timeimmortal

Easy to see where Jonathan Kay gets his skill with the written word from:

Ayatollah-prescribed fatwas are so pre-9/11. Nowadays, as liberal elites rush prophylactically to ward off charges of tolerating “Islamophobia,” the fatwas (in all but name) against damn good books like Mark Steyn’s America Alone aren’t bruited in mosques; they issue forth from human rights commissioners.

…

Many Canadians believe the nation’s human rights commissions (HRCs) are motivated by high ideals and good intentions. But in conspiring to silence what a handful of Muslims deem “hate speech,” these good intentions are paving the way for the hell of global “soft jihad.”

The soft jihad is gradualistic and law-abiding, but no less desirous of Islamic domination of the West than its violent counterpart. Soft jihad strategy exploits liberal discourse and weaknesses in our legal system to induce guilt about a largely mythical “Islamophobia.”

The list of complaint-triggering speech offences is long in all Western countries, and ranges from the trivial to the politically existential: A decoration on a lid of ice cream distributed by Burger King offends because it resembles Allah in Arabic script; Fox Entertainment’s drama 24 portrays South Americans, Bosnians, Germans and Muslims as terrorists, but only Muslims complain; a Turkish lawyer sues an Italian soccer team because the red cross on their jerseys reminds him of the Crusades.

…

One way or another we must stop the fatwa industry in its tracks. Begin with removal of speech-regulation from the HRCs’ legal mandate. Build on that with legislation that imposes costs and damages on litigious third parties who seek to chill journalists.

Canada should also pass legislation imitative of the U.S. Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) law, presently active in 24 U.S. states, which disallows harassment of those writing on matters of “public concern,” as well as the Libel Terrorism Protection Act, a New York state initiative that will combat libel tourism.

The HRC crisis is not a tempest in a teapot. Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, says: “I don’t think it’s too strong to say that the [HRC] complaint against Mark Steyn is a totalitarian document.”

It is therefore no exaggeration to say that Levant and Steyn are fighting for the defining ideal of Western civilization which, once lost, would spell the beginning of the end of all our other freedoms.

Freedom of speech/expression is the cornerstone human right in truly free societies — without it, all the other rights we enjoy will crumble. And in their zeal to protect the smaller rights, the HRCs will destroy this most important right unless we are able, somehow, to reverse their course or cast them down.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission has dropped the complaint against Maclean’s magazine. This is a good and welcome development in the debate over freedom of expression in Canada, although one is left to wonder at why Jennifer Lynch and her CHRC actually went about dropping the case in the first place.

Mark Steyn notes the official reasoning that was given:

The Steyn article discusses changing global demographics and other factors that the author describes as contributing to an eventual ascendancy of Muslims in the ‘developed world’, a prospect that the author fears for various reasons described in the article. The writing is polemical, colourful and emphatic, and was obviously calculated to excite discussion and even offend certain readers, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

Overall, however, the views expressed in the Steyn article, when considered as a whole and in context, are not of an extreme nature as defined by the Supreme Court in the Taylor decision. Considering the purpose and scope of Section 13 (1), and taking into account that an interpretation of s. 13 (1) must be consistent with the minimal impairment of free speech, there is no reasonable basis in the evidence to warrant the appointment of a Tribunal.

For these reasons, this complaint is dismissed.

And Maclean’s official statement in reaction to this dismissal (linked to above), notes:

Maclean’s magazine is pleased that the Canadian Human Rights Commission has dismissed the complaint brought against it by the Canadian Islamic Congress. The decision is in keeping with our long-standing position that the article in question, “The Future Belongs to Islam,” an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s best-selling book America Alone, was a worthy piece of commentary on important geopolitical issues, entirely within the bounds of normal journalistic practice.

The Maclean’s statement, however, also continues the indictment against the HRCs:

Though gratified by the decision, Maclean’s continues to assert that no human rights commission, whether at the federal or provincial level, has the mandate or the expertise to monitor, inquire into, or assess the editorial decisions of the nation’s media. And we continue to have grave concerns about a system of complaint and adjudication that allows a media outlet to be pursued in multiple jurisdictions on the same complaint, brought by the same complainants, subjecting it to costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to say nothing of the inconvenience. We enthusiastically support those parliamentarians who are calling for legislative review of the commissions with regard to speech issues.

