Haroon Siddiqui is right

The Toronto Star's Haroon Siddiqui weighs in on the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the thought crime complaints against Maclean's magazine. No-one who is familiar with Siddiqui's radical ideology would be surprised that he supports the complaints.

(By the way, whenever a journalist supports such censorship -- and, frankly, I can't think of another newspaper columnist in the country who shares Siddiqui's views -- I'm reminded of what Abraham Lincoln said about slavery: when I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.) 

Siddiqui gets some of his facts wrong. For example, he repeats the fiction that students Khurrum Awan, Naseem Mithoowani, Muneeza Sheikh and Ali Ahmed are complainants against Maclean's. But that's not true. If I'm reading these documents correctly, the complaint that is before the CHRC was filed by Mohamed Elmasry alone, and the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal complaint was filed by Elmasry and Naiyer Habib of Abbotsford, B.C. (the Ontario case was rejected for jurisdictional reasons). Those four students are not complainants; they are nothing more than a PR front, to conceal the fact that the real complainant, Elmasry, is a Jew-hating bigot.

But there is a point Siddiqui makes, and others have made it too, that has some merit:

There was little or no hue and cry when human rights commissions were ruling on complaints by various groups, but there is when the complainants are Muslim.

Martin and others need to address that if they are not to be seen as hypocrites.

The media, including the Star, also vehemently oppose human rights tribunals regulating the press.

They do so to protect press freedom. They also point to disparities in the human rights codes in different jurisdictions. Ontario's refers to signs, symbols, emblems etc. but not the media. The federal statute, and the ones in Alberta and B.C., are clearer, which is why the tribunals there heard the cases they did.

It follows, then, that the federal and British Columbia commissions have no option but to hear the complaint against Maclean's. Otherwise, they will stand accused of double standards.

The reason Maclean's is fighting back (and me, too) is not because our complainants are Muslim; it's because our complainants, regardless of their religion, seek to censor bona fide political discussion, and thereby are violating our freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and our property rights. Their complaints are twisting any reasonable definition of "human rights" and "discrimination". I'm sure Maclean's and I would have fought back just as vigorously had the complainant been an opportunistic grievance-monger complaining "on behalf" of Muslims, like Darren Lund, or the usual complainant in section 13 cases, Richard Warman.

That said, Siddiqui has a point. And it's actually the same point I've been making for some time: the precedent of censorship and government persecution has been set, using oddballs and racists (or politically incorrect Christians) as the guinea pigs. Few people stood up for the constitutional rights of the CHRC's victims to date, because those victims were so politically or personally odious. That's Lemire's point -- though he argues that he is not as odious as he's been painted.

If anti-Semites can be censored by the CHRC, why can't "Islamophobes"? And if "Islamophobes" and anti-Semites can be censored, how about any other "phobe" or "ite"? Siddiqui defends an immoral law that is being capriciously enforced. But he at least understands what the Canadian Jewish Congress does not: it is inconsistent to demand that your enemies be censored, but to insist on an exception for your friends. That's exactly what the CJC (and Warren Kinsella, actually) are arguing, by saying Steyn and I should be acquitted. How is that anything but a violation of the rule of law in its own way? The CJC says:

In our estimation, the complaints against Maclean’s and Levant fall well short of the mandated standard of the provincial human rights commissions petitioned for redress and should not have been accepted. 

Well, obviously the HRCs disagree. Why should they limit their censorship to the CJC's enemies?

I think Elmasry is appalling; and I think the HRCs are not only violating our constitutional freedoms, and making a mockery of due process and natural law, but they're clearly exceeding their own statutory mandates. But if that's what HRCs are doing these days, it shouldn't surprise us that Islamo-fascists are attracted to them, and hijacking them for their own political fetishes, just as the Warmans and CJCs of the world have done for years.

Which is why the answer is not to tinker with these bureaucracies, or try to reform them, but to gut them, uproot them and abolish them.

I blame Elmasry; but he is only doing what the CHRC lets him do. And I blame the CHRC; but they are only doing what the federal government continues to let them do.

Siddiqui is right: until we change the law, we shouldn't be surprised that Islamic fascists abuse it.