Time Immortal

Can’t stand the heat, I guess:

All of this has resulted in us reviewing the situation and deciding that we will no longer be carrying content related to the case or Mark Steyn. Any legal information that appears similar to the case after this point is pure coincidental. Anyone posting under this name on other sites can assumed to be fraudulent.

The complainants in the case, of which only one is represented here in part, should be setting up their own site soon. Please hop over and take your feeding frenzy over there, and let us resume our academic discourse in peace. lawiscool

Couple of points�wow these folks fold fast. Imagine if a real QC jumped out from behind a tort and yelled �boo�. They�d settle for a buck and a half and the client could go hang.

Second, the lawiscool position, along with the �only one is represented here in part� (one wonders which part), is that the CHRC complaint was designed to allow dialogue and debate and that the meanies at Mcleans wouldn�t let the noble law students take over their magazine for an issue. Now, of course, the lawiscool wussies have discovered the mild heat of the Canadian blogosphere and are running away.

Third, all of the people who have been supporting [ (and [Ezra Levant]) deserve a pat on the virtual back. Running these wannabes out of blogtown is a Mitzvah (which I say as a social Anglican).

And, finally, too bad you could not stand the virtual heat kids - you were getting writing tips from some of the best in the business (and God knows you need them), learning a bit about advocacy in the internet sandbox and, I suspect, discovering the value of pushing back. All are useful lessons and all were offered in the spirit of a good, clean, fight.

Kathy Shaidle adds her $0.02:

We win. They lose. Their mothers are hamsters and their fathers smell of elderberries!

When the complainants set up their own site, as promised (how in the world has it taken them so long? Amateurs…) we’ll already have a months-long advantage in terms of web presence.

Now, let’s carry on, without dubious benefit of council, “sympathetic” or otherwise.

From the moment the Mark Steyn/HRC fracas began, it was clear to pretty much every level-headed blogger, of any (or no particular) political stripe, that Steyn was in the right and his accusers in the wrong. It was, furthermore, clear that all the issue really was about was censorship through the use of an (illegal) organ of the Canadian state and its (agan, illegal) ability to issue penalties of fines on those who do not hold to an approved set of opinions. And the people behind Law is Cool — especially, though not exclusively, Daniel Simard — have only too willingly made this clear by their own words.

And while they’ve been anxiously and feverishly clamouring for censorship in Canada, they have simultaneously responded to their critics by crying foul; commentator lewis whined, on this site, that a post I made “asserts that the law students have their facts wrong, where�s the proof? The students have dealt with barrage of attacks with professionalism and accuracy and they have NEVER made one incorrect factual assertion. On the other hand, Steyn, his supporters and even the media have greatly erred with the facts of the situation. You want to disagree, ridicule and fulminate their efforts, fine, but at least get your facts right!”.

That he made this comment on an article in which I excerpted from a Mark Steyn column in which Steyn explicitly gives a rebuttal to some of the facts that the law students have gotten wrong is an irony that seems to have eluded the poor man’s ability to detect it.

Canada was founded upon a principle “that the citizen is sovereign, that he is free to do as he wishes unless the state can show unambiguously that there is an overriding need to limit his liberty temporarily.” In other words, Canada was founded as a free nation — and any limits that the government imposed on the freedom of its citizens were to be, first and foremost, non-permanent. Instead, the bizarre and alien notion that the state will outline what is and is not permitted — only in terms of speech and expression at present, though in due time this will likely expand to include other aspects of life as well — has been gaining ground and popularity within this nation of ours. Canada is becoming, in essence, un-Canadian, in that what is emerging as the state of the nation now is completely inverse to the principles upon which the nation was founded.

Relatedly:

Update: Welcome, Steynians! Feel free to look around and give feedback; the blog, she is not so new.

Spot on, as is usual for Mark:

Wasn’t that the Grits’ slogan last time round? , one of the “plaintiffs” in the “case” against and a fellow whose line to the newspapers is that he only wants to start a debate, seems to be growing more comfortable with the explicit language of Censorship:

Nothwithstanding, by the nature of your position, that Muslims are the ones being portrayed as barbaric savages whilst adhering to a radical form of Islamic fundamentalism, your remarks trodden down the path of vigiliantism to justify the perfidious tactics used against legitimate (and seemingly necessary) state censorship. 

