CBC Sunday

UPDATE: You can watch the video clip of the documentary here.

UPDATE 2: Did you notice -- as I did -- that the CBC showed the cartoons on air? I sense a human rights complaint coming!

I watched the CBC Sunday mini-documentary today on human rights commissions. If I can find a link to the video, I'll post it. In the meantime, here are my thoughts.

The fact that the CBC is talking about these commissions, and their censorship of political and religious free speech, is a victory in itself. Such coverage would not have happened three months ago. Ask yourself this: do you think the complainers-of-fortune and the human rights commission's hangers-on were happy that this documentary was made? Hardly -- it's a part of their denormalization, branding them as censors.

The report focused on three cases -- the Western Standard's publication of the Danish cartoons, the Canadian Islamic Congress's complaint against Maclean's and Mark Steyn, and the conviction of Rev. Stephen Boissoin for rambunctiously professing Christian beliefs about homosexuality. In each case, the CBC interviewed only one side of the story. In my case, it was my side -- so, needless to say, I was pleased with how the case was represented. I'm not sure if this was because Syed Soharwardy has simply decided to cut his losses and stop talking about his complaint, or because the CBC didn't even try to interview him. I suspect the former.

As to the other complaints, the CBC says they tried to contact Ken Whyte, the publisher and editor of Maclean's, but he declined to be interviewed, so that segment only interviewed one of Mohamed Elmasry's sockpuppets, without rebuttal. Finally, the CBC interviewed Darren Lund, the complainant in the Boissoin case, without a word from Boissoin himself.

I'm sure Boissoin and Maclean's were unhappy with that lop-sidedness. But I think that critical thinkers watching the show would have picked up on revealing comments made by Elmasry's spokeschild, Khurrum Awan, and by Lund.

Unlike what he has usually done, Awan didn't commit the fraud of ascribing embarrassing comments about Islam to Mark Steyn himself. This time, when Awan read passages from Maclean's about pedophilia and bestiality in Islam, Awan (unlike on previous occasions) grudgingly acknowledged that Steyn was quoting from Muslim imams. In other words, Steyn was reporting grotesque remarks about Muslims, made by other Muslims. The comments about bestiality and pedophilia weren't his -- they were said by radical Muslim leaders. In effect, Awan was saying that Steyn and Maclean's should be forbidden from reporting facts that embarrass him.

To me -- and, I hope to other viewers -- that exposes the absurdity of the complaint against Maclean's and Steyn. The words complained about may well be embarrassing, or hurtful, or demeaning, and indeed they do show Islam in a bad light. But they were said by radical Muslim leaders, and Maclean's reported that. To demand equal space to present "the other side of the story" -- when the first side of the story is the accurate reporting of facts -- makes Awan et al. look like illiberal fools. I'm biased on the subject, but I thought that Awan came across not only as thin-skinned, but as complaining about what Muslims said -- not what Steyn said. Out of an obviously lengthy interview with Awan, that choice of editing by the CBC served to highlight his weakness.

There was another point that Lund's interview elucidated that I was vaguely aware of, but about which the documentary refreshed my memory. In that offensive decision, the Christian pastor's views on homosexuality were linked circumstantially to an alleged beating of a gay teen a few weeks later. To apportion any blame for an act of physical violence to an unrelated political discussion about homosexuality is an abomination of our legal system. But what I had forgotten -- until Lund's interview -- was that the teen in question has never been identified, and did not even complain to the police. We only have a vague newspaper report and Lund's own say-so -- but nothing more. Who was that youth? Was he really attacked? He was a high school student -- was he one of Lund's own students? Did Lund have anything to do with the complaint? If there was a real, physical crime committed -- an assault and battery -- why was nothing done about it? Why did the police not make inquiries, either to Lund or the reporter in question? Or did they -- and did they dismiss the case as unfounded, or even a hoax?

That such a vague event -- a rumour really -- was used to convict a pastor shows how abominable these human rights commissions are. They didn't "convict" the person who allegedly attacked the teen. So they took out their politically correct venom on some Christian pastor who happened to be talking about homosexuality a few weeks before.

I'm not sure if those subtleties came through to many, especially to people unfamiliar with the case. But it was a reminder to me that HRCs use vague facts -- or, as we saw last Tuesday, even manufacture facts -- as ammunition in their wars against conservatives and Christians. I don't think I would have said so before the Lemire hearing last week, but having learned that human rights "activists" use the tactics of planting fake evidence, and using fake names and fake facts to provoke "hate crimes", I now wonder if the rumoured gay-bashing incident in the Boissoin case was itself manufactured, either by Lund -- the Richard Warman of Alberta -- or someone else looking to drum up business for the commission.

Perhaps those are small points, and Lund and Awan came across as persuasive to CBC Sunday viewers. But I don't think so. I think they came across as politically correct whiners, pampered liberals who would rather file a grievance against their opponents than debate them. Perhaps that will ring sympathetic with the stereotypical CBC viewer, but I think that enough people, even on the left, believe in free speech to be turned off by such thin-skinned complainants. As Lund himself said, the Red Deer Advocate published plenty of critical replies to Boissoin's article; only Lund himself started a five-year witch-hunt using goverment resources.

But the main reason I liked the report was that it started and ended with Alan Borovoy, the head of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. The documentary showed historical footage of Borovoy being one of the founders of these human rights commissions; then it quoted him -- more than anyone else was quoted, in fact -- as being a very concerned critic of the commissions straying into censorship. He was set up as the neutral, father figure of the documentary -- me, Lund and Awan were the partisans. Borovoy was the go-to man for analysis; he was "the expert".

The fact that he -- rather than a human rights commissioner -- was set up as the arbiter of reason is quite dramatic, given how much of a free speecher Borovoy is.

The documentary wasn't perfect -- but, as a "report" as opposed to an opinion piece, it was favourable to the side of free speech. I thought it was yet another landmark event in our journey to expose and denormalize the commissions, and build momentum for political change. I'd give it a thumbs up.