A right to be offended

Editorial

Freedom of speech is once again being attacked in Canada. And, once, again, human rights commissions are aiding its assailants.

The Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission will start hearings soon on a complaint that the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada brought against the Western Standard, after it published the controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. And, according to writer Andrew Coyne, that same commission recently ruled against a pastor from Red Deer who offended homosexuals in a letter to a local paper.

The latest offender in the grasp of not one, but two, human rights commissions is Maclean's magazine, because it published an article last year by journalist Mark Steyn about the growing population and power of Muslims in the world. Earlier this month, the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) filed complaints to the Canadian, B.C. and Ontario human rights commissions, charging Maclean's with subjecting Canadian Muslims to hatred and contempt and spreading Islamophobic messages. Sadly, the Canadian and B.C. commissions have agreed to investigate the matter, while Ontario is still deciding its course of action.

In their complaints, the CIC submitted a list of 42 assertions to which they took offence. The list consists not only of assertions that Steyn made in the article explicitly, but also those that the CIC saw as being implicitly hurtful to readers. The CIC considers Maclean's responsible not only for what people read, but what people may think about what they read.

In one complaint, the group's president, Mohamed Elmasry, stated, "Reading the article and seeing the messages portrayed as objective news by Maclean's had a serious impact on me. This impact included harm to my sense of dignity and self worth as a Canadian Muslim." Elmasry said his right to receive service free of discrimination was infringed by the article.

Steyn's main argument in "The future belongs to Islam," is that "of course, not all Muslims are terrorists – though enough are hot for jihad to provide an impressive support network of mosques from Vienna to Stockholm to Toronto to Seattle. Of course, not all Muslims support terrorists – though enough of them share their basic objectives (the wish to live under Islamic law in Europe and North America) to function wittingly or otherwise as the 'good cop' end of an Islamic good cop/bad cop routine. But, at the very minimum, this fast-moving demographic transformation provides a huge comfort zone for the jihad to move around in.... When a European jihadist blows something up, that's not in defiance of democratic reality but merely a portent of democratic reality to come."

Definitely controversial. After the article was published, Maclean's ran 27 letters to the editor about it – the most for any cover story that year. What the magazine has rightly refused to publish is a response by Muslim law students from York University, because the students demanded it be equal in length and prominence to Steyn's article and written by an author of their choice and unedited by the magazine.

Support for Maclean's has come from several sources, including the Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC). In a recent press release, the MCC said, "Labelling Canada's premier weekly news magazine as a carrier of Islamophobic literature is a thinly veiled attack on freedom of press that will serve no purpose other than to reinforce the stereotype that Muslims have little empathy for vigorous debate and democracy."

In a separate article, Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan of the MCC, write that, "the reaction of the CIC has only given credence to his [Steyn's] premise – that Muslims in the West cannot accept the values of individual freedom, a free press and the right to offend.

"How ironic, and how unfortunate. For Steyn's thesis could as easily have been disproved, by the traditional means of rational debate. While Steyn's analysis of the spread and influence of radical Islamic factions in Europe is certainly compelling, the premise of his argument, that Muslims are a monolithic entity hostile to Western values, does not withstand scrutiny."

Fatah and Hassan counter Steyn's arguments with facts such as, "Both in Canada and abroad, it is Muslims who have stood up to jihadi goons to defend liberal values. It was a Muslim MNA from Quebec, Fatima Houda-Pepin, who spoke out against sharia, not the PQ or [Jean] Charest; it was the Canadian Council of Muslim Women who confronted misogynist practices, not NAC and the mainstream feminists."

They defend Steyn's right to be wrong, saying, "Only when we Muslims stand behind the right of authors and writers to freely express their views – even if they are offensive – will we have proven Steyn wrong. By trying to censor him, the CIC only proves him right."

Open societies depend on the freedom of their citizens to say what they think – on encouraging civil discourse, rather than shutting it down. If publications must defend themselves against charges of human right abuses every time one of their readers is offended, meaningful debate will disappear from their pages and our society. The human rights commissioners should know better. That they don't should be a warning to all of us about the power we have given them.

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