Distasteful speech is much less distasteful than the puffery and prudish political correctness rhetoric spouted by many of my supposed leftist colleagues who seem to often abandon what is worth preserving in western liberalism. The human rights commission was certainly right to dismiss the complaint. Prejudice and hatred of Islam is not going to be cured by repression. Personally I oppose any type of hate crime legislation. It is more dangerous than the speech it is trying to prevent. People whose speech is banned believe that their views are being repressed--which they are--and this must be because those whom they oppose know they are true and as powerful people they repress them. This may be untrue but it certainly is not obviously untrue!
Rights commission dismisses complaint against Maclean's
Last Updated: Saturday, June 28, 2008 7:09 PM ET
CBC News
The Canadian Human Rights Commission has dismissed a complaint by a Muslim organization against Maclean’s, ruling that the views expressed in one of the magazine's articles were not “of an extreme nature.”
The Canadian Islamic Congress had alleged that the article written by Mark Steyn entitled "The Future Belongs to Islam" and posted on the magazine’s website in October 2006 discriminated and spread hatred against Muslims.
The article, an excerpt of a book authored by Steyn, talks about Islam being a threat to North American institutions and values. It used statistics to show higher birth rates plus immigration mean Muslims will outnumber followers of other religions in Western Europe.
"The writing is polemical, colourful and emphatic, and was obviously calculated to excite discussion and even offend certain readers, Muslim and non-Muslim alike," wrote Lucie Veillette, secretary to the commission.
"Overall, however, the views expressed in the Steyn article, when considered as a whole and in context, are not of an extreme nature as defined by the Supreme Court."
The commission said there was "no reasonable basis in the evidence to warrant the appointment of a Tribunal."
On its website, Maclean's said it was pleased the complaint was dismissed and that the decision was in keeping with its position that the article "was a worthy piece of commentary on important geopolitical issues, entirely within the bounds of normal journalistic practice."
But it added that no human rights commission should have the mandate to monitor or assess the editorial decisions of the nation's media.
Faisal Joseph, a lawyer for the Canadian Islamic Congress, told the Canadian Press that the Congress is disappointed the commission made its decision without hearing "the compelling evidence of hate and expert testimony" the Congress recently presented in a complaint to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. That tribunal has yet to release a ruling.
Showing posts with label Mark Steyn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark Steyn. Show all posts
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Free speeh(sic), eh? Why is Canada prosecuting Mark Steyn?
The Star has a contrary viewpoint that is worth reading. I am not sure that the author of this article, MacDonald cannot spell "speech" or is pretending that Canadians can't spell or if it is just a typo.
I hate laws against hate speech. I think they are a dangerous limitation upon free speech. Contrary to what the Star article argues I believe as does MacDonald in this article that free speech is a perfectly good excuse for allowing racist, anti-semitic, sexist, Islamophobic, etc.etc. speech. In taking this view I often find myself on the side of racists, sexists, Islamophobes etc. but so what. Sometimes people with racist, Islamophobic, etc views are correct about some matters. The argument that a position is wrong because it is held by people with disgusting viewpoints is a type of ad hominem argument even when it is advanced by the most progressive liberal or whomever.
Of course free speech is not absolute. You can''t allow someone to yell fire when there is no fire in a crowded theatre. But there are already laws limiting free speech: libel laws. Even those laws seem to me often too rigid.
As for the U.S. MacDonald is correct in some ways but misleading in others. You don't need laws to restrict free speech. A case in point is the power of the Israel lobby in their ability to manage opinion about Israel in the U.S.. They even have been able to persuade some universities, institutions that are supposed to cherish free speech, to cancel speeches by authors of a book critical of Israel even though the authors are established academics. The market can effectively limit the penetration of critical dissenting speech. While no laws limit free speech opinions are nevertheless manufactured by the U.S. mass media system because of the fashion in which it works. Noam Chomsky has written of this at length in his book Manufacturing Consent. I believe there are videos of a series about this. One of the beauties of the internet and blogs is that they can help clear out some of the fog of manufactured news.
Free speeh, eh? Why is Canada prosecuting Mark Steyn?
Last Updated: Friday, June 13, 2008 6:54 PM ET By Neil Macdonald CBC News
The bookshop across the street from my office here in Washington is once again offering America Alone, Mark Steyn's 2006 polemic about the Muslim diaspora in the West.
But it now carries this splash on the cover: "Soon to be banned in Canada."
