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I get a lot of letters along these lines:
What I don't understand is why you are even bothering to acknowledge Canada's human rights commission. You live in New Hampshire, right? So why don't you just ignore them? No court in America is going to extradite you over this stupid Islamic Congress case.
Well, maybe - although that Saudi sheik has now been given the go-ahead to enforce his English legal judgment against Rachel Ehrenfeld in a US court. But you're right in a broader sense: I live in the country, I have an inexpensive lifestyle, I could afford to write off my Canadian business interests - and my British ones, or European ones, or Australian ones, or wherever the next of these legal assaults arises. But I don't think it's in America's interest for the lights to go out on free speech in Canada or Britain, Europe, Australia and the rest of the western world. So I'm not prepared to give up on free expression in one of the oldest settled democracies on the planet, simply because defending it is a pain in the neck and consumes way too much time and money.
But there's another reason. In their fraudulent dossier on Maclean's "Islamophobia", the Sock Puppet Four - now the Sock Puppet Three (if, indeed, they're still in showbusiness at all) - made innumerable misrepresentations subsequently recycled throughout the rest of the Canadian media, the most notorious of which was that I had said Muslims were "breeding like mosquitoes". As I was obliged to point out time and again, those are not my words, but those of a prominent European Muslim, Mullah Krekar, in an interview with a Norwegian newspaper.
The man who interviewed Mullah Krekar was a journalist called Carsten Thomassen. On January 14th, he was in Kabul covering the Norwegian Foreign Minister's tour of Afghanistan. That day, he was in the lobby of the Serena Hotel waiting to meet with the minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, when two members of the Taliban killed the exterior guards, forced their way inside and opened fire. Carsten Thomassen died of his injuries at a Nato field hospital. The Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg called the terrorist murders an attack not only on Norway but on freedom of speech.
I didn't know Carsten Thomassen, except as a skilled reporter who extracted devastating quotes from Mullah Krekar and others. But we owe it to his memory to insist on the truth about that mosquito line, not just because his murder reminds us of the difference between real "hate" and the pseudo-victims of the Canadian "human rights" circus, but because to allow Elmo and the Sock Puppet Three to bully the media into going along with their misrepresentations is to collude in a lie. And no society that does that is truly free.
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