January 2008 Archives

I was delighted that CTV invited me to appear today to talk about my human rights commission interrogation. You can see the short clip here.

The interviewee who followed me was Khurrum Awan, one of the four students who are the front-men for Mohamed Elmasry's human rights complaint against Mark Steyn, since Elmasry himself isn't exactly, uh, suitable for media appearances. (Read Jason Kenney's gorgeous smack down of Awan and Elmasry here).

Most of Awan's comments were the same ones he and the rest of Elmo's Kids have been offering for months. But Awan said something bizarre, for the first time that I've heard. He claims that human rights commissions "are not government bodies" and that "it's completely false... to say [their penalties] amount to government censorship."

Huh?

Every human rights commission in Canada is part of the government. They were each created by a government law, directed by government appointees, funded by government budgets, staffed by government bureaucrats, and their orders have the force of the government behind them.

There are two possibilities here: Khurrum Awan is really that bad a lawyer, or he's lying through his teeth. It's hard to believe that, even with its affirmative action programs, Osgoode Hall Law School would admit someone so thick as to support the first possibility, or if they did, to graduate him. I believe the second possibility is more likely true: that, like his boss Mohamed Elmasry, Khurrum Awan will say anything and do anything to promote the cause of radical Islam and to undermine our Western freedoms. If that means lying to CTV and its viewers about the nature of a human rights commission, why, that's just a little bit of taqiyya.

Or maybe it's both option one and option two: because anyone who would utter such an easily checkable fib isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. When I first heard Awan was going to be on TV after me, I groaned. Not anymore: as far as I'm concerned, the more Canada hears from him and the rest of Elmo's Kids, the more damage they do to their credibility -- and, hopefully, to the human rights commissions themselves.

Keith Martin, a Liberal MP from Victoria, has introduced a private member's bill motion that is as groundbreaking as it is concise:

That, in the opinion of the House, subsection 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act should be deleted from the Act.

This is important for several reasons:

1. It's evidence that the "undernews" of the abusive, unaccountable conduct of the human rights commissions has caught the attention of at least one MP (we can assume Sen. Anne Cools is watching things, too).

2. That MP is a socially progressive Liberal (formerly a red Reformer), whose human rights credentials with the Left are impeccable. Not only has he made international human rights one of his causes in Parliament, but he has personally walked the talk, serving on various Doctors Without Borders missions.

3. If a progressive, young, hip Liberal MP from an urban seat feels comfortable proposing this motion, it is a sign that reforming these commissions is politically safe, even for a Conservative government still worried about being tagged as "anti-human rights". Martin is a political entrepreneur who goes for winning opportunities. He once ran for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance; he crossed the floor to the Liberals and was rewarded by them; he has a very friendly relationship with the press. The man picks political winners. That alone is a signal to other MPs that it's safe to stand and be counted on this fight.

4. By taking the initiative -- and beating other MPs, especially Conseratives, to the punch -- Martin will get some well-deserved credit for leadership. But he'll also make it easy for Conservative MPs, even the Conservative government itself, to "follow" his example, rather than to lead. In a way, Martin takes the political risk; by supporting him, the Tories are merely sensible and bi-partisan followers. He's the point-man. 

5. The fact that Martin is a "visible minority" is irrelevant to most normal Canadians, but to the identity politics Left, it's a sign of his moral virtue, and thus makes him even more politically safe. 

Congratulations to Martin for doing the right thing. But more than that: he has given the government itself a political opening to amend this awful law. The Conservatives should ensure that Motion M-446 goes to a vote, and every one of them -- as well as other MPs of good faith from every party that cares about freedom -- should join with Martin to make his amendment law. 

I published a blog entry at this link today that had way too much fun describing a recent set-back suffered by Warren Kinsella. But I'm taking that post down now. Not out of compunction -- I'm sure that Kinsella, as the author of "Kicking Ass" and "The War Room" wouldn't want any -- but out of respect for a bystander who was inadvertently embarrassed when the details of Kinsella's private political set-back were made public. Not a lot of people could inveigle me into pulling a punch against Kinsella, but one friend did.

This morning I was interviewed on the "Mancow" show out of Chicago. It's the second-highest-rated morning show in American radio. When I was on hold waiting for my interview, I listened to the show for a few minutes. I've never heard radio like that before, ever -- extremely fast paced; fun; musical; smart; interactive; hilarious. It was like a mix between Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern and Rick Dees. I loved listening to it, and wish he was on air in Canada, too. You can catch my clip here at 2 hours and 27 minutes into the show. (I was caught off guard by his amazing invitation to join him in Toronto, and it was a bit of a clunker for me to decline on air, but other than that, I think it was a hit.)

I have a few more interesting things coming up regarding the human rights commission, including an interview with the BBC. But I think things are winding down now -- at least until the commission renders its decision on what to do with me: prosecute before a tribunal, or acquit.

I think the commission is in a bit of a pickle: if they prosecute me, they will precipitate another storm of public derision, and perhaps even political action. But if they acquit me -- in the face of my bald-faced contempt for them, and my de facto plea of "guilty!" -- they consent to their own abuse, and set a precedent for others called before them. Had I not videotaped my interrogation, that precedent would not have been known; now it's the most well-known thing about the commission (other than Richard Warman's serial complaints). I really don't know what they'll do. Judging by their molasses pace so far, I should expect to hear back from them some time before 2009.

Now that things have calmed down, I hope to attend to some of the very supportive e-mails that I've received these past weeks. I apologize to my well-wishers that I haven't had time to acknowledge their letters yet, nor to thank the many generous donors to my legal defence fund. I was truly touched by the moral -- and financial -- support I received. It's staggering to me that my Facebook "solidarity group" has over 900 members willing to stand by me. Thank you for that.

I have enjoyed blogging about my ordeal, and hope to keep up with it, at least one entry a day if possible. I'll still continue to write about the human rights commissions as news presents itself, but I plan to start writing about other subjects again, as I did before this deluge. There is a lot going on, with a provincial election imminent in Alberta, a federal election always a possibility, and fascinating developments around the world from the U.S. primaries to new successes in Iraq, to new challenges in places like China and Russia. I hope to talk about all of that -- and to continue to be an advocate for our fundamental freedoms and our western, classical liberal traditions.

I have given more thought to my idea, bruited here a few days ago, of setting up a bloggers' defence fund to protect against both spurious defamation lawsuits (such as those filed by, you guessed it, Richard Warman) and even to human rights commission attacks on political and religious speech, such as those faced by Free Dominion. I spoke with my corporate lawyer today, and if things go well, I hope to incorporate a not-for-profit corporation for that purpose within a month. I have already had two private requests for legal help, but I want to build a proper structure, including proper financial governance and compliance with issues like insurance law, before firing the starting gun. I invite advice on this subject, either in the comments section or privately.

Thanks again to my many friends in the blogosphere who have helped make a difference in the fight for freedom. I'm awed by the power of blogs -- many small voices (and a few big ones) -- united for a common, noble purpose. In the case of illiberal human rights commissions, we have started rolling the big boulder of change, and it's picking up momentum. I can hardly wait to see what happens next. 

The past three weeks have taught me about the power of the blogosphere to fill in the gaps left by the mainstream media. (Mickey Kaus calls these sorts of stories, the ones that the big media ignore but that talk radio and the Internet explore, the "undernews".) While I have yet to be interviewed by any of the three main Canadian TV networks since my interrogation, more than 5,000 bloggers have weighed in on the subject. Canadian news reporters have been AWOL, but Canadian talk radio interest has been strong, and many op-ed columnists have weighed in, too. My favourite has to be Rex Murphy's column, so beautiful it should be called a poem.)

I haven't read all of the blogs, but I'm pleased that most are supportive of free speech and oppose the human rights commissions. And most of those that are critical of me are merely critical for personal or partisan reasons. Even Warren Kinsella acknowledged today that he doesn't actually support the human rights commission's prosecution of me or Mark Steyn; his criticisms are merely personal.

I've already given too much ink -- and web traffic -- to him, but he is a symbol, I think, of the human rights commission's "constituency": partisan political activists who have a personal stake in the commissions, usually a financial one. Kinsella's first book, Web of Hate, is a kind of diary of these human rights commissions and their battles against powerless kooks and eccentrics who don't actually pose a threat to anyone. So of course Kinsella must weigh in to magnify the threat the commissions tackle, to defend the commissions' importance, and to defend their chief customer, his friend Richard Warman. In a way, that's all Kinsella is doing here: running a one-man political war-room for his buddy Warman, who has had the tar kicked out of his reputation in the blogosphere these past weeks.

It's usually good counsel to ignore folks like Kinsella, but sometimes they say things that ought to be corrected, at least for the record. I've generally ignored his weird biographies of me; I acknowledge that I'm a defamation lawyer, and that I have represented both plaintiffs and defendants, and have been a litigant myself. To compare defamation law with government-prosecuted political censorship in kangaroo courts, as Kinsella does, is simply a tactic of distration, not a real argument. (I'm also against counterfeit currency, forgery and fraud, but Kinsella is sensible enough not to call my support of those abridgements of free speech "hypocrisy".) But it's just plain weird to read things like his accusation that I've sued "Calgary Conservative riding associations".

I haven't, actually, and it's odd that the National Post, which is usually pretty good at fact-checking things (they are at least when I write for them) lets Kinsella's more partisan nose-stretchers onto their web pages.

In fact, before I helped found the Western Standard, I was a lawyer at Chipeur Advocates, which was then counsel of record for the Conservative Party (known as the Canadian Alliance back then). I didn't sue the party or its riding associations; I protected them from suits, including in several interesting defamation cases. After the 2000 election, I had the privilege of representing both Stockwell Day and Rod Love against a frivolous suit brought by a Liberal candidate who was tossed out of the Liberal Party because of his connections to the Taliban and his anti-Semitic TV broadcasts on a Calgary cable channel. (The suit was abandoned after the plaintiff had a, uh, difficult examination for discovery.) I even billed a small amount of time for Stephen Harper after he became leader and before I left the firm to start the magazine. This isn't just name-dropping (though it is a bit of that!); it's my way of saying (to my readers, and to the protectors of the Post's reputation for accuracy) that Kinsella's political fog ought not to be taken at face value. 

On his personal blog, Kinsella reminds me of a column I wrote for the Sun in 2004, and calls it hypocrisy.

I was writing about a Vancouver imam who didn't just lace his weekly sermons with "hate speech"; he went further, calling for violent action -- the killing of infidels. At least one of his congregants seems to have taken his message to heart:

Like Keegstra, Kathrada called Jews names -- "we are dealing with a people ... the brothers of the monkeys and the swine ... whose treachery is well known." Calling Jews brothers of monkeys and swine sounds like a schoolyard taunt more than high argument, but his point was clear. And just in case it wasn't, Kathrada made it clearer still: His sermons repeatedly called for the killing of Jews.

Poor old Keegstra. All he ever did was call the Jews power-hungry money-grubbers, and he was convicted of a crime. Kathrada whips up his congregants into a Jew-baiting frenzy -- and tells them to go and actually kill someone -- and he remains free.

There's some evidence that his Muslim acolytes actually followed his instructions, too. Rudwan Khalil Abubaker, who attended Kathrada's mosque, was in a fire-fight with Russian troops in Chechnya earlier this year. At least he took his violence outside of Vancouver.

The question remains: Why was Keegstra's offensive but non-violent anti-Semitism taken to the Supreme Court, but Kathrada's is tolerated with impunity?

