The Canadian Islamic Congress has
a new partner in its censorship
campaign: the state
I should declare an interest off the
top. In 2002, I was named in the Canadian Islamic Congress's
"Fifth Annual Report on Anti-Is-lam in the Media."
Under the heading "How the National Post was endangering
the well-being of Canadian Muslims," the CIC included
a reference to my Oct. 29, 2001, column. I reprint the
offending passage in full, with a warning that sensitive
readers may wish to exercise discretion: "... the
massive backlash against innocent Muslims that failed
to materialize..."
That would be, um, it: the only reference
to Muslims in the entire piece. To deny, even in passing,
that Muslims are being oppressed is, apparently, to
"endanger their well-being." It is for this
sort of exquisite sensitivity that the CIC is justly
famed in newsrooms across the land. Reporters and columnists
have grown used to being accused by the CIC of anti-Muslim
bias on even flimsier grounds than I was. And not only
reporters. The well-known spokesman for a rival Muslim
organization, the Muslim Canadian Congress, resigned
his post last year after the president of the CIC, Mohamed
Elmasry, accused him publicly of "smearing Islam"
- a charge, essentially of apostasy, that left him fearing
for his safety.
To most of us, however, the CIC has
seemed little more than a nuisance.
They do not speak for Islam, and they are not the last
word on the subject. They are entitled to their views,
of course, but so, in a free and democratic society,
are those with whom they take issue.
Or were, until recently. For of late
the CIC has found a new partner in its campaigns: the
state. Not content with tossing around incendiary charges
of religious bias, the CIC has enlisted the force of
the law to press its case. It has done so, what is more,
not through any of the traditional legal means by which
freedom of speech may be limited, nor with any of the
legal system's usual requirements of due process, but
through a new and seemingly open-ended mechanism: the
human rights commission. To be specific: the organization
has launched a complaint against Maclean's before the
federal, Ontario and British Columbia human rights commissions,
alleging that an article the magazine published last
year, excerpted from Mark Steyn's book America Alone,
"subjects Canadian Muslims to hatred and Islamophobia."
The case is not without precedent. Two
years ago, the president of yet another Muslim group,
the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, brought a similar
complaint against the Western Standard before the Alberta
Human Rights and Citizenship Commission (AHRCC), after
the magazine published the famous "Danish cartoons,"
a collection of mild satires on Islamic extremism that
of--fended some, but by no means all, Muslims. The commission
begins hearings next month. Nor are Muslim groups the
only complainants to seek the human rights commissions'
aid in suppressing speech they find offensive. Just
last week, the AHRCC ruled a pastor from Red Deer, Stephen
Boisson, was - is guilty the word? - of writing a letter
to the editor of the local paper that said rude things
about homosexuals. The chairwoman of the commission
said she found "a circumstantial connection"
between the letter and the beating of a gay teenager
two weeks later.
That the CIC and other charter members
of the Assocation of the Perpetually Offended should
seek to express their revulsion by such means is unsurprising.
There are a great many people in this country who seem
to have no clue about what freedom of speech means,
or why it was invented. What is astonishing is to find
so many of them in the employ of the human rights commissions.
No: rather, I wish I were astonished.
What's truly astonishing is that the
commissions should have been granted such powers to
begin with. As Alan Borovoy, general counsel for the
Canadian Civil Liberties Association, argued recently,
"during the years when my colleagues and I were
labouring to create such commissions, we never imagined
that they might ultimately be used against freedom of
speech." To be acting as censors, he wrote, was
"hardly the role we had envisioned for human rights
commissions."
Amen. Yet the commissions have been
allowed to stray, far from their original purpose of
preventing discrimination in employment and housing,
into the nebulous world of expression. They succeeded,
largely because their early targets were so odious,
marginal figures who scribbled letters to the editor
or left hateful messages on their answering machines:
who wants to defend racists and homophobes? Emboldened,
they are now going after mainstream media organizations
- Maclean's, for heaven's sakes.
And so, rather than give the back of
their hand to the CIC's complaint, we are treated to
the spectacle of not one but two human rights commissions
- Ontario's may yet join them - agreeing to launch inquiries.
Had the CIC sought remedy under Canada's hate speech
law, as over-broad as it is, they would at least have
had to persuade a prosecutor to take their case, and
to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. But as it is
they can tie up the magazine and its lawyers before
one commission or another for months. The chill this
should send through the nation's newsrooms is obvious.
I don't propose to get into the merits
of their complaint: suffice to say I think it is baseless.
The point is, I shouldn't have to. Maclean's shouldn't
have to. There is only one proper outcome for this affair:
not merely that the CIC's complaint should be thrown
out, but that the commissions' power to hear such cases
should be removed. They have no business meddling with
speech.
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