The question could be raised as to why the CHRC decided to back down on this issue. Could it perhaps have anything to do with the fact that the RCMP are investigating the Commission (in regard to, among other things, hacking into a private citizen’s wireless network in order to surf white supremacist websites)? Could it be the brutal beating the Commission has taken in the media, and on the blogs? Could the Privacy Commissioner’s investigation have had anything to do with it? Could the attention being given to e.g. Bill M-446 have played a role?

The CHRC has been under a lot of pressure, and one kind of begins to suspect that they may have issued this dismissal in an effort to appear magnanimous. Personally, I don’t buy it for a second — I think they are looking to regroup, but not to fundamentally change anything about the way they operate. This is little more than skin-saving.

Still, a victory is a victory, and good news is good news. This is both, I think.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Mark Steyn links to an article that explains, in brief, the full implications of what a “guilty” ruling by either of the human rights commissions that Maclean’s magazine has yet to face:

Take a look at s. 37(2) of the BC Human Rights Code, where it says:

(2)If the member or panel determines that the complaint is justified, the member or panel
(a) must order the person that contravened this Code to cease the contravention and to refrain from committing the same or a similar contravention,

That is a mandatory injunction. An obligatory ‘cease and desist’ order. If the complainants win, the Tribunal has to order Maclean’s to stop running ‘Islamophobic’ articles. Not just articles by Mark Steyn, mind you; they have to stop running those articles period. Goodbye Barbara Amiel. Now, you might respond that Steyn wouldn’t be silenced, he would just have to pick his words more carefully. But think about it; the CIC is not just complaining about the excerpt from America Alone, but about a whole sheaf of Steyn’s articles. It’s pretty safe to assume that whatever Steyn has written about Islam in the last seven or so years would be considered offensive by the CIC. In the face of an injunction, then, he would either have to stop writing about Islam or stop obeying the dictates of his conscience as a writer.

The students may say they don’t want to silence Mark Steyn or anyone else. Their complaint, if successful, will do just that. It can do no other.

Just so. I’ve tried to make that point in interviews. The BC tribunal’s ruling will mean that I can no longer write for Maclean’s, and that Maclean’s itself will be highly circumscribed in what it can publish about the relationship between Islam and the west. In other words, on one of the central questions facing the world today, the editorial decisions of Canada’s largest news weekly will be determined by a British Columbia “court”.

My career in Canada will be formally ended next month.

These human rights complaints — in fact, virtually every human rights complaint filed under Section 13 of human rights law in Canada (and its provincial equivalents) — are about censorship, and nothing more. They can have no other outcome (and given the nearly 100% conviction rate of the HRCs, one could almost surely say that they will have no other outcome).

And in this great debate, that’s the line in the sand, on one (and only one) side of which each of us must fall. Either we oppose censorship in any and every circumstance, or we acknowledge that it is sometimes/often/commonly necessary. If we place ourselves with the former camp, we are on the side of freedom (which, unfortunately but necessarily, we must share with some less-than-savoury characters; but who said freedom was free from being, occasionally, ugly?). If we place ourselves with the latter camp, we abdicate any and all moral authority with which to complain, in the future, should someone else end up facing the prospect of being legally silenced by the CHRC or one of its provincial parallels.

Perhaps it will be a rock star whose music is much loved. Perhaps it will be, as someone else I read this morning suggested, a public figure such as David Suzuki. Whomever it is, let it be understood that the power of the HRCs, and their continued corruption and abuse of power, will not end when the Mark Steyns, Marc Lemires, and Ezra Levants of the world have been duly dispatched — the field of targets will not have been narrowed then; it will only find need to shift leftward.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

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.
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Today only!

That’s right — any Mark Steyn merchandise or books purchased today will mean money donated to the legal defence funds of Canadian bloggers Ezra Levant, Kathy Shaidle, Kate MacMillan, Mark and Connie of Free Dominion, and National Post columnist Johnathan Kay against the lawsuit filed by Richard Warman. These men and women have been vocal, vital advocates in the cause of freedom of expression rights in Canada, and both need and deserve our support, O Reader.

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Mike — or Mike Savant, as his email address would suggest his full name is (don’t worry, Mike, I won’t post it here) — writes in to “clarify” the “facts” of the complaint filed against Mark Steyn and magazine.

