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Ezra Levant’s magnificent performance before “human rights agent” Shirlene McGovern has raised the bar for the rest of us ensnared by this grotesque system. He’s absolutely right not to waste time attempting to mitigate his “offence”, and he’s also correct in rejecting this pseudo-court’s jurisdiction over him.

Over the weekend, I was reviewing the Canadian Islamic Congress’ dossier on Maclean’s “flagrant Islamophobia” for my forthcoming book The Mark Steyn Flagrantly Islamophobic Reader. One of the differences between the Maclean’s case and The Western Standard’s is that Ezra is being pursued by a foreign imam trained (such as it is) by the semi-literates of some third-rate Saudi seminary [CORRECTION: Pakistani seminary. Ezra's tormentor is merely a lecturer at the third-rate Saudi seminary]. My dossier, on the other hand, has been put together by five students at what’s supposedly the best law school in Canada. Page 30 is especially choice:

Assertions and Implications:
1. American will be an Islamic Republic by the year 2040 – there will be a Muslim / Islamist takeover
2. As a result of the Muslim takeover, there will be a break for prayers during the Super Bowl, the stadium will have a stereotypical Muslim name, and the fans will be forced to watch the game in a Muslim prayer posture
3. Due to the Muslim takeover, the US will have split into different countries and states. Much of the country will be destroyed, there will be a Christian state, there will be a Muslim state in which will be filled with ideas of Jihad, and Jews and other minorities will have to be smuggled into Canada to escape from the Muslims who will be out to eliminate them
4. As a result of the Muslim takeover there will an oppressive religious police enforcing Islamic /Muslim norms on the population, important US icons [such as the USS Ronald Reagan] will be renamed after Osama bin Laden, no females will be allowed to be cheerleaders, and popular American radio and television talk show hosts will have been replaced by Muslim imams
5. The Muslim takeover of American will occur in a violent way through a nuclear attack on the US. A copy of the Quran that will survive the nuclear attack will be placed in a War Museum that will be built by the Muslims. On the whole this Muslim takeover will be like that of Hitler’s and the Third Reich’s takeovers Europe; Jews will be accused of various false conspiracies and will be massacred by the Muslims
6. Muslims and Islam are taking over Europe and North America; Europe is becoming
“Islamified”.
7. As a result of the Muslim takeover, the star basketball player for an iconic American basketball team will be a Muslim. Further, a popular American actress, while accepting an Academy award will announce her conversion to Islam and announce her marriage to the Muslim star basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers. Her conversion and announcement will inspire tens of Millions of Americans to do the same furthering the Muslim takeover.
8. A Muslim takeover is quite feasible – Islam will prove to be the “great seducer” and will takeover the West. The West needs to return to its Christian roots in order to resist the Islam / Muslim takeover.

Er, no. These are not “Assertions and Implications”. They are aspects of the plot of Robert Ferrigno’s Prayers For The Assassin. A novel. A work of fiction. A creative art form. My column is a review of the novel. It is customary in reviewing novels to cite aspects of the plot, and usually without litigious Muslims taking you to court.

Or at least one had always assumed it was. Mr Ferrigno’s book is a “what if?” novel: What if America became Muslim? It’s an established genre: my columnar confrere on The Daily Telegraph, Robert Harris, wrote a novel on the premise “What if Hitler had won the war?” And nobody took him to court over it.

Khurrum Awan, Muneeza Skeikh, Naseem Mithoowani, Ali Ahmed and Daniel Simard, the authors of this report, submitted it to the various “human rights” commissions on the grounds that Maclean’s exposed them to “hatred and contempt”. I certainly don’t hate them, but I do hold them in contempt. They don’t have the excuse, as many of the firebreathing imams of the west do, of being illiterate, at least in English and on anything other than the Koran. Yet Canada’s allegedly finest law school is turning out lawyers who believe that describing the plot of a novel should be actionable. How, I wonder, do Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje feel about that?

As I said, I’ve been busy running through my own contributions to the report for The Mark Steyn Flagrantly Islamophobic Reader. So it took me a while to get to the final exhibit in Messrs Awan, Skeikh, Mithoowani, Ahmed and Simard’s Maclean’s Hall of Shame – a piece called “I Begged To Confess” by my colleague Steve Maich, about the repeated rape and torture of a Canadian citizen, William Sampson, in a Saudi jail. Again, it’s in the context of a new book – a memoir by Mr Sampson about his experience. Here’s what the Osgoode Hall geniuses say:

This article is written for the purpose of promoting a book that depicts Saudi Arabia and Muslims in a negative light.

