Jason Kenney on CIC/Steyn; Elmasry Defends Hezbollah Terrorists

I believe this to be the first time a politician has spoken on the Canadian Islamic Congress/Steyn affair. It's Conservative Jason Kenney:

"To be attacking opinions expressed by a columnist in a major magazine is a pretty bold attack on the basic Canadian value of freedom of the press and freedom of expression," Kenney said in an interview. "I think all Canadians would reject that kind of effort to undermine one of our basic freedoms."

This isn't the first time there has been some interaction between Jason Kenney and the CIC. Mohamed Elmasry, the president of the CIC, previously described Jason Kenney as a man who subscribes to "dubious ideologies." But what establishes Kenney as such? In Elmasry's mind, it is because Kenney said: "The world was wrong to negotiate with [the Nazis] then, and it would be wrong to negotiate with Hezbollah today." Hezbollah is a terrorist group, yet Elmasry defended them when he got the chance, and equivocated them with every other political party and described them as "legitimate." This is the man leading the Canadian Islamic Congress which purports to represent the Canadian Islamic community in its entirety.

Did he do it for the "lulz"?

Mark Steyn responds to a review of his debacle from one Jim Henley. Henley quotes only one sentence from Steyn's article: "Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes" and calls this statement "frank bigotry" on Steyn's part. Unfortunately for Henley, these were actually the words of Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar, not Steyn. You might think that Henley would then make a post about the "frank bigotry" of Mullah Krekar instead. But no, the imam gets a free pass, and Mark Steyn is still liable for the rest of his article, which is really just showing the why and how behind the imam's statement -- that's why it is used as the final and concluding statement of the piece.

And this gets to the absurdity of the CIC and HRC's case against Mark Steyn. According to these accusers of him, he is subjecting Canadian Muslims to "hatred or contempt" by showing how the words of a Norwegian Muslim leader about Muslims in Europe are true. How truly "flagrantly Islamophobic" to state that a Muslim leader is correct! Sinister really. Just imagine if someone moves from this already egregious bigotry of agreeing with Muslims, to such catastrophes as standing up and saying that Muslims are wrong! Oh the horror! Or...errr...wait?

Who's actually endangering Muslims?

Andrew Coyne writes more on the Mark Steyn affair and also a decent bit on the Human Rights Commissions in general.

Coyne points to the irony of the CIC making these charges against Steyn. It was CIC president Mohamed Elmasry who declared Tarek Fatah to be "anti-Islam" and that we was "smearing Islam." Such labels are exactly what Mr. Fatah was attacked for in 2006 when thugs smashed the windows in his car, threatening him because he was "anti-Islam." The irony is palpable. Has any Muslim in Canada been attacked for being "part of a disastrous demographic sea-change in Europe," as Mark Steyn, as I paraphrase, charges of Muslims? None, yet there is a Muslim in Canada attacked for being "anti-Islam" just as Elmasry charges of that Muslim. Maybe the CIC should bring itself before the Human Rights Commission...or just leave Mark Steyn alone.

Also, Elmasry was in favour of the sharia courts for Muslim family disputes in Ontario, this would further hurt Muslims. It would subject Muslims to the obscurantist decisions of the fundamentalist Islamic scholars and keep Muslims, women in particular, one step further from equality under law. And this sets a precedent for evermore introduction of sharia, bringing even greater harm to Muslims.

And I wish to make a more general point, that the CIC's stifling of open discourse hurts Muslims as well. It's doesn't hurt to hear criticisms of your side, even if it does hurt your sensibilities.

Misconceived

"What's so scary about Muslims?" asks Yilmaz Alimoglu. Only "misconceptions," he answers. But don't feel bad: we're all at fault for these misconceptions, Muslim and kafir alike.