I think many people do not understand why a complaint was filed against Macleans Magazine. The following YouTube link provides an interview from Khurrum Awan *himself* [Oooohh...aaaah... - Ken] on the Mike Duffy Live Show explaining the facts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeenAJx-Zjk

I would encourage the reader to watch the above-linked video; it’s an interesting re-hash of things already known.

At the core of the complaint, Awan’s big beef is that he found the excerpt from Mark Steyn’s book America Alone to be “Islamophobic”, and full of errors and assertions about Islam and Muslims, and the aims of said same on the global stage. He and his compatriots demanded of Maclean’s equal space to publish a rebuttal (free from any editorial oversight) to Mr. Steyn, a demand which Maclean’s refused since — as an independent company — they are free to choose what they do and do not publish. Lacking sufficient evidence for a formal court charge of discrimination or dissemination of hatred, Awan et. al. filed a human rights complaint with four (I think it was four) different HRCs — the national one, and three provincial tribunals as well (two of which have taken the case).

What is interesting is that, since launching this human rights complaint, Mr. Awan and his associates have had an immense amount of public exposure and media coverage, and could have — at any point — leveraged that coverage to issue their rebuttal to Mr. Steyn. True, it wouldn’t have been published in Maclean’s…but Mr. Awan could have, for example, used his time on the Mike Duffy Live show to address some of Steyn’s main points. Or he could have done it through LawIsCool, as a guest author. Or he could have started his own website (as I did some years back, for the measly sum of $7.95 USD/month) and then only appeared in public whilst wearing a shirt with the URL of said website emblazoned on it. In this era of new digital media, it is ludicrously easy for someone — anyone! — to spread any message they want to.

Come to think of it, Mr. Awan enjoys the backing and (presumably) the financial support of the Canadian Islamic Congress. I wonder, for a moment, what the CIC could accomplish if its president, Mohamed Elmasry, took a break from claiming that all Israelis over the age of 18 are legitimate targets for suicide bombers and focused the energy and financial resources of his organization into the creation of an alternative to Maclean’s, in the same spirit of entrepreneurship that led to the founding of Maclean’s a century ago. This is the West, this is a (relatively) free country — if you want to say something, found your own damn magazine and publish it! This sort of thing could have been immensely beneficial! Just think: a vibrant, active, well-written (well, not if Mr. Awan was doing the writing, but there’s always hope) magazine for the Muslim community in Canada, or maybe for all Canadians to find something in.

But did Mr. Awan and his compatriots do any of those things?

Nope.

Instead, they went whining to the Canadian Human Rights Commission and are currently demanding that, because a privately-run newsmagazine didn’t cave in to their (unreasonable) demands, they receive a formal apology in the form of several thousands of dollars.

Now, as comprehensive a reply to Mike as all the above is, there is one even more curious, and potentially amusing, detail. Binky has also written a response to someone named Mike (curious, that) who also very helpfully provided a YouTube link to Mr. Awan on the Mike Duffy show:

Sorry, Mike: ZZzzzz. We could rehash Khurrum’s stale pitch almost verbatim, and he’s had lots of places to explain his point. What’s still lacking from the chatter from the Four Elsmasry Puppets is the specific, serious, and substantial content of an ‘answer’ to Steyn & Company as published in Macleans over the past few years. As of yet, there’s just no ‘There’ there.

Yeah, we get it: you really, really, really disagree. What became clear from the comments of two Osgoode Hall students was their apparent expectation that the comfy-blanket of the modern university– speech-codes, tribunals, one-sided arguments and leftward intellectual life with no serious engagement with differing views, or the vast history of Western Civilization out of which everything arose– that the comfy-blanket should be imposed on the entire country and population of Canada, at least in the matter of criticism of Islam, or of ideas and institutions beloved by the left.

Perhaps you actually are all nice sincere diversitarian law-kids who just dream of, like, an inclusive tolerant enforced Trudeaupia, a heaven on earth– but that crazy world-view is not a solution: that’s part of the problem.

However, within your own religious community there are those who would use you to unmake Canada and rebuild the pieces in an exclusively Islamic shape. That the political left and aggressive Islamists cooperate to do so is a bad thing– and to be pointed out by Macleans columnists and many, many authors and commentators around the world, where free presses and free speech allow it– well, that’s a rather helpful and timely warning as to what is NOW happening in Europe (the motherland of Western Civilization), and what is slowly beginning to happen in North America.