That's not hypocrisy; that's my whole point. Hate speech laws, both in the criminal code and the human rights commissions, are applied arbitrarily and don't deal with real threats to real rights. We know about their arbitrariness; otherwise, Richard Warman, Kinsella's friend, would be charged by now for calling Sen. Anne Cools a c*nt and a n*gger. A consistent application of "human rights law" would probably have Kinsella charged with both illegal sexism and religious bigotry. It's not just interesting to ask why Keegstra was charged with a hate crime and Kathrada wasn't, it's legally important: a law that is applied irregularly loses both its moral and legal force. It's really the difference between rule of law and rule of men. Another way of saying it would be "equal justice under law".

My column was not a call for the laying of "hate speech" charges, though it expressed my curiousity (and offered my own explanation) for why the government didn't lay those charges. It was a public question about why someone who called for murder -- and seems to have got it from one congregant -- wasn't even charged with real crimes. That crucial distinction was conveniently redacted by this these partisans, too.

I re-read that column, and I like it. I'll reprint it here in its entirety. I think I made a fairly clear distinction between "inciting hate" and actually "inciting violence". And after it, I'll reprint my column on another case, that of David Ahenakew. 

I write this to correct the record; I've been a pretty consistent advocate of free speech since I was young -- I even arranged a debate at my law school between Doug Christie, a free speech lawyer for the likes of Keegstra and Zundel, versus Tom Kuttner, a human rights/hate speech advocate from New Brunswick. Every professor but one boycotted the debate -- but not the students. On a Friday afternoon, the biggest hall in the law school was packed for what I think was the best debate I've ever seen in my life. Of course the professors boycotted it; far easier than engaging in debate.

(A Jewish law student asked Christie why we couldn't simply outlaw hate; Christie patiently pointed out that "hate" is a feeling, and it usually stems from some grievance, either legitimate or not. Outlawing "hate" is as impossible as outlawing any other feeling, he argued, and, if anything, such a law would likely only deepen the feeling of grievance. That's pretty clear thinking and tight logic; I haven't yet heard a refutation of it, and I doubt our school's professors could have done so even if they had deigned to attend the biggest extra-curricular event of the year.) 

In closing, here is the full text of my Sun columns on Younus Kathrada, and David Ahenakew.  

Years ago, Jim Keegstra was charged with and convicted of the crime of spreading hatred. It was a seemingly endless case, working its way up to the Supreme Court.

It cost millions of tax dollars, and more than that, was an energetic expression of the government's opposition to racial and religious discord. Libertarians were rightly upset that speech -- no matter how vile -- could be criminalized. But a precedent was set, along with a message.

Fast forward to the present: News out of Vancouver is the imam of the major mosque there, one Younus Kathrada, has been whipping up his congregants each week with anti-Semitic hatred that would make Keegstra sound positively like a Zionist.

Like Keegstra, Kathrada called Jews names -- "we are dealing with a people ... the brothers of the monkeys and the swine ... whose treachery is well known." Calling Jews brothers of monkeys and swine sounds like a schoolyard taunt more than high argument, but his point was clear. And just in case it wasn't, Kathrada made it clearer still: His sermons repeatedly called for the killing of Jews.

Poor old Keegstra. All he ever did was call the Jews power-hungry money-grubbers, and he was convicted of a crime. Kathrada whips up his congregants into a Jew-baiting frenzy -- and tells them to go and actually kill someone -- and he remains free.

There's some evidence that his Muslim acolytes actually followed his instructions, too. Rudwan Khalil Abubaker, who attended Kathrada's mosque, was in a fire-fight with Russian troops in Chechnya earlier this year. At least he took his violence outside of Vancouver.

The question remains: Why was Keegstra's offensive but non-violent anti-Semitism taken to the Supreme Court, but Kathrada's is tolerated with impunity?

Kathrada doesn't just call for the death of Jews. He slams Muslims who dare to believe in peaceful co-existence -- you know, Ottawa's dream of multiculturalism. Kathrada claims such Muslims aren't real Muslims, and no truce with Jews can ever be had.

Kathrada also uses his tax-exempt mosque to trumpet the cause of Hamas, a notorious terrorist group responsible for countless suicide bombings.

Why hasn't Kathrada been charged with a hate crime? Why haven't he and his mosque been charged under Canada's new anti-terrorism laws for promoting and aiding terrorist groups like Hamas? (To date, not a single charge has been laid under this law.)

The answer is obvious. It's easy to pick on a politically incorrect country bumpkin like Jim Keegstra. Some dumb white guy making dumb remarks about Jews -- go get 'em. There's not a well-funded, politically correct Dumb Guy Defence Committee ready to roll for his defence.

But ever since 9/11, liberals throughout the West have decided an anti-Arab backlash would be worse than Arab terrorism itself. So true risks like Kathrada are ignored, in the name of not making a fuss. The liberal thinking is that charging someone like Kathrada would only give a bad name to all Muslims.

Of course, it would do the opposite -- it would point out that not all Muslims are in league with such terror tactics, and that the few who are will be rooted out.

Not charging the handful of Muslims who are haters is like not charging the handful of Italians who are part of the Mafia -- it is a misguided act of political correctness. The majority of Muslims -- we hope -- do not support Kathrada. He should be made an example of, not have excuses made for him. Justice calls for it.

:::

I just watched a British documentary about David Icke, the British alien-conspiracy theorist, and the "anti-racist" group that opposed his visit to Vancouver, led by Richard Warman.

This segment of the documentary showed Icke doing a media tour of the city, and expressing his frustration at interviews being cancelled because of political pressure from Warman's group. That's how political disagreements ought to be done -- no state censorship, just moral persuasion. If protesters can bring peaceful pressure to bear on a radio show to cancel an interview, good for them. Judging by the surprisingly warm reception Icke received in Vancouver, it certainly hasn't stopped him from getting his strange theories out there.

There are so many surprising details that I did not expect:

• Icke comes across as a very charming and well-meaning man who truly believes that he must share his alien theories with the world; it's the street punks in Warman's "anti-racist coalition" who come across as the uncivil ones.
• It's clear that Icke's theories are large and weird; anti-Semitism is just one ingredient in his sci-fi stew. The importance given by the "anti-racists" to combating such a non-threat is likely explained by the fact that they're just some trouble-making kids hamming it up for a foreign cameraman. Vancouver, with its warm weather, easy drugs, fat welfare cheques and big labour unions fomenting protests, has a lot of these "activists". But what's the excuse of the once-credible Canadian Jewish Congress? It's clear as the video progresses that while the "coalition" does successfully scotch some media appearances for Icke, they -- and the disproportionate attention spent on him by the CJC -- actual provide Icke with a tremendous amount of press and credibility, the documentary included. As I've said before, the CJC has a knack of taking weird nobodies (like Ernst Zundel) and turning them into big somebodies.
• All in all, it looks more like a fun afternoon's "work" for some Vancouver street urchins, with lots of booze involved. Richard Warman is the odd man out: he's not a street kid just having fun with his fellow nose-pierced left-coasters; he's a lawyer, who has found a way of turning this sort of thing into a money-making career. It feels out of joint because it is out of joint. That's the stuff for kids, not grown men.

But the next video clip in the documentary turns a shade darker. It's clear that no-one else cares about censoring an alien-conspiracy theorist -- more people find the prospect entertaining than worrying. The smartest line in the segment comes from an older lady in line to see Icke who, when challenged with his foolish theories, says "so what. Let him make a fool of himself if that's what he's doing." That's what grown-ups say -- and grown-up societies too. They are tolerant of eccentrics like Icke, and tolerant the motley crew that harasses him.

But Warman and his young "activists" are upset that no-one cares. So they decide to do what one of Warman's wards calls "the ultimate expression of free speech": they're going to physically attack Icke in public, by throwing a pie in his face, to "humiliate" him. Uh, that ain't free speech fellas, that's assault. Warman himself proposes the idea, and does a lot of nodding and winking to the camera, as if he would never counsel the commission of a crime.

The finale of the video is the attack -- and a lamer spectacle is hard to find. The crowd at the bookstore is large and engrossed in Icke's talk. The rag-tag "coalition" -- now just down to the handful of professional protesters -- walk in slowly and labouriously, one wearing the standard issue paper mache outfit, disrupting his event, and shouting out a few stunted heckles that, despite days of planning, manage neither to inform nor entertain. I suppose the kids in charge of the rhyming chants were seconded to some other rally that day.

Warman's kids are roundly booed by the crowd -- another flop. Before they all bravely run away, one of Warman's wards lobs the pie at Icke, grazing his arm, but falling to the bookstore floor below, hitting a children's book stand, ruining some of the books. Icke again comes across as the bigger man; he doesn't call for police to press assault charges -- as was his right, and as others have done. He recovers his composure immediately (actually, unlike his timid assaulters, he never lost it), cracks a joke, licks some of the cake off his sleeve and continues. The "coalition" retreats to crow about their great victory.

Until this video, I only knew Warman as a collection of facts and figures -- as a serial complainer-of-fortune at the Canadian human rights commission, and someone who conned the Canadian Jewish Congress into supporting his "anti-racist" antics, to their deep discredit. Now I have a much better picture of the man: a jumped-up, self-righteous student politician who is no longer a student, a political activist who can't connect with or persuade real people in the court of public opinion, a petty squabbler who hasn't yet outgrown the childish antics of leftist street theatre and pie-throwing.

It's not just the weirdness of his choice of racist dragons to slay (kooky David Icke? Unknown Internet bloggers?) or his hypocrisy (a lawyer counselling an illegal assault; a "human rights activist" posting bigoted comments about Canada's first Black, female Senator). It's that he's taken this childish game to an agency of the Canadian government, and they've agreed to let him continue his stunts in their tax-funded court.

David Icke is not a danger. He's an amusing eccentric. Icke has an optimistic desperation in him -- he simply must reveal his Truth to the world, and does so earnestly no matter what obstacles are thrown at him -- combined with an obvious flair for the dramatic. I don't think anyone who watches these clips would disagree that dinner with Icke would be a much more passable evening than spending an hour with Richard Warman and his semi-literate street urchins.

Richard Warman is the greater danger. Not in and of himself -- except to those against whom he organizes pie-assaults. But when his childish, petty, malicious, abusive antics jump from a band of minor hoodlums into human rights commissions, then it moves from poor street theatre to worrisome abuse of a government office.

I don't think anyone can watch these videos and genuinely think that Richard Warman is a genuine human rights activist. The fact that he generates nearly half of all section 13 complaints at the CHRC is prima facie proof that they are little more than a group of voyeurs enabling Warman's political fantasies at taxpayer expense -- to the detriment of civil rights, and to the disrepute of the administration of justice.

UPDATE: After thinking about this for a bit longer, I know what it is that stood out the most: the glee of "humiliating" Icke. Real human rights activists don't set out to humiliate anyone. With Warman, it's one of his driving motives. That video clip, where he counsels the pie assault, shows what makes him tick. It's repellant -- far more than some kook who think Jews are alien reptiles. 

Richard Warman -- the former human rights commissioner who went on to become the commission's most avid complainant -- is at it again.

Warman, and his allies at the Canadian Jewish Congress, have issued a jubilant press release. They've managed to convince Regina's police to lay criminal hate speech charges against a nobody with no following who they're about to turn into a somebody with a huge audience. The Canadian Jewish Congress, and its executive director, Bernie Farber, are the super-agents who turned Ernst Zundel into an international figure. They're about to work their magic again.

(I'm surprised; if I understand the news correctly, this charge will require the approval of the Attorney General. Will he really go along with this -- especially on the heels of the courts tossing a similar case in the same province?)

But that's not what's interesting. After all, the CJC has become increasingly politically irrelevant, as the country and the Jewish community move away from their dyed in the wool leftism. Their decision to stand by Warman, despite recent revelations of his own anti-Black, anti-women bigotry, has only hastened their spiral into irrelevance.

What's interesting is how foolish the CJC's figurehead co-presidents, Reuven Bulka and Sylvain Abitbol, are willing to allow themselves to look. Their press release on these new hate charges was issued on exactly the same day that Bulka and Abitbol published an Op-Ed in the Canadian Jewish News trying to distance themselves from the excesses of human rights commissions.

