timeimmortal

Ian Fine, Director General and Senior General Counsel for the Dispute Resolution Branch of the Canadian Human Rights Commission has posted his opening remarks to a panel discussion put on by the Canadian Association of Journalists.

The panel topic? Human Rights and Free Speech: Where are the Limits?

Mr. Fine’s statement is lengthy, and I don’t have much time for analysis myself (I see I am not alone in this), but I wanted to remark on one thing that struck me as odd.

Mr. Fine opens with this observation:

Free speech is also a cornerstone of human rights.

He finishes thusly:

The Commission acknowledges that human rights are not static. They evolve and change with changes in society and the law.

A free and inclusive society must draw a line between free expression and hatred. They are not one in the same.

Free expression is the foundation of a free, open and inclusive society.

Hatred is the poison that erodes the tolerance and open-mindedness that must flourish in a multicultural society committed to the idea of equality.

I am tempted to sing “one of these things is not like the others,” but…instead, let’s take the closing remarks point by point.

1) Firstly, it is the opinion of the CHRC that human rights “are not static” — that is, they can be granted or revoked at the whim of those who have established themselves as overseers of human rights in Canada. Fine attempts to hide this understanding behind the acknowledgement that rights “evolve and change” as society and law change, but this is really nothing more than an artful untruth: the HRCs operate — as Ezra Levant continues to chronicle — well outside of Canadian law, and regard themselves as unaccountable to any court or investigative body.

What is even more damning about Fine’s rhetorical dodge, though, is the way it also abdicates human rights entirely. Should “changes in in society and the law” result, after successive generations of increasingly radicalized Islamic immigrants, in Canada becoming a Sharia state, by his own statement Mr. Fine has no grounds to object to the sudden and dramatic shift in human rights that such a change would effect…even as the burqas are being passed out.

In essence, this is a totalitarian sentiment wrapped in a puffy outer coating of pseudo-tolerant rhetoric. And the orator of such an irrational statement is a twit.

2) It is also the opinion of the CHRC that free people “must draw a line between free expression and hatred,” because the two are not the same. This is false: hateful or bigoted speech and non-hateful or non-bigoted speech are both forms of freedom of expression, and in fact both must be allowed if freedom of expression means anything. If people are only free to express views deemed “acceptable” in public discourse, those people do not have freedom of expression at all.

It’s Henry Ford’s car colours applied to speech, really: you can say anything you like, as long as it’s nice/happy/whatever.

Mr. Fine is ultimately confused: free societies do not need to draw a line between free expression and hatred, but between free expression and incitement to violence. Saying hateful things must be permissible, if distasteful, up to (but not including) the point where that hateful speech crosses the line to incitement to violence and other acts of racial hatred.

In other words: it has to be okay to say that e.g. Jews are reponsible for all the wars in the world. It must not be okay to say that all Jews over the age of 18 are legitimate targets. The former is an ignorant and bigoted statement, but ultimately harmless statement (apart from its potential to cause a few hurt feelings…but it is only a very deluded person who believes that he or she can save people from ever having to experience a hurt feeling). The latter is incitement to violence against a specific category of person.

3) “Free expression is the foundation of a free, open and inclusive society.” This is exactly correct (and hearkens back to Mr. Fine’s opening remark) — it’s just a pity that in the statement before, and the statement after, Mr. Fine undermines the very idea of freedom of expression in Canada. If we are truly an open, free, and inclusive society, then we even have to “include” those whose opinions we find contemptible — we have to be open to everyone, including the Zundels of the world, if in fact we value the freedom to speak that we ostensibly have.

4) Mr. Fine dismisses hatred as “a poison that erodes the tolerance and open-mindedness that must flourish in a multicultural society.” This is exactly backward: if a society is truly tolerant and open-minded, it must (by definition) allow for hatred to be expressed (within the reasonable limits imposed by laws prohibiting incitement) alongside all other viewpoints. “We don’t tolerate intolerance” is not a worldview; it is a nihilism. We must tolerate to hear expressed even those things that are intolerant, or else we must concede that what “freedom” we have to express ideas is ultimately meaningless, since we are all just following a script anyhow.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Best to read the whole thing. Interestingly, Rehmat does deny that Islam is a “Religion of peace” — although, laughably, he does claim it to be a “religion of tolerance.” That’s a rather ironic comment in light of his later comments praising Ayatollah Khomeni.

…Bishop [the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali] made another point about the way in which the growth of Islam has been used as a pretext to dethrone Christianity in British public life.

He said “It is now less possible for Christianity to be the public faith in Britain. The existence of chapels and chaplaincies in places such as hospitals, prisons and institutions of further and higher education is in jeopardy either because of financial cuts or because the authorities want “multifaith” provision, without regard to the distinctively Christian character of the nation’s laws, values, customs and culture.”

