SteynOnline

The Law Is Cool nellies are all very excited because they think they've caught me out being inconsistent. Here's their "evidence":

Yo Steyn! The Canadian Right thinks you’re a hoity-toity! You stood on the side-lines when they came for Marc Lemire, and twiddled your thumbs when they went after Paul Fromm. Now that the CHRC is looking in your direction, you want this Brotherhood of Free Speech warriors to ride to your rescue! Such presumption!

But you know what? Here’s where you get a chance to redeem yourself. The CHRC is going after one of the little guys again, someone who hasn’t got the full weight of Macleans magazine’s vast legal team to fall back on. Now its your turn to wield that flaming sword of flowery rhetoric of yours and play the role of hero, rather than whining like an oppressed minority!

Arthur Topham runs The Radical Press, a Victoria B.C. website to go along with The Radical, a paper-based, monthly alternative tabloid that he produces himself. Arthur’s chief obsession is those darn Zionists. He has written any number of posts about them, with titles like:

“The Shell Game” Just Another Zionist Scam to Stop 9/11 Investigation of Israel

ARE THE GLOBALISTS [Zionists] OUT TO GET RON PAUL?

Curt Maynard’s blog The Politically Correct Apostate shut down hours after posting anti-Zionist article

Unfortunately for Mr. Topham, Harry Abrams and the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada got wind of his site (you’re basically fucked when that happens), and launched a CHRC complaint against it...

So here’s the deal, Mark: are you a Free Speech man, or a Free Speech girly-man? If the former, it behooves you to unleash your yellow crayon of fury and defend Mr. Topham from B’nai Brith Canada and their ilk. 

What's the point here? That a Zionist neocon Bush shill like me is somehow silent when an anti-Zionist anti-neocon anti-Bush nut in BC gets picked on by the thought police? If that's the issue, let me put it this way:

Do I like anti-Semites and white supremacists?

No.

Do I like Bnai Brith or anybody else unleashing the Canadian thought police on anti-Semites and white supremacists?

No.

So what's the bigger danger to Canada? A white supremacist who sits in his basement posting to a website six people read? Or systemically biased government bodies increasingly comfortable with regulating public (and semi-private) discourse in Canada? No contest, it's the latter. Who are the real "supremacists" here? The loser boy ranting about Zionists? Or a guy like Richard Warman using the CHRC as his own private inquisition?

I've been consistent on this issue my entire adult life:

The aim of a large swathe of the left is not to win the debate but to get it cancelled before it starts. You can do that in any number of ways -- busting up campus appearances by conservatives, "hate crimes" laws, Canada's ghastly human-rights commissions... 

One reason I've always opposed stupid vain moral-posturing laws criminalizing Holocaust denial is because it should have been clear to the foolish Jewish groups that embraced them where they would lead. As I wrote in The Western Standard on March 27th last year:

The free world is shuffling into a psychological bondage whose chains are mostly of our own making. The Saskatoon StarPhoenix, you'll recall, published an advertisement directing readers to Romans 1:26, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, and I Corinthians 6:9, and was fined $4,500, as was the advertiser, for "exposing homosexuals to hatred or ridicule." The British "historian" David Irving sits in an Austrian jail, having been convicted of Holocaust denial. It's not unreasonable for Muslims to conclude that, if gays and Jews are to be protected groups who can't be offended, why shouldn't they be also?

They have a point. How many roads of inquiry are we prepared to block off in order to be "sensitive"? And, once we've done so, will there be anything left to talk about other than showbiz gossip? Holocaust denial should be ridiculous and contemptible but not illegal.

If the objection is that it's a uniquely terrible stain on humanity, that's all the more reason to talk about it openly. How did we end up in a world where David Irving sits in a cell for querying the numbers of the last Holocaust while men march through London streets promising a new Holocaust and are given a bodyguard of police officers to help them do so? The more we hedge ourselves in with "hate speech" regulations, the less we're able to hold any genuinely inquiring discussion on the issues we face. And once that's the case, as the angry young men in the streets have figured out, you might as well just burn and kill to get your way. Canada and Europe need more free speech and less free incitement to murder. Instead, on the vital question of the age, we're retreating into darkness--one intimidated cartoonist, one browbeaten editor, one beleaguered publisher, one terrified Danish schoolgirl at a time.

I oppose the HRCs whether they're regulating my Islamophobia or Mr Topham's neoconphobia or Mohamad Elmasry's Judeophobia. Ideas thrive or perish in the market in the light of day. The HRCs shouldn't be in this game at all. This weekend a friend who's also been called up before one of these "human rights" star chambers mused in an e-mail about the difference between his lawyer's inclination - that he should be reasonable in order to "get off the hook" - and his own feeling that the hook itself needs to be done away with. Speaking for myself, I don't want to get off the hook. I want to take the hook and stick it up the collective butt of these thought police. Metaphorically speaking, I hasten to add.

As I say in Maclean's this week, freedom of speech only for inoffensive speech is no freedom at all. A nation free only to prance along to Barney the Dinosaur pabulum is living under a soft beguiling totalitarianism, even if it doesn't yet know it. Take Dean Steacy, the Canadian HRC's lead "anti-hate" investigator, and his delusion that "freedom of speech" is an "American concept". Golly, we'd all hate it if the ghastly Yanks had invented it. But isn't Canada a signatory to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Including Article 19?

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

No Americans need be involved, folks. Why, the UN Declaration of Human Rights is so Canadian, it's on the back of Canada's $50 bill - and, if the HRC doesn't believe me, it can check the next time its doling out another cash settlement to Richard Warman. Mr Steacy and the HRCs are, in fact, abusers of the "human rights" laid out in the UN Declaration, so the only reason for me to string along with their game is to play my part in ending their regime.

As for the Law Is Cool nellies, it's a sad comment on Canada that Osgoode Hall students can be so decadent and self-absorbed as to believe they're "victims" of anything.     

If it's any consolation to Kathy Shaidle, who doesn't care for the thought of a Canada run by the likes of the self-appointed Tonewatcher-General below, I thought this guy had a pretty funny line:

Mark Steyn and MacLeans magazine are being taken to court - well, not a court, a human rights commission - well, not 1 human rights commissions, but 3. In Canada, after Tim Horton's, the second most popular franchise is a human rights commission.

Unlike Tim's, it's not run by Americans. Meanwhile, Marco figures the anti-HRC crowd aren't thinking straight:

Steyn has really crossed the line in a number of places, also due to lack of forethought. Might be better to sacrifice him. There are plenty others ready to take his place, and will probably do better as well with more than a high school education. 

Looks like my all-star CanCon fundraising single is going to be a lonely affair:

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
They paved paradise and put up a Human Rights Commission.

Daniel Simard, one of the Osgoode Hall Muslim law students whose "human rights" Maclean's breached by publishing an excerpt from my book, sent an e-mail in response to my recent column:

"Why should free-born Canadians require the permission of the state to read my columns?"

Well done. I would support your right to expression any day if all your messages were conveyed in such a tone.

Daniel Simard
Toronto

Well, that's awfully big of you. But why don't we save the condescending chit-chat for the witness stand?

Rex Murphy was on fine form on the CBC last night. I especially liked this bit:

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?

Indeed. I've now heard from three different people that "sources in the Prime Minister's office" believe Maclean's will lose the case. Well, we'll see. The minute that the British Columbia HRC (the most reflexively PC in its dispositions) orders the country's biggest-selling general-interest magazine to remove an article from its website, run a rebuttal and pay money to the "plaintiffs", it won't be Ken Whyte and me on trial but the integrity of the system.

Meanwhile, I was heartened, considering it's a CBC crowd, by the robustness of the commenters. The only pro-"plaintiff" correspondents are trotting wearily through the same leaden talking points. Talal Awan:

Mr. Murphy’s segment, as a point of view clip, failed to convey the factual basis for the complaints and the circumstances surrounding the case against Maclean’s Magazine.

Er, actually, no one, either among the bullies at the Canadian Islamic Congress or their Osgoode Hall stooges, has disputed on a "factual basis" anything about the book excerpt. Not a fact, not a quote, not a statistic. It's all about "hurt feelings". Still, Elizabeth is on their side:

I would like to hear the perspective of the muslim students!!! It is my impression that they only asked for the right to speak!!! why is their perspective being ignored???

Gee, I dunno!!! Maybe they used insufficient punctuation!!!! Ever considered that, Elizabeth????? Sumera Sahar trots out the Canadian Islamic Congress version of events:

In defiance of "free speach" Macleans told those wishing to publish an article in response to Steyn's piece, that "Mcleans would rather go bankrupt than do so". Free speach is a cherised fundamental right unless it is demanded by those who seek to challenge the hate speach deteremined to protray Muslims and Islam in the most negative light possible.

In fact, Muslims who "seek to challenge the hate speach" had no difficulty getting their letters published or, in the case of Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan, a dissenting article. And as Kathy Shaidle points out:

There is no such creature as the "rights of communities to participate in media discussions" (??) except in your fevered, brainwashed minds.

Very true. But, in fact, neither the CIC bullies nor the Osgoode Hall students have ever made any effort to "participate in media discussions" - at least in the traditional sense of writing a rebuttal to my column. Instead, the Osgoode Hall guys came in with no alternative argument, only a string of demands, including a demand for money. Every self-respecting publisher in Canada or any other free society would do exactly what Ken Whyte did. Go on, try it. Go see the editors of Bathhouse Times and demand a five-page cover story arguing that the sodomites will burn in hell - oh, and you want monetary demages, too. Or drop a line to the lily-livered nellies at Law Is Cool, and demand the right of response to their incoherent effusions. Even those pantywaists would tell you to take a hike. This was never a (very belated) request for a right of reply, but a muscle-flexing stunt from the very beginning.