I've spoken before on this blog about the proper legal limits on speech -- ranging from laws against forgery and fraud, to laws against defamation.

How out of synch must the CJC be with Canadians and Jews before its name crosses over into "false advertising"? Or, in the words of the human rights commissions, before the CJC, because of the bullying censorship committed in its name, causes Jews to be held in "hatred and contempt"?

The Alberta Human Rights Commission has responded to the wave of criticism that has pummelled them since news of my interrogation has spread. Here is a letter to the Edmonton Journal by Charlach Mackintosh, the commission's chief; a version of it ran in the Calgary Herald, too.

Mackintosh and his drones aren't the quickest draws in the West; their rapid response took two weeks to get out the door, but that's pretty good for a bureaucracy that has taken two years simply to get me into interrogation, and took five full years to issue a ruling in the Boissoin case.

Of course, the commission's tone-deaf, weeks-late response isn't the point. It's that what Mackintosh wrote simply isn't true.

In his letter, Mackintosh implied that the commission was an easy-going, voluntary process. I was merely "invited" to participate. No bullying here. But look at what sections 23 and 24 of the Alberta Human Rights Citizenship and Multiculturalism Act actually says:

an investigator may do any or all of the following:

                                 (a)    subject to subsection (2), enter any place at any reasonable time and examine it;

                                 (b)    make inquiries orally or in writing of any person who has or may have information relevant to the subject‑matter of the investigation;

                                 (c)    demand the production for examination of records and documents, including electronic records and documents, that are or may be relevant to the subject‑matter of the investigation;

                                 (d)    on giving a receipt for them, remove any of the things referred to in clause (c) for the purpose of making copies of or extracts from them.

(2)  An investigator may enter and examine a room or place actually used as a dwelling only if

                                 (a)    the owner or person in possession of it consents to the entry and examination, or

                                 (b)    the entry and examination is authorized by a judge under section 24.

• I was interviewed on the XM satellite radio channel "POTUS '08". Click here to hear it. I'm not sure how a radio channel dedicated to the 2008 U.S. presidential election found a way to dedicate 15 minutes to a case of Canadian censorship, where the CBC's several radio channels have been silent on the subject.

• One of Canada's great journalists, Peter Worthington, weighs in.

• My TVO interview is now posted to the Internet, here. I've seen some blog commentary that Steve Paikin was too tough in his questioning of me. I don't think so; if anything, he made a generous allocation of airtime to me, and restated my views where necessary to the panel that followed. I do think Paikin was too focused on the subject matter of the cartoons. To publish or not to publish them was a news story two years ago; today's news is that a government agency is interrogating a journalist for thought crimes. It's not really important what the particular thought crime is -- although my particular thought crime, offending radical Muslims, may explain the CBC's silence on the subject.

• I watched a few minutes of the discussion panel that followed, and Ziyaad Mia said something strange -- that I had tried to ban cartoons once, myself. At first, I couldn't for the life of me figure out what he was talking about. I think I know: When I was a university student in the 1990s, the campus newspaper ran a cartoon that I regarded as anti-Semitic. I don't remember the details of it -- I think it compared the State of Israel to the Nazis.

But I didn't call the police, or the human rights commission. I didn't sue -- or riot or commit arson. I wrote a letter to the editor of the paper, and tried to organize others to do the same. Without digging up that old letter to refresh my memory, I'd like to think that I would have complained that the newspaper was published with the mandatory dues collected from students -- a tax -- and that they should publish that crap with their own money, not mine. If anyone can dig up my letter -- if anyone cares -- I'll happily publish it here.

The fact that Mia can't distinguish between my liberal approach to political disagreement -- using peaceful, non-coercive methods, writing letters and calling for political accountability of a student newspaper funded by student money -- as opposed to the illiberal approach of state censorship of private media and private citizens, was a pretty weak rebuttal. Besides being factually wrong, it's a personal attack, an attempt to paint me as a hypocrite. Even if I were, what does that have to do with the principles at stake?

Paikin's final question to me posed the same sort of query: am I being intellectually consistent? After all, as the great legal scholar and intellectual, Warren Kinsella, has written, I am a defamation lawyer, and have represented both plaintiffs and defendants, and I have occasionally been a litigant myself. Kinsella says I'm a "fraud" and "full of crap" because I believe defamation law is legitimate law, but believe that government censorship through human rights commissions isn't legitimate.

That's not a real argument, of course. Like Mia's, it's an attempt to discredit me personally -- not my ideas. As I told Paikin, I support laws against other forms of speech, like fraud, forgery or copyright violation. Kinsella sets up a false dichotomy: I must either support all legal restrictions on speech, or none; I must either support both real courts and kangaroo courts, or neither.

Defamation law has evolved through 400 years of legislation and litigation, and is an essential part of our British legal tradition. It strikes a balance between the rights of plaintiffs to protect their reputations and the rights of defendants to criticize those reputations (and the rights of the public to hear different points of view). There are a dozen lawful defences to such a lawsuit, including truth and fair comment. And, of course, it is heard by real courts of law, with even older traditions of natural justice.

I've sued and been sued under defamation law. I believe some cases are valid, and some aren't -- just as some cases of fraud are upheld, and some aren't. I just don't believe that government censorship, as a newfangled, politically correct species of law, is either legitimate or comparable to other centuries-old jurisprudence.

• The above is far too substantial a rebuttal to Kinsella, who is merely engaging in some spin -- his specialty -- for his friend, Richard Warman. That's actually what surprised me the most about Paikin's interview: that he quoted a turbo-partisan dirty-trickster in what was actually a debate about ideas.

I don't think Kinsella is a thinker; he's a doer, or more accurately an undoer. And his goal here was to confuse and chill the growing media scrutiny of human rights commissions generally, and Warman in particular. In a series of over-the-top blog posts (here, here, here, etc.), he has threatened a number of Warman's critics with defamation lawsuits if they didn't stop. It was classic war room style: stampede your opponents with enough threats and half-truths to panic them into a hasty over-reaction. To my regret, that happened to one of my favourite bloggers.

That's not defamation law, by the way. Defamation law is conducted through court filings and sworn testimony. Kinsella was clearly trying to avoid defamation law, by dressing up a hyperventilated blog entry as something legal and serious, rather than his regular partisan pap.

Kinsella and Warman are lawyers by profession, but they try to avoid real lawsuits -- better to win by the mere threat of one. Compare their high school braggadocio towards little bloggers, with this rather meek demand letter sent to the Post in response to a column I had written about him. It was properly ignored; Warman didn't dare sue a monied defendant with real lawyers, and Kinsella chose his paycheque over speaking up for his principles. Unlike spurious human rights suits, a defamation action here would neither be a sure thing nor a cash jackpot.

I get defamation threats all the time, like this one, just this week from Syed Soharwardy. (Here is my reply.)

That reply is not just me being lippy; it's knowing the difference between empty, blustering, Kinsella-ish threats made as a political tactic, and a real legal problem. (I'm pleased to say that, in nearly four years of publishing, the Western Standard was never once served with a defamation lawsuit, despite receiving 50 or so Kinsella specials. Getting your facts straight is the best defence, of course. But far fewer lawsuits are settled because of the facts and law of a case than because of the fight itself.)

All of this is a lengthy preamble to something I've been thinking about these past weeks: a legal defence fund for people who are vulnerable to being blown over by Kinsellian huffing and puffing. The National Post and Maclean's don't need help, but most bloggers do. My observation is that bloggers make defamation law errors very frequently -- not that they engage in real defamation often, but that they overreact to the first whiff of gunpowder, and cower before any schmuck with a lawyer's letter, because they do not know their defences under defamation law, and even if they did, they feel they can't afford to exercise them.

The point here is not to oppose all defamation suits against bloggers; on occasion, bloggers will be in the wrong, and the right response is to correct or apologize. Unlike human rights inquisitions -- which are always immoral -- some complaints against bloggers will have merit. The point, rather, will be to protect bloggers against political attacks masquerading as defamation threats. And that's what should make this task less enormous than it might sound: if my experience at the Western Standard is any guide, almost all of the work will be merely fending off folks who were angry enough to spend $500 to get a lawyer to draft a demand letter, but have neither the legal case nor the financial resources to file a proper statement of claim, let alone run a trial.

It is my anecdotal observation that the preponderance of such threats come from the domestic left or Islamic fascists, and I imagine that most of the bloggers who will need to be protected will come from the conservative side of the spectrum. But not all; at the magazine, we received demand letters from provincial Tories upset with our coverage of a scandal. And I can think of at least one Liberal blogger whose case -- not defamation, but media law nonetheless -- I'd love to take.

I would imagine that such a defence fund would be financed partly through the pro bono contributions of defamation lawyers like myself, and partly through dues paid by bloggers into a fund -- say, a dollar a month. I imagine it would be a non-profit corporation, overseen by a board scrutinizing revenues and expenses. There would have to be clear rules of when to take an engagement -- a written "insurance policy", including rules to avoid the moral hazard that insurance creates.

Of course, the larger threat is not nuisance defamation suits, for which the legal system has built-in suppresants ranging from the plaintiff's own legal fees and disbursements to the commendable Canadian rule that the loser pays a portion of the winner's costs. The larger threat is human rights commissions of the sort that have gone after Mark Steyn, Free Dominion, Catholic Insight and others. These are rarer than defamation threats, so far, but they are far more worrisome. I think we need to wait a few more months to see how the current media blowback against commission bullying plays out.

There are details to work out, but the concept is sound. If I were a leftist, I'd call it a blogger's union. It's really a mutual aid society, where bloggers pool their resources to afford together what they cannot get on their own: competent legal advisors who aren't easily bamboozled by the Kinsellas and Warmans of this world.

I look forward to reader comments on this idea. 

• The Glenn Beck show on CNN went well. Ms. Underestimated links to a video clip of it here. I'll keep you posted on when Mark Steyn and I are rescheduled for Bill O'Reilly's show, and if a tentative invitation to CTV's The Verdict firms up.

• Great new columns by Calgary's Barry Cooper and Vancouver's Terry O'Neill.

• Somehow, Iowahawk managed to get a copy of the notes taken by Shirlene McGovern, the "human rights officer" who interrogated me. Check it out here.

• My lawyer has received two upset calls from the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The first, from Shirlene McGovern herself, complained about the publicity she is receiving. I'm surprised at her reaction -- you'd think someone who regularly interrogates citizens about their private political views would be comfortable with the concept of public scrutiny. Imagine if she actually had to expose her private thoughts, not just her public actions as a government officer.

• A few days later, another commission officer called my lawyer, complaining about this blog. I told my lawyer to invite them to write a letter to the editor to me. I haven't received it yet, so I presume they're just going to file another human rights complaint against me.

• My YouTube videos have crested 400,000 views. A week ago, I installed a statistics program to track the number of visits to this site. It won't surprise you that employees at the human rights commission have been very frequent visitors. At first, as a taxpayer, I was upset that Officer McGovern was surfing the net during business hours, looking for her name. But I realized that every minute she was Googling herself -- ego-surfing, it's called -- was a minute she wasn't interrogating some other poor shmoe. 

• Officer McGovern isn't the only one upset. The left-wing Canadian Jewish Congress, the special-interest lobby group most responsible for criminalizing speech in Canada, is obviously feeling some political heat because of what they have wrought. Their figurehead co-presidents, Rabbi Reuven Bulka and Sylvain Abitbol, wrote a muddled column called "Some human rights complaints are frivolous". That's actually less mealy-mouthed than it sounds, given that the commissions have a 100% conviction rate for thought crime hearings. But what is the standard for acquittal that the CJC proposes?