Don’t worry trying to figure out what the hell that sentence means. Look at the last ten words. I believe he’s a first-year law student but he sounds like the 1980s fag-end-of-Communism apparatchiks I used to run into in Hungary and Romania. (By the way, “fag end” is a British expression, not my latest hate crime.)

When the Facebook group of , Usher Ahmed, Super Samer, Issam Zeineddine, Khalil Jeha, Hussein Abdulbaki, Abe Rafih, Issam Khalil, and Manal Abdallah, all of Calgary, call a “piece of shit JEW” who “bends over for toonies”, Ezra shrugs it off and his pals have some sport with it.

When Kathy Shaidle, Jay Currie and I call the Law R Kewl pantywaists “nellies” and “baby barracudas“, the poor wee bairns have a nervous breakdown and say that this all this beastly unpleasantness “reinforces the need for legal intervention” and that they’re “sure there will be some bench in the future weighing in on that issue”. Bench In The Future: I think I saw that movie.

Choose your Canada. Whom do you want the Canada of tomorrow built by? The “piece of shit JEW” who  believes in even for Ali Zee and his twerps? Or the “nellies” who demand “legal intervention” and “state censorship” for every slight? Even if it were desirable for the state to regulate public (and semi-private) expression to the degree M Simard wants, it would be unsustainable. What a sad comment on the state of Canada’s allegedly Number One law school that he seems incapable of understanding this.

In a certain sense, one should be thankful for Daniel Simard’s obtuse candour: here, again, is a person openly advocating for censorship in Canada. The problem, O Reader, is that he might just have his way, which would be a terrible thing for this nation indeed.

Well, no, let me amend my statement, because in a certain sense, there is already operating within Canada an organ of the state which is responsibile for censoring those opinions which do not conform to the received wisdom of…whom, exactly? The Canadian state? Possibly…but one doubts this, because while there is (as yet) no example one could point to of a sitting member of the national government being hauled before the HRC, it is also not hard to imagine that such a case will one day take place, perhaps even in relation to legislation that the MP in question voted for, or against. Is it so hard to imagine an MP on day being hauled before the HRC, and duly fined, for the ‘crime’ of not voting in support of new legislation concerning abortion in Canada?

No, it would seem that the organ of the Canadian state which even now carries out its role as censor to the nation is answerable only to the opinions of those bureaucrats and lawyers who operate it, and to the whims and fancies of those who bring complaints before it…almost all of which, and of whom, serve only to advance the cause of special interest groups, to the disadvantage of a majority of Canadians.

And we cannot allow such a thing to keep operating — and then in flagrant violation of the stipulations of the , which Canada is purportedly governed by — if we believe that we, in Canada, are free people under the law, and/or under God.

Relatedly:

Update: Welcome, Steynians! Feel free to look around and give feedback; the blog, she is not so new.

It’s most interesting to note how LawIsCool shuts down the ability of people to put in opposing points of view in their comments section. That is their right. How would he feel if a human rights commission ordered LawIsCool to give equal time to opposing points of view after costing them a fortune in defending their right to close their comments section? He wouldn’t like it I am sure. But I guess, to paraphrase George Orwell, some people are more equal than others and their rights to freedom of speech more equal than others.

I’ve had commentators at the site tell me that the people going after Mark Steyn are the ones that have all their facts in line, and that Steyn’s would-be censors have consistently been gracious and non-insulting. We’ll leave aside, perhaps, mention of how — one of the key figures behind LawIsCool — accuses those who disagree with him of being mentally unbalanced, or how he has dismissed comments he disagrees with as ’spam’ (what wonders they have done for spam bots on the ‘Net if they can now respond to discussions on topic and coherently). And we’ll ignore how he has re-written yet other comments he has found fault with.

Deborah Gyapong�s commentary is worth reading in full, and is an excellent analysis of just the sort of people who are pursuing the case against freedom of speech in Canada. In some respects, it’s nice to know that Daniel Simard is as consistent in his denial of people their basic human right (as per the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document I am sure Simard is otherwise quite fond of) to free speech…but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s being an arsehole who is denying people their basic human right to free speech.

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

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.

Relatedly: