From the Globe and Mail editorial:

Offence won a valuable victory last week. The Canadian Human Rights Commission rightly concluded that certain words “obviously calculated to excite and even offend certain readers” were not hate speech.

Here's the CTV.ca story. I can't seem to find a link to the CHRC ruling.

The editorial noted that while the Supreme Court upheld the hate crimes provision in 1990, it held its collective nose in doing so, as the judges felt uncomfortable with the sweeping language about being "likely" to cause "hatred or contempt."

The commission aptly said that Mr. Steyn's (note: Mark Steyn, author of America Alone, from which the Oct. 20, 2006 article was excerpted - BD) article was “polemical, colourful and emphatic” – not like the racist rants of the Western Guard.

The B.C. section is very similar to the federal one, and the B.C. commission ought likewise to be able to discern the difference between vivid, witty polemics and blowhard, spouting hatred.

Even so, it is to be hoped that the federal agency, having this month commissioned a policy review of the hate-speech section, will see a continuing danger to freedom of speech and press, and will move swiftly to recommend the section's repeal.

The editorial also took a shot at the Ontario Human Rights Commission's opining on the Maclean's/CIC case:

By contrast to the self-restrained federal body, its Ontario equivalent imputed racism and Islamophobia to Maclean's and Mr. Steyn almost in the same breath as it announced it had no authority to deal with the matter ...

The B.C. Human Rights Commission, which concluded a week-long hearing last month, is expected to take months to rule.

So far, the complainants are batting zero for two.

Addenda

The CBC's Neil Macdonald had a June 13 column on the differences between the U.S. and Canada with respects to free speech.

On July 3, the Globe printed the following letter to the editor:

IMAM ZIJAD DELIC
national executive director, Canadian Islamic Congress

You referred to the Canadian Islamic Congress's complaints against Maclean's magazine as being "vexatious" (The Right To Offend - editorial, June 30). The Ontario Human Rights Commission did not share that opinion. It condemned Maclean's for its Islamophobic content and referred to the Maclean's article, the Future Belongs to Islam, as an "explicit expression of Islamophobia."

The federal commission's investigator stated: "An argument could be made that the material in the complaint bears some of the hallmarks of hate ... [in] that it does portray persons of the Muslim faith in a negative light based upon broad generalizations, and therefore may expose persons of the Muslim faith to hatred or contempt."

The Ontario commission has already condemned Maclean's; B.C.'s commission will make a decision on the merits of the case argued before it. The federal commission's decision not to hear the complaint will soon be appealed to the Federal Court.

One way or the other, the denigration of Muslims in the pages of Maclean's magazine will be brought to the attention of our legal system.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news for the imam, but the recent Supreme Court ruling on the 'fair comment' defence in defamation cases doesn't help the CIC's cause.

The broad theme of Steyn's argument is that Muslims have a higher birth rate than the traditional populations of western Europe. Steyn, in my opinion, was more scathing towards the secular nanny states of Europe than he was towards Muslims, but that's just me. An excerpt to illustrate my point:

Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare.

We are witnessing the end of the late 20th- century progressive welfare democracy. Its fiscal bankruptcy is merely a symptom of a more fundamental bankruptcy: its insufficiency as an animating principle for society. The children and grandchildren of those fascists and republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital. Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly. Over on the other side of the equation, the modern multicultural state is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship. So they look elsewhere and find the jihad. The Western Muslim's pan-Islamic identity is merely the first great cause in a world where globalized pathologies are taking the place of old-school nationalism.

There are some issues that need to be talked through. I'll focus on Britain for some examples:

The government is spending $12.5 million to "de-radicalize" Muslim communities, according to a BBC report. Here's a q-and-a on Britain's plan to combat Muslim extremism.

In January, a Church of England bishop warned that in the city of Rochester, some areas were becoming no-go zones for non-Muslims.

In December 2007, a British Muslim peer warned that some Muslim "hardliners and hotheads" were using Islam to argue against voting and equal rights for women.

One British woman received death threats from her own family after she converted from Islam to Christianity.

Here's an excerpt from a 2006 Times of London story on a poll it conducted on support for extremist attitudes within the British Muslim community:

Six per cent of British Muslims believe that the 7/7 bombers were acting according to the true principles of Islam, while 7 per cent agree that suicide attacks on civilians in Britain can be justified under certain circumstances, a figure that rises to 16 per cent if the target is the military.

However, the poll of more than 1,000 Muslims indicates that nearly two thirds of Muslims (64 per cent) think that no more than a tiny minority of their community sympathised with the 7/7 bombers, and 59 per cent of the general population believe the same.

To my mind, it's not "Islamophobic" to note that there are minority extremist elements within the Muslim communities in Britain, Europe and North America. Some of those extremist elements have already done tremendous harm (see Madrid and London for two examples, although I could also throw in Theo Van Gogh).

However, it's also important to note that a strong majority of Muslims are not extremists, and that the Muslim community has some real grievances that the extremists can exploit, chief among them being the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the occupation of Iraq.

There are also questions about how effective the nations of Europe have been with respects to integrating its Muslim citizens.

These are issues must be discussed. Relentlessly demonizing Muslims and Islam, as some commentators do, or bleating "Islamophobia!" about anything and everything critical of Islam by some on the Muslim side, really does nothing to advance that discussion.