"Human rights commissions must constantly recalibrate where the balance lies between free expression and its abridgement, but the determination of where to place the fulcrum must always be based on the statutory standard that such expression is “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.”

and

"the appropriate application of statutory criteria is our best defence against those who would eliminate the law to protect their interests, and against those who would use the law to promote a narrow political agenda."

In other words, the concept of a "pre-crime" is still fine by them. No-one has to be exposed to hatred or contempt for someone to be found guilty. It just has to be "likely" that could happen. And hatred or contempt -- emotional feelings -- are enough. The CJC doesn't even think that a discriminatory act is necessary for a conviction. They support the notion of thought crimes.

If the human rights commissions apply the standards in this fuzzy-headed op-ed, Mark Steyn and I will still be convicted.

What an embarrassment the CJC has become. Essentially they are pleading for Steyn and I as special cases. Is it because I'm a Jew and Steyn sounds like he might be, too? Is it because we're being sued by Muslim fanatics? Or is it because the CJC is taking some political heat for their support of these illiberal, anti-intellectual commissions, and the CJC's alliance with Richard Warman, the serial human rights complainant and foul-mouthed, anti-Black, misogynist bigot?

The CJC's op-ed will be seen as nothing but more proof for anti-Semites and neo-Nazis who claim -- with historical and statistical validity -- that the hate speech provisions are a tool used mainly by secular, leftist Jews to punish their anti-Semitic critics. But now that those same precedents are being used against Jews and philo-Semites by Islamic fascists, the CJC wants to change the rules.

I know these two men. I attended Bulka's synagogue when I lived in Ottawa, and I served on a board with Abitbol. They're reasonable enough fellows who always seemed to me to be open to debate and disagreement. But they're not the ones running the CJC; they're the political window dressing. The engine behind the CJC's censorship campaign is Bernie Farber, the CJC's full-time executive director.

I first met Farber in the 1990s when I was a student. I remember him opening a speech in Calgary with the phrase, "those of us in the business of fighting hate know that..." It was the most honest thing I've ever heard him say: "fighting hate" was Farber's business. And if fighting hate is your business, you need to have hate to fight. Bernie knows how to develop his market. Agents provocateurs like Warman help drum up that business when it doesn't occur naturally.

I've always laughed at the fact that Mohamed Elmasry, the anti-Semite suing Mark Steyn, and Syed Soharwardy, the misogynist radical suing me, each claimed to represent all Muslims. Elmasry calls his organization the "Canadian Islamic Congress" and Soharwardy calls his the "Islamic Supreme Council". Neither represents more than a handful of Muslims -- and in Soharwardy's case, even that is in question.

Does the impressively named Canadian Jewish Congress really represent Canadian Jews today?

Three generations ago, the CJC's purpose was to help assimilate Jewish immigrants to Canada, and to help recruit Jews to join the Canadian army during the Second World War. I'd call that "conservative". A quick read of their website today shows that they're basically the Liberal Party at prayer -- feting Justin Trudeau when they're not calling for the construction of government housing projects. At least they dropped their environmental and Aboriginal policies, which kept them busy ten year ago.

Offensive and anti-Semitic free speech didn't kill the Jews during the Holocaust. Murderous men did, and they only did when real rights and freedoms were destroyed -- the right to property; the right to life; the right to equality before the law; mobility rights; freedom of religion; freedom of association. Violent acts killed the Jews, not "feelings" of "contempt". How revolting that the official Jews now propose limiting real rights and freedoms in the vain hope that will stop people from feeling "hatred" for them. I'm no anti-Semite, but if I'm anything to go by, the CJC, and the other supporters of these unconstitutional laws are the ones engendering feelings of contempt. 

For readers tuning in for the first time, here's a quick summary of what's going on.

1. Two years ago, the now-defunct Western Standard magazine reprinted the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. I was the publisher.

2. In response, a radical Muslim imam named Syed Soharwardy asked the Calgary Police Service to arrest me. They didn't, of course. So Soharwardy complained to the Alberta Human Rights Commission, a government agency. Here's his hand-scrawled complaint; here's my reply. For two years, using government lawyers and taxpayers money, they have been pursuing me, infringing on my natural rights of free speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion.

3. On January 11th, a government "human rights officer" interrogated me for 90 minutes. Instead of bowing my head, I used the opportunity to challenge the moral and legal basis of the complaint, and the human rights commission itself.

4. I recorded the interrogation and posted video clips to YouTube. In the past week, they have been viewed nearly 400,000 times and were at one point the fifth most watched videos on all of YouTube. Though Canadian talk radio shows and op-ed columnists have covered the story well, I have seen only one newspaper report on the subject. I can't understand why mainstream reporters and editors do not think it's newsworthy that a publisher can be summoned by a government bureaucrat, and grilled as to his political thoughts. I'm pleased, though, that the support from pundits has come not just from the right, but from the enlightened left.

5. I've got some ideas of what people can do. Although my case is being prosecuted by the hapless, lame-duck provincial government of Alberta, it is politically more likely that change will come first to the federal Canadian Human Rights Commission. That commission is currently hounding columnist Mark Steyn on similar thought crime charges.

6. The blog posts below expand on various details of the case. If you are interested in the videos, they are all posted below, with commentary. Here are three of the more popular clips:

my opening statement:

me being asked about possible thoughtcrimes:

and a slip of the tongue by my interrogator.

I just finished reading Glenn Beck's book, An Inconvenient Book, so I'm particularly looking forward to being on his TV show tonight. It's on CNN across Canada, and the transcript should show up here.

Fox's Bill O'Reilly has postponed his show with Mark Steyn and me until another day -- I'll let you know when that will be.

• Tonight I appeared on TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin. I'm told the video will be uploaded tomorrow, so I'll link to it then. (Here's producer Alan Echenberg's blog.)

• My Globe and Mail commentary yesterday was the "most read" and "most e-mailed" story in the newspaper, and attracted nearly 500 reader comments in the twelve or so hours that comment thread was open. Perhaps the Globe's readers are more interested in the government interrogation of a Canadian publisher than the paper's news editors, who have ignored the story so far.

• The Nose on Your Face guys have come up with some funny chotchkes for sale, with my battle as their theme. I predict that the "Ezra Akhbar" bib

and the "It's my bloody right to do so" baby

jumper

will be particularly brisk sellers with politically aware infants.

• Speaking of which, that same space I had on the Globe's website yesterday was given today to the four law students who have been promoting the complaints against Mark Steyn. The actual legal complainant in those cases is Mohamed Elmasry, as you can see here and here. But the CIC has made the public relations decision not to make Elmasry their front man -- probably a good idea, given his public approval for terrorist attacks. His four surrogates are slightly more polite company, but only slightly.

What's interesting about today's essay by the four students (I'll call them Elmasry's Kids) is that they have substantially changed their arguments over the past months.

Their original argument was a blatant call for state control of Canadian media -- what I call bringing Saudi values to Canada. That didn't really go over well -- it merely reinforced the CIC's well-deserved image of grievance-mongering. Here's Peggy Wente's brilliant take-down.

Elmasry's Kids soon took a second approach. Although their formal complaints remain unchanged -- they still demand government punishment of Maclean's -- they changed their talking points to argue for media "balance" and downplayed their earlier demand for cash from Maclean's. This tack didn't go over too well, either, earning scorching rebukes even from fellow Muslims.

Last week, Elmasry's Kids slouched back to a third line of defence -- that Canada is awash in anti-Muslim bigotry, and that human rights commissions were their only hope. It was less the rhetoric of radical Islam, Elmasry-style, and more the boring old mush of professional complainers -- not surprising, considering their new and official allegiance with the Marxist Canadian Federation of Students and other labour unions.

Today's piece in the Globe tries out yet a new argument: that human rights commissions are the only accessible form of justice for poor people -- poor, like four lawyers are poor. It's an absurd comparison because these commissions do not deal with the kind of law that normal people, especially poor people, need -- contract law, divorce law, labour law, real estate law, small claims court, etc. It deals with political grievances. It's not poverty law; it's the opposite in fact -- the legal playground for the rich and malicious.

But what I found most interesting about the letter is that it has switched to the defensive. It still makes the perfunctory grievances of the cliche left. But I think Elmasry's Kids are realizing what I think is the truth: that their frontal assault on Canadian values like free speech, freedom of the press and the separation of mosque and state has kicked a beehive. Canadians who hadn't even heard of human rights commissions were woken up to the threat they pose to our liberties. Even the Canadian left has started to speak out against them. Federal cabinet ministers -- including the one in charge of multiculturalism -- are pushing back, too.

I've written before that I was astounded that the videos of my own human rights interrogation have been viewed 400,000 times now. I believe that's a sign of a pent-up and growing backlash against illiberal values being injected into Canada. That injection was slow and quiet until recently. Elmasry's Kids changed that with their noisy assault on Maclean's. I think it's backfiring on them, and I think their latest essay acknowledges it. I hope they're right. This morning I was woken up with a phone call from yet another federal cabinet minister -- the fifth to call me so far -- cheering my battle against these commissions. As always, I pressed my caller to make reforms to the commissions.

I saw on one of the many blogs discussing this issue a quote from Winston Churchill, when he was fighting fascists:

we will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst - and we will do our best. Perhaps it may be our turn soon; perhaps it may be our turn now.

I'm beginning to think that Elmasry's Kids will lose their battle, and I'm beginning to think they know it.

Here is my commentary, published today on the Globe and Mail's website. Some excerpts:

One of the complainants against me is someone I would describe as a radical Muslim imam, Syed Soharwardy. He grew up in the madrassas of Pakistan and he lectures on the Saudi circuit. He advocates sharia law for all countries, including Canada. His website is rife with Islamic supremacism — offensive to many Canadian Jews, gentiles, women and gays. But his sensitivities — his Saudi-Pakistani values — have been offended by me.

And so now the secular government of Alberta is enforcing his fatwa against the cartoons.

...How did it come to be that rough and, I would say, bigoted men such as Mr. Soharwardy and Mr. Elmasry could, by simply claiming that their tender feelings were hurt, sic a government bureaucracy on a magazine, or anyone for that matter?

...What a strange place Canada is in 2008, where the police care more about human rights than the human rights commissions do, where fundamentalist Muslims use hate-speech laws drafted by secular Jews, and where a government bureaucrat can interrogate a publisher for 90 minutes, and be shocked when he won't shake her hand in greeting.

The Ottawa Citizen's David Warren sums it up concisely:

That's why you go to an HRC: because your case is not good enough to stand up in a legitimate court of law. And because you don't want to invest your own time and money, but would rather the taxpayer provide officers to do the paperwork, and pick up the tab. Instead, you want a slam-dunk way in which you can victimize someone you don't like, by playing the victim yourself, without any financial or legal consequences, except to him. "Human rights" commissions were designed to provide just this service, for the use of persons who are both litigious, and lazy.

The commissions are set up to attract complaints from people who don't like free debates, who don't like the rigors of a real court, or who simply see a punitive government process in which they'd like to entangle their enemies.

Is it any surprise that such a system appeals to foreign-born radical jihadis like Mohamed Elmasry and Syed Soharwardy, and domestic litigators of fortune like Richard Warman?

My criticisms of Canada's so-called human rights commissions have been on two grounds: their goal is the unconstitutional restriction of free speech, and their methods are procedurally unsound and arbitrary.

To those I would add a third critique: the commissions themselves have become corrupted. They have been turned into tax-funded machines for the personal vendettas of some very angry men, who now resort to planting "evidence" of racism on suspects. It's not entrapment; it's positively framing people. Read on.

The unconstitutional substance and arbitrary procedures of these commissions make them improper to begin with -- which is one reason why the federal (and Alberta) commissions have a 100% conviction rate for thought crimes cases. But the personal corruption of the commissions makes them a disgrace, even on their own terms. As Woody Allen joked in Bananas, "this trial is a travesty. A travesty of a mockery of a sham!"