As the nearly-silenced Pentagon expert Maj. Stephen Coughlin points out, this is not hate-speech or fear-mongering, but to simply describe what world-wide jihadis actually say, plan, hope for, and are all about. If the Osgoode 4 and Dr. Elmasry actually stand with Western Civ on this one, they’d do better to leave Macleans & Steyn & [Ezra Levant] alone, and get to work exposing and correcting those truly hateful elements within their own community who do espouse silencing critics, and worldwide religious war, here and abroad.

Personally, I think it’s decent advice. And Mike, just one thing, speaking to you personally: if you’re the same Mike that Binky has already dispensed with, and given what you and I both doubtless know about the essentially instantaneous nature of the interconectivity of the blogosphere…what are you doing going after the smaller blogs, when the bigger ones have already pegged you for the fool that you are? Did you think I wouldn’t be a regular reader of a blog that has now linked to this one a dozen times, and for which I have composed banner images? Did you think I wouldn’t make the connection? And did you think I wouldn’t instantly recognize just how foolish your attempt at persuasion was?

Update: Oh. My. God. Mike…could you at least have tried? Do I mean so little to you? There you go flirting with that tramp Binky, and when he spurns you, you turn around and send me exactly the same love note? But seriously, dude…are you even trying?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

…a Supreme Court of Canada decision sentenced millions of the unborn to a most horrible death. The Henry Morgentaler decision was Canada’s Roe vs. Wade…but unlike in that case, the pro-abortion personality in the Canadian equivalent has not since flipped to the pro-life side.

Since the 1988 Supreme Court of Canada decision vindicating Morgentaler and decriminalizing all manner of abortion, a political chill descends whenever the subject is broached. In the last federal election, Paul Martin exploited the fear of an abortion ban to demonize Stephen Harper, who pointedly distanced himself from any challenge to the existing non-law. And when Conservative MP Rob Merrifield suggested pregnant girls might benefit from pre-abortion counselling, feminists tore a strip off him, urging women not to vote Conservative on that basis alone. Other politicians took the hint and kept shtumm.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease on abortion, it seems, and not the 68% of Canadians who in a 2004 poll said they wanted legal protection for fetuses at some point in their development. Most Canadians are uncomfortable with the complete ban on abortion (including cases of rape, incest and severe fetal deficit) advocated by ardent pro-lifers, and as well with the complete lack of constraints on abortion we now “enjoy.”

Canadians should be informed that the Morgentaler decision produced disturbing outcomes. But there is no public forum to discuss them. Here are two of the many resulting media orphans:

1) Young women today are more careless about becoming pregnant, indicating an increasing psychological desensitization to the creation of new life. For example, in 1988, 16% of pregnancies in Quebec, Canada’s most abortion-friendly province, resulted in abortion. Today, 30% do. Girls are using abortion — tax-funded and easily available — as an alternative form of birth control. No morally aspirational society should feel complacent abetting this trend.

2) A less predictable outcome (in Canada, at any rate) was, with access to early and improved ultrasound technology, the use of abortion for gender selection — a popular strategy amongst cultural groups that privilege male children. If even the women’s rights-obsessed Morgentaler balks here — “It seems a bit awkward to eliminate a fetus on the basis of gender,” he said in an interview — there can’t be many who would support it, or at least not on the basis of women’s rights. Yet it remains perfectly legal.

Abortion is like medicare: Both need a policy change, but for no logical reason an old template has evolved into such a sacred national cow that their respective ideological guardians are able to drown out reasonable voices.

The average progressive does not believe in open dialogue about the abortion issue, and for good reason — open dialogue about the issue inevitable favours those who oppose the practice of abortion as immoral and murderous. There is simply no way to sidestep the fact that at its core, what the abortion issue is really about is whether or not, and (if so) at what stage(s) of development, it is considered legal for one human being to kill another.

For that is the plain truth about abortion. There is little point in denying — absent any religious consideration, mind — that the gestating child within the womb of a woman is, biologically, both of the species homo sapiens and genetically distinct from either of its parents. That is simply a more complex way of saying that the unborn are human. Likewise, the unborn are alive in almost every case, for in almost every case in which one is born the baby turns out to be alive (and, usually, quite vocally so). Abortion, then, in terminating the existence of the unborn, is killing a living human being.

