Our columnist Rory Leishman, whose last column was about the ridiculous Human Rights Commission complaint against the brilliant Mark Steyn (whose book, America Alone, I’ve been promoting since before it was published) sent me this set of excerpts from the superb National Review online, where some of the most brilliant people including Mark Steyn write in the U.S.
Even if much of the Canadian blogosphere and mainstream media isn’t taking notice, they and we at PTBC are taking notice of the insanity that passes for “progressiveness” in Canada and its actually regressive Human Rights Commission, a freakish body (another Liberal government (1977) creation which like all big-government liberal-left creations has morphed over time into a big, ugly, regressive monster, literally ruining lives) which agreed to accept the complaint against Steyn and Maclean’s magazine by the Canadian Islamic Congress, and to actually hold hearings.
Please note that our columnist David Warren is also on this and also wrote about this, this week.
This story should be front and center among all bloggers in Canada, and in fact all Canadians—until such time as the Human Rights Commission is abolished or extremely, severely restrained in its mandate, as I have complained and demanded over and over and over and over and over and over again here at PTBC.
(From Rory Leishman to me)
Stanley Kurtz has initiated a lively exchange on the human rights complaint against Mark Steyn and Maclean’s magazine in “the corner” blog on National Review Online (see here). Among the participants are Steyn, himself, Jonah Goldberg and John O’Sullivan. Here are some of the entries.Friday, December 7:
Steynophobia [Stanley Kurtz]Late yesterday I stumbled across an article about a “human rights complaint” filed by the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) against Maclean’s, Canada’s most widely-read news magazine, for running a “flagrantly Islamophobic” excerpt from Mark Steyn’s book, America Alone. At least two Canadian Human Rights Commissions have agreed to hear these complaints. Only then did I find Steyn’s too-easily-missed late-night post from Wednesday on the controversy.
This is a big deal. The blogosphere has so far largely missed it, but this attack on Mark Steyn is very much our business. There may be an impulse to dismiss this assault on Steyn, on the assumption that it will fail, that Steyn is a big boy and can take care of himself, and that in any case this is crazy Canada, where political correctness rules, rather than the land of the free. That would be a mistake. The Canadian Islamic Congress’s war on Mark Steyn and Maclean’s is an attack on all of us. I’ll say more in a moment about how a Canadian case can reach into America, but let’s first take a look at the goings on up north.
The complaints against Maclean’s for publishing an excerpt from America Alone have been filed by several Canadian law students and by Faisal Joseph, a former crown attorney. Maclean’s published a total of 27 letters over two issues in response to Steyn’s piece–more responses than any Maclean’s cover story received over the past year. Yet when the law students demanded a longer response, Maclean’s was willing to consider it. The students then insisted that Maclean’s run a five-page article, written by an author of their choice, with no editing by the magazine. They also demanded that the reply to Steyn be a cover story, with art controlled by them, rather than the magazine. At this point, Editor-in-Chief Kenneth Whyte showed them the door, saying he would rather let Maclean’s go bankrupt than permit someone outside of operations dictate the magazine’s content.
The tiff over the excerpt from America Alone is only the tip of the iceberg. The Canadian Islamic Congress has actually accused several Canadian news outlets of Islamophobia. CIC issued a report entitled “Maclean’s Magazine: A Case Study of Media-Propogated Islamophobia,” in which at least 18 articles were said to show anti-Muslim bias. Canada’s National Post has been similarly attacked. Here, journalist Andrew Coyne explains how he was accused of endangering Muslims merely for having penned the phrase: “…the massive backlash against innocent Muslims that failed to materialize…”
Although the more liberal Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC) has criticized CIC and defended Maclean’s, it’s worth noting that CIC has managed to successfully intimidate MCC in the past. Coyne notes that a spokesman for MCC resigned his post last year when the president of the CIC accused him of “smearing Islam.” The charge of de facto apostasy left the MCC spokesman fearing for his safety.
What about the article in question–the actual excerpt from America Alone published in Maclean’s ? Read it and you’ll see that Steyn is an equal opportunity savager. Enervated Europeans come in for every bit as much criticism as jihadi terrorists–more, really. The closer to home, the tougher Steyn gets. Of all Europeans, Steyn is hardest on culturally “dead” Belgians, the country where Steyn’s mother and grandparents came from. The only really vicious insult in the piece is hurled at Steyn himself.
Keep reading this post . . .
12/07 10:20 AMSteyn Defended: HRC’s Attacked [Stanley Kurtz]
Canadian columnist, Rory Leishman, defends Mark Steyn in the London Free Press. Here are excerpts:
…Consider the implications: By the logic of the CIC’s attack on Maclean’s magazine, the owners and operators of Canadian libraries and bookstores could also be charged with violating the human rights of Muslims by making not just Steyn’s article but also his entire book widely available to Canadians throughout the country…
The problem can be traced to the overweening powers of Canada’s human rights tribunals….
the restrictions on speech in the codes were intended to apply only to communications that fostered discrimination on such bases as employment or housing. Instead, human rights tribunals have adopted such expansive interpretations of these speech restrictions that a newspaper or magazine could get into trouble for publishing even a truthful article about conflict in the Middle East, Bosnia, Rwanda or elsewhere that is likely to expose at least one of the parties to contempt.
Canada’s power-grabbing human rights commissioners evidently have scant regard for the freedoms they suppress or for the original understanding of the codes they are supposed to uphold. Otherwise, the British Columbia tribunal and the Canadian and Ontario human rights commissions would have promptly dismissed the CIC’s complaints against Maclean’s as entirely without merit….
