Canada Human Rights Tribunal Looks To Censor Speech...

Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 12:39 pm

Canada Human Rights Tribunal Looks To Censor Speech Critical Of Islam

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-kafkaesque-show-trial-of-mark-steyn/

Author and columnist Mark Steyn�s week-long trial for �hate speech� began in a British Columbia courtroom on June 2.

Steyn was accused of �flagrant Islamaphobia� after his bestselling book America Alone was excerpted in Canada�s oldest newsweekly magazine, Maclean�s, in 2006.

If found guilty by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, Maclean�s could be ordered to stop publishing Steyn�s column, or other articles �likely� to expose Muslims to �hatred or contempt.� In other words, a magazine that�s been published for over a century in an ostensibly free Western nation will now be subject to state sanction and preemptive censorship. Canadian Human Rights Tribunals boast a 100% conviction rate on such �hate speech� cases, and have already handed down lifetime bans against the likes of Rev. Scott Boision. That Christian preacher is now forbidden for life from ever citing Bible verses regarding homosexuality in his sermons, or �in newspapers, by email, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the Internet.�

So Mark Steyn�s guilty verdict seems a fait accompli. As he predicted in May, his �career in Canada will be formally ended next month.�

Canada�s liberal mainstream media more or less shrugged.

Despite the national media�s general incompetence and indifference, many troubling or just plain bizarre developments during the trial made their way into the public record nevertheless:

* Steyn�s accusers called a deconstructionist Buffy the Vampire Slayer scholar as an expert witness.

* One of his accusers admitted under oath that he�d misrepresented his group�s initial demands to the media on numerous occasions.

* Websites that linked to the �offending� Maclean�s article � including U.S.-based sites like Free Republic and Catholic Answers � were proof of Steyn�s contagious �Islamophobia.� This led another Catholic website to ask: �Catholicism: A Hate Crime in Canada?�

* Unable to refute Steyn�s statistics and facts, or to deny that the portions of the article they found most offensive were in fact chilling quotations made by radical Muslims themselves, Steyn�s accusers condemned his �tone,� use of �sarcasm,� and reliance upon �subtle intellectual arguments.�

Not a few bloggers noted ruefully that the last day of Steyn�s trial coincided with the anniversary of D-Day, and wondered what the Canadian men who�d died on Juno Beach would make of their nation today.

As for the outcome: no one knows when the Tribunal will issue its decision. As Andrew Coyne told National Review:

My hope is that it will go to appeal � in other words, I�m hoping that we lose this at the hearing level and that we appeal it to a proper court of law, as opposed to these quasi-judicial tribunals, and at that proper court of law that we make the constitutional argument that this is an infringement of our charter rights to freedom of the press. I believe that�s what we�ll do if we lose the case.

Steyn agrees. Echoing many of his supporters, he told reporters:

We want to lose so we can take it to a real court and if necessary up to the Supreme Court of Canada and we can get the ancient liberties of free-born Canadian citizens that have been taken away from them by tribunals like this.

We want those ancient civil liberties restored.

Musing on his surreal circumstances, Steyn wrote in what may be one of his last columns for Maclean�s:

By the way, I see I�ve been nominated for a National Magazine Award, to be handed out later this month. By then, Mr. Joseph [the complainants� lawyer] will have succeeded in getting the B.C. troika effectively to ban me from Maclean�s and from all Canadian journalism. An impressive achievement. My book was a No. 1 bestseller in Canada, and the new paperback edition was at No. 4 the other day, and President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Governor Mitt Romney, Senator Joe Lieberman, Senator Jon Kyl, and (at last count) six European prime ministers have either recommended the book or called me in to discuss its themes.

But in Canada it�s a hate crime.