News from the New Party

Free press under attack in Canada

We note with alarm recent events in Canada, where the respected news magazine Macleans and the journalist and commentator Mark Steyn are facing "hate speech" charges which will be heard by two separate judicial panels: the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

The complaints have been brought by five Muslim law-school students working through the Canadian Islamic Congress, some months after publication by Macleans of a chapter from Steyn's best-selling book America Alone.

The New York Post reports:

Steyn, who won the 2006 Eric Breindel Journalism Award (co-sponsored by The Post and its parent, News Corp), writes for dozens of publications on several continents. After the Canadian general-interest magazine Maclean's reprinted a chapter from the book, five Muslim law-school students, acting through the auspices of the Canadian Islamic Congress, demanded that the magazine be punished for spreading "hatred and contempt" for Muslims.

The plaintiffs allege that Maclean's advocated, among other things, the notion that Islamic culture is incompatible with Canada's liberalized, Western civilization. They insist such a notion is untrue and, in effect, want opinions like that banned from publication.

Two separate panels, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Canadian Human Rights Commission, have agreed to hear the case. These bodies are empowered to hear and rule on cases of purported "hate speech."

Of course, a ban on opinions - even disagreeable ones - is the very antithesis of the Western tradition of free speech and freedom of the press.

Indeed, this whole process of dragging Steyn and the magazine before two separate human-rights bodies for the "crime" of expressing an opinion is a good illustration of precisely what he was talking about.

This is of course true.  The charges against Steyn and Macleans are vexatious and politically motivated, and must at all costs be defeated.  However, the real crime here is that the Canadian legal system aids and abets such egregious abuse against the freedom of the press.  Whilst one might deplore the tactics of the plaintiffs in this case, Canada's Human Rights Commissions are in principle open to any motivated individual or group to intimidate or harass their opponents into silence.

Melanie Phillips comments:

The irony, of course, is that by this action Canada is thus demonstrating that if any culture is incompatible with liberalised western civilisation, it is clearly Canada’s. The idea that certain arguments must not be made, and that to do so is to find oneself arraigned before a judicial tribunal, is the very antithesis of a liberal society. It is a symptom of totalitarianism. It is also doubly ironic that it is the Islamic world, through the Canadian Islamic Congress, that is bringing this action -- since in seeking to suppress the view that the Islamic world is incompatible with liberalism, it is demonstrating with the starkest possible clarity the truth of that proposition.

It is no accident that it is uber-‘liberal’ Canada, which worships at the shrine of human rights law, where this medieval inquisition is taking place. The fact that the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Canadian Human Rights Commission are to conduct this oppressive hearing is grotesque but not in the least surprising. The belief fundamental to human wrongs law, that minorities are sacrosanct and that to criticise them is proof of rampant prejudice, is part of the mindset which has turned truth, morality and freedom inside out. If a writer who tells the truth about Islamists spreading hatred and contempt for the west is himself hauled before a court charged with spreading hatred and contempt by telling such a truth, then the Orwellian nightmare has well and truly arrived.

But again, as Mark Steyn himself has observed:

Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off.

The real killer for western liberal democracies is that we have lost sight of the underlying principles on which our societies were based.  "Freedom of expression", even journalistic or academic freedom, has been strangled by an array of absurd, contradictory and ultimately unenforceable rules which demand above all else that noone should offend or take offence at anything.  As a result political discourse takes place within an ever smaller space, the boundaries of which are policed by ludicrous kangaroo courts in Canada and elsewhere.

Freedom and democracy cannot ultimately survive under such circumstances.  True liberal values must be reasserted before the lights of freedom go out once and for all.