Marmur's murmurings

Dow Marmur, a Toronto rabbi, weighs in on the Battle of Khartoun in today's Toronto Star.

...though newspapers should have the power to publish such pictures at will, they should choose the path of prudence not to do so out of consideration for the feelings of the Muslim minority. In the hierarchy of values, there's a strong case for at times allowing sensitivity to and respect for others to come before free expression.

I think that's what could be called the "conservative libertarian" approach: it acknowledges that we have the right to do a very wide range of things in Canada, but we can voluntarily choose to restrain ourselves from doing them. Fair enough; if Marmur was a publisher, it sounds like he wouldn't have made the choice that I did to publish those cartoons two years ago. Reasonable people can disagree on how to exercise their freedoms, and if an armchair publisher would choose to let "sensitivity" trump newsworthiness, that's fine. My objection is when the government steps in to make that decision.

Marmur's piece is a touch muddled, as modern sermons can be, and he gets some facts wrong. Contrary to his assertions, not all Muslims believe that depicting Mohammed is offensive. In fact, many mosaics and other engravings of Mohammed appear throughout the Muslim world. Radical mullahs like Syed Soharwardy have trumped up this "prohibition" as a political weapon against the Western free press, just as the recent Islamist insistence on the hijab is not a truly religious point, but rather a political weapon against the liberation and integration of Muslim women.

Marmur gets other facts wrong in relation to my own case. He writes that Alberta's human rights commission acknowledged that freedom of expression is central to Canadian life and so the commission didn't claim jurisdiction over me. That's just wrong: the Alberta HRC has vigorously declared that the right not to be offended trumps freedom of expression -- see paragraph 357 of this grotesque ruling -- and that's their precedent for having jurisdiction over me. And, though Mullah Syed Soharwardy has dropped his complaint against me, an identical complaint by the Edmonton Council of Muslim communities proceeds against me at the HRC. 

I suppose I should be gentle with the rabbi. His last column was surprisingly sensible for a Canadian clergyman, and the Star itself: he argued against abolishing the Lord's Prayer in Ontario's legislature, even criticizing the atheist -- or, more accurately, anti-Christian -- tendencies of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Maybe I have more in common with Marmur than first meets the eye.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn keys in on another passage of Marmur's that I ignored. Marmur says:

This was my stance more than a decade ago when Show Boat was staged in Toronto and some members of the black community objected on the grounds that it was racist. Many of my friends thought otherwise. For all I know, they may have been right, because it's difficult to describe Show Boat as a racist musical. Nevertheless, I felt that if some blacks thought that it was, their feelings were more important to me than my own artistic judgment. I think tolerance is also about that. 

Again, Marmur has the right to circumscribe his own life in accordance with the sensitivites of professional complainers, whether they're complaining about coverage of a news story or the production of a play. As Steyn points out, handing over such a veto to the thinnest-skinned people in society will make for a very boring life indeed, for any work of art -- or news or politics, or for that matter, religion such as the rabbi's -- is the subject of some controvery or offence. If Marmur wants such a sterile life for himself, he's welcome to it. I just don't want human rights commissions to command me to live my own life that way.