In real court systems, travesties of mockeries of shams can be taken to the Judicial Council, where rogue judges can be held to account. But human rights commissions aren't run by judges, and there is no ethical oversight, other than from legislatures. That's my earlier argument: the insanity of these commissions has to be brought to the attention of the commissions' only masters -- politically accountable legislators.

Ten years ago, I worked in the Canadian Parliament as the question period co-ordinator for the Official Opposition. (For American readers, question period is a daily, 45-minute question and answer session where government cabinet ministers are peppered with questions by opposition legislators. It's like a press conference, but with other politicians asking the questions, not reporters.) It's probably the quickest and easiest venue for accountability on a specific problem like this.

If I were writing QP questions for the opposition Liberal Party today, I'd hang the antics of the human rights commission around the neck of the man who is ultimately responsible for it -- and in the case of the federal HRC, that would be Rob Nicholson.

I'd probably start off like this:

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Justice Minister. One of his staff, Dean Steacy of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, has admitted under oath that, as part of his job, he joined a neo-Nazi website called the "Stormfront", and posted racist remarks there. Can the Minister please explain why taxpayers' dollars are paying someone in his department to join neo-Nazi groups to spread bigotry?

Mr. Speaker, can the Minister tell us: was this a rogue act by a single hate-monger who infiltrated the human rights commission? Or did others at the commission approve of this race-baiting strategy, too? Did the minister himself know? Or did he turn a blind eye to state-sponsored bigotry in his own department?  

Mr. Speaker, it's not just Dean Steacy who spreads hate in the name of human rights, using taxpayers' money. Richard Warman does it, too. He used to work for the CHRC, but then he left to work with them, filing dozens of complaints at the CHRC about hateful words. But now it turns out that Warman himself writes many of those hateful words, including calling Senator Anne Cools a "n*gger" and a "c*nt", and then complaining about it. Will the Minister immediately intervene to stay all of Richard Warman's complaints, and launch an internal investigation to see whether the evidence he planted was done with the collusion of his old friends at the CHRC?

Mr. Speaker, given the confession of the Minister's employee, Dean Steacy, that the CHRC plants racist evidence that the CHRC then uses to investigate and convict others, and given the proof that the CHRC's most prolific complainant has planted racist, sexist remarks, will the Minister launch an independent review of all so-called "hate message" cases that the CHRC has ever conducted to see if they were all corrupted by planted evidence?

Criticism of the human rights commissions has generally come from conservatives. But isn't a government-funded campaign to spread racist remarks precisely the sort of thing that should outrage lefties, too?

It might also be the sort of question that someone should put to the far-left Canadian Jewish Congress, which awarded Warman a human rights award last year. Did they know that Warman called Canada's first Black, female Senator a c*nt and a n*gger? Now that they do know it, will they rescind their award? Or -- and this is my unhappy guess -- are they part of this whole scam?

UPDATE: Of course, those are the questions I would write for the Liberal Party -- but I am sympathetic to the Conservative government. The real Liberal Party or NDP would probably not give the government the benefit of the doubt. Their questions would sound like:

Mr. Speaker, even though it has been public knowledge for weeks that the CHRC employs racist provocateurs like Dean Steacy, who spread bigotry on the Internet, the Justice Minister still hasn't done anything about it. Is that because he has no idea what's going on in his own department? Or is it because he agrees with this bigotry? Is the Minister a bigot, or is he clueless?

I know Nicholson enough to know he's neither bigoted nor clueless -- he's likely facing resistance from bureaucrats and civil service lawyers giving him a dozen "yes minister" reasons why the CHRC can't be reformed or abolished. But they're not the ones who are ultimately politically accountable -- he is.

I have three upcoming interviews:

On Sunday, I'll be on the John Batchelor show, out of Los Angeles, at 7:20 p.m. Pacific Time. You can listen online, here.

On Monday, I'll be on TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin at 8 p.m. Eastern Time. Details here.

On Tuesday, I'll join Mark Steyn on The O'Reilly Factor. Website here.

Let me know what you think of them.

Eye Weekly, Toronto's left-wing freebie magazine, gets it. They disagree with me and the late, great Western Standard on just about everything. But they know that if a conservative publisher can be hauled before the government today, it will be a leftist publisher tomorrow. Here's an excerpt from their latest editorial:

"...there are things on which civilized people from across the political spectrum agree, basic assumptions that are necessary prerequisites to the functioning of a democracy: that only open debate and the airing of conflicting opinions produces progress, and that everyone is entitled to due process before the court system. The things that keep us safe from totalitarianism are free speech and due process. That the human rights commissions of BC, Alberta and the federal government are even hearing these complaints endangers both.

...Human Rights Commissions, who may still serve some purpose as an informal way for victims of employment and housing discrimination to find redress, need to be reined in. They should have no jurisdiction to restrict or stand in judgment of freedom of speech and of the press."

Eye Weekly knows this isn't a battle between the left and the right on the spectrum of ideas. It's a battle between everyone in the spectrum of ideas, against those who would attack the very notion of a spectrum of ideas.

If a conservative, Calgary publisher and a leftist, Toronto arts magazine can agree that it's high time to amend the human rights acts to protect freedom of speech and the press, surely it's safe for legislators to attempt at least that minimal correction. 

In the new issue of Maclean's magazine, Mark Steyn writes a virtuoso analysis of Canada's "human rights" commissions. Here are a few passages from it:

In the three decades of the Canadian "Human Rights" Tribunal's existence, not a single "defendant" has been "acquitted."

:::

In its entire history, over half of all cases have been brought by a sole "complainant," one Richard Warman. Indeed, Mr. Warman has been a plaintiff on every single Section XIII case before the federal "human rights" star chamber since 2002 — and he's won every one. That would suggest that no man in any free society anywhere on the planet has been so comprehensively deprived of his human rights. Well, no. Mr. Warman doesn't have to demonstrate that he's been deprived of his human rights, only that it's "likely" (i.e. "highly un-") that someone somewhere will be deprived of some right sometime. Who is Richard Warman? What's his story? Well, he's a former employee of the Canadian Human Rights Commission: an investigator.

:::

The American website Pundita has a sharp analysis of Section XIII, comparing it to Philip K. Dick's sci-fi novel The Minority Report, set in a world in which citizens can be sentenced for "pre-crime" — for criminal acts which have not occurred but are "likely" to. Who needs futuristic novels when we're living it here and now in one of the oldest constitutional democracies on the planet? What kind of countries have tribunals with 100 per cent conviction rates that replace the presumption of innocence with the presumption of guilt and in which truth is not only no defence but compelling evidence of that guilt?  

Why has the story of my interrogation by a government "human rights officer" received such wide coverage in the blogosphere, but not in the mainstream media? Is it not newsworthy that a publisher was summoned for a 90-minute government interrogation about his political beliefs?

Part of the reason for this paucity of reportage is that this story "broke" on a Friday afternoon, in the Mountain Time zone -- when most of the national media corps in Ottawa and Toronto had already filed their stories and were heading home for the weekend. And the dramatic facts of the story -- the video clips -- weren't uploaded to the Internet until that night, and they were uploaded to the Internet, not sent to TV stations. So, for logistical reasons it's not surprising that the blogosphere got a jump on the story, at least until Monday. And, by nature, the blogosphere values freedom of speech quite highly.

But what happened on Monday, when the mainstream media went back to work?

By then, these videos had gone viral -- on Sunday, they were the fifth most watched channel on all of YouTube, and the blogosphere had pre-digested many of the issues for the mainstream press. So where were they?

Talk radio was very interested; I did seven interviews on Monday alone, from Calgary to New Brunswick. They ran big with the story, even though they could not show their audience any of the video footage. So why have TV stations (with the notable exceptions of Michael Coren's show on CTS, and a forthcoming interview on TVO -- both boutique programs) ignored the story? 

And in terms of newspapers, only the National Post has reported on the story. Many opinion columnists have weighed in on the subject -- uniformly supportive, by the way -- but there has been almost no reportage.

The Washington Times ran a half-page news story on the matter today, placing it on page A2. Here's the impressive screen shot: 

Four years ago, when the RCMP raided Juliet O'Neill's house to seize privileged evidence that had been leaked to her, the media went on the warpath for weeks, reporting on the subject and toasting O'Neill as a free speech hero. So said the group Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.

I agree that an actual raid on O'Neill's house to seize documents is indeed a big news story, and it does touch upon issues of the free press. But is not a two-year-long government investigation of the political thoughts of a Canadian publisher newsworthy as well?

The small sliver of opinion on the blogosphere that has spoken out against me on this matter has focused, in the main, on my own personality or political stripe -- I can count on two fingers the blog posts that actually support human rights commissions. The bulk of the opposition to me is personal. Is that the same thing in the mainstream media -- for personal or political reasons, or competitive reasons, they're declining to cover a story of government censorship? My interrogation is not as dramatic as a raid on O'Neill's home for documents, but it is just as troubling. More, even -- O'Neill's "crime" was receiving leaked documents. My crime was having illegal thoughts about poltiical and religious subjects.

Perhaps another reason is that the bulk of the media is rather shy about this entire subject, given that the vast majority of them hid under their desks during the initial cartoon kerfuffle. The Canadian Journalists for Freedom of Expression sure did. When we were taken to the human rights commission, they thought it more important to issue a press release about freedom in Uganda. At least they were better than Amnesty International, which condemned the publication of the cartoons. Like "free speech" advocates who went on vacation, editors and producers who were AWOL -- or worse, enforced the cartoon ban in their own media organizations -- might not want to remind themselves or their audience of that now.

Another reason might be ongoing fear of human rights complaints against them -- the "chill" factor. Best to avoid difficult issues, and focus on happy human interest stories everyone can agree on, including radical Muslim imams.

But the story isn't about me. It isn't even about the cartoons or about Islam. It's about whether or not the government can summon anyone, including a publisher, to an interrogation to answer for their political thoughts.

If I'm fair game today, anyone is fair game tomorrow.

The first time I met the complainant, the radical Muslim imam Syed Soharwardy, was when I debated him on CBC radio, nearly two years ago. The subject was the Danish cartoons.

As a part-time pundit, I do debates like that every week, but Soharwardy doesn't, and he wasn't used to being challenged so vigorously. I went about the rest of my day as usual; Soharwardy went to the police to ask them to arrest me.

They laughed him out of the police station, but the human rights commission welcomed him, and has chased me for two years now, using tax dollars and government bureaucrats. How much do you think that has cost Alberta taxpayers? $100,000? And we haven't even had the full hearing yet.

I discuss this sequence of events in this video clip. You can follow along in Soharwardy's absurd, chicken-scratched complaint here (my written response is here).

I'm fighting the human rights commissions from inside the belly of the beast. I appreciate the generous help I have received towards my legal bills. (Thank you.) But what can people do besides help with my case?

I can think of two things:

1. Denormalize the commissions; and

2. Press legislators to act.

The first makes the second possible.

By "denormalizing", I mean bringing the public's perception of these commissions in line with the awful facts about them. Denormalizing the commissions means demonstrating how they disrespect Canadian values, showing how they have become a sword, attacking human rights, rather than a shield protecting them.

These commissions aren't normal. It's not normal to haul publishers before the government to ask them about their political thoughts. It's not normal for a secular state to enforce a radical Muslim fatwa against cartoons. These human rights commissions are counterfeits; they improperly benefit from the reputation of real courts, but they also destroy respect for the whole legal system -- that's just what counterfeit currency does amidst real currency.

Denormalizing the commissions is important, especially since most people have never heard of them, and when they do, they hear three positive words: "human rights commissions". It's sort of like the old Communist countries, like the "German Democratic Republic", which was neither Democratic nor a Republic, but it sounded good. Same thing here.