And “depicting Saudi Arabia in a negative light” is now a crime in Canada?

As I said, I hold the five authors of this report in contempt. However, as a crude display of political muscle, what they’re doing at least has a kind of logic. Harder to understand is the reaction of chaps like our old friend Garry J Wise, Mister Moderate, dean of the let’s-strike-a-sensible-balance brigade. I doubt very much that Mr Wise, a fellow graduate of Osgoode Hall, really wants a Canada where plots of novels cannot be discussed and the accurate depiction of Saudi Arabia as an ugly thug state is a “hate crime”. But, in pretending that this ludicrous charade is somehow just a routine judicial process working itself out, he is providing cover for the shriveling of speech in his country. Irked by American correspondents’ invocation of the First Amendment, Mr Wise seems to think, somewhat myopically, that this is a US vs Canada competition. No, it’s not. It’s not a game of comparisons. It’s about absolute freedoms. Universal freedoms. Freedoms that are part of America and Canada’s common inheritance. What’s going on in these Human Rights Commissions would be wrong even if every other country on the planet was a police state. They’re a betrayal of hundreds of years of Canadian history. Mr Wise graduated Osgoode Hall in 1984, which I guess would put him in early middle age – or young enough to end his days in a wholly transformed land once his five fellow alumni and those of similar disposition are staffing the judiciary and the HRCs and the justice ministries.

As for the HRCs who accepted this “case” based on a dossier invoking the plots of novels and objecting to negative news reports about Saudi Arabia, I hold them in even greater contempt. William Sampson is a Canadian citizen, yet, when he was seized, tortured and sentenced to be beheaded, his government entirely failed him. The only reason he’s walking around today is because the United Kingdom intervened on behalf of his fellow (British) hostages and Mr Sampson was released on their coat-tails, so to speak. He was sprung by Her Majesty’s Government in London, not in Ottawa. Yet the Canadian state that abandoned Bill Sampson to Saudi torturers is now prepared to drag into “court” the magazine that told the truth about his ordeal - on the grounds that five law students object to casting Saudi Arabia in a “negative light”.

How about casting Canada in a “negative light”?

It has to be said, since this business with the Canadian thought police got going, that not all my "defenders" are as full-throated as one might wish. In fact, a certain recurring shtick set in pretty quickly. “Mark Steyn’s book about Muslim demographics may contain some cynical statistics and Islamic stereotypes,” wrote Peter Jackson in The Telegram of St John’s, Newfoundland, “but his observations are not totally without merit.”

“Not totally without merit”, eh? That’s not exactly what Broadway producers call a money quote. Happily, Kathy Shaidle is a rollicking exception to the rule. In recent days alone, she's dusted off the all-time pithiest distillation of free-speech absolutism by Colby Cosh, and republished the Danish cartoons under the headline "Come and get me, you fairies." Her general approach was spelled out in this post:

If your response to the Maclean's/Steyn case isn’t tainted with outrage, sarcasm and a profound sense of urgency, there is something wrong with you... I’m getting as worried by these prissy attitudes emerging around this case as I am about the case itself.

She's right. I don't mind the Muslim shills sending out for the form letters from the Supreme Islamic Council of Moose Jaw or whatever cockamie pressure group's fired them up, but to read some of the non-Muslim responses in Maclean's or at the CBC website or The Calgary Herald is to wonder how many Canadians are auditioning to be the eunuchs in the new caliph's harem.

By the way, Kathy Shaidle has a new e-book out. I'm so square I'm not sure I quite know what that is, but I've read it, and it reads like an old-fashioned non-e-book, only better. You should get it. It's her collected columns mostly from The Toronto Star, and it begins with a fine jest on the Star's pedantic copyeditor who would have rewritten Al Jolson into saying, "You have not seen a single thing yet." Miss Shaidle doesn't miss the Star's copyediting, but, if they had any sense, they'd miss her. she's the nearest Canada has to those Fleet Street gals who get a page all to themselves of a mid-market tabloid like the Mail or the Express or the Standard and use it as a kind of virtuoso highwire act of punditry. She has fans around the world: in the course of the last year, I've sat in a restaurant on the beach at Malibu and at the Savoy Grill in London and listened to various long-distance admirers regale me with favourite examples of her prose. If anyone of Toronto's dozy editors had any sense, she could be the Dominion's Julie Burchill. I especially like her more or less regular headline over the week's all too predictable gay-activist item - "More KY For The Slippery Slope". It's fantastically rude, but also a fine crack, as one would hope the larkier gays would be the first to acknowledge. Anyway, Acoustic Ladyland takes in everything from the comparative coolness of Sandra Dee and Hunter Thompson to the loss of the Empress of Ireland two years after the Titanic in 1914. She's one of those writers who can pretty much write about whatever tickles her fancy, including, impressively, ear wax:

He'd squirt a strong, swift stream of water into each ear - expelling some stuff truly shocking in volume and appearance - and I could hear again.

(Unfortunately, it was the 70s, so what I got to hear again was mostly Supertramp.)

Actually, she's very good on bodily imperfection. Among her tips on cellulite:

The Apollo astronauts christened the moon's craters with poetic names like 'Sea of Tranquility'; why not do the same with yours?

This after a Scottish survey showing one in five men think cellulite is a type of battery. Of course, it's not all contemplation of ear wax. There's a moving reminiscence of Ronald Reagan and a magnificent demolition of Bishop Spong. She pulls off what so many columnists try but usually miss: moral seriousness and groovy cultural references. You need this book.

Full disclosure: I've met Kathy Shaidle just once, at Conrad Black's pad. We spoke for two minutes and then I suggested to Doug Kelly, the editor of The National Post, that he stop wasting his time trying to re-hire me and get Kathy instead. He was, as they say, politely non-committal. Still, with my own brief moment in Canadian media drawing to a hatemongering close, I'll mention it to my boss at Maclean's when we lunch next week. And, while you're waiting for editors to come to their senses, buy Acoustic Ladyland.

Is that even possible? The sensitive anonymous blogger at LawIsCool writes:

We must have missed that front-page episode, as well as the other dozens of articles countering the extreme views expressed by Steyn and others (don’t forget the others) in Maclean’s.

But then again, it is quite possible we missed it, seeing how we canceled our subscriptions to the magazine. 

Oh, really? What's that - the royal "we"? How many "subscriptions" did you fellows have from Maclean's until you belatedly discovered my book excerpt?

Incidentally, for all the portentous legalistic posturing, M'Learned Anonymity appears to have breached Canadian copyright law and engaged in intellectual property theft by reprinting in full the Nanaimo Daily News editorial. But what do I know? I'm not a lawyer.

C'mon, Mr Anonypussy, why so shy? I've heard of witnesses who have to have their identities protected, but not a lawyer. When you graduate and you appear in court, are you going to revive those English barrister's wigs but wear them over the front of your face?

This editorial isn't available at their somewhat undernourished website but it gave me a titter. From Monday's Nanaimo Daily News in British Columbia:

At the centre of what is turning into a very Canadian issue about free speech and our views on Islam is Maclean's magazine. On Oct. 6, 2006, columnist Mark Steyn wrote a piece titled 'The Future Belongs to Islam,' which only in the last week gained any notice. The piece is excerpted from his book, America Alone.

The rather boring piece, which reads half like Steyn talking to himself and half like he's trying to show us how smart he is, got the attention of Canadian Muslims...

Oh, dear. I guess when Maclean's fires me there'll be no point waiting for the big phone call from Nanaimo. (Just for the record, the piece appeared in the October 23rd 2006 edition of Maclean's. Also for the record, the magazine is owned not by Quebecor, as these chaps state, but by Rogers. Also for the record ...whoops, there I go, trying to show how smart I am...).

By the way, the editorial's overall tone of having wandered into the play halfway through the plot is nicely caught by their endearingly inept headline:

Even Jihadists Have The Right Of Free Speech.

Who can doubt it? Jihadists promise to "Behead The Enemies Of Islam" and demand the Pope be executed and threaten to rain down a second 9/11 on Europe and call Britain's Tube bombers "the Fantastic Four" - and no-one ever suggests restraining their free speech. On the contrary, in London the guys calling for the beheading of infidels are flanked by constables of the Metropolitan Police so zealous in their defence of jihadist free-speech rights they threaten to arrest any members of the public who get too near.

What's at issue here is the non-jihadists' right to free speech.