It’s statements like these that have landed Steyn on various hit lists, including, most famously, those of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which are strange quasi-judicial bodies that were stirred to action a decade ago by the Canadian Islamic Congress. Between 2005 and 2007 the weekly news magazine Maclean’s published eighteen articles by Steyn, including an excerpt from America Alone, that were all deemed “Islamophobic” by the human rights tsars. Without going into excruciating detail about the various legal jockeying that took place — who knew one country could have this many commissions and tribunals that could all attack simultaneously? — Steyn and Maclean’s were charged with inciting hatred against Muslims, setting in motion an endless process of discovery and hearings.
“We were trying to lose,” said Steyn. “We wanted them to find us guilty so that we could appeal to a real court, hopefully the Supreme Court, and prove that these hate-speech laws are more absurd than any laws outside North Korea. Before I came along, these human rights tribunals had a 100 per cent conviction rate! The fact that we fought back meant that I became an albatross around their neck. The Thought Police were exposed to massive unrelenting publicity for the first time, and they didn’t expect that. They didn’t expect us to push back. But free speech is on the retreat, and this was not a time for a faint-hearted defence.”
The Canadian Human Rights Commission eventually bowed out of their part in the imbroglio, saying the articles were “polemical, colourful and emphatic” but failed to satisfy the definition of writings “of an extreme nature” as defined by the Supreme Court. But the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal was not so sure, holding a five-day hearing during which the Canadian Islamic Congress presented evidence that twenty articles in Maclean’s presented Islam as a violent religion and Muslims as violent people, with the Islamist lawyer using words like racist, hateful, contemptuous, Islamophobic and irresponsible. Mahmoud Ayoub, a Harvard historian of religion, testified that Steyn didn’t understand the meaning of the word jihad and that, of the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, less than a million interpreted jihad to justify violence against non-believers. (I don’t know of any other religion in the world that has merely a million devotees willing to kill, but that’s what the man said.)
Mark Steyn, interviewed by John Bloom, “Mark Steyn, Cole Porter and Free Speech”, Quadrant, 2017-05-11.
May 17, 2019
QotD: Mark Steyn and the “Human” “Rights” Tribunals
Comments Off on QotD: Mark Steyn and the “Human” “Rights” Tribunals
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
