Odds and ends

• 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.