Mohamed Elmasry's spokeschild falls apart

A friendly reader e-mailed me an audio clip of Naseem Mithoowani, one of Mohamed Elmasry's spokeschildren, who appeared on Cross Country Checkup today right before me.

Let's set aside Mithoowani's fib that she is a complainant against Maclean's -- she's not; Elmasry is, but he's rightly keeping a low media profile, given his infamous anti-Semitism. And let's not, right now, quarrel with her misrepresentation of what Maclean's actually published, what Mark Steyn really wrote, and her convenient omission of the fact that Mithoowani and her friends demanded cash from Maclean's. (Quaere: did the Canadian Islamic Congress, by filing a human rights complaint against Maclean's when they wouldn't pay that shake-down money, commit criminal extortion?)

Let's instead enjoy the deer-in-the-headlights responses Mithoowani offered up to Rex Murphy's simple challenges to her bromides. How could she claim she's been silenced, if she and Elmasry's other spokeschildren have appeared in a dozen newspapers in response? How has an "offensive" article actually impacted her "human rights"? What, exactly, does she propose as a remedy?

Mithoowani says the answer is to have "mandatory" regulatory bodies to forcibly compel magazines to carry rebuttals from "groups" who feel slighted by a publication.

Of course, Maclean's already runs such rebuttals voluntarily; they're called letters to the editor. But Maclean's, and many other media, receive more letters than they could possibly run, even if they were editorially up to snuff. Who would be the decider as to which rebuttals would be run? Right now, that decision is left to Maclean's editors; Mithoowani wants to make that decision herself -- she wants to tell Maclean's readers what they'll read, and tell Maclean's editors what to print. I don't think she convinced many listeners. 

But, in case she did, I'm excited about all of the writing opportunities that will suddenly come my way. I will expect to be able to have a "rebuttal" column in every issue of the Canadian Islamic Congress's weekly e-mail newsletter -- not to mention a "Jew's Views" column in the half-dozen Arabic language newspapers in Canada, many of which are virulently anti-Semitic. I'll even demand my "equal time" when the Liberal Party publishes its newsletters -- after all, as a conservative, I'm sure I'll feel offended by what they have to say.

I wrote earlier that Rex was far more patient than I would have been when listening to such foolishness. But upon reflection, I realize that there was nothing that he could have done that would have more powerfully proved the folly of Mithoowani and company than to let them be hanged by their own words.

P.S. Here is my clip from today.