Meanwhile, Tom Flanagan, professor of political science at the University of Calgary and former campaign manager for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has waded into the controversy. He urges: “All who write and speak in the public domain should rally to Mark Steyn’s defence. If so-called human rights commissions can be used against him, they can be used against anyone who dares to express an idea worth debating.”
12/08 04:05 PM
Save Steyn: Abolish HRCs [Stanley Kurtz]
Canadian columnist David Warren defends Mark Steyn and calls for an end to Canada’s human rights commissions:
For more than twenty years, in this column and elsewhere, I have been writing against the human rights commissions, which have quasi-legal powers that should be offensive to the citizens of any free country. They are kangaroo courts, in which the defendant’s right to due process is withdrawn. They reach judgments on the basis of no fixed law. Moreover, “the process is the punishment” in these star chambers — for simply by agreeing to hear a case, they tie up the defendant in bureaucracy and paperwork, and bleed him for the cost of lawyers, while the person who brings the complaint, however frivolous, stands to lose nothing.
My hope is that this case against Mark Steyn and Maclean’s will be fruitful. It will be, if it inspires enough people — especially journalists, of all political persuasions — to express outrage at what has been done; and inspires Canada’s free citizens into the necessary political action to put an end to the human rights commissions themselves. The worst possible result is if the case fails to produce this response.
For another important Canadian column, see my Saturday post. We can’t begin to rest easy on this. The forces behind human rights commissions in Canada are powerful. America has got to notice the Steyn case and speak up. It will make a difference in Canada, just as a decision against Steyn in Canada (or even a mere case, however decided, brought against Steyn that fails to evoke widespread protest) would seriously harm America.
12/09 09:12 AMChapter and verse [Mark Steyn]
Anyone interested in reading in full the Canadian Islamic Congress’ case against me and my Maclean’s colleagues can find it here.
If convicted, I promise to re-publish the offending pieces in a special all-Islamophobic anthology. Of course, we’ll have to do that this side of the border, but I’ll use the old bootlegging runs around Lake Memphremagog to smuggle it across the Maple Curtain into Canada. Look for me selling it off the back of the pick-up in the parking lot of La Belle Province at Ange-Gardien, alternate Tuesdays. I’ll be wearing a false beard over my real beard.
12/09 04:08 PMThe Case Against Steyn [Stanley Kurtz]
Mark, thanks for posting the complaint against you. It is an appalling document. “Appalling” may not do justice to it, actually. “Totalitarian” is more accurate. This is a totalitarian document. If this complaint carries — or is even partially vindicated, and it’s basic framework is taken at all seriously — free speech in Canada will be on its last legs. The only good thing to be said for this offense against freedom is how vividly obvious it makes the corruption of the term “human rights,” as interpreted by today’s censorious multiculturalists.
If this complaint carries, public discourse on the war on terror, Muslim immigration, and related topics would be transformed beyond all recognition (in Canada). It is as if, instead of simply rebutting or railing against conservatives and Republicans, liberal Democrats went to the Supreme Court and had the right side of the blogosphere, and nearly all conservative opinion magazines, placed into receivership. It is evident that the complainants are aware of this. They are determined to fundamentally reshape a kind of journalism “that has become increasingly pervasive in Canada in the last few years.” So this is not really a complaint against any particular factual claim or rhetorical move. It is instead a request that vast sections of heretofore legitimate reporting and opinion journalism be altogether banned.
The macabre totalitarianism here comes out most clearly in the sections condemning protests against the very “human rights” laws and multiculturalist ideology, resorted to in the complaint itself. The result is a bizarrely infinite regress of despotism. (See page 13.) These folks are making a bogus claim of religious and racial discrimination in order to persecute a writer, thereby launching a lawsuit on frivolous grounds. And what are they complaining about? Why, writers who say that Muslims make bogus claims of religious and racial discrimination, in order to persecute writers, and launch lawsuits on frivolous grounds.
Your attackers object to claims that Muslims at large believe in “burning books of learning.” Yet they not only want to burn your book, so to speak, they object even to articles or reviews that provide a “guise of legitimacy” to “recognized Islamophobes” like Bruce Bawer and Claire Berlinski. So the complainants would not only ban your article, and by extension, your book, they would ban the entire genre of books touching on problems raised by large, relatively unassimilated Muslim immigrant communities in the West. And to top it off, they’d ban anyone who has the temerity to protest the very laws that (in the complainants’ view) allow book banning itself. These guys have got us going and coming. “Totalitarian” is not too strong a word — although I recognize that, simply by saying this, I have opened myself up to prosecution in Canada. (From now on I stay strictly on the American side of the Falls.)
The word that jumped out at me here was “potential.” The complainants here object less to specific allegedly false claims than to matters of degree and emphasis. How do you remain fair to non-radical and law-abiding Muslims while still pointing to possible problems with some or many Muslims, either now or in the future. You refer to what “potentially” might happen. Yet the complainants are trying to delegitimate even the citing of “potential” problems as racist. In their world, raising a “doomsday scenario” is forbidden. Of course, arguments about improper emphasis, unrepresentative examples, “fear mongering,” and such are commonplace in many or most policy debates. Al Gore is all about “doomsday scenarios.” Should critics try to ban his movie, or simply rebut it?
I could go on and rebut specific accusations, but the deeper problem here is that the underlying terms of this complaint obviate freedom of speech as such. It seems to me that you face some interesting choices here, Mark. You can grasp the nettle and hurl back a brilliant reply that unforgettably burns into our brains the menace to freedom embodied in this complaint. No one could do it better than you. Or you can refuse to have dealings with what should properly be considered an illegitimate tribunal. I don’t know which makes more sense, but it seems to me you need to seriously consider both options.
12/09 11:17 PM
Also see ANDREW COYNE and his Maclean’s column: “Got a complaint? Call 1-800-Human-Rights.”.
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