Muslim ‘hate speech’ complaints contrived

While reading the newspapers last week, I found myself several times looking at news articles that reported suicide bombings carried out by Muslim extremists next to stories about a number of Canadian Muslims who see hate speech in every article that makes any mention of Muslims.

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Particularly galling was the assertion by Khurrum Awan, Naseem Mithoowani and Muneeaza Sheikh, three Canadian law students who are serving as sock puppets for Mohamed Elmasry’s Canadian Islamic Congress in attempting to legally stifle free speech in Canada. The original complaint by these three, plus a fourth law student, was against MacLean’s Magazine and columnist Mark Steyn for running a story called “The future belongs to Islam”. The story was an excerpt from Steyn’s book America Alone, which indicated that given the current trend of Muslim families to have more than twice as many children as European and Canadian families, Muslims would eventually outnumber non-Muslims. Steyn also quoted numerous Imams whose inflammatory rhetoric against Western values made it clear that their end goal was the eventual establishment of an Islamic Europe. For some reason these twerps took exception to the MacLean’s piece and demanded that the magazine provide them with an equal amount of space to rebut the Steyn article. Given that MacLean’s is a privately owned publication and given the fact that it also published numerous rebuttal letters from Muslims in subsequent issues, the magazine demurred. And, of course, the rest is history. The complaint launched by these four was recently heard by the BC Human Rights Tribunal and will soon be heard before the Canadian Human Rights Commission, and it will be no surprise that both of these star chambers will find in favor of the aggrieved. Initially they had also complained to the Ontario Human Rights Commission who dismissed the complaint without a hearing because magazine articles were not a part of that body’s mandate. Barbara Hall, who heads up the OHRC, announced the dismissal along with a scathing condemnation of both Mark Steyn and the MacLean’s. In case you are wondering, it’s the same Barbara Hall who was disgraced during her 2003 bid for the mayoralty of Toronto for breaching Ontario’s Elections Act. But hey, trying to rig an election is not nearly so bad as saying unflattering things about people who routinely engage in suicide bombing. What I can’t understand is how Canadian Law students could get it into their heads that a privately owned publication was obligated to give up pages within its magazine to satisfy people who perceived a given story to be offensive to them. I believe this action goes deeper than just what Mark Steyn might write or what MacLean’s may print. It is entirely within the realm of possibility that this action before the various human rights tribunals is the opening salvo in an attempt to totally and completely silence the media in Canada in matters pertaining to Muslims. At the very least it’s possible that this action will force Canadian news organizations to start using euphemisms, as they did in Europe during the riots in France that saw “disaffected youths” stone police officers and torch nearly 100,000 cars. I see a great deal of (forgive me) black humor in this entire situation. For nearly a week I was reading news reports about how Mark Steyn’s book was seen as hate speech against Muslims by Khurrum and his friends right next to news reports of a trial of 11 Muslim men who were planning to blow up both the CBC and the RCMP office in Toronto, attack parliament and decapitate the prime minister. I wonder if reporting on this trial will also some day be seen as “hate speech”? There is little doubt among most observers of this melodrama that the verdict is a foregone conclusion and both Steyn and MacLean’s will be found guilty. But it’s also possible that this will be the straw that breaks the (forgive me) camel’s back and generates enough of a backlash against the misuse of human rights commissions to force our elected officials to rein them in.