But that is not the only way in which the abortion issue can be shown to be the horror that it is when the discussion about it is open and honest. Two more examples can be found above: the idea of “safe, legal, and rare” has been shown, in most cases, to be little more than a lie, while in many places around the world (even here in Canada), abortion is used to the detriment of women. Red China is the easiest example, where approximately 116 male children are born for every 100 female children (if I do remember the statistics from America Alone correctly) — and a part of the reason why this happens is because Chinese parents prefer their one allowed child to be male, and so abort any pregnancy in which the child is female. The same happens a bit further south, in places on the Indian sub-continent. And the same happens here.

But of course, progressives do not care to discuss this. They instead cling to the tired platitude that the ability to choose to have an abortion is “a woman’s right”. But to have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing that thing, and I think that is certainly true in the case of abortion. And indeed, bearing that in mind, and bearing in mind that the right of my fist to swing ends just shy of the right of my friend’s nose to occupy a point in space, perhaps we need to re-think whether women really have the right to choose to end the life of a living human being who is related to, but genetically distinct, from them, regardless of said human being’s current place of residence.

Apparently, Lady Black was hauled before it back in 1978. Then, as is the case now with the likes of Mark Steyn and , there was no good reason for it.

The Manitoba and the Ontario human rights commissions had complained about an article I had written for on the “British disease.” The U.K. was lurching from crisis to crisis with strikes that left bodies unburied and bread unbaked. I had used the word “Huns” to explain British apathy as in “the Huns are no longer at the gate.” The word was clearly used in a historical context, but to no avail. In the bowels of Manitoba, a lobby group of professional grievance collectors found solace for my wounding word in Canada’s up-to-date human rights legislation. I was, wie schrecklich, slagging off all German Canadians. After a bout of correspondence I saw both HRCs off but not before they had tried to get me censored, possibly fired, and all behind my back. Fortunately, then-editor of Maclean’s Peter C. Newman felt I ought to be made aware of their complaints.

Cut to 2008 with Maclean’s being asked to respond to complaints issued by various HRCs about an excerpt it published from the book America Alone by columnist Mark Steyn. It makes me nostalgic. The magazine’s plight occurs on the 30th anniversary of my similar encounter with the same Thought Police (the gemstone is pearls). The charges against me then were as empty as the ones now brought against Maclean’s, though as Steyn pointed out last week, the poison is not in the truth or falsehood of the complaint but the notion that it is the business of government to judge it.

In the balmy days of the seventies, human rights commissioners and their allies who monitored one’s “errant” views were mainly ultra-liberals, people with whom you could, more or less, have a reasoned discussion. Indeed, I cranked out my 1980 book Confessions as a response to Rabbi Gunther Plaut’s questions at that luncheon about my opposition to the very existence of HRCs. Many of those old-time liberals are having spots of amnesia now about their early support for the HRCs, but never mind. One was reasonably safe in their hands then, even though you knew as surely as night follows day that the safety was temporary and their hands would not be the last ones censoring ideas.

As victimhood became fashionable, unsurprisingly Canada’s Thought Police expanded. A few years later when I was editor of the Toronto Sun, city taxpayers footed the bill for an investigation into the newspaper’s alleged “racism.” I was cleared personally, but Sun columnist McKenzie Porter was not. Porter, an elderly British writer who yearned for the lost grandeur of the British Empire, and I had an understanding: I spiked any overly offensive columns of his but promised never to edit him. This seemed to work to his and readers’ satisfaction if not Toronto’s city hall.

Today, Canada’s human rights industry flourishes in a barren landscape where there are no proper rules of evidence, legal procedures or public and press scrutiny. Tribunals can cause you to lose your job and fine you. Fail to answer a witness summons and you face contempt of court � possible imprisonment. Under this scenario, Steyn could become a fugitive from Canadian justice in his New Hampshire home, where he and “Tiffany” (his assistant, long rumoured to actually be Mark avoiding phone conversation with editors) could survey the plains, shotgun ready, for red-coated policemen riding over the hills. Mark has long counselled my husband to stay out of the clutches of the American judicial system. I offer him refuge in Palm Beach.

…

Whether stupid or prejudiced, true or false, suppressing opinion is always bad. Seven of my columns are used as examples of Islamophobia in the report. I want to sue the authors myself for defamation, but my view of their view should not be actionable. One would think most Canadians intelligent enough to grasp that freedom doesn’t mean you are free only to express nice thoughts. Freedom is not a maple-syrup nut cake to be sliced up: you cannot have some freedom of speech or freedom of speech only for those people you like. By definition, freedom is indivisible. It should be so simple really. The thing speaks for itself.

