Time Immortal

On the Left writes in to correct our thinking, O Reader.

Check your facts folks. Mark Steyn IS NOT A PARTY TO THE COMPLAINTS - therefore HE HAS NO LEGAL BILLS!! HE IS FREE TO WRITE WHATEVER HE WANTS - This proceeding has been initiated against Maclean’s Magazine for publishing Islamphobic material - 20 articles over a year and a half without a single counterview response - The issue is about targeted communities to have the right to respond.

Allow me now to correct On the Left’s thinking.

Yes, Mark Steyn might not be a party to the complaint — the complaint itself is filed against Maclean’s magazine — in the sense that he doesn’t have any legal bills to pay, but he is a party to the complaint in the sense that it is his article, The Future Belongs to Islam (October, 2006) which forms the core of the issue for the Canadian Islamic Congress, Mohamed Elmasry, and the Osgoode Hall law students that he uses as his sock-puppets.

Indeed, Mark Steyn himself spells it out rather well in this article, in which he explicitly states that the complaint is against Maclean’s, and that the key reason for the complaint is the “Islamophobic” article that he penned (which was really just an excerpt from America Alone, his best-selling book).

So while Steyn may not be on the hook for legal bills, he has a horse in this race all the same. After all, had Maclean’s not run his article, Mohamed Elmasry wouldn’t have had anything to complain about. Oh, sure, there are a handful of other articles, some of which (if memory serves) might even just be letters to the editor, but they’re all garnish. Steyn’s article is the main issue here, and without that there wouldn’t be enough material on which to base a complaint.

Now, as to the whole thing about “targeted communities to have the right to respond,” precisely where in the is the “right of response” outlined and detailed? I realize that leftists do rather enjoy inventing new and previously unheard of rights for those they deem to be minorities (since, in the soft bigotry of low expectations that most leftists engage in, those minorities need these rights because they would otherwise be unable to help themselves, the poor darlings), but no Western nation has ever enshrined in its constitution the notion that a person has a “right to respond” to a published article.

That’s not to say that Mohamed Elmasry and his sock-puppets don’t have the right to compose an argument against what Steyn et. al. have said in Maclean’s — of course they do, given that they, like Steyn and the other authors, all have (or should have) a fundamental human right to freedom of expression. What they lack, however, is the right to dictate to a privately-owned magazine what it can and cannot publish.

Let’s be clear on that: Elmasry et. al. have a right to compose any number of articles answering what they see are unfair statements against Islam. They do not have a right to compel any particular media outlet, especially a privately-owned magazine, to publish their screeds. Maclean’s has every right to allow or refuse the publication of any form of content its editors wish, because it too possesses the right to freedom of expression, which includes the right not to be compelled to say any particular thing.

Let’s be even more clear, then: there is no such thing as a “right to respond” in the sense that is meant when leftists like On the Left use it.

If Elmasry et. al. only wanted to respond, they have had plenty of opportunity to do so. They have held press conferences. They have given television and radio interviews. They have written numerous articles in different national newspapers. They could have, at any time, taken one of more of those opportunities to issue their full statement of response, and they did not. The Canadian Islamic Congress is an extremely well-funded group, and could easily have bought numerous full-page ads in any national newspaper, or in multiple newspapers, and published their response in that way — it would have reached many more people than Maclean’s does. They could even have started their own damn magazine, as Colonel Maclean did a century ago, with his own money.

They didn’t do any of those things, and have abused each and every public appearance by using it only as an opportunity to re-iterate that they only want the right to respond. Do they? Do they really? They’ve had ample opportunity, and haven’t taken it.

That suggests that the issue here is not actually about the fictional “right to respond” at all, but about using the full power of the Canadian state to crush freedom of expression for those with whom they disagree. This should be concerning to leftists more than to conservatives, because in due time that same coercive power of the Canadian state might just be used to, say, suppress a gay pride parade (since homosexuality is highly offensive to Muslims such as Dr. Elmasry).

I wonder if On the Left has thought through the full implications of what he (she?) is saying. Let us assume that this issue really does end up with “targeted communities” being given the “right to respond.” Would that mean that a “targeted community” gets the right to respond in kind according to the act perpetrated against it? If a group of feminist radicals broke in to a Catholic church in Montreal and desecrated the altar with used tampons, would a group of Catholics be selected and given legal sanction to trash a surgical suite at an abortion clinic, littering Rosaries and spraying holy water everywhere as they go? If a gay atheist wrote a lengthy tract in The Globe and Mail extolling the virtues of consequence-free sex and raining down criticisms upon conventional religion, would a conservative Baptist minister be able to hand-deliver an article in rebuttal — in which numerous Biblical injunctions against both disbelief and homosexuality were quoted — to the offices of the newspaper and compel the editors to run it?

Because that is what human rights really mean: either everyone has them, or they are meaningless. Freedom of expression is meaningless if a person can be prosecuted for telling lies about the Holocaust. Freedom of religion is meaningless if the state can compel the closure of a house of worship. Freedom of conscience is meaningless if the state can compel a Christian doctor to perform an abortion or face fines or the loss of his medical license.

And if, by some fiat of a human rights commission, it is determined that the “right to respond” does actually exist, that right is likewise meaningless if only certain people are allowed to respond to certain things.

Has On the Left thought the implication of that fact through to its fullest extent, I wonder?