But he's right, I think poorly of Islam because of my misconceptions of it. Misconceptions such as that it is a tenet of Islam that the Quran is the uncreated word of Allah which has existed with Allah for all eternity, or at least that it existed when Musa supposedly existed, between 1436 and 1316 BC. This despite the fact that it is written in Arabic, which, to the best linguistic research, descended originally from a proto-Semitic language and immediately from Ancient North Arabian between 400BC and 300AD, well past the date when the Quran supposedly existed. How was there a text written in Arabic, before Arabic even evolved? But no, I shouldn't ask. That's just a misconception: Muslims don't actually believe in anything delusional like that; they really believe that the Quran was just written by people over a period of time in the 7th century, as the scholars hypothesise in accordance with scientific evidence. Oh? What? They do believe the delusional one? Oh, jeez, I feel like I may be stumbling into some serious hate speech already! I better zip-it or the Canadian Islamic Congress and the Human Rights Commission may write me up for inciting contempt toward a group of people on the basis of religion, all for rightly calling Muslims delusional.

Islam grows in Canada due to the active policies of the government: multiculturalism with mass immigration from Muslim majority countries. Is growth in Islam good? I think it's not. I think the fundamental tenets of Islam are wrong because they are delusional, as in the example I just gave, and so anyone who believes in Islam is wrong as well. So the governmental policies actively increase the ranks of adherents to a fundamentally wrong ideology.

If you like Islam, great, good for you, you're getting what you want -- keep on importing delusions. If you don't, then maybe you should start opting for a change of policy. This more or less brings us to the article for which Mark Steyn is being investigated for breaking the Human Rights Code: he says, under the current policies, areas of Europe and Canada have become and are becoming majority Muslim, and the continuation of these policies will eventually lead to the entire relevant countries becoming majority Muslim. What would these countries look like at that time? Would they maintain a secular legal system, or have something more in line with sharia law? I bet on the latter, because every Muslim majority country has laws based on sharia to some extent (what a radical inference!). Again, if you would like a sharia-based system, then keep the current policies. If you wouldn't, then the time to change the policies is now, not later.

If this is hate speech, I'm sorry, sincerely, but I don't retract it, for I think it's true.

More on Steyn

Ezra Levant writes a bit more on the CIC vs. Steyn affair. And he has more on Mohamed Elmasry -- about his antisemitism. He also writes about a parallel human rights commission case against him in Alberta for republishing the Danish Mohammed Cartoons.

I think it's just a tragedy that in Canada a person would have to face a tribunal because he insulted a "prophet." To show my support for freedom of speech and my opposition to theocracy, and hopefully not just because I'm confident one would not actually be prosecuted for these things, I'll post one of the Danish cartoons again. I don't think this is hate speech. I've said this before. I think this a poignant criticism of a character in a religious text that represents an actual political leader in the 7th century. The caricature makes him out to be both violent and deceitful in his wielding of this violence by the obfuscation of the bomb in his headdress. Both of the traits are seen in the character of Mohammed as he is portrayed in the Islamic texts. Calling it like it is isn't hate speech. It's no different from any other political caricature; and the banning of as much would be an instance authoritarianism, especially when you consider the political influence this character still has:

CIC Against Mark Steyn

A while back, I wrote about how the HRC could be used to silence critics of Islam. The Canadian Islamic Congress, whose leader, Mohamed Elmasry, has said before that he seeks to silence critics of Islam, has done just that. It has launched a suit with the HRC that seeks to charge Maclean's magazine with something like "flagrantly Islamophobic" hate speech as a violation. Maclean's has been hosting articles by Mark Steyn, and they published an excerpt from his book America Alone, which is the "offending" material. You can read it for yourself, as it is still up at the Maclean's website here.

One may ask, why would they try to quash the web article, but not the book? Well, as I said in the article I mentioned, the Human Rights Code section 13 which deals with "telecommunicated" speech is different from all other sections of the Code. It prohibits any telecommunication "that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination." There's nothing similar for non-telecommunicated speech, such as in a book. Maybe they didn't want to be known as Canada's book-burners, which would be the eventual result of banning books. The removal of webpages isn't such a dramatic image of this contempt of free speech.