I think this probably the most worrying aspect of the problem. Diplomacy, tolerance and good sense can - in the right conditions - almost certainly bring about integration in the divided cities of this country, given enough time and a breathing space in which mass immigration is halted.

A strong Muslim minority in this country could have many good effects (I’ll come to that later). But it is important that Islam does not gain the status of Christianity, for that will mean a moral and cultural revolution of enormous force.

One of the great puzzles of modern Britain is the political left’s attitude to Islam.

Why should an atheist, sexual liberationist, morally relaxed liberal attack people such as me (as they do) for criticising Islam? They have nothing in common.

It is in fact quite simple.

The left will deal with any ally against conservative Britain. It thinks it can use Islam to further its ends, just as in the past it has allied itself with any anti-conservative, anti-patriotic cause that was going. But the alliance lasts only long enough to allow the Left to destroy what it doesn’t like.

The trouble is, Islam is more serious and determined than any of the other people whom the left have sought to use for such purposes.

And so, while intending to dethrone Christianity and make this a secular society, the left now risks helping make this an Islamic society, which - if it comes to pass - will be profoundly hostile to everything the left wants.

These are the fruits of cynicism.

As the bishop notes, and as hospital chaplaincies so clearly show, the disestablishment of Christianity has not led to the opening of Richard Dawkins reading rooms in our hospitals, but in the increasing creation of multi-faith rooms which have an increasingly Islamic character, thanks to the fervour and devotion of Muslims, and the fading faith of the Christian churches.

Likewise the removal of Christianity from the state schools may well end in the existence if an increasing number of state schools which are in effect Islamic, while the official national religion, Christianity, goes neglected and untaught.

A Christian country would have kept the chapels, and allowed and encouraged the opening of separate rooms for other faiths.

I haven’t room or time here for an argument about the respective merits of Christianity and Islam, though it would be interesting to have one.

But I finish with this point.

There is no doubt that the laws, institutions, customs, language, marital arrangements, relaxations, family structure, even the diet of this country are the result of centuries of Christianity.

If it became a Muslim country, all these things would change, some beyond recognition.

If we want that to happen, and deliberately choose it, then all well and good.

Islam, as I stated earlier, has many admirable characteristics and would surely be better than total Godlessness, but how foolish to let it happen by mistake, and then regret it when it was too late.

The militant ‘war on terror’ sorts who inveigh against Islam still seem to think that the Maxim gun, or the CIA, or MI5, or airstrikes on Afghanistan, or invasions of Iraq and Iran, will defeat this powerful ideology.

The anti-British left seem to think, by contrast, that Islam is a pet pussycat which they can toy with, set on their enemies for while, and lay aside.

Both are wrong.

If you prefer our sort of society to an Islamic one, then you have to recognise that the good things about our society come from Christianity - and the more we throw those good things aside and the more we dismantle Christianity in our state, our schools, our culture in general, the weaker our society will become and the more likely it will be to embrace Islam - which suffers from no doubts about its rightness and is not in the least bit afraid of Professor Dawkins.

When I speak of atheism as the greatest threat to human liberty, I do so for two reasons. One is that, of course, if one is to look at the lessons of history, one observes an essentially 1-to-1 correlation between the act of a regime making atheism an explicit policy of the state and the engagement of that regime in murderous, repressive actions against its own people. The gulag is, really, the most logical outcome of officially-mandated state secularism.

But second to that is that atheism, in those states which drift toward a secular character without ever officially enshrining atheism as the ‘religion’ of the land, also serves as an enabler. Faced with the hopelessness that the materialist philosophy houses at its core, many people who have grown up in essentially secular lifestyles are finding, more and more, the need to discover meaning in their existence. And we see, in Europe especially, that they are finding it, in droves, in religion. Fortunate are those that find their way into Catholicism, or even into some of the various noble and respectable forms of Protestantism that have emerged from European tradition. Less fortunate are those whose thirst for meaning finds its fulfillment in the confidence and swagger of the more radicalized forms of Islam now sweeping through that same continent, and indeed through all the world.

Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum, and the same can be said for the spiritual vacuum that the secular worldview causes in the human soul. So not only is applied atheism a threat, but so is ‘merely philosophical’ atheism, for it serves as an enabler for other violent pathologies to insert themselves into Western societies.

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

Religious groups have demanded the resignation of the Bishop of Rochester after he claimed that Islamic radicals had turned parts of Britain into “no-go” areas for non-Muslims.

The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali wrote in The Sunday Telegraph that fundamentalism had made some communities hostile to Christians and those from other faiths.

