Where's Syed Soharwardy?

Syed Soharwardy, the radical Muslim imam who complained to the Calgary Police Service and the Alberta Human Rights Commission because I published the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, has disappeared lately. He was on a bit of P.R. campaign a few weeks ago, when his ghost-written Op-Eds appeared in several newspapers. I think he felt pretty good about his "make love, not jihad" campaign, until Licia Corbella gave him the smack-down of a lifetime. Then he wisely decided to just stop digging.

Looks like one of his press releases was republished on a lefty site today. Here's the response I wrote to his Herald column; Licia's dynamite column ran instead. I might as well post my reply now.

P.S.: Soharwardy claims he's dropped his complaint against me. Not according to the commission he hasn't.

Censorship and the Code of the East

        After wasting close to $500,000 of Alberta tax dollars – and costing me and the now-defunct Western Standard magazine the better part of $100,000 in legal fees – a Muslim preacher named Syed Soharwardy says he’s going to abandon the complaint he filed with Alberta’s “human rights commission” two years ago when we published the Danish cartoons of Mohammed.

If this were a real court, Soharwardy wouldn’t be able to walk away from his mess without paying my costs – a judge would order it. And he wouldn’t be able to stick taxpayers with his bill – he’d have to pay his own way in a real lawsuit. Soharwardy’s embarrassing explanation of his flip-flop demonstrates one of the flaws of human rights commissions: they attract nuisance complaints that wouldn’t be tolerated by real courts.

And even if Soharwardy does follow through and drop his complaint – he hasn’t, yet – an identical complaint was filed by Soharwardy’s friends at the Edmonton Muslim Council. So the human rights commission will continue to grind away against me, as it has for two full years now.

So why is Soharwardy distancing himself from his mess? Soharwardy wrote in the Calgary Herald that he now believes in the “Code of the West”, where a “man’s word is his bond”. That’s great, though I have no idea what that has to do with his nuisance suit. But it’s a change from the Code of the East that Soharwardy advocated in the Herald a few years ago, when he said that the entire world should live under Sharia law – where the Koran would be our constitution, as it is in Saudi Arabia. No, thanks. Even women at Soharwardy’s own mosque don’t like that – they’ve filed their own human rights complaint againt Soharwardy, accusing him of mistreating them to the point of harassment. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’ve seen a videotape of a meeting at his mosque; the women were seated at the back of the room, and whenever they tried to speak, Soharwardy shouted them down. That might fly in Saudi Arabia, but I don’t want women in Canada treated that way. Perhaps Soharwardy has a different Code of the West than I do.

Soharwardy says he has now reconciled himself to Canadian values, and has abandoned the illiberal views he brought with him from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. And he says he’s eager to “sit down with [me] and discuss it”. Forgive me if I doubt the man’s sincerity – as recently as last month, he asked the Calgary Police Service to arrest me for hurting his feelings (they very politely told him that in Canada, the police don’t do that sort of thing). And a few weeks ago, Soharwardy’s lawyer threatened me with a lawsuit like the one he’s filed against the dissidents in his own mosque.

I’m not so sure I’m interested in meeting with a bully like that – someone whose website is overrun with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (and the weird claim that Spanish Conquistadors committed a “holocaust” by massacring the Muslims they discovered in South America). I’ll stick to more polite company.

Soharwardy told the Herald that “most Canadians” see my interrogation as a free speech issue; he didn’t say that he sees it that way. But he did concede that “Canadian society is mature enough” to handle looking at those cartoons. Well, that’s awfully big of him. I know Canadians were waiting for a madrassah-trained imam who’s popular on the Saudi lecture circuit to give us his approval that we’re “mature” enough to read what we want.

What’s really going on here is that Soharwardy is simply upset at the hostile P.R. he’s received since filing his complaint. All over the world – from CNN to the National Post to a thousand websites, people are calling Soharwardy as they see him: a censor, intolerant of others, using a secular government agency and public money to enforce an Islamic fatwa. I may be getting pummelled in human rights “court”, but Soharwardy is getting pummelled in the court of public opinion.
 

His column in the Herald was an exercise in damage control, trying to recast himself as a reasonable man who accepts our freedoms. But the very night his column was published, he told CBC’s The National why he really dropped the complaint against me: not because he has some epiphany about freedom, but because “people were looking at Ezra Levant as a martyr of freedom of his speech ... taking this into a different direction that I did not want.” Soharwardy started this human rights circus, but he never thought he’d come across as the clown.

Soharwardy might want to forget about all this, but I don’t. I’ve instructed my lawyers to sue him for the tort of “abuse of process”.

When the complainant in a two-year censorship exercise admits the whole thing was just an ill-considered lark, such a suit is not just about recouping my losses. It’s about holding a little tyrant, and the government agency he hijacked, to account, and having grown-ups -- that is, real judges in real courts -- tell them that what they’ve been doing is morally and legally wrong.

Soharwardy tried to get Saudi justice. Now I’m going to get some Canadian justice.