Inside the latest edition, Steyn, a conservative Vermont-based columnist who writes regularly for a number of Canadian publications, advises the reader: "If you're browsing this in a Canadian bookstore, you may well be holding a bona fide 'hate crime' in your hand."
That is a bit of self-promotion, of course, designed to sell even more copies of a book that is already a New York Times bestseller. It also happens to be true.Author Mark Steyn (CBC)
Steyn, at the moment, is effectively being tried, by a quasi-judicial panel in Vancouver, for insulting Islam.
Normally, that's the sort of proceeding you'd expect to hear about in Saudi Arabia or Iran, not the West. But the British Columbia Human Rights Commission, in the cause of protecting minorities, asserts its right to judge and even restrict speech.
Currently, it is hearing a complaint about Steyn's book from Mohamed Elmasry, head of the Canadian Islamic Congress. Elmasry is going after both Steyn and Maclean's magazine, which excerpted his book when it was published two years ago.
The complaint states that the article "discriminates against Muslims on the basis of their religion. It exposes Muslims to hatred and contempt due to their religion." Elmasry complains that Steyn's book tars entire Muslim communities as complicit in violent jihad. Mohamed Elmasry, head of the Canadian Islamic Congress (Canadian Press)
In Canada, such a proceeding is evidently unremarkable. With the exception of Maclean's and the National Post, the two national outlets that Steyn writes for, coverage in the Canadian media has been notably limited.
Here in the U.S, though, where freedom of expression and the public right to know is taken very seriously, it is front-page news when an organ of government — a neighbouring Western government at that — hauls a journalist before its bar to judge his writings.
'Deafening silence in Canada'
A New York Times reporter has been covering the B.C. tribunal, and filed a front-page story recently. The version on its website carried this headline: "Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech."
On the same day, one of the best-read articles on the website Real Clear Politics was entitled "Deafening Silence in Canada."
It's not that Americans ignore racism. That is not the case by a long shot. This country has laws defining hate crimes and judges can tack on extra punishments when it is proved that violence is motivated by racial bias.
But where speech is concerned, Americans take a nearly absolutist view. It is protected, period, unless someone is directly inciting physical harm as in "Let's take this gasoline and set fire to that synagogue."
The U.S. Supreme Court has generally agreed with jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes that the right to swing your fist stops at the beginning of the other guy's nose. To paraphrase Nat Hentoff's anti-censorship treatise Free Speech For Me, But Not For Thee, offensive speech in this country ought to be combated with more speech.
Free to be contemptuous
Now, I have read Steyn's book. And Elmasry's accusation that it treats Islam contemptuously is certainly true.
Steyn, like many social conservatives, practically seethes with contempt for certain Islamic laws and customs. He mocks Western leftists who, out of a sense of moral relativism, defend them.
"Non-Muslim females in heavily Muslim neighbourhoods in France now wear headscarves while out on the streets," he writes, demanding to know why feminists don't speak out more.
His conclusion oozes sarcasm: "Yes, yes, I know Islam is very varied and Riyadh has a vibrant gay scene, and the Khartoum Feminist Publishing Collective now has so many members they've rented lavish new offices above the clitorectomy clinic."
As the New York Times reporter characterized it: "The tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal."
Adds the dispatch from Vancouver: "Things are different here."
Different, eh?
As I have often tried to explain to my American colleagues, we Canadians simply don't have a history of free speech comparable to what exists in the U.S.
Our institutions have been controlling speech and information for so long that we barely blink at things that would shock an American.
Canada currently has a federal government that tries to control almost every syllable spoken publicly by its bureaucrats and every bit of information disseminated to the public. Americans, who insist on scrutinizing politicians' medical records and tax returns, simply would not stand for such secrecy.
Canada also has a Security of Information Act, which though recently revamped is still based largely on the draconian British model of official secrets. While its reach is being tested in the courts, and increasingly found wanting, it still effectively criminalizes the disclosure of anything the government wants kept secret.
What's more, Canadians love turning to governments to protect us from speech or expression that offends. Though we are sometimes unhappy when we get what we ask for. (Ask the feminist groups that pushed for a restriction on pornography, only to find the new law used by Canada Customs to block gay and lesbian fiction, as well as straight erotica.)
What goes around
Elmasry himself come to regret having launched this complaint against Steyn. Like others who have sought to control the speech of others, he is someone who tends to shoot from the lip himself.
