Syed Soharwardy's back!

Syed Soharwardy, the anti-Semitic, anti-Christian imam who filed a human rights complaint against me for publishing the Danish cartoons, is back!

Soharwardy had wisely decided to disappear from public view a few weeks ago after this devastating Op-Ed about him was published in the Calgary Herald. I haven't read a take-down like that in a long time. The column's strength was that it used Soharwardy's own words to show him as a bigot. Here are some of the quotes the Herald unearthed:

"Sharia cannot be customized for specific countries. These universal, divine laws are for all people of all countries for all times."

"Presently, what Israeli forces are doing to Palestinians is worse than the Holocaust of World War II."

"[Soharwardy's group] . . . strongly condemns the exploitation of tsunami victims by the Christian missionaries. There have been several reports that the Christian missionaries are kidnapping Muslim children in Indonesia. . . . It is now proven that the Christian missionaries do not help people on humanitarian grounds. They help people in order to exploit their needs and convert them to Christianity."

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Anyone who has the stomach to surf Soharwardy's various websites -- or, worse yet, to search his website pages that he's since deleted, will find a deeply bigoted man who isn't afraid to publish "religious commentary" from terrorists.

I thought that Soharwardy had properly found some spider hole to hide in after the Herald's smackdown. But he's back. According to this blog,

In a statement [March 5th], Imam Syed Soharwardy said, “The alliance of anti-Islam hatemongers and few opportunists within the Muslim community will not succeed in stopping me from serving my country; Canada, my community and my religion. The hatemongers will fail in their hate and we, law-abiding and civilized Canadians will succeed in defeating the racist, illegal, hateful and bullying agenda of few hatemongers”.

Our lawyers are working hard on a criminal defamation lawsuit to be filed soon. We are also working to use all other available legal channels including Human Rights Commissions to bring the hatemongers to face Canadian
justice system.

Imam Syed Soharwardy will be available to the media today (March 5, 2008) at 12:00 noon - 02:00 PM at the Al Madinah Calgary Islamic Centre, 5700 Falsbridge Drive, Calgary NE for any questions. Imam Syed Soharwardy can be reached at 403-463-5723.

The first thing that sticks out is Soharwardy's threat to use human rights commissions as a weapon, again. This flies in the face of his statements, less than a month ago, that he had reconciled himself to our Canadian value of free speech. Here's what he wrote in the Globe and Mail in February:

...discussions with several Muslim leaders, and more particularly with some of my Christian and Jewish friends, have led me to conclude that my complaint was beyond what I now believe should be the mandate of such a commission. I now am of the view that this matter should have been handled in the court of public opinion.

Dear reader, like you I'm shocked -- shocked! -- that Soharwardy was lying during his "make love, not jihad" PR campaign, just to get himself out of a tight spot!

The second thing that comes to mind is Soharwardy's threat to file a "criminal defamation" lawsuit. I know a little bit about defamation law, and I know that it's almost always a civil, not a criminal, matter. Defamation does exist in our criminal code, but it's exceedingly rarely used. And, as with all criminal code charges, the burden of proof is enormous -- "beyond a reasonable doubt", not just the "balance of probabilities" test used in civil defamation proceedings. And then there's the small problem of trying to convince police and prosecutors to pursue such an abusive action. But this discussion pretends that Soharwardy has given any more thought to his latest ejaculation than he did to the hand-scrawled complaint against me two years ago. To call Soharwardy a thoughtful analyst of Canadian law is to be generous in the extreme.

This isn't the first time we've heard of defamation threats from Soharwardy. When I criticized him last month, he had his lawyer fire off a defamation threat to me; here is my response. I haven't heard back from him since. I'm not looking for more lawsuits right now, but it would have been a bonanza to take Soharwardy through an examination for discovery, where the phrases "no comment" or "that's confidential" or "you're a hatemonger" don't hold up. Imagine what one would find sifting through his mosque's financial records.

Besides his trademark bullshit, there is something troubling about his press release. Did the Alberta Human Rights Commission truly dismiss the complaint of the dissident women in his mosque? That complaint was essentially identical to this one, filed against Soharwardy at the federal HRC. I say again, I don't believe that human rights commissions are legitimate, and if the women in his mosque were truly threatened or harassed, there are other, more appropriate means of legal recourse, including going to the police. But, if we do have unreformed HRCs operating in Canada, and if they have felt free to prosecute me for two years based on the mere thought crime of publishing some cartoons, it would be remarkable if, as Soharwardy claims, they rejected these women's complaint out of hand, without even an investigation.

I've seen a 45-minute DVD of a rowdy meeting at Soharwardy's mosque, where these women and other dissidents try to pin Soharwardy down on his financial dealings. I've seen Soharwardy shout down the women when they tried to speak (from the back row, of course). And, far more troublingly, I've read the report of one of those women subsequently getting beaten in her own home, by an attacker who police say warned her to stop talking about Soharwardy's mosque. Here are the gruesome pictures of that beaten woman, as published in the Pakistan Post.

I say again that the proper office to investigate these beatings is that of the real police, not the thought police. The proper body to investigate financial dealings at Soharwardy's mosque is the Canada Revenue Agency, or the white collar crime unit of the real police, not the keystone cops of the human rights commissions. But it is passing strange that a complaint with so much circumstantial evidence of true discrimination, harassment and violence, is rejected offhand, while my political crime of publishing a cartoon has been prosecuted for two full years now, to the cost of $500,000 tax dollars.

I've read 50 Alberta HRC rulings, and probably 50 others from other HRCs. I cannot recall a single case in which the respondent to a complaint was a minority, let alone a radical Muslim fundamentalist like Soharwardy. I don't think it's because radical Muslims like Soharwardy are in compliance with the politically correct codes of HRCs. I think, at least in part, it's because the staff at HRCs subscribe to the "soft bigotry of low expectations". Like so much of the media, they excuse conduct on behalf of tin-pot fascists like Soharwardy and Mohamed Elmasry that they would prosecute if those men were Canadian-born WASPs. Take away the spelling errors, and Soharwardy's and Elmasry's websites read a lot like white supramacist websites. Replace the Arabic and Urdu accents with a Southern drawl, and Soharwardy and Elmasry sound a lot like former KKK leader David Duke. But in the politically correct eyes of the HRCs, Soharwardy and Elmasry are "victims" by nature of their race and religion, so they couldn't possibly be bigots in their own right.

And if that means the women in Soharwardy's mosque are denied equal justice under Canadian law, well, those uppity gals should be grateful they're not facing justice, sharia-style.

UPDATE: As Rightgirl points out in the comments, the blog on which Soharwardy's press release appears describes itself thusly:

"Also, this site is counter measure of bias information from The West Mafia News Media, which already been dominated by JEWISH & CHRISTIAN Mafia."

Yeah, that sounds like Soharwardy's kind of people -- and, increasingly, like the human rights commissions' kind of people, too.