Human rights complaint against Maclean's dismissed

A very happy Mark Steyn

Happy days are here again. Well, not quite but this is a monumental decision in the war against the islamification of the West. I believe that not only is this the first time the Comission has dismissed a suit for lack of evidence, it's the first time they have not handed down a guilty verdict. Unfortunately, the Commission is still in business and there is a long way to go to guarantee freedom of speech in Canada.

FROM CTV.CA:

Human rights complaint against Maclean's dismissed

Updated Sat. Jun. 28 2008 4:40 PM ET
CTV.ca News Staff
The Canadian Human Rights Commission has dismissed a Muslim group's complaint against Maclean's magazine.
The Canadian Islamic Congress had argued the magazine published an article in October 2006 that would likely expose Muslims to hatred and contempt.
The article, entitled "The Future Belongs to Islam," by Mark Steyn claimed that Muslims are on the verge of dominating Europe and the West because of a demographic shift.
The article claims that their greater numbers will eventually allow Muslims to dominate Western countries. The article goes so far as to quote a European imam who allegedly said Muslims are reproducing like "mosquitoes."
While commentators have said Steyn's demographic claims are way off-base, the CHRC concluded the views in the article, "when considered as a whole and in context, are not of an extreme nature, as defined by the Supreme Court."
Therefore, the Commission said there is no reason to warrant the appointment of a tribunal to look into the matter. In its four page decision, the Commission noted Steyn's "writing is polemical, colourful and emphatic, and was obviously calculated to excite discussion and even offend certain readers, Muslim and non-Muslim alike."
Faisal Joseph, a lawyer for the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC), said he disagreed with the commission's finding. He said there was "compelling evidence of hate and expert testimony" to support their case, had it been allowed to move forward.
The complainants have argued that Maclean's forced them to act because the magazine wouldn't print their response. They want the magazine to publish a counterpoint.
They've also filed a similar complaint with the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, which finished hearing the case earlier this month, but has yet to make a ruling. The Ontario Human Rights Commission has said it does not have the jurisdiction to hear a similar case.
On its website, Maclean's released a statement noting satisfaction with the CHRC decision.
"Though gratified by the decision, Maclean's continues to assert that no human rights commission, whether at the federal or provincial level, has the mandate or the expertise to monitor, inquire into, or assess the editorial decisions of the nation's media," said the statement.
"And we continue to have grave concerns about a system of complaint and adjudication that allows a media outlet to be pursued in multiple jurisdictions on the same complaint, brought by the same complainants."
Steyn and others -- including editors at Maclean's -- have said the issue is not the article's merits or its viewpoint. They are concerned that such human rights tribunals could suppress free speech.

You will be Steyn, all Steyn

Mark Steyn is another writer being persecuted for expressing his opinion in public. There is a draconian movement afoot to suppress any ideas or opinions that oppose the PC dogma of never saying anything that could possibly offend anyone. Such a position is of course absurd and impossible. Being insulted cannot become a crime or else no one will ever be able to utter even the most innocuous comment without fear of prosecution. The blogger Lionheart is in much greater difficulty right now in Britain for voicing his opinion on his blog. Steyn and Lionheart are two of a kind as far as persecution of free speech is concerned.
FROM ATLASSHRUGS:
You will be Steyn, all Steyn
Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee, bloggers! Get on the horn. NOW! Blogburst! Blogbomb! Blogswarm! The price of free speech is getting wildly expensive. Have you subscribed to MacCleans yet? the best way to show support is to support the beleaguered publishers by taking out a subscription Maclean's for you or a friend. US and overseas wannabe-subscribers have told us they're having a bit of difficulty getting the website form to acknowledge non-Canadian postal codes. If you have trouble, send us the details and we'll make sure Maclean's sort it out when the Subscription Dept wallahs return to the office on Christmas Bank Holiday First Thursday After Hogmanay, or whenever folks go back to work in Toronto.
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Steyn strikes back: Squashing debate like mosquitoes

