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Faisal Joseph is the former Crown prosecutor who's now Elmo's vicar on earth, and he did most of the talking at yesterday's Canadian Islamic Congress press conference. Apparently, the actors he signed up to play the "complainants" - the Osgoode Hall students - don't have speaking parts. And Mr Joseph was reluctant to let anyone else get a word in, too. I enjoyed this:
When he raised his hand again to ask his fourth or fifth question, the lawyer got testy.
"Why are you asking so many questions?"
Brean deadpanned: "Because it's a, uh, press conference...?"
Mr Joseph doesn't seem to be quite up to speed with the concept. Still, this was an ill-advised attempt at a smackdown:
"Will you let me answer, madam?"
"Why didn't you just answer when I asked you the first time?"
Seems a bit tetchy under all the bling. I thought the most interesting glimpse into King Faisal came in the National Post report:
He also hinted that the rebuttal has already been written, or at least sketched out, and that "one of the remedies in British Columbia may very well be that they [Maclean's] could be ordered by the tribunal to put it in."
I see. So this is how it works, is it? A "human rights" judge orders an ostensibly independent privately-owned magazine to print five pages of Islamist propaganda?
As I always say, I can't speak for Maclean's, but, were I the publisher, I'd say: Go ahead, make my day. You'll order us to print the turgid drivel ordered up by Mr Joseph, and we'll say no. What then? You get the RCMP to kick Maclean's doors down. At that point, even the Dominion's somnolent media might wake up to the kind of Canada Elmo and his enablers are constructing. I wonder if Jack Layton, apparently auditioning for chief eunuch of the new caliphate, even read the dossier of Maclean's systemic Islamophobia before giving Elmo the tongue bath.
Tomorrow I'll be in Ottawa for the "World Press Freedom" awards. I don't expect to win, but if this line doesn't alert the Canadian Association of Journalists to what's at stake, they deserve what's about to befall them:
They could be ordered by the tribunal to put it in.
In his sob-sister paean to the sock puppets, the litigious Warren Kinsella wrote:
My impression of these young people? They are citizens. They are young and idealistic. They are law-abiding people. They should be able to live free from defamation of their deeply-held beliefs, just like anybody else.
Hmm. Can you defame a "belief"? Well, Warren's the bigshot lawyer, not me. But yes, the sock puppets are citizens. So too is Mr Joseph. Yet someone who thinks it appropriate for a judge to order an editor to publish his lobby group's propaganda is a man who is not, in the fullest sense, a functioning citizen of a free pluralist democratic society. Which in today's Canada probably means he's a shoo-in for Chief Justice.
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