The Western Standard is asking people to pony up a few bucks to help it fight a complaint launched against it by a Calgary Muslim man over the Danish cartoons it reprinted.

Here is some of what the Standard sputters in outrage:

We think we will be successful in the end -- freedom of the press is still the law in Canada. But our attacker is using the abusive, costly process of the Human Rights Commission as a punishment in itself. Even if we win, we'll still have to spend tens of thousands of dollars fighting this complaint, and hundreds of hours of our time. Our attacker doesn't have to do anything but sit back -- the Human Rights Commission uses taxpayer money and government employees to put us through the ringer.

I haven't seen the exact wording of the complaint, but I hope Syed Soharwardy, the Calgary imam who launched the complaint, doesn't win.

Update: The Standard's blog has a scan of the complaint (warning: It's hand-written and a tough read), publisher Ezra Levant's formal response and the letter he sent to magazine supporters (H/T to Zerby)

Soharwardy is president of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada. On Feb. 23, he joined with Mohammed Elmasri of the Canadian Islamic Congress in telling the Toronto Star that Canada needed a blasphemy law "so that offensive remarks or depictions of any religious figure are considered a crime."

Niaz Salimi, president of the Muslim Canadian Congress, wrote the following on Feb. 24:

Their demand has its origins in Egypt, where Islamists led by Sheikh Mohammed Tantawi of al-Azhar University have been lobbying Muslim leaders to ask the United Nations to write a law that "condemns insulting any religion, including the Holy Scriptures and the prophets."

The Muslim Canadian Congress questions the motives behind this initiative. Such a law can only be effective if it also includes a ban on accusations of blasphemy and apostasy by Muslim clerics; a tool used in many Muslim countries to silence political opponents. Today, writers in Iran, Jordan and Yemen, are among 11 Muslim journalists in five Muslim countries facing prosecution for printing some of the cartoons.

Any law that makes it an offence to insult or mock religion, must also allow for a respectful and healthy critique of any religion, religious leader and even religious texts. Also, the law should ensure that such a critique does not lead to imprisonment or death threats by governments, religious institutions or religious vigilantes.

I wrote a lot about the cartoons crisis, and I'm very opposed to any suggestion of a blasphemy law.

On the issue of whether a Canadian Muslim's human rights were violated by the reprinting of the cartoons in the Standard, I will watch with great interest to see what test the commission applies.

To me, the logical outcome would be that he might find the content offensive, they don't comprise an act of discrimination against Mr. Soharwardy.

Did a restaurant not serve him, a potential employer not hire him because of eight of the original 12 cartoons published by the Jyllands-Posten newspaper were reprinted in the Standard? If that happens, are the restaurant or potential employer to blame, or the cartoons?

I've seen the cartoons, Mostly, I don't think they were great cartoons, although I don't live in Denmark and I can't read Danish, so I may have missed some nuance. I think more of Muslims who expressed their outrage peacefully, and less of ones who reacted violently.

Even if there was genuine offence, for freedom of expression to mean anything, there has to be a right to offend -- within certain limits. This is particularly true with satirical cartoons.

If a cartoonist goes too far, it generally reflects more poorly on him, her or their publisher than on the group being attacked. To see what I mean, hunt down some of the Holocaust denial cartoons put out by some of the radical Islamist groups in Europe in response to the Danish cartoons.

I've never reprinted the Danish cartoons here or directly linked to them, because I really don't want to cause gratuitous offence. But if someone else does, then they can exercise their freedom of expression in that direction.

Remember that attempts to prosecute the Standard -- and the Calgary Jewish News, which also reprinted them -- for hate crimes over the cartoons went nowhere.

I hope the same happens with this human rights complaint.