Nobody messes with Steyn.
FROM JIHADWATCH.ORG:
Steyn strikes back: Squashing debate like mosquitoes
Mark Steyn responds to his accusers. "In rebuttal: Squashing debate like mosquitoes," in the CalgaryHerald
(thanks to Kathy Shaidle):
They and their friends at the Canadian Islamic Congress are seemingly not interested in stimulating debate, but only in shutting it down, by making it more trouble than it's worth for editors to run articles on one of the central questions of the age: Islam's relationship with a dying West. In using quasi-judicial coercion to squash debate, they make one of the central points of my argument -- that a proportion of Islam is inimical to western traditions of freedom -- more eloquently than I ever could.
Ain't it the truth. Again and again and again and again I have seen jihadists and their allies charge me with all variety of evil thing, in order to compel people of good will to turn away from what I am saying. But never do they deign actually to refute what I am saying. They can't do that, in fact, so they try to shut me down instead, or claim that what I have written is "total BS," but refuse to explain how or why -- because we are all such evil folks we won't listen anyway.
Westerners who understand the need for and value of free speech need to stand up for and with Steyn and Savage and all the rest -- before it's too late, and we can't stand up for them, because we will be imprisoned or worse for doing so.

Time for the U.S. to get comfortable with ideology

Another powerful treatise by Mark Steyn. This time on why we are uncomfortable with standing our ground and defending our way of life.
Time for the U.S. to get comfortable with ideology
FROM JEWISHWORLDREVIEW.COM:
By Mark Steyn
Peter Robinson, a Reagan speechwriter in the last years of the Cold War, posed an interesting question the other day. He noted that on Feb. 22, 1946, a mere six months after the end of World War II, George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat in Moscow, sent his famous 5,000-word telegram that laid out the stakes of the Cold War and the nature of the enemy, and that that "Long Telegram" in essence shaped the way America thought about the conflict all the way up to the fall of the Berlin Wall four decades later. And what Mr. Robinson wondered was this:

"Here we are today, more than six years after 9/11. Does anyone believe a new 'Long Telegram' has yet been written? And accepted throughout the senior levels of the government?"

Answer: No.

Because, if it had, you'd hear it echoed in public — just as the Long Telegram provided the underpinning of the Truman Doctrine a year later. Kennan himself had differences with Truman and successive presidents over what he regarded as their misinterpretation, but, granted all that, most of what turned up over the next 40 years — the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam war, Soviet subversion in Africa and Europe, Grenada and Afghanistan — is consistent with the conflict as laid out by one relatively minor State Department functionary decades earlier.

Why can't we do that today?

Well, one reason is we're not really comfortable with ideology, either ours or anybody else's. Insofar as we have an ideology it's a belief in the virtues of "multiculturalism," "tolerance," "celebrate diversity" — a bumper-sticker ideology that is, in effect, an anti-ideology which explicitly rejects the very idea of drawing distinctions between your beliefs and anybody else's.
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They wait for us to run again

Once again Mark Steyn nails it. Recently the President and a number of pundits have been drawing inept analogies between Viet Nam and Iraq. As usual, they miss the mark, but Steyn puts things into proper perspective.
FROM OCREGISTER.COM:
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Mark Steyn: They wait for us to run again
George W. Bush gave a speech about Iraq last week, and in the middle of it he did something long overdue: He attempted to appropriate the left's most treasured all-purpose historical analogy. Indeed, Vietnam is so ubiquitous in the fulminations of politicians, academics and pundits that we could really use anti-trust legislation to protect us from shopworn historical precedents. But, in the absence thereof, the president has determined that we might at least learn the real "lessons of Vietnam."
"Then as now, people argued the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end," Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention Aug. 22. "Many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people … . A columnist for the New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: 'It's difficult to imagine,' he said, 'how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.' A headline on that story, dateline Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: 'Indochina Without Americans: For Most a Better Life.' The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be."
I don't know about "the world," but apparently a big chunk of America still believes in these "misimpressions." As the New York Times put it, "In urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Mr. Bush is challenging the historical memory that the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies."
Well, it had a "few negative repercussions" for America's allies in South Vietnam, who were promptly overrun by the North. And it had a "negative repercussion" for former Cambodian Prime Minister Sirik Matak, to whom the U.S. ambassador sportingly offered asylum. "I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion," Matak told him. "I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty … . I have committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans." So Sirik Matak stayed in Phnom Penh and a month later was killed by the Khmer Rouge, along with about 2 million other people. If it's hard for individual names to linger in the New York Times' "historical memory," you'd think the general mound of corpses would resonate.
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