I was on a little blog break for the past 52 hours, but Deb Jones at Canadian Journalist noted there won't be criminal hate crimes charges laid against two publications that printed some of the notorious Prophet Muhammad cartoons.

See this Toronto Star story for details.

Mohammed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamc Congress reacted thusly:

"If the law cannot withstand this case, I think, either we strengthen it to make sure that similar cases will be prosecuted, or, if we don't have the political will to do it, abolish (hate laws altogether). ...

The publishing of the cartoons, "presents an image that the Prophet of Islam and implies that all Muslims, by being a Muslim, also are terrorists," Elmasry said. "It will endanger the well-being of Muslims in Canada."

If that isn't enough to meet the conditions of the hate laws, he said, "this means there is something wrong with the law."

And check out this graf:

Syed Soharwardy, president of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, said his group plans to lobby for changes to hate laws so that offensive remarks or depictions of any religious figure are considered a crime.

Deb had a fair bit to say about the notion of blasphemy-type laws:

Surely Canadians are mature enough to swat aside this ludicrous demand. Most Canadian publications have been too mature to reprint the Danish cartoons. Most Muslim Canadians have been mature enough to protest peacefully. Our system so far has been mature enough to wisely pass on the various calls for an authoritarian response.

Reprinting the cartoons was, in my opinion, ill-mannered, provocative, inflammatory and worst of all detrimental to an intelligent debate about a global issue, which is far more complex and muddied than the simple renderings. But the great thing about free speech is that we in Canada are mostly allowed to be rude, crude, ill-mannered or stupid, without getting hauled into the courts or sentenced to jail, as was odious historian David Irving in Austria this week, or having our heads chopped off, which is the punishment recently decreed by lunatic, extremist Islamists in Pakistan for the originators of the Danish cartoons. In Canada, Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant got to reprint some cartoons, critics got to slam him for it, perhaps some of us learned something, perhaps not, but wiser or not, we all got on with our lives.

That should be the end of it.

Fingers crossed that Canada, at once so enriched and yet so vulnerable with our proverbial multicultural mosaic, continues to react with such tolerance. That now requires dismissing as not just absurd but entirely offensive the Muslim demands for blasphemy legislation.

In a comment attached to her story, I said:

 I was discussing the subject of free speech and blasphemy in another forum, and someone mentioned than an offence of "blasphemous libel" -- Section 296(1) -- is still on the books.

Personally, I've never heard of this charge being laid, let alone successfully prosecuted, but there it is.

I suspect it's an archaic pre-Charter charge that has not been tested in the courts, and I further suspect a thorough revamp of the Criminal Code would see it removed.

This could become a thorny policy knot to unravel as more and more immigrants arrive from cultures that don't value freedom of expression and who believe it should be specifically curtailed in the case of commenting on religious figures and beliefs.

Fouad Ajami has one perspective on this.

Then again, he's been described as "the Pentagon's favourite Arab." :)