Four lawyers/law students in a Canadian Islamic Congress action against Maclean's magazine respond to Ezra Levant.
On December 4, the four of us announced at a press conference that we had launched several human rights complaints against Maclean's magazine with respect to its October, 2006 article, The Future Belongs to Islam, written by Mark Steyn.
At the time, we expected to hear some criticism of our complaints, which were filed as a result of Maclean's refusal to negotiate space for a response to the aforementioned publication. What we did not expect, however, was the almost paranoid assault launched on the respective human rights commissions for accepting our complaints and, in one case so far, for moving ahead to schedule hearings into the matter we have brought to their attention. The latest to attack the commissions is Ezra Levant, whose commentary appeared in this space yesterday. ...
The importance of human rights codes in Canada is not limited only to affordability. These commissions guarantee our human rights against eventualities not covered by the existing Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which applies only to state entities. Thus, a diminishment in the human rights codes and the commissions that enforce them would leave a gaping hole in our rights protections — an outcome being lobbied for by a few disproportionately loud "activists."
Unfortunately, this turn of events is all too familiar to the Muslim community. Faith-based arbitration was not a "problem" until the Muslim community decided to pursue a facility already available to the Christian and Jewish communities. Similarly, funding for religious schools was not a "problem" until Ontario's Conservative leader John Tory included Islamic schools in his funding proposal. And human rights commissions were not a "problem" until the Muslim community decided to pursue the right to respond to publications that subject identifiable communities to hatred or contempt.
The "problem" is not the human rights commissions or the human rights codes they uphold. The "problem" as some choose to see it — is that the Muslim community in Canada is actually using them for their intended purposes.
Firstly, here's how the Economist described the group's request of Maclean's:
Maclean's published 27 letters, many of complaint. That was not enough for some offended Muslims. Last spring a group of Toronto law students marched into the magazine's offices demanding equal space for a rebuttal by an author of their choosing. Ken Whyte, the editor and publisher, told the group he would rather see Maclean's go bankrupt.
I don't know of any publisher in this country who would accede to a demand for equal space for a rebuttal article. Can anyone give me an example of one that has done so?
The Canadian Islamic Congress has a website, so why can't it publish a rebuttal article there? For that matter, why isn't a news release available about the launching of the complaint, or the text of the complaint itself?
In any event, the group did publish the following undated article on its website: Macleans magazine: A case study of media-propogated Islamophobia. Here's an excerpt:
1 women will be forced to wear the Muslim veil,2 Christians will be expelled from their countries,3 Jews will be massacred,4 Muslim religious police will enforce Islamic norms on the population,5 honour killings of women will become common practice, and women will be unable to vote.6Fear of Muslims is also promoted by raising doomsday scenarios about what will transpire when the alleged impending Muslim takeover occurs: Muslims will burn books and libraries,
Other examples of fear mongering include:
•
The extent of the terrorist threat to Canada is grossly exaggerated by presenting unsubstantiated allegations of fact: Canada has allegedly been infiltrated by Muslim terrorist, bases of anti-Canadian and anti-Western hatred have been set by Canadian Muslims, and a high number of Muslim Canadians have devoted themselves to “radical Islamism” and have acquired “combatant status” with terrorist enemies.7•
Private and public places of worship such as private homes and universities are alleged to be centers of radicalization and terrorist planning.8When I looked at footnotes 1-8, not one of those claims is attributed to the The Future Belongs to Islam article, which is the object of the human rights complaint! However, some were written by Steyn.
We do run across the notorious article at footnote 13. The authors assert:
due to their religious identity, and to allege that Muslims have taken over Belgium.13A single incident of juvenile violence perpetrated by three Muslim youths in Belgium is used to represent that European Muslim youth are the primary perpetrators of juvenile violence in Europe
I certainly didn't read it that way. But here's the excerpt. Judge for yourself:
Actually, I don't think everything's about jihad. But I do think, as I said, that a good 90 per cent of everything's about demography. Take that media characterization of those French rioters: "youths." What's the salient point about youths? They're youthful. Very few octogenarians want to go torching Renaults every night. It's not easy lobbing a Molotov cocktail into a police station and then hobbling back with your walker across the street before the searing heat of the explosion melts your hip replacement. Civil disobedience is a young man's game.
In June 2006, a 54-year-old Flemish train conductor called Guido Demoor got on the Number 23 bus in Antwerp to go to work. Six -- what's that word again? -- "youths" boarded the bus and commenced intimidating the other riders. There were some 40 passengers aboard. But the "youths" were youthful and the other passengers less so. Nonetheless, Mr. Demoor asked the lads to cut it out and so they turned on him, thumping and kicking him. Of those 40 other passengers, none intervened to help the man under attack. Instead, at the next stop, 30 of the 40 scrammed, leaving Mr. Demoor to be beaten to death. Three "youths" were arrested, and proved to be -- quelle surprise! -- of Moroccan origin. The ringleader escaped and, despite police assurances of complete confidentiality, of those 40 passengers only four came forward to speak to investigators. "You see what happens if you intervene," a fellow rail worker told the Belgian newspaper De Morgen. "If Guido had not opened his mouth he would still be alive."
