B.C. journalist Terry Glavin recalls the days when obscenity laws, inciting to commit an indictable offence and criminal libel were used to persecute the then-underground Georgia Straight newspaper.

Today, Glavin ties those days to the present problems being faced by Muslim intellectuals and journalists. (H/T to Canadian Journalist)

An excerpt from his Straight.com column:

All these years later, the very same question that Fotheringham posed is being raised in a widely distributed plea, recently coauthored by 11 prominent Muslim-Canadian writers and academics. What are the rest of us doing now that extremists in Toronto are vowing to drown the Danish people “in their own blood” because of certain vulgar cartoons that were published in a Danish newspaper? What are the rest of us doing now that there are journalists in Jordan, Iran, Yemen, and elsewhere, “rotting in jails, facing charges of apostasy and blasphemy”?

Why no protest?

“A curtain of fear” has descended upon Canada’s intellectual class, the declaration asserts. One of the declaration’s coauthors, Taj Hashmi, a history professor at Simon Fraser University, tells me it’s also partly because multiculturalism has rendered many Canadians incapable of recognizing fascism when it comes in an “ethnic” or “religious” guise. Further, Hashmi said, there is a certain tendency, especially among leftists, to regard radical Islamism as a defensible response to western imperialism.

“Islamism is not the new revolutionary movement against global forces of oppression, as a section of the left in this country erroneously perceives,” warns the declaration. Among its other coauthors are such prominent Canadians as Jehad Aliweiwi, former executive director of the Canadian Arab Federation, Tarek Fatah of the Muslim Chronicle, and Munir Pervaiz of the Pakistan-Canadian Writers Forum.

Meanwhile, a dozen more intellectuals and journalists—including former British Columbian Irshad Manji, British novelist Salman Rushdie, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali of the Netherlands—have just published a similar manifesto. It puts the point this way: “After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat—Islamism.”

Hashmi, the author of several books about Islam and South Asian politics, is a 55-year-old Bangladeshi who was born in Assam and educated in Australia, and he taught in Singapore before emigrating to Canada four years ago. He praises Canada’s efforts to integrate people from so many cultural and religious traditions, but he admits to a gnawing fear about the future.

In the tyrannies of the world, Muslims are sinking into despair, Hashmi said. In Canada, young Muslim immigrants could soon end up drowning in a subterranean current of racism, turning to drug abuse, crime, or political extremism as their means of escape. “Multiculturalism is a good thing so long as it doesn’t inhibit people from integrating,” Hashmi said, adding that Canada’s devotion to multiculturalism must be forged in a similarly firm commitment to secularism and free speech.

Here's some additional points Glavin made at Canadian Journalist:

In Turkey, 29 journalists have been charged, since last June, with offences related to "insulting Turkishness" under Article 301 of Turkey's penal code. Among them are Murat Belge, Haluk Sahin, and Erol Katircioglu of the daily Radikal, and Hasan Cemal, of the daily Milliyet. They could face prison terms of six months to 10 years for the crime of having reported on the decision of an Istanbul court to ban an academic conference on the mass killing of Armenians during the days of Ottoman rule. Their case resumes April 11.

 In Yemen, one of the poorest countries on earth, journalists are facing mounting restrictions, intimidation, beatings, and jail. There were six violent attacks on Yemeni journalists in the last six months of last year, and the Yemeni government hasn't conducted any serious investigations - most likely because government agents were involved in the attacks. In recent weeks, at least four journalists have been jailed and three newspapers closed for publishing some of the controversial "Mohammed cartoons" that first appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

 Attacks on Yemeni journalists have been mounting for the past two years, mainly because journalists there have been working hard to expose government corruption and have started "naming names," according to a Committee to Protect Journalists report.

 In Algeria,  more than 100 charges were brought against journalists last year, resulting in fines and suspended prison sentences. One of the most notorious cases of press intimidation in Algeria involves Mohamed Benshicu,  editor of Le Matin, who has been in jail since June, 2004. His health is failing, and Algerian authorities have refused to provide medical treatment. Another case involves jailed cartoonist Ali Dilem, of the daily Liberté. Last month, Dilem was sentenced to a year in prison for his caricatures of Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, leaving Dilem with a total of nine years in prison to look forward to, owing to a variety of "defamation" charges. He is out on bail, awaiting appeals.

"The daily lot of a Algerian journalists is to experience censorship, repeated summonses, defamation suits launched by the government and partial judges," says Reporters Without Borders.

 You could say the same of the daily lot of journalists throughout the so-called Muslim world.

 "We call on Canadian politicians and intellectuals to stand up for freedom of expression," Hashmi and his declaration co-authors assert. "Our democratic values, including free speech, should not be compromised under the garb of fighting hate."