Time Immortal

And we have the HRCs to thank for it.

…Bradley Watson, professor of American and Western political thought at Pennsylvania’s St. Vincent College, said he will present a petition calling for the American Political Science Association (APSA) to re-evaluate its selection of Toronto for its 2009 conference at this year’s annual meeting, taking place over the Labour Day weekend in Boston.

His protest has garnered support from dozens of professors across the United States, including prominent scholars such as Princeton University legal philosopher Robert P. George and Harvard University’s Harvey Mansfield.

…Mr. Watson said that professors signing the petition are concerned that recent human rights commission investigations into Maclean’s and Western Standard magazines over articles concerning Islam, and the conviction of pastor Stephen Boisson, who was ordered by Alberta’s human rights tribunal in May to cease publicizing criticisms of homosexuality, suggest that professors risk being chilled from discussing important academic subjects, or ending up in legal trouble. Mr. Watson said he plans to distribute hundreds of buttons to attendees at the Boston conference reading “Toronto 2009, Non!”

What a right mess, yet no more than Canada deserves for allowing the travesty of the HRCs to continue, unimpeded, within its borders.

It should be noted, too, that these professors are not exactly likely to be raving right-wing nutbags; most are very notable for their left-wing views. But that’s how absurd the situation here has really become: American liberals, even the very liberal sorts who teach in places like Harvard and Princeton, want nothing at all to do with Canada because of our lack of respect for the concept of freedom of expression.

God help us, eh?

Apparently, the Alberta Human Rights Commission has no less than fifteen people working on Ezra Levant’s case.

And yet, surprisingly, not one of them realized that Shirlene McGovern — in her questions for Syed Soharwardy (the Calgary imam who filed the human rights complaint against Levant for the latter’s publication of the Muhammed cartoons) — doesn’t even know which cartoons Levant’s magazine, the Western Standard, re-printed, nor does she apparently know what the twelve original cartoons of Muhammad actually are.

No, really.

Here are McGovern’s questions for Soharwardy. There’s a lot of crap in there, and I’ll try to comment on it all later. But focus on question 10:

…[image]…

She talks about the “most offensive” Danish cartoon — the one with “mohammed as animal/pig; sex with animal”.

But no such cartoons were ever published by a Danish newspaper, nor by our magazine. Here are the original 12 cartoons exactly as published in Denmark: we chose eight of those.

What McGovern is referring to are three cartoons fabricated by Danish imams, designed to be as offensive as possible, in order to whip up ignorant Muslim mobs that might not get sufficiently excited about the actual Danish cartoons.

In other words, McGovern was duped by jihadist propaganda. Soharwardy must have smiled like a cat when he heard her regurgitate those lies as if they were truths.

Does anyone else find it alarming that one of the people charged with deciding what is perhaps the most important case of the right to freedom of expression that has ever come up in Alberta is so terrifyingly unfamiliar with even the most basic facts of the case itself?

Ezra Levant’s case before the Alberta Human Rights Commission has passed its 800th day — that is, it has been over 800 days since Syed Soharwardy first filed his human rights complaint against Levant. That complaint was, of course, in regard to the publication of the Muhammed cartoons in the Western Standard magazine (now defunct).

Eight hundred days!

So we’re at more than 800 days since the HRC first received Soharwardy’s complaint.

So you can imagine my amusement today when my lawyer told me that the HRC asked him for a copy of my videotape of that interrogation.

Uh, what have they been doing these past four months? Did Officer McGovern not take notes?

…

As the Alberta HRC boasts in its annual report, its case load of complaints has actually fallen by 15% in the past year. Albertans just aren’t bigoted enough for them, it seems. But it takes the HRC 7% longer to dispose of complaints — up from 382 days to 410 days. That’s a net productivity decline of 22% in a year. And their goal for next year: 435 days. Yes, the Alberta HRC actually wants to be less “efficient”.

(Imagine if the HRC was actually being used for its original purposes of helping people, say, kicked out of an apartment in wintertime because of their race. What good would “help” a year later do? But the HRCs long ago stopped pretending to be shields to protect people — now they’re swords to attack people for the crime of political correctness.)