In 2004, Elmasry told television interviewer Michael Coren that any Israeli of military age, 18 or older, civilian or not, might be considered a legitimate target for militant attacks. He was also quoted in 2003 as saying "it is clear that homosexuality is forbidden and if someone wants to insist on doing it, they will be held accountable in the end."
Gay rights groups and pro-Israel Jewish groups no doubt remember those remarks and are probably watching the B.C. tribunal's deliberations with great interest along with other advocacy organizations who consider their members hated and insulted on a routine basis.
(Elmasry's complaint was laid before three human rights commissions: Ontario's, which declared it lacked jurisdiction but went on to castigate Steyn anyway; British Columbia's, which began hearings two weeks ago; and the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which has opened a case but not yet begun hearings.)
Speaking as someone who's lived in the rough-and-tumble American marketplace of ideas for many years now, I prefer the speech-versus-speech approach.
I have read Holocaust denial material here and I remain convinced the Holocaust happened. I've read tracts demonizing homosexuality and don't consider gays a threat to anything. I've read accounts by reporters who laid bare national security secrets and I've watched other reporters interview jurors at the end of a criminal trial — all things that can be suppressed in Canada.
There is no chance whatever that either Mark Steyn's or Mohamed Elmasry's utterances would be censored here.
Here, they'd be left to argue with one another and the public might be better informed for having listened.
I hate laws against hate speech. I think they are a dangerous limitation upon free speech. Contrary to what the Star article argues I believe as does MacDonald in this article that free speech is a perfectly good excuse for allowing racist, anti-semitic, sexist, Islamophobic, etc.etc. speech. In taking this view I often find myself on the side of racists, sexists, Islamophobes etc. but so what. Sometimes people with racist, Islamophobic, etc views are correct about some matters. The argument that a position is wrong because it is held by people with disgusting viewpoints is a type of ad hominem argument even when it is advanced by the most progressive liberal or whomever.
Of course free speech is not absolute. You can''t allow someone to yell fire when there is no fire in a crowded theatre. But there are already laws limiting free speech: libel laws. Even those laws seem to me often too rigid.
As for the U.S. MacDonald is correct in some ways but misleading in others. You don't need laws to restrict free speech. A case in point is the power of the Israel lobby in their ability to manage opinion about Israel in the U.S.. They even have been able to persuade some universities, institutions that are supposed to cherish free speech, to cancel speeches by authors of a book critical of Israel even though the authors are established academics. The market can effectively limit the penetration of critical dissenting speech. While no laws limit free speech opinions are nevertheless manufactured by the U.S. mass media system because of the fashion in which it works. Noam Chomsky has written of this at length in his book Manufacturing Consent. I believe there are videos of a series about this. One of the beauties of the internet and blogs is that they can help clear out some of the fog of manufactured news.
Free speeh, eh? Why is Canada prosecuting Mark Steyn?
Last Updated: Friday, June 13, 2008 6:54 PM ET By Neil Macdonald CBC News
The bookshop across the street from my office here in Washington is once again offering America Alone, Mark Steyn's 2006 polemic about the Muslim diaspora in the West.
But it now carries this splash on the cover: "Soon to be banned in Canada."
Inside the latest edition, Steyn, a conservative Vermont-based columnist who writes regularly for a number of Canadian publications, advises the reader: "If you're browsing this in a Canadian bookstore, you may well be holding a bona fide 'hate crime' in your hand."
That is a bit of self-promotion, of course, designed to sell even more copies of a book that is already a New York Times bestseller. It also happens to be true.Author Mark Steyn (CBC)
Steyn, at the moment, is effectively being tried, by a quasi-judicial panel in Vancouver, for insulting Islam.
Normally, that's the sort of proceeding you'd expect to hear about in Saudi Arabia or Iran, not the West. But the British Columbia Human Rights Commission, in the cause of protecting minorities, asserts its right to judge and even restrict speech.
Currently, it is hearing a complaint about Steyn's book from Mohamed Elmasry, head of the Canadian Islamic Congress. Elmasry is going after both Steyn and Maclean's magazine, which excerpted his book when it was published two years ago.
The complaint states that the article "discriminates against Muslims on the basis of their religion. It exposes Muslims to hatred and contempt due to their religion." Elmasry complains that Steyn's book tars entire Muslim communities as complicit in violent jihad. Mohamed Elmasry, head of the Canadian Islamic Congress (Canadian Press)
In Canada, such a proceeding is evidently unremarkable. With the exception of Maclean's and the National Post, the two national outlets that Steyn writes for, coverage in the Canadian media has been notably limited.