But Mohammed Shafiq, from the Ramadhan Foundation, said: “Mr Nazir-Ali is promoting hatred towards Muslims and should resign.”

Ajmal Masroor, of the Islamic Society of Great Britain, said: “It’s a distortion of reality. Our communities are far more integrated than they were 10 years ago.

“If the Church of England had an iota of fairness they would take serious action.”

But senior figures from the Church of England have backed the Bishop of Rochester’s remarks about faith and said Christians in predominantly Muslim areas could feel isolated and nervous about how to express their belief.

Related:

“It is Muslims who need to be told, or need to be shown, that this lost-dog sign, while hardly a brilliant sally of wit, is neither prosecutable as a crime nor, in the civil law, actionable. And that the hysteria that they are showing is designed of course to force everyone to go after anyone who dares to display an attitude other than one of respect, or even reverence. It is designed, that is, to force non-Muslims in a non-Muslim land to behave as circumspectly, or deferentially, toward Islam in all of its aspects, as possible. Yet when such deference and such circumspection is not demanded of us, we do not demand it of ourselves, in regard to any non-Muslim faith.

“The transparent attempt to manipulate non-Muslims is aided and abetted by the moral-preeners who choose never to quite come to grips with the collectivism and the aggressive nature of Islam.

The Reverend isn’t the only man currently in trouble in England for speaking out against the many and varied injustices that are taking place in Islamic immigrant communities in England at the moment. One blogger has even been told that he will be arrested for “stirring up racial hatred” when he returns home to Britain.

It’s sad that it has come to this, but in a way it isn’t exactly surprising. Sorry to put it so bluntly, but many Muslim immigrants — especially to European nations — come from nations that do not have the same concepts of human rights and freedoms that most Western nations do. Moreover, they come from nations where Islam is not only the majority demographic group, but is also very often the mode of governance. In “the old country”, any affront to Islam — even an imagined affront — would be met not only with the outrage of the populace, but with the full power of the law. The person giving the affront could expect to be harshly fined, whipped, or killed for the affront given.

And it would seem that many of these Muslim immigrants to Western nations come here expecting that the government will act in the same way as the one “back home” would when a perceived affront to Islam emerges from the (non-Muslim) people of the nation these immigrants have come to. Unfortunately, more often than not, Britain’s police and courts are only too happy to treat every perceived slight against Islam as a hate crime, probably because they fear the loss of their right to speak their mind freely less than they fear the murderous outcomes of protests and riots by enraged members of the immigrant communities.

In reality, the opposite approach needs to be taken, with that stereotypical British “stiff upper lip” firmly fixed in place. Every Western government must stand ready to tell those people who immigrate to a Western nation from some backwards little hellhole of a country that Western society very rightly neither recognizes nor practices government crackdowns on free speech, even free speech which is either truly insulting to some people, or else is deemed as insulting by some people (whether it actually is or not). If any immigrants to any Western nation demand that the government of that Western nation step in and control the speech of its population and regulate the open exchange of ideas, the only acceptable response by that Western government is to offer to buy the complaining immigrants plane tickets back to where they came from; such attitudes, and the people who articulate them, have no place in Western society, and quite frankly should not be allowed to remain in Western society.

What’s really tragic is that — just as is the case with Mark Steyn — the Bishop of Rochester didn’t actually say anything hateful. He did not promote hatred against Muslims. He did not demean Muslims. He simply pointed out that Muslim immigrants to Britain have created several communities which are, in essence, closed-off and unsafe for non-Muslims to enter. This is a truthful statement.

But to such people as are complaining against the Bishop, truth is itself a forbidden thing; it is the enemy of their system of power and control, and the enemy of the system of power and control under which they lived before moving to Britain. And so it is their enemy, and they decry it when they hear it.

That’s not something that can be tolerated.

Speaking of tolerance…the news article about the Bishop has some very excellent comments, including:

Along with the other atheists who have commented on this story, I stand full square with bishop.
Irrespective of any belief in a God we can have respect for the humanitarian value of the church. The relationship between church and state was settled hundreds of years ago, which is what defines this as a “Christian” country.
Newcomers may be tolerated today but they can’t expect to rewrite history.

And as refreshing as that was, here’s one better:

Well done the Bishop of Rochester for daring to put your head above the parapet. You are spot on in what you say, & it should have been said long ago. Now perhaps the No Go areas can be dealt with.
And if the Muslims who live there don’t like it they have the option of leaving the country which they so obviously despise.
It is obvious and has been for a long time that Islam & democracy are not comfortable bedfellows.

But I think Kathy found the best one (speaking of tolerance and all):

My tolerance of Islam is proportional to the number of Christian churches in Saudi Arabia.

I can get behind that kind of attitude.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: SDA)