Relatedly:

This is a man who knows that of which he speaks, having faced the star chamber kangaroo court Alberta Human Rights Commission himself.

“Human rights laws, designed as a shield, are now being used as a sword,” [Bishop Fred Henry] wrote in a December 31 email from Calgary, in what he described as an increasingly “bizarre” series of events.

The recent filing of human rights complaints against magazine for an excerpt of Mark Steyn’s bestselling book America Alone, and against Catholic Insight magazine for articles outlining Catholic teaching on homosexuality, are only the latest in a series of cases that have highlighted freedom of speech and religious freedom.

The Catholic Civil Rights League (CCRL) described the Steyn and Catholic Insight cases as part of an “ongoing pattern in the use of human rights commissions to penalize the expression of unpopular opinions,” in a December 31 alert to members entitled, ‘Stop the use of human rights commissions in free speech cases.’

“The League is concerned about this disturbing trend, since it often involves opinions based on religious beliefs,” said CCRL executive director Joanne McGarry.

Henry agrees, stating: “The issue is rarely true Discrimination but rather censorship and enshrinement of a particular ideology through threats, sanctions and punitive measures.”

In 2005, Henry faced two separate complaints to the Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC) for allegedly discriminatory comments in a pastoral letter on marriage. “I challenged one by one the standard arguments used to support same sex unions as the equivalent of traditional marriage,” Henry stated.

Though the complaints were eventually dropped, Henry described the process as “fundamentally flawed,” and closely resembling “kangaroo courts.” Among those flaws, he maintained, were the “presumption of guilt until you can prove your innocence; the open ended time lines for dealing with a complaint; and unjust incurring of financial expenditures for the defendant in the simple event of a complaint being lodged.”

The AHRC covers the complainants’ costs.

Human rights commissions (HRCs) were set up to protect people against discrimination when it came to housing, employment or services. Henry contended that existing human rights legislation needed to be interpreted very broadly to allow the complaints against him.

“It was surprising that the Commission accepted the complaints on the basis of ‘goods/services refused and terms of goods/services,’ as there was no explanation as to what constituted goods or services refused, or their terms,” Henry said. “Nor did the complainants set out the manner of discrimination in other areas.”

He added: “I believe these complaints were an attempt to intimidate and silence me.”

As is becoming increasingly clear, the various advocates for the establishment of Canada’s human rights commissions — at a national and provincial level — must have either been absolutely daft to not realize that such bodies would become instruments for censorship and the regulation/elimination of in Canada, or must have had that censorship and jackbooting of freedom as their goal. Out of charity, one desires to assume they were merely daft, but in the end the outcome is the same either way.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)

Time was when “human rights” was a truly large and noble idea. I associate the concept with, and its birth out of, some of the great horrors of the past century: the bestial depredations of the Nazis, their ‘race science’ and death camps, the horrors of unbridled totalitarianism - under which, the whim of the rulers was sufficient to mutilate, torture and destroy lives, collectively or individually - send millions to arctic slave camps - the debasement of internal exile and psychiatric rehabilitation.

More currently, I associate real human rights advocacy with the case of a young Saudi woman, who very recently was repeatedly gang-raped - and then she � the victim - charged and sentenced by a Saudi court to 200 lashes and six months in jail for being in a car with a male not her relative. The sentence, after international protest, was voided — but that young woman�s case represents a real example of the violation of basic human rights.

What I do not associate with this deep and noble concept is getting ticked off by something you read in a magazine - or for that matter hear on television - and then scampering off to a handful - well, three - of Canada’s proliferate human rights commissions - seeking to score off the magazine: this is what four Osgoode Hall law students and graduates — a very definition of the ‘marginalized’ — under the banner of the Canadian Islamic Congress have done after reading an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s America Alone in . The complainants read the article as �flagrantly islamophobic�.

Maclean�s magazine? Well, we all know what a hotbed of radical bigotry and vile prejudice Maclean�s magazine has been. Go away � for what seems like a century Maclean�s was no more “offensive” (that is the can�t term of choice these days) than a down comforter on a cold day and if Mark Steyn’s article offended them: so what? Not every article in every magazine of newspaper is meant to be a valentine card addressed to every reader’s self-esteem. Maclean�s published a bushel of letters following the article’s appearance: some praised it: others scorned it. That’s freedom of speech: that’s democracy: that’s the messy business we call the exchange of ideas and opinions.