So the average case takes 410 days. I’m at 800 days and running — and my formal hearing hasn’t even been scheduled. The only way I know my interrogators are still alive is that they called my lawyers to get a copy of my videos.

(Could you imagine if a real police officer grilled a criminal suspect for 90 minutes, and then four months later sheepishly called up the suspect and asked sweetly for a copy of that suspect’s notes on the interrogation? Imagine the peals of laughter!)

You know, I wonder if perhaps there isn’t a point to this delay, if it isn’t some kind of tactic on the part of the HRCs? Attrition, perhaps? We know that people called to account before a human rights commission have to pay their own legal fees, so could the AHRC be using this delay to try and magnify Levant’s costs, in the hope that he’ll eventually be crushed under the financial burden of defending his good name, and thus give in?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Stephane Dion is trying to stifle Liberal Party MP Dr. Keith Martin and his private members bill, M-446, which would (if passed) see Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act struck down. That’s the section of the Act that basically informs the creation of the various human rights commissions (HRCs) in Canada, and which gives them their mandate for Censorship.

His concern, and ours, was sparked by the recent uproar over human-rights commission cases brought against magazine and Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant over publication of material some Canadian Muslims found offensive.

How sad that Liberal leader Stéphane Dion has asked [Keith Martin] to withdraw his motion. Whatever brand of politics Dion is playing with freedom of speech and of the press, he should stop until he can answer noted civil libertarian Alan Borovoy. The problem with using human-rights commissions in free-speech cases, Borovoy notes, is that unlike in the Criminal Code’s hate-speech law, “there is no requirement for an intent to foment hatred and no defence for truth or reasonable belief.”

Is free speech worth so little, Mr. Dion?

Using this blunderbuss of intimidation against any group that feels offended by anything will chill free expression in the media and public affairs. Instead of trying to block Martin’s proposal, [Stephane Dion] should get behind it.

Martin got the issue exactly right: “We have laws against hate crimes, but nobody has a right not to be offended.” The Human Rights Act section in question “is being used in a way that the authors of the Act never envisioned.”

Censorship of does not belong in Canada. Section 13 of the Human Rights Act is not only an affront to the human rights of every Canadian, but it antithetical to the concept of a free, democratic, Western nation. It has to go.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

All of this is a lengthy preamble to something I’ve been thinking about these past weeks: a legal defence fund for people who are vulnerable to being blown over by Kinsellan huffing and puffing. The National Post and Maclean’s don’t need help, but most bloggers do. My observation is that bloggers make defamation law errors very frequently — not that they engage in real defamation often, but that they overreact to the first whiff of gunpowder, and cower before any schmuck with a lawyer’s letter, because they do not know their defences under defamation law, and even if they did, they feel they can’t afford to exercise them.

The point here is not to oppose all defamation suits against bloggers; on occasion, bloggers will be in the wrong, and the right response is to clarify or apologize. Unlike human rights inquisitions — which are always immoral — some complaints against bloggers will have merit. The point, rather, will be to protect bloggers against political attacks masquerading as defamation threats. And that’s what should make this task less enormous than it might sound: if my experience at the Western Standard is any guide, almost all of the work will be merely fending off folks who were angry enough to spend $500 to get a lawyer to draft a demand letter, but have neither the legal case nor the financial resources to file a proper statement of claim, let alone run a trial.

It is my anecdotal observation that the preponderance of such threats come from the domestic left or Islamic fascists, and I imagine that most of the bloggers who will need to be protected will come from the conservative side of the spectrum. But not all; at the magazine, we received demand letters from provincial Tories upset with our coverage of a scandal. And I can think of at least one Liberal blogger whose case — not defamation, but media law nonetheless — I’d love to take.

I would imagine that such a defence fund would be financed partly through the pro bono contributions of defamation lawyers like myself, and partly through dues paid by bloggers into a fund — say, a dollar a month. I imagine it would be a non-profit corporation, overseen by a board scrutinizing revenues and expenses. There would have to be clear rules of when to take an engagement — a written “insurance policy”, including rules to avoid the moral hazard that insurance creates.