Denormalizing the commissions is something the blogosphere can be particularly good at, by spreading information widely and inexpensively. I think the reason my YouTube videos were so popular (320,000 views so far) is because they contained information the public has never seen before about how a commission actually works, and it was startling. Of the eight videos I've uploaded so far, the most popular has been the one where Officer McGovern asks me about my intentions -- what Orwell called a "thought crime". We should all be encouraged by the public reaction to these videos. Now let's just change that number from 320,000 people to 3 million or more.

Denormalizing the commissions can best be done by highlighting the two central qualities of the commissions:

1. They erode Canadian values such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion and diversity of opinion. I'd call this the substance of the commission -- what they're trying to achieve; their mission or purpose. It's unCanadian.

2. They erode Canadian values such as fairness from a government agency. This is not about the purpose of the commissions; it's how the commissions achieve their purpose. It's the means to the end; their internal procedures and rules. Those are unfair -- they reward nuisance suits, violate normal Canadian rules of procedure and evidence, etc.

Over the past few days, I have posted a great deal of evidence demonstrating both the foul substance and foul procedures of these commissions. Other than the videos, I think the best resource is to actually read the crazy decisions these commissions make. Here is a list of the Alberta decisions. This is where you'll find cases like the restaurant that was fined $4,900 for firing a kitchen manager who had Hepatitis-C. Tour through them -- they are bizarrely inconsistent. To me, the worst decision was the one I mentioned in several of the videos, the Boissoin case. That's the case where panellist Lori Andreachuk ruled that the right of busy-body activists not to be offended trumped a Christian pastor's right to write a letter about his religious views. (It's also the first time I have ever encountered the word "trisexual" -- see paragraph 44.)

Here is a list of the federal decisions. Click on the complaints by alphabet; you'll find that nearly 50% of all complaints under the "hate" section of the federal act are filed by one individual complainant, a former staffer of the human rights commission, Richard Warman.

My YouTube videos, and these primary documents, are a good starting point to illustrate the unCanadian purposes of the commissions, and their unfair processes. A great place to get current commentary on these matters is here.  

The goal of denormalization is to build a public demand for change -- to make the commissions unacceptable to Canadians.

That's where legislators come in.

There are human rights commissions in every province and federally, so any legislature in Canada could start making changes. B.C.'s Gordon Campbell should get credit for dismantling that province's commission. The tribunal still exists (that's the panel that hears cases) but the commission (the officers, like Officer McGovern, who go out and hunt for cases) has been disbanded. It's a good start. If I had to guess the governments most open-minded to change, I'd list B.C., Saskatchewan and the federal government.

B.C. has already done something bold by eliminating the commission, and B.C.'s civil liberties association -- true libertarians, not leftist censors like the U.S. ACLU -- is the most principled in the country. Saskatchewan would probably be next; they just elected a new, freedom-oriented provincial government, and their commission has made some appalling decisions recently that have hurt their reputation (call it self-denormalization). Finally, the federal Conservatives despise the commissions -- Stephen Harper himself called them totalitarian, before he was Prime Minister -- and they might be open to whatever changes are possible, given their minority government. (Here's a good barometer of the cabinet's feelings on the commissions' recent adventures in censorship.)

I'd list the following items on a legislator's to-do list, starting with the easiest, moving to the hardest to achieve:

1. Appoint true civil libertarians to the commissions.

These commissions are staffed by commissioners appointed by their respective governments. To date, they have made appointments from the same stale pool of leftist activists -- people who view the commissions as political weapons. Since filling appointments is a regular and natural occurence, why not choose libertarian commissioners, rather than mindless bureaucrats or outright censors?

2. Send lawyers to intervene in cases.

In the Boissoin case I mentioned above, the government of Alberta sent a lawyer to intervene against Boissoin's freedom of speech. It was truly appalling. Why doesn't the federal government send a lawyer to intervene on behalf of Maclean's magazine and Mark Steyn in their upcoming hearings -- on the side of freedom?

3. Introduce an amendment to the human rights acts to protect freedom of speech and thought.

If it were precisely worded, such an amendment to these commissions' governing statutes would be difficult for detractors to characterize it as an assault on "human rights". In fact, the amendment could be called The Human Rights Expansion Act or something like that -- and it would be worded clearly, to enshrine and protect freedom of speech and thought as fundamental human rights. It would be hard to imagine anyone but the far left wing of the NDP opposing such an amendment -- but I think the public (and the media, who would be amongst the chief beneficiaries of the amendment) would love it.

4. Abolish the commissions, but keep the tribunals.

This is what B.C. did. The tribunal -- the quasi-court that hears cases -- still exists. But the commissioners -- the trouble-making, problem-hunting recruiters of complaints, like Officer McGovern who interrogated me, were all fired in B.C. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a giant step forward. And it's not just "pruning" the commission, like adding sympathetic commissioners would do -- it's digging it out by its roots.

5. Abolish both the commission and the tribunal.

That's the only permanent solution. There is no need for government censors in Canada. Nor is there any need for the other jobs of the commissions, which were meant as solutions to problems that are now largely obsolete. We already have labour law and employment law to deal with people fired for improper reasons. We already have landlord and tenant law to govern housing. These might have been issues forty years ago, but they're largely solved now, which is why the commissions have moved on to other, ignoble tasks, like persecuting pastors or censoring cartoons.

Far better for a government to abolish those commissions, and take those budgets and invest them in civics programs -- teaching Canadians, especially new immigrants, about the most precious and valuable human rights around, the ones we have inherited from 800 years of tradition in the free west. It is not a coincidence that the two recent complaints against free speech were filed by radical Muslim immigrants from Egypt and Pakistan. Basic civics classes -- not partisan political indoctrination, but a basic primer in the rule of law; fundamental freedoms; the equality of men and women; non-violent solutions to problems, etc.

A week ago, I would have thought that this last option would have been politically impossible. But, given the overwhelming support I have received from the general public -- and the positive reception from even liberal and many left-wing commenters -- I think that an abolition of the commissions and their tribunals would be well-received.

I'd invite people to help with this process. Denormalize these commissions to build a demand for change, and then press politicians to deliver that change. In the meantime, I promise to keep fighting like hell in my own case before Alberta's commission.

(I'm going to refine this post over the next day; feel free to send me your advice in the comments section.)

Matthew Good, the rock star who has sparred with our magazine in the past, has written a blog post about our human rights trial. I've criticized Good before -- surely artists should be the most concerned about government censorship -- so it behooves me to credit him now.

As to his dislike for my use of the phrase "separation of mosque and state", it was a deliberate choice of words. "Separation of church and state" is conventional wisdom amongst liberal and ACLU-types. I think it's overstated -- our Constitution is replete with references to the church, actually. But it's a phrase associated with the secular left's over-reaction to things like the Ten Commandments being displayed in court houses. I used that phrase specifically to remind knee-jerk anti-Christians of their professed hostility to religious censorship, in the hopes that they'd be consistent when it comes to Islam. That reminder wouldn't be necessary if we were discussing a human rights complaint filed by a Catholic bishop against, say, a gay magazine. But I think the liberal left needs a reminder of their own professed values when it's a Muslim imam and a conservative magazine.

(I've only seen one liberal try to defend being anti-Christian himself, while condemning the publication of the cartoons as anti-Muslim; it doesn't really work.)

But these are trivial points. I honestly salute Matthew Good for his clear statement on freedom of expression -- perhaps the one subject on which we agree.

P.S. This is one of my favourite Matt Good tunes. It has almost as many views on YouTube as the human rights videos I posted -- so give him a few more clicks!

As I've written before, there's an incongruity to rough men like Mohamed Elmasry and Syed Soharwardy filing human rights complaints. Elmasry has publicly declared that any adult Jew in Israel is a legitimate target for a terrorist attack. When he's not egging on violence, though, his delicate sensibilities can be hurt by Maclean's magazine. Hey, terror advocates have feelings, too!

Syed Soharwardy, one of the complainants in my case, is a proponent of sharia law -- the legal system that governs Saudi Arabia, where rape victims get sentenced to the lash for their "immodesty". Soharwardy is made of stern stuff when he's telling Saudi -- and Canadian women -- their "proper" place. But he, too, has his soft side. In his case, our publication of some cartoons turned that stern task-master into a river of tears.

But that's how George Orwell said it would be; in his book 1984, he wrote of a war department called the Ministry of Peace, and a propaganda department called the Ministry of Truth. So why is it surprising that Alberta's "Human Rights Commission" actually tramples human rights like free speech, and that bigots like Elmasry and Soharwardy are not the subjects of its investigations, but rather the originators of them?

Well, in the case of Soharwardy, it appears that he himself is the subject of a human rights complaint -- for discrimination against women. There's a shocker. It was filed with the Edmonton and Ottawa offices of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Some women in his mosque allege that:

I've asked a dissident member of Soharwardy's mosque for a copy of the DVD of that meeting, referred to in the complaint. I'll post some excerpts from it when I get it.

Being a sharia sexist is not the only complaint against Soharwardy; some of his same dissidents have complained to the police about his financial probity. Here's a copy of that letter of complaint. And it gets uglier and weirder.

Let me be clear: I don't wish the women of Soharwardy's mosque success in their human rights complaint against him. All of my arguments against the commission apply to their complaint as much as it applies to Soharwardy's complaint against our magazine. But there's something poetic about Soharwardy being hoist on his own human rights petard. Of course, if there are real claims of harassment or threats, those complaints belong to the police. It may be that new immigrants at Soharwardy's mosque, especially the women, are still operating under Pakistani or Saudi norms of how women expect to be treated. Again, this is the important distinction between merely offensive words vs. physical deeds such as physical abuse.

One proper response to these claims of sexism is a public discussion, including in Calgary's media, about the role of women in Islam, especially here in Canada. That's an uncomfortable topic for the liberal press, as we saw in their awkward coverage of the honour killing of Aqsa Parvez. The mainstream media holds a soft bigotry of low expectations towards people like Soharwardy -- they don't hold him to the same standards of conduct as they would if he were a WASP. If a Christian pastor was accused of sexism and financial irregularities -- complaints that, on the face of them, warrant serious inquiries -- it would be front page news in Calgary. But because of the media's politically correct deference to "the other", they'll give him a mulligan.

Soharwardy is trying to live his Canadian life like he's back in the madrassahs of Pakistan, or on the lecture circuit in Saudi Arabia. He says the Koran should be our constitution, he thinks the police should arrest dissidents like me and, if these complaints have any validity, he's running his mosque with decidedly third-world standards of corruption. 

As a lawyer I've made plenty of closing arguments before, but not for myself. Before the interrogation began I hadn't thought about making one -- it wasn't the right forum. I had written my opening comments about the illegitimacy of the commission, but in those I never really addressed my own particular case and the specific question of whether I should be convicted or acquitted.

Before the interrogation I spoke with my lawyer, Tom Ross. He outlined the obvious alternatives as to how to approach answering Officer McGovern's questions. The first option would be to try to actually win the case within the rules of the system, by coming across as reasonable as possible. Tom thought that we might have a chance, since our publication of the cartoons was so bland, and obviously done in good faith. If we came across as agreeable and submissive, he thought we might win -- and that Officer McGovern would recommend that the complaint be dropped. (Note in this video clip, however, that she claims she recommended that Rev. Stephen Boissoin be acquitted, but the tribunal went ahead and tried and convicted him anways.)

But Tom has known me long enough to know that I would not choose submission -- or dhimmitude, as Syed Soharwardy would call it. So I chose the other option: a principled articulation of freedom of speech, a defiance of Islamic fascism, and a rejection of the unconstitutional pretentions of the human rights commission itself. In other words, Tom knew we weren't going to win, but we'd fight a good fight. (He also knew that from that moment on, he'd have a tough time getting a word in edge-wise!)

