The line in the sand must be drawn.
All our voices need to be raised whenever freedom's indivisibility is compromised. Particularly when it occurs in our own backyards, and precisely when what we are defending is the sovereignty of individual conscience. For this, more than anything, is the object lesson in the difference between liberty and tyranny.
At a time of increasingly politically-correct and appeasing restrictions on fundamental liberties of expression, it was heartening over the past weeks to see two decisions in Canada that seem to offer a glimmer of hope for reason and for courage.
The Canadian Human Rights Commission dismissed a hate speech complaint against Maclean's Magazine. It was brought by Mohamed Elmasry, national president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, who several years ago suggested on the Michael Coren television broadcast that all Israelis were legitimate targets because Israel has a citizen army. The complaint was tied to the ongoing BC Human Rights Commission hearings on Maclean’s excerpt of Mark Steyn’s “The Future Belongs to Islam” taken from his best-selling America Alone.
The aim of the complaint was to force Maclean's to print a "mutually acceptable" rebuttal. Elmasry’s failure at the federal level leaves the entire issue in the hands of the BC tribunal, which heard the case this month.
The ruling means the CHRC does not believe there is evidence to support a complaint that the Steyn article was "likely to expose" Muslims to hatred or contempt.
This year, Liberal MP Keith Martin introduced a motion to scrap human rights hate speech law altogether, and several Conservatives have expressed similar views.
In another ruling over the past ten days, the Supreme Court of Canada has unanimously decided that outspoken Vancouver radio host Rafe Mair not liable for defamatory statements.
The court upheld a previous B. C. Supreme Court decision that the right to fair comment protected Mair's statements in an on-air editorial about Kari Simpson, a public figure whom Mr. Mair compared to Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members.
Media law expert Mark Bantey said, "[The ruling] finally, finally puts to rest this lingering notion that comment or opinion has to be fair or reasonable," It gives constitutional protection to all opinions, no matter how outrageous, so long as they are based on the facts."
"We live in a free country where people have as much right to express outrageous and ridiculous opinions as moderate ones," the ruling says.
And that’s the whole point. A free society cannot be one that stifles expression because some group would be “exposed” to hatred or contempt, or some person thinks a comment is outrageous. That’s the free battleground of ideas.
Freedom is indivisible. If we want to enjoy it we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they agree with us or not. This standard cannot be carried lightly, and the burden of it has fallen from many hands throughout history. Each generation must be vigilant that it not slip from its grip.
Hate laws are a two-edged sword. No one questions the noble intentions of those dozen or so nations who have made it a crime to deny the Holocaust for example. Neither do we doubt the malignant nature of those men and women who would put in doubt the reality of the greatest crime in the history of man. However, if that orgy of blood is to have any meaning as living testimony, it is that no person shall ever again be persecuted, or prosecuted, for their beliefs, so long as those beliefs do not clearly and specifically call for violence against any person or group.
In trying to imbue political correctness into our laws in order to satisfy every group, all we do is encourage the perversion of our most sacred trusts by appeasing every special interest that threatens and uses violence. We are mirroring that which we seek to destroy. And as Churchill reminded us, "An appeaser is someone who feeds the crocodile hoping he will eat him last."
But eaten we will be.