Of course, the larger threat is not nuisance defamation suits, for which the legal system has built-in suppresants ranging from the plaintiff’s own legal fees and disbursements to the commendable Canadian rule that the loser pays a portion of the winner’s costs. The larger threat is human rights commissions of the sort that have gone after Mark Steyn, Free Dominion, and others. These are rarer than defamation threats, so far, but they are far more worrisome. I think we need to wait a few more months to see how the current media blowback against commission bullying plays out.

There’s not much more to say that Mr. Levant doesn’t already say here. It’s a good idea, methinks, especially in these uncertain times when the typical response of progressives to reasonable criticism of their ideas is to accuse one of being a bigot.

As the reader may be aware, Ezra Levant has had a run-in with the Alberta Human Rights Commission over the publication of the Muhammed cartoons, which emerged as a controversy from the moment of their first publication back in Denmark in 2005. Ezra Levant’s now-defunct magazine, the Western Standard, published the cartoons in the interests of…you know…actually showing the Reader just exactly what it was that was causing all the rioting and violent invective overseas.

And so we’re clear, here’s the cartoons themselves:

The publication of these pictures, many of them little more than childish scribbles that are much more pitiable — for the obvious lack of talent behind them — than they are offensive, was legitimate within the rights and freedoms that the UN purportedly grants all people of the world, which the EU supposedly recognizes. One drawing, in particular, is a very accurate commentary on the relationship of European artists and Islam (that would be the picture of the cartoonist drawing a little scribble on his paper whilst fearfully looking over his shoulder). Most of the artists of these Danish cartoons are now in hiding, their fear of ending up like Theo van Gogh very real and very justified.

That’s a huge story, and one would think that the only way to report on it accurately would be to begin by reprinting the cartoons, to provide context for the reader. And this is all the Western Standard did.

For that ‘crime’, a radical, Saudi-trained imam in Calgary — Syed Sohawardy — filed a complaint with the demanding an apology from Levant. (Point of interest: In his complaint, Sohawardy even makes the claim that he is descended directly from Muhammad.)

Of course, these sorts of things take time to happen, and it was only in the last week that Levant had his day before the officer of the AHRC. Ever articulate, and ever in fine form, below is his closing argument.

He says some pretty powerful, and defiant, stuff. It’s hard not to feel proud to be a Canadian standing in solidarity with someone like Levant:

I do not want to be excused from this complaint because I was reasonable, because it was not the government’s authority to tell me whether or not I’m reasonable. If I commit a crime with words, which is possible — fraud, a tort like defamation — then the government has a role. But political and religious debate are not the proper province of human rights commissions. They have exceeded their original mandate, they have strayed far, and they are tampering in illegal ways with fundamental rights. It is my hope that this matter is not dismissed. It is my hope that this complaint is accepted, that it goes to a hearing, and that I happen to appear before the most fascist of the panelists — some thug down in Lethbridge named Lori Andreachuk. I hope I appear in front of her, and I hope she’s having a particularly angry day. I hope she hears every word in this [video], and that I call her a thug. And I hope that she convicts me, and “sentences” me to the apology that this fascist from Saudi Arabia demands of me. Because then I will take this junk out of the human rights commission, and into real courts, where eight hundred years of common law, and the Charter of Rights, and the Bill of Rights will come to my aid, and where we won’t have hearings where reporters are not allowed, and we won’t have hearings where my defence team is limited to one person, and we won’t have hearings before a divorce lawyer like Lori Andreachuk, who knows nothing about constitutional freedoms. I reserve maximum freedom to be maximally offensive, to hurt feelings as I like. I didn’t do that in this case; a few thin-skinned radicals radicals were angry. It was a reasonable publication, but that is not what should exculpate me. My rights as a free man should.

That is, I think, the most important point: his rights as a free man — a Canadian citizen — as outlined and stipulated in the should exculpate him, should set him free from the kangaroo court that is the HRC, is that such a thing as the HRC should not even exist in Canada to begin with. The human rights commissions — at both the federal and provincial levels — are illegal and an affront to the rights of every Canadian citizen, including the right to freedom of expression.

Thus:

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