To read the full column, go here.

"As for "freedom of the press," in her now celebrated decision to dismiss the Canadian Islamic Congress complaint against Maclean's, Barbara Hall of the Ontario "Human Rights" Commission acknowledged that she did not have jurisdiction over magazines. So she ruled that, while she didn't have the power to toss us in the clink, she'd certainly like to and we certainly deserve it. Commissar Hall suggested that if my words had appeared on a sign rather than in a magazine article, she would be free to haul my hatemongerin' ass into the dock. Makes sense to me. So I've now put the offending excerpt from my book on a placard and I'll be in Toronto in the first week of May to drop it off at her office. I look forward to the prosecution. Given that we've already been found guilty, I don't think I've got much to fear from the trial.

Happily, beginning on July 1, under Ontario's "human rights" reforms, Commissar Hall will have far greater powers to initiate prosecutions against all and sundry. Under the new proposals, " 'hate incident' means any act or omission, whether criminal or not, that expresses bias, prejudice, bigotry or contempt toward a vulnerable or disadvantaged community or its members." "Act or omission"? Of course. The act of not acting in an insufficiently non-hateful way can itself be hateful. Whether or not the incident is a non-incident is incidental. I quote from "Concepts Of Race And Racism And Implications For OHRC Policy" as published on the OHRC website:
"The denial of racism used by so many whites in positions of authority ranging from the supervisor in a work place to the chief of Police and ministers of government must be understood for what it is: an example of White hegemonic power over those considered 'other.' "

Got that? Your denial of racism merely confirms your racism — because simply by being a "White hegemon" (like Barbara Hall or Jennifer Lynch) you wield racist power. The author, Frances Henry, cites the thinking of "modern neo-Marxist theorists" as if these are serious views that persons of influence in Canada's "human rights" establishment ought to be taking into account, rather than just the latest variant of an ideology that's led to the deaths of millions in Russia, China and everywhere else it's been put into practice. Yet, underneath the blather about "omissions" and "denial" of racism is the bleak acknowledgement that, alas, Canadians just aren't hateful enough to justify the cozy sinecure of taxpayer-funded hate police. "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," Commissar Hall said. C'mon, you Ontario deadbeats, can't you hate a little more? Or complain a little more? To modify Brecht, we need to elect a new people, if only to file more "human rights" complaints...

I don't have as low an opinion of Canadians as Barbara Hall and Jennifer Lynch do. I don't believe your liberty is the conditional discretionary gift of hack bureaucrats advised by Marxist theorists. You defeat bad ideas — whether Nazism, Marxism, jihadism, Steynism or Trudeaupian pseudo-"human rights" mumbo-jumbo — in the bracing air and light of day, in vigorous open debate, not in the fetid corridors of power policed by ahistorical nitwits."

The pictorial guide to Canadian Human Rights and Free Speech

This is the best explanation of the current battle over free speech and human rights I have seen.

Jihadist conference in New York City, highlights

Here are some videos of interesting speeches by Robert Spencer, Steven Emerson and Mark Steyn.