No, he wouldn't. He would be as dead as those 40 passengers are, as the Belgian state is, keeping his head down, trying not to make eye contact, cowering behind his newspaper in the corner seat and hoping just to be left alone. What future in "their" country do Mr. Demoor's two children have? My mother and grandparents came from Sint-Niklaas, a town I remember well from many childhood visits. When we stayed with great-aunts and other relatives, the upstairs floors of the row houses had no bathrooms, just chamber pots. My sister and I were left to mooch around cobbled streets with our little cousin for hours on end, wandering aimlessly past smoke-wreathed bars and cafes, occasionally buying frites with mayonnaise. With hindsight it seemed as parochially Flemish as could be imagined. Not anymore. The week before Mr. Demoor was murdered in plain sight, bus drivers in Sint-Niklaas walked off the job to protest the thuggery of the -- here it comes again -- "youths." In little more than a generation, a town has been transformed.
Of the ethnic Belgian population, some 17 per cent are under 18 years old. Of the country's Turkish and Moroccan population, 35 per cent are under 18 years old. The "youths" get ever more numerous, the non-youths get older. To avoid the ruthless arithmetic posited by Benjamin Franklin, it is necessary for those "youths" to feel more Belgian. Is that likely? Colonel Gadhafi doesn't think so:
Here's another claim deeper in the article, that Steyn asserts that "Muslims have far too much freedom of movement in Western society." They don't cite a particular passage, but they may have meant this:
In Thomas P. M. Barnett's book Blueprint For Action, Robert D. Kaplan, a very shrewd observer of global affairs, is quoted referring to the lawless fringes of the map as "Indian territory." It's a droll joke but a misleading one. The difference between the old Indian territory and the new is this: no one had to worry about the Sioux riding down Fifth Avenue. Today, with a few hundred bucks on his ATM card, the fellow from the badlands can be in the heart of the metropolis within hours.
Here's another difference: in the old days, the white man settled the Indian territory. Now the followers of the badland's radical imams settle the metropolis.
That's hate literature?
Anyways, go through it yourselves.
One question I would have for the authors of that document is this: Have they come across any articles they would deem to be fairly and justifiably critical of Islam? There must have been one.
While you can't cover everything in one commentary, I wished they would have focused on the clash between the rights of someone feeling aggrieved and the right of someone else to say something offensive.
Here's an excerpt from a Dec. 5, 2007 CBC.ca article:
Maclean's said it stands behind the writer of the article, Mark Steyn, and it is confident the human rights commissions will find no merit in the complaint.
Faisal Joseph, a lawyer from the Canadian Islamic Congress who is representing the four students, argued that journalists can't write just anything.
"You have to be responsible. There are limits on freedom of expression, people seem to forget that," he said.
But Sohail Raza, a representative of the Muslim Canadian Congress, said Maclean's had the right to publish the article.
"This is Canada, not Sudan, Egypt or Pakistan, where the press is stifled," he said. "There is absolute freedom of expression and people have an opportunity to voice their opinion."
Alan Borovoy of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association said the organization is concerned about the human rights complaints process.
It's too easy to claim an article may subject a group to hate or contempt under commission rules, Borovoy said."Even truthful articles describing some of the awful situations in this world could run afoul of this law, it is so broad and such a potential threat to freedom of speech," he said.
In any event, I have a relatively simple solution to avoid being offended by Mark Steyn, Barbara Amiel and others of that ilk -- I don't set out to read them.
If I do come across something they say that's offensive, I can offer my own rebuttal in this space -- where it will be read by five, sometimes six people! :)
I'm not big on those who beat up on Muslims. I suspect Muslims may be suffering from "new kid on the block" syndrome compounded by the horrors of the London, New York and Madrid attacks (although one Muslim colleague of the time told me in the aftermath of 9/11, "These [al Qaeda] are our Nazis; remember, they hate moderate Muslims as much as Crusaders). While there are some Canadian Muslims who hold extremist views that are odds with Western values (although keep in mind there's a subset of crackpots in any group), my guess is the vast majority are people who want to live their lives, practice their faith and not bother anyone. I would further hazard a guess that most Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, Jews and others want to do much the same thing.
If someone rights truly hateful things about Muslims (or others) and veers into criminal behaviour while doing so, charge them.
If someone discriminates against a person because of their faith, that clearly is a violation of their human rights. They deserve redress.
But if someone writes something that's goofily alarmist, should that really be considered a human rights violation in a secular, democratic society where free expression is considered a fundamental freedom? I don't think so.