As the 90-minute interrogation proceeded, it became obvious to me that it would be morally inconsistent to end by asking for an acquittal, or any other "mercy" from the government. The logical conclusion of denying the legitimacy of the commission was to demand its worst. The point of civil disobedience is not to get off scot-free, but to willingly accept the punishments of an unjust system, to shame that system into reform.

Here's how I phrased it.

It's been a busy few days since my "human rights" interrogation on Friday afternoon. As of yesterday, the video clips I uploaded were viewed nearly 200,000 times, making them the 5th most watched "channel" on YouTube. I'd like to thank the blogosphere for covering a story that has been under-reported by the mainstream media, and I'd like to thank generous visitors for their financial support for our legal defence via PayPal.

For new visitors to this site, here is a quick summary of the facts.

In February of 2006, the Western Standard magazine, of which I was publisher, reprinted the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. We were immediately hit with two "human rights complaints". These are a strange species of lawsuit, inimicable to Western liberal traditions of rule of law and freedom of speech. A real court would have thrown these complaints out as baseless, but Alberta's human rights commission has proceeded. Friday was the day of my interrogation. I videotaped it.

You can see the hand-scrawled complaint against us here. You can see our written reply here.

I have uploaded several video clips from Friday, each with written commentary. The first video clip is my opening statement. There are seven clips so far, and I'll upload a few more, including my closing comments.

I recommend scrolling down to the bottom of this blog page, and working your way back up -- that's roughly chronological in terms of the video clips, and my written commentary makes more sense that way, too.

I'm truly heartened by the moral support that I have received on the blogosphere, in my own blog's comments, via e-mail and even on the Facebook support group. I promise I will continue to fight this battle to the end, even if that means appealling it all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Officer McGovern claimed that sometimes human rights tribunals rule in favour of the accused. "We do find on both sides," she said, "in case you're interested." And later, "things can go either way, okay?"

But that simply isn't true. The federal Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has a 100% conviction rate under their thought crime provision (section 13, the "hate messages" section, as it's called). But I can't find a single case of thought crime case that resulted in an acquittal in Alberta or federally. The Alberta commission has only heard one thought crime in recent years -- the Boissoin case that I mentioned -- and it was a conviction. I pointed that out, and noted that in the Boissoin case, hurt feelings were enough to convict the accused. No proof of discrimination or actual harm was needed (see paragraph 354 of that decision).

Officer McGovern claimed that she herself wrote the "opposite view" in her briefing on the Boissoin matter. That is, after interrogating that Christian pastor about his Christian beliefs, she claims she recommended that the commission let him go. But they didn't.

What's the point of an interrogation then, really? Why waste everyone's time? If the interrogating officer recommends that someone accused of a thought crime be set free, and the commission prosecutes and convicts him anyways, why even bother going through the motions? Isn't that the definition of a kangaroo court -- a show trial, to pretend that there's some rule of law?

So the commission ignores its own internal policies. But McGovern demonstrates that they ignore substantive law, too. She told me that "to find something is discrimination, not just offensive to some, is a high test." But that's not what the Boissoin decision ruled -- there was no evidence of discrimination or harm, just a lot of officious bystanders, a cadre of complainers-of-fortune, ready to plead hurt feelings (just like in the cartoon case). I had read the 80-page Boissoin decision carefully; McGovern was simply mis-stating it. So I challenged her: "that's not what the Boissoin case wrote!"

Her reply was stunning. She disowned the judgement: "That was Ms. Andreachuk's."

What on Earth does that mean? That Andreachuk -- not a judge, not even a human rights lawyer, but a divorce lawyer from Lethbridge who has a part-time patronage gig on the human rights tribunal -- is considered by the commission's own paid staff to be a rogue adjudicator who ignores the commission's own laws and policies?

McGovern speaks as if Andreachuk was issuing a personal opinion on her own time, as a nutty private citizen. But she did so as an officer of the government, with the authority of the law. Her decisions are enforced by the state.

This video is more technical than the others, because it talks about the inner workings of the commission. But it's more important than the others, because it's first-hand evidence that the commission doesn't follow either its own procedures or substantive law.

Human rights commissions do not follow the rule of law. They violate their own, few internal rules -- and they have a 100% kill rate.

Technical note: there is short hiccup at 1:20 into the clip but no words were omitted.

Officer McGovern asked if I thought there should be any limits to free speech under our constitution. Of course there should be, and I listed a half-dozen examples. But I drew a distinction between criminal or tortious speech and political speech. I also pointed out that free political speech isn't just protected in a liberal democracy -- it protects a liberal democracy. That's because it acts as a "safety valve" for people who want to change society. They don't have to resort to arms.

We also discussed the absurd -- and illegal -- power of the commission to "order" me to apologize for publishing the cartoons, even if I didn't feel contrite. Officer McGovern confirmed that was the remedy sought by the complainants.

At exactly one minute into this clip, I describe the Canadian legal test that governments must meet before they're allowed to override freedom of speech -- it's called the Oakes Test. Officer McGovern nods her head in agreement. But look at any -- actually, every -- human rights decision: these commissions claim that the Oakes Test doesn't apply to their censorship. See here, for example, the Boissoin case to which I referred. The panelist explicitly ruled, at paragraphs 356 and 357, that no constitutional test was needed before trumping a pastor's right to publish Christian views on homosexuality. Officer McGovern humoured me with her head-nod, but in fact the commission does not apply the Oakes Test. 

Here is an exchange between me and Officer McGovern. I talked about the chilling effect that human rights complaints have not just on the victims -- e.g. the people and companies named in the complaints, like we were -- but on other media who see what could happen to them if they dare upset thin-skinned whiners. It's similar to the phenomenon of libel chill, except it's worse. Libel chill is when reporters are worried about writing a story for fear of being sued. But that's not much more than a healthy fear -- if a story's facts are true, it's defensible in defamation law. More than that, any would-be plaintiff would have to finance his own lawsuit, be subject to well-known rules of court, and have to pay the costs of any failed nuisance suits. None of those restraints are checks againt "human rights commission chill": truth is not a defence; plaintiffs complain for free; taxpayers pay for the prosecuting lawyers; rules are arbitrary; legal precedents are not applied consistently; and instead of judges, tribunals are stacked with activists, many not even lawyers.

The worst part is that there is no deterrent to spurious complaints -- there is no cost to making false accusations. That's where the "human rights chill" comes in: why would any rational publisher or editor report on sensitive subjects (read: radical Islam) if they knew they would be tagged with a no-win complaint?

That's the point I was making. And after I made it, Officer McGovern said "you're entitled to your opinions, that's for sure."

Well, actually, I'm not, am I? That's the reason I was sitting there. I don't have the right to my opinions, unless she says I do.

We have the right to be rude. It's not a cost-free right; being rude shouldn't be. It marginalizes us socially; removes us from polite company; loses us friends. A business -- such as a magazine -- that is offensive may lose readers, advertisers and even staff and investors.

Publishing the Danish cartoons wasn't rude -- by western, liberal standards. It wasn't even rude by the standards of most Muslims, especially most Canadian Muslims. Even radical Muslims only "decided" to riot in places like Iran and Syria when those two dictatorships had a need for an anti-Western riot -- not because any of the rioters actually saw the cartoons.

I was happy to answer for the conduct of our magazine to anyone who asked -- reporters, readers, the public in general. I probably get asked about the decision once a week, and it's been two years now. But I won't explain myself to the government.

I have about ten more clips I plan to post over the course of the weekend. Many of them are in the same vein, but there are a few moments that are illuminating, including an off-hand comment made by my inquisitor.

The hearings were actually in response to two complaints. The first was filed by a radical imam in Calgary, Syed Soharwardy, a tin-pot fascist who has publicly called for Canada to be ruled by sharia law. Soharwardy boasts of his studies in Pakistani madrassahs and his religious lectures in Saudi universities, and he's bringing those Saudi and Pakistani values to Canada.

The second, almost identical, complaint was made by the Edmonton Muslim council. The chief difference between the two is that the Edmontonians cleaned up their spelling and grammar, and left out some of the nuttier sharia law arguments that are Soharwardy's specialty.

The "human rights" officer asked me to answer the Edmonton complaint that these cartoons made life dangerous for Muslims, and ought to be banned for that reason. Here's my response. (The case I refer to can be read here.)

Our magazine had published eight of the Danish cartoons to illustrate a story (you can read it here after a quick and free registration) about the cartoon riots and the Western media's fear of printing them.

The magazine spoke for itself -- it's an artifact; anyone could see the words and pictures we used. Why would the commission ask me about my "intentions"?

Why would my intentions as publisher be relevant in determining whether or not the publication was illegal? The answer is that these "human rights" commissions are interested in what George Orwell called "thought crimes". If my thoughts were pure, the publication might receive their blessing. If my thoughts were impure, the very same publication would be banned. It's worse than a limit on freedom of expression -- which is when you say or print what's on your mind. It's a test of what's on your mind itself -- a limit on freedom of thought.

Again, I refer to Hannah Arendt's phrase, "the banality of evil". No six-foot brownshirt, no police cell at midnight. Just Shirlene McGovern, an amiable enough bureaucrat, casually asking me about my political thoughts, on behalf of the government of Alberta. And she'll write up a report about it, and recommend that the government do this or that to me. Just going through checklists, you see.

If you don't pay attention, you might not even realize that freedoms are being eroded. I had half-expected a combative, missionary-style interrogator. I found, instead, a limp clerk who was just punching the clock. She had done it dozens of times before, and will do it dozens of times again. In a way, that's more terrifying.

Here is a video clip of my opening statement. The other two people in the room are the "human rights officer", Shirlene McGovern, and my lawyer Tom Ross.

This is what an interrogation in 2008 looks like. It's not in a dungeon, or even a secure government facility. It's not done by paramilitaries in uniforms. It looks banal -- in a meeting room at a law office, with a bored bureaucrat. It's what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil".

At today's "human rights" interrogation, I was not permitted to bring anyone other than my lawyer and my wife along -- the "human rights officer" barred others from attending as observers, even other officers of the magazine (such as our former editor). The news media who showed up congregated in the lobby of the law firm and waited until we were done.

But my lawyer and I insisted that we be permitted to record the interrogation, for use when we appeal the commission's decision to a real court. The officer allowed the video camera, but asked that we keep the recording confidential. But, over a year ago, our lawyer served notice on the commission that we reserved the right to publish any communications to or from the commission whatsoever, and that they should govern themselves accordingly. It's not surprising that a censor like the commission would want to do its censorship in the dark.

I'm currently downloading the 90-minute recording. It's too long to upload on YouTube (they limit uploads to ten minutes), and much of the interrogation was repetitive. I will endeavour to upload the most interesting exchanges over the next few days.

In the meantime, here is the first news report that I've seen on the subject, from CanWest News. An excerpt:

"A secular government bureaucracy has essentially been hijacked by a radical Muslim imam," [Levant] said. "It's being used to further his fatwa against these cartoons."

"We have a great tradition of free speech in Canada," he said.

"My freedom to publish a cartoon that some radical Muslim imam doesn't like, well that's the free west for ya."

 UPDATE: Here is the local CBC clip on the subject -- fast forward to 30:35 (link is likely not permanent).

I have just returned home from my session at the kangaroo court, called the Alberta human rights commission. Here is my opening statement that I delivered at the interrogation. I will post more details about the interrogation soon.

Alberta Human Rights Commission Interrogation

Opening remarks by Ezra Levant, January 11, 2008 – Calgary

My name is Ezra Levant. Before this government interrogation begins, I will make a statement.

