Time Immortal

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.

Erf writes in, in response to this article:

I think the people who point out that honour killing comes from pre-Islam cultures are trying to keep this from tainting all Muslims everywhere. Moreover, they’re saying that it’s not Islam that causes this — we shouldn’t be blaming the religion for this insanity. I think there’s something to that, trying to separate correllation from causation.

That said, the people involved in these honour killings are from more than just Pakistan — there was the Egyption immigrant family you mentioned a while ago, for example. So it’s broad. Maybe some sort of insane pseudo-fundamentalist sub-religion who never grew out of “the old ways”? (The distinction between “Muslim” and “Fundamentalist Muslim” is a very important one, and shouldn’t be dropped; otherwise we encourage people to lump us in with the people trying to take science out of schools.)

On one hand, I agree.. I think there is a legitimate reason to point out that honour killings are a cultural practice which emerged prior to the promulgation of the Islamic faith, and which are practiced in other regions of the world besides those in which Islam is the majority demographic. Likewise, I agree — at least in principle — that where the association between honour killing and Islam exists (which is a very broad range of areas, unfortunately), one can generally look at the particular strain of Islam (because Islam, like Christianity, has many divisions within it) in that region and perceive that it is of a more radicalized bent.

But regarding the first point, I think of something I wrote a short while back: “In Christian tradition, the early church didn’t necessarily celebrate religious holidays in the way they are traditionally celebrated now. Christmas trees and Easter eggs are two easy examples of things that began outside of Christian tradition which were absorbed into, and in essence ’sanctified’ by, historical Christianity, and are now recognizable as symbolistic components of the Christian observance of these religious holidays. Within…Catholicism, vast amounts of philosophy were absorbed directly out of Greek tradition, and as a result the Church was able to formally articulate one of its most important teachings: transubstantiation and the Real Presence of Christ in the celebration of the Eucharist.

Religions are not static entities (or, at least, shouldn’t be), but are instead dynamic things which adopt and (hopefully!) sanctify certain practices from the cultures from which they emerge (or into which they extend). This has certainly been the case with Christianity. Should it come as any surprise that Islam — if not entirely, then at least certain local variants of it — has potentially done the same?” As unfortunate as it is to say, I think it is reasonably safe to assume that these more “radicalized” strains of Islam have, in fact, absorbed honour killing into their core theology, and promote the practice on that basis.

More interestingly, though, is the analogy to the fundamentalist Christians. While there is something of a parallel that can be drawn, it should be noted that mainstream Christians are, typically, very willing to speak out against the more ridiculous things that fundies do. What is more, mainstream Christians often do speak out in exactly that way. The “science in the classroom” issue is a good example of this, actually, and for every Christian who argues in print that evolution is the devil’s tool, there are other Christians who will step in — often with some serious academic firepower at their disposal — to call B.S.

(Of course, it serves to note that whereas fundamentalist Christians typically just make Christians look ignorant and anti-science, fundamentalist Muslims often have slightly more…ah…murderous aspirations — in this regard, the parallelism in the comparison mostly fails.)

The same is true, to a degree, on the Islamic side, but with a difference. Whereas in Christianity, the fundies are a (vocal) minority, in Islam it is beginning to look like the fundamentalist strains are becoming the mainstream strains, while more moderate theological schools are being pushed to the side.

Islam is divided into Shia and Sunni variants, each of which has a powerful, oil-rich nation that serves as a kind of driving force for the promulgation and expansion of radicalized strains of each. Sunni Islam is the religion of Saudi Arabia, and that nation’s oil money gets used to finance mosques and schools around the world…mosques and schools in which the Saudi interpretation of the Islamic faith (a very ‘fundamentalist’ interpretation, to be sure) is what is taught. Shia gets its drive and financing from Iran, but the net outcomes are the same. In either case, the strains of Islam that are becoming more and more common in the world, driven as they are by the absurd revenues that Iran and Saudi Arabia are making off of the sale of oil, are the fundamentalist ones.

And increasingly, we are seeing that more moderate voices are being either marginalized or, in a lot of cases, actively hounded out of their faith communities. That’s certainly the fate that befell Canada’s own Tarek Fatah, and his story is hardly an uncommon one.

It would be easy to suggest that this is just some insane little cultish interpretation of the religion that does not speak for the whole. But, as was noted, a lot of the problems that this fundamentalist Islam causes are found in many different places throughout the world. That suggests that the radicalism itself is as broad in scope as the range of places in which things like Islam-linked honour killings occur. Which makes sense — that , in Islam, is the school of thought behind which the big money can be found. It has drive, and it has ambition, and it is becoming (I think) the norm, rather than the bizarre little exception to the rule (unlike in Christianity).