But where does the BC Human Rights Commission, the Ontario Human Rights Commission, the Canadian Human Rights Commission come into this picture? Has anyone been publicly whipped? Has someone or some group been hauled off to a gulag? Is there a race frenzy sweeping the land?

Why is any human rights commission inserting itself between a magazine, a television show, a newspaper and the readers or viewers? Is every touchy, or agenda-driven sensibility now free to call upon the offices of the state and free of charge - to them - not their targets - to embroil them in “justifying” their right to write and broadcast as they see fit? The Western Standard magazine, during the so-called Danish cartoon crisis got hauled before the Alberta Human Rights Commission for publishing the cartoons that all the world was talking about. The action drained the magazine�s resources - but it was free to the complainant.

Meantime real human rights violations - threats of death against Salman Rushdie, riots after the cartoons, death threats against the artists, the persecution of Hirsi Ali, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, neither inspire nor receive human rights investigations.

Maclean�s and its columnists - especially of late - are an ornament to Canada’s civic space. They should not have to defend themselves for doing what a good magazine does: start debate, express opinion, and stir thought. And most certainly they should not have to abide the threatened censorship of any of Canada’s increasingly interfering, state appointed and paradoxically labeled human rights commissions.

Relatedly:

Update: Kathy Shaidle has this linked as well, and her added commentary is well worth repeating:

PS: the site accepts comments, and some are quite good. However, note the number of Muslims — who still can’t spell — calling for a less “one sided” approach to the story yet again.

Once again: why don’t you people just start your own damn magazine, first of all, instead of acting like parasites. (Professional tip: when you do, hire a proofreader for whom English is his first language…)

If you want to be treated respectfully, start by having the self-respect to quit all this crying and begging.

Second, there is no such creature as the “rights of communities to participate in media discussions” (??) except in your fevered, brainwashed minds.

Their complete refusal or inability to comprehend elementary Western concepts like “freedom of the press” and “private property” is truly sad. They wallow in hysterical victimhood, tossing around left-liberal platitudes and charges of “Islamophobia.”

That people like them are the cause of so-called “Islamophobia” escapes them completely.

God save us from these pathetic whiners. Alas in these and other ways, they are perfectly assimilated little Canadians.

In rebuttal:

Naseem Mithoowani, Khurrum Awan, Muneeza Sheikh and Daniel Simard write that “some clarifications are in order” re: The Calgary Herald’s coverage of their complaint to at least three of Canada’s many “human rights” commissions about an excerpt from my book, America Alone, published by .

So, in that spirit, let me clarify one point of their column,”Debate denied over Maclean’s Muslim article,” which ran Saturday. They cite the following quote as an “extract from Steyn’s article”: “The number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes.”

That line certainly appears in my text, but they’re not my words. Rather, they were said by a prominent Scandinavian Muslim, Mullah Krekar, to a respectable Norwegian newspaper. The imam was boasting at how Islam would outbreed Europe: “We’re the ones who will change you . . . Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children.”

This is the nub of Messrs Mithoowani, Awan, Sheikh and Simard’s complaints against Maclean’s: They’re objecting to a Canadian magazine quoting accurately the statements of leading Muslims. And at least two of Canada’s “human rights” commissions, to their shame, have accepted their absurd proposition that accurately quoting leading Muslims is somehow “Islamophobic.”

Unfortunately, Naseem Mithoowani, Khurrum Awan, Muneeza Sheikh and Daniel Simard are possessed of an at-least-decent chance of becoming high-profile lawyers, if not politicians, in this country. Of course, it comes as no susprise to see that they cannot even get their facts straight about the thing which they are complaining. To a man, they are all progressives, and if there is one thing that can be said about the Canadian progressive, it is that he (or, to be fair, she) cannot be counted upon to possess any formal understanding of reality in any objective capacity.

To Naseem Mithoowani, Khurrum Awan, Muneeza Sheikh and Daniel Simard, hurt feelings are what matter, not accuracy, reality, objectivity, or truth. And unfortunately, the Canadian Human Rights Commission has demonstrated througout its history that it agrees with them. Which is why it needs to go; no country can survive having a legal body at work within it that pronounces judgements and issues punishments solely on the basis of whether someone “feels” upset/threatened/hurt by someone else.

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