When the Western Standard magazine printed the Danish cartoons of Mohammed two years ago, I was the publisher. It was the proudest moment of my public life. I would do it again today. In fact, I did do it again today. Though the Western Standard, sadly, no longer publishes a print edition, I posted the cartoons this morning on my website, ezralevant.com.

I am here at this government interrogation under protest. It is my position that the government has no legal or moral authority to interrogate me or anyone else for publishing these words and pictures. That is a violation of my ancient and inalienable freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and in this case, religious freedom and the separation of mosque and state. It is especially perverted that a bureaucracy calling itself the Alberta human rights commission would be the government agency violating my human rights. So I will now call those bureaucrats “the commission” or “the hrc”, since to call the commission a “human rights commission” is to destroy the meaning of those words.

I believe that this commission has no proper authority over me. The commission was meant as a low-level, quasi-judicial body to arbitrate squabbles about housing, employment and other matters, where a complainant felt that their race or sex was the reason they were discriminated against. The commission was meant to deal with deeds, not words or ideas. Now the commission, which is funded by a secular government, from the pockets of taxpayers of all backgrounds, is taking it upon itself to be an enforcer of the views of radical Islam. So much for the separation of mosque and state.

I have read the past few years’ worth of decisions from this commission, and it is clear that it has become a dump for the junk that gets rejected from the real legal system. I read one case where a male hair salon student complained that he was called a “loser” by the girls in the class. The commission actually had a hearing about this. Another case was a kitchen manager with Hepatitis-C, who complained that it was against her rights to be fired. The commission actually agreed with her, and forced the restaurant to pay her $4,900. In other words, the commission is a joke – it’s the Alberta equivalent of a U.S. television pseudo-court like Judge Judy – except that Judge Judy actually was a judge, whereas none of the commission’s panellists are judges, and some aren’t even lawyers. And, unlike the commission, Judge Judy believes in freedom of speech.

It’s bad enough that this sick joke is being wreaked on hair salons and restaurants. But it’s even worse now that the commissions are attacking free speech. That’s my first point: the commissions have leapt out of the small cage they were confined to, and are now attacking our fundamental freedoms. As Alan Borovoy, Canada’s leading civil libertarian, a man who helped form these commissions in the 60’s and 70’s, wrote, in specific reference to our magazine, being a censor is, quote, “hardly the role we had envisioned for human rights commissions. There should be no question of the right to publish the impugned cartoons.” Unquote. Since the commission is so obviously out of control, he said quote “It would be best, therefore, to change the provisions of the Human Rights Act to remove any such ambiguities of interpretation.” Unquote.

The commission has no legal authority to act as censor. It is not in their statutory authority. They’re just making it up – even Alan Borovoy says so.

But even if the commissions had some statutory fig leaf for their attempts at political and religious censorship, it would still be unlawful and unconstitutional.

We have a heritage of free speech that we inherited from Great Britain that goes back to the year 1215 and the Magna Carta. We have a heritage of eight hundred years of British common law protection for speech, augmented by 250 years of common law in Canada.

That common law has been restated in various fundamental documents, especially since the Second World War.

In 1948, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Canada is a party, declared that, quote:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

The 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights guaranteed, quote

2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

a) freedom of conscience and religion;

b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;

Those were even called “fundamental freedoms” – to give them extra importance.

You may start your interrogation.

Today at 2 p.m. I will appear before an Alberta "human rights officer" for an interrogation. I am being interrogated for the political crime of publishing the Danish cartoons in the Western Standard nearly two years ago.

As a lawyer, I've been in different courts and tribunals, but I've never experienced a kangaroo court first-hand. I will have a more comprehensive report later today. In the meantime, I leave you with three documents:

1. The hand-scrawled complaint filed against the magazine by a radical, Saudi-trained imam who has publicly called for sharia law to be imposed in Canada;

2. My response to that complaint; and

3. A look at those cartoons again.

As they say in Virginia, sic semper tyrannis!

Khurrum Awan is a busy boy.

When he's not filing spurious human rights complaints against pundits, he's a bit of a pundit himself.

Here's a sampling of Awan's scintillating wit and deep analysis that he posted as a comment on Garth Turner's website, when that MP was turfed from the Tory party:

Hello Mr Turner,
i noted on your weblog from July that you told the Arab community to go to
hell because of their criticism of you (& the Conservative party) for
behaving like an outpost of the Israeli Likud Party in Canada…seems what
goes around comes around…cuz you have been told to go to hell by the
Conservative Party!! LOL! Hope that was fun
Khurrum Awan

By Khurrum on 10.21.06 12:21 pm

You can read it here -- just scroll down halfway, or search for the word LOL! using your browser's find function.

(Hey, I'm the second vice president of the Calgary Southwest Constituency Association of the Israeli Likud Party in Canada, and I'm deeply offended by Awan's remarks. We would never have run Turner as a candidate.)

At least Awan didn't say what Mohamed Elmasry, his boss at the Canadian Islamic Congress, says about Likudniks (that's anti-Semitic code for Jews) -- that we are all fair game to be murdered in terrorist attacks in Israel.

Awan's writing is still infantile, as anyone who has read his submissions in the aforementioned Steyn case can attest, though Elmasry seems to have insisted that Awan eliminate the smileys. We all know how the Canadian Islamic Congress feels about cartoons.

Well, now Awan is at it again. He's sent this grammatically creative letter to Jason Kenney, the cabinet minister who has spoken out against the CIC's fatwa against Steyn.

(If you're wondering how I got this letter, it's obvious. The Israeli Likud Party in Canada is part of the "Toronto Coalition to Support the War" to which Awan sent the letter, as part of his cc list. He's not much for details, this young Johnnie Cochrane.)

Awan accuses Kenney of "undue intereference with a legal proceeding" for having publicly stood for Canadian values like freedom of speech. He also called Maclean's continuing discussion of the human rights complaints against it to be illegal "retaliation" against Muslims.

That got me thinking: Kenney's job is minister of multiculturalism, and it was recently expanded to include Canadian identity programs and domestic rights issues. It's his mandate to defend civil rights, and to inculcate those values into new Canadians, such as Egyptian-born Elmasry and Pakistan-born, Saudi-trained Syed Soharwardy, and many of the other radical immigrants who have brought illiberal foreign values into Canada.

I think Kenney shouldn't just issue a statement to the press. He should go the whole mile -- and send a lawyer, on behalf of the Canadian government, to intervene in the Elmasry vs. Steyn fight. Contrary to what Awan thinks, it's not inappropriate to take a position in legal proceedings such as this, with its public policy ramifications. If the Government of Alberta can intervene against freedom of speech in an Alberta case, then surely the feds can send a lawyer to intervene for freedom in a federal case.

It's unlikely that the Conservative government, with only a minority in Parliament, will do what it really ought to do, and pull the plug on the Canadian Human Rights Commission altogether. But until a Conservative majority comes, they can send a lawyer on behalf of the federal government, to teach the CHRC -- and Awan and his fellow censors -- that human rights in Canada mean freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the separation of mosque and state.

*******

P.S. Look at the that motley crew of lobby groups to which Awan sent his letter -- that's the coalition of censors (Mark Steyn might call it the "coalition of the chilling") that the CIC is assembling.

But what do they have in common? What does the pro-feminist, pro-abortion, pro-secular, pro-gay Canadian Federation of Students have in common with a hodge-podge of Muslim groups so strict on those matters that they make the Pope look like Liberace? (Awan himself led the CIC's charge against gay marriage).

This strange union of the domestic left with foreign fascists has only one thing that holds them together: they all loathe Canada's western, liberal traditions.

Here's my column from today's National Post about how white reporters are covering black Barack Obama. An excerpt:

Take an "interview" three weeks ago on Good Morning America. Chris Cuomo asked Obama, "What do you think the bigger obstacle is for you in becoming president, the Clinton campaign machine or America's inherent racism?"

That's not reporting. That's not even about Obama. That's Cuomo showing how enlightened he is. Diane Sawyer asked Obama whether he thought America was "secretly … more racist or more sexist." That's what this campaign is to liberals: identity politics. Obama is nothing more than a black candidate. Hillary Clinton is nothing more than a female candidate.

For liberal, white Baby Boom reporters, Obamamania is a way to expiate their own prejudices -- and to project their guilt onto America.

They're giving Obama a free ride. Their euphoria is a form of journalistic affirmative action. And when Obama loses -- not for being black, but for being unready and ideologically extreme -- the media euphoria will turn to national self-flagellation.

Mohammed Elmasry, the Jew-hating president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, has announced that he's stopped lobbying Stephen Harper.

"We gave up on having a constructive dialogue with the current government on any foreign policy issue," Elmasry told CanWest News.

Yeah, I guess that's one way of looking at it. Another way to look at it might be to remember that Stephen Harper has continually refused to meet with Elmasry, as part of Harper's policy decision to marginalize radical Muslims and apologists for terrorism.

Elmasry's insane spin that he is the one breaking off a dialogue -- a dialogue that never existed! -- demands Baghdad Bob-style credulity to believe. And CanWest -- a newspaper chain owned by Zhoos, as Elmasry likes to point out -- believed it.

That's what bothers me more than the nutty ramblings of Elmasry. Does Mike Blanchfield -- and the editor who wrote his headline -- really believe that the CIC speaks for all Muslims?

At least Blanchfield didn't repeat the CIC's slogan that it's the largest Muslim group in the country. Other than a handful of media spokesmen, it's an empty shell -- and Elmasry himself only works as its president-for-life on a part-time basis.

News stories like this only serve to normalize nuts who should be marginalized, as Harper has tried to do. Reporters like Blanchfield should add a few more numbers to their "Muslim spokesman" rolodex. Tarek Fatah, Irshad Manji, Salim Mansur and a dozen other moderates could credibly speak for more Canadian Muslims than Elmasry, and none of them have legitimized suicide bombings.

hat tip: Rob Breakenridge

Ed Stelmach, the Alberta Tories' Harry Strom, is angry that a local Liberal, David Cournoyer beat him to the punch to register the domain name www.edstelmach.ca.

Here's a copy of Stelmach's legal demand letter.

The first thing that comes to my mind is that Cournoyer didn't register the domain until April of 2007. Stelmach has been in politics for decades, and premier since 2006 (though he hasn't yet been affirmed in that position by anything as messy as an election). But don't be too hard on the old man. These Inter-Nets can be confusing!

The second thing is Stelmach's first response: go litigious. Let's see how that works out in the blogosphere. Until Stelmach's demand letter, very few people would have known about any of this -- Stelmach has the .com, .net and .org sites for his name, as well as all of the provincial Tory and government websites. His approach -- lawyers -- has brought a flurry of media coverage painting Cournoyer as a David to Stelmach's lazy, low-tech and bullying Goliath.

The third thing is that Stelmach is going to lose. The Canadian Internet Registration Authority -- the administratrive body that oversees .ca sites -- is very tough on commercial cybersquatters who have no legitimate reason to register a URL, and who clearly want to sell it for a quick buck.

But that's not Cournoyer. He clearly falls under CIRA's policy 3.6(d), which allows cybersquatting if: 

Anyone who gets their news from television "knows" who the religious nut running for president is: Mike Huckabee, the former pastor. Mormon Mitt Romney comes in a close second.

But it was neither of those men who said:

"We're going to keep on praising together. I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth."

It was Barack Obama.

I'm not concerned about Obama visiting churches and talking about building Christ's Kingdom -- though it's interesting that the ACLU and their friends in the media are mum on the subject.

What's more interesting to me -- and equally underreported in the MSM -- are stories like these, about Obama's Muslim youth.

I doubt Barack Hussein Obama is Muslim today. But if we can be treated to an in-depth, critical analysis of Romney's Mormonism and Huckabee's Baptist faith -- how many cover stories in Time and Newsweek so far? -- let's learn a little bit more about Obama's faith, too.