Here in the U.S, though, where freedom of expression and the public right to know is taken very seriously, it is front-page news when an organ of government — a neighbouring Western government at that — hauls a journalist before its bar to judge his writings.
'Deafening silence in Canada'
A New York Times reporter has been covering the B.C. tribunal, and filed a front-page story recently. The version on its website carried this headline: "Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech."
On the same day, one of the best-read articles on the website Real Clear Politics was entitled "Deafening Silence in Canada."
It's not that Americans ignore racism. That is not the case by a long shot. This country has laws defining hate crimes and judges can tack on extra punishments when it is proved that violence is motivated by racial bias.
But where speech is concerned, Americans take a nearly absolutist view. It is protected, period, unless someone is directly inciting physical harm as in "Let's take this gasoline and set fire to that synagogue."
The U.S. Supreme Court has generally agreed with jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes that the right to swing your fist stops at the beginning of the other guy's nose. To paraphrase Nat Hentoff's anti-censorship treatise Free Speech For Me, But Not For Thee, offensive speech in this country ought to be combated with more speech.
Free to be contemptuous
Now, I have read Steyn's book. And Elmasry's accusation that it treats Islam contemptuously is certainly true.
Steyn, like many social conservatives, practically seethes with contempt for certain Islamic laws and customs. He mocks Western leftists who, out of a sense of moral relativism, defend them.
"Non-Muslim females in heavily Muslim neighbourhoods in France now wear headscarves while out on the streets," he writes, demanding to know why feminists don't speak out more.
His conclusion oozes sarcasm: "Yes, yes, I know Islam is very varied and Riyadh has a vibrant gay scene, and the Khartoum Feminist Publishing Collective now has so many members they've rented lavish new offices above the clitorectomy clinic."
As the New York Times reporter characterized it: "The tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal."
Adds the dispatch from Vancouver: "Things are different here."
Different, eh?
As I have often tried to explain to my American colleagues, we Canadians simply don't have a history of free speech comparable to what exists in the U.S.
Our institutions have been controlling speech and information for so long that we barely blink at things that would shock an American.
Canada currently has a federal government that tries to control almost every syllable spoken publicly by its bureaucrats and every bit of information disseminated to the public. Americans, who insist on scrutinizing politicians' medical records and tax returns, simply would not stand for such secrecy.
Canada also has a Security of Information Act, which though recently revamped is still based largely on the draconian British model of official secrets. While its reach is being tested in the courts, and increasingly found wanting, it still effectively criminalizes the disclosure of anything the government wants kept secret.
What's more, Canadians love turning to governments to protect us from speech or expression that offends. Though we are sometimes unhappy when we get what we ask for. (Ask the feminist groups that pushed for a restriction on pornography, only to find the new law used by Canada Customs to block gay and lesbian fiction, as well as straight erotica.)
What goes around
Elmasry himself come to regret having launched this complaint against Steyn. Like others who have sought to control the speech of others, he is someone who tends to shoot from the lip himself.
In 2004, Elmasry told television interviewer Michael Coren that any Israeli of military age, 18 or older, civilian or not, might be considered a legitimate target for militant attacks. He was also quoted in 2003 as saying "it is clear that homosexuality is forbidden and if someone wants to insist on doing it, they will be held accountable in the end."
Gay rights groups and pro-Israel Jewish groups no doubt remember those remarks and are probably watching the B.C. tribunal's deliberations with great interest along with other advocacy organizations who consider their members hated and insulted on a routine basis.
(Elmasry's complaint was laid before three human rights commissions: Ontario's, which declared it lacked jurisdiction but went on to castigate Steyn anyway; British Columbia's, which began hearings two weeks ago; and the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which has opened a case but not yet begun hearings.)
Speaking as someone who's lived in the rough-and-tumble American marketplace of ideas for many years now, I prefer the speech-versus-speech approach.
I have read Holocaust denial material here and I remain convinced the Holocaust happened. I've read tracts demonizing homosexuality and don't consider gays a threat to anything. I've read accounts by reporters who laid bare national security secrets and I've watched other reporters interview jurors at the end of a criminal trial — all things that can be suppressed in Canada.
There is no chance whatever that either Mark Steyn's or Mohamed Elmasry's utterances would be censored here.
Here, they'd be left to argue with one another and the public might be better informed for having listened.
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