Canada's Al Sharpton

I wonder if it will work: Mohamed Elmasry and his Canadian Islamic Congress are trying to become the Canadian version of Al Sharpton, the U.S. shake-down artist and race hustler.

Sharpton, and his competitor, Jesse Jackson, trump up grievances or outright manufacture stories to stoke racial anger, and then set themselves up as the mediators of those same grievances -- often with a hefty financial payment to them as part of the solution.

When Elmasry, the Jew-hating president-for-life of the CIC, first complained about Maclean's magazine's book excerpt from Mark Steyn's America Alone, a tidy cash payment was part of their proposed solution.

Of course, Elmasry lacks Sharpton's media savvy, so in his Maclean's shake-down effort, he sent out three Muslim students and a Gentile to do his bidding (the Gentile has since left the team). It made sense: even Elmasry knows that it's a bit hard to square his own "human rights" complaint with his public statements justifying the murder of Jews.

(It will be interesting to see if media coverage of Elmasry's sock-puppets press conference today note that they are not, in fact, the complainants against Maclean's -- Elmasry the Jew-hater is.)

But that's what we've got here: an ethnic shake-down racket. In the U.S., racial grievances are trumped up and then "solved" when the natural currents of political correctness -- usually in the form of companies' aversion to calls for boycotts -- outweigh the shakedown victim's sense of outrage at being conned. There are no human rights commissions enforcing the media and corporate surrender in the U.S.; it's all about risk management and image management by those companies. That's why Sharpton and Jackson cultivate their media celebrity status: it's their sole leverage to get the cash.

Canada doesn't have the same heritage of racial division that the U.S. does, for obvious reasons, and so we lack much of the deeply ingrained liberal guilt -- the same sort of guilt that has rocketed a clearly unready Barack Obama to the lead of the Democratic Party. And most Muslims have only arrived in Canada in the past twenty years -- Canadians really haven't had a chance to become politically deferential to their claims of being victims, and the tepid reaction of most of Canada's Muslim leaders to 9/11 didn't help their claim to victimology, either. But we've been good at mimicking U.S. racial politics, by osmosis.

It will be interesting if Elmasry can pull off a Sharpton -- he'll be one rich anti-Semite if he can.

Elmasry's gambit has failed as a PR effort alone. To be sure, his sock puppets have received an enormous amount of ink and airtime -- which, in itself, proves false their points about being "marginalized" in the media. Nonetheless, despite having had acres of newsprint to argue their points of view, it's clear that not only are they failing to convince people, they're actually stoking up Canada's free speech instincts, and anger towards the CIC. As usual, Peggy Wente's column back in December said it best:

Curiously, the four complainants in the case are all law students or graduates from York University's Osgoode Hall. You might think that law students, of all people, would be very big on stuff like civil liberties, tolerance and free speech. I guess not.

"There is a fine line between freedom of expression and promoting hatred," said Muneeza Sheikh, one of the complainants. "Our feeling was that the article definitely did promote hatred."

Darn those feelings. They can make you feel so bad. If feelings were facts, no one in Canada would be allowed to state a controversial opinion.

...The CIC has lots to say about Islamophobia in Canada, but not a word to say about rape victims being flogged in Saudi Arabia or teddy bear demonstrations in Sudan. Plenty of Muslims wish it would just shut up, and for good reason. If the CIC wants to know who's fuelling prejudice against Muslims, maybe it should look in the mirror.

Wente's view has been nearly universal amongst Canada's commentariat: the CIC is trying to import Saudi or Egyptian values to Canada, and no matter how they try to dress it up, it's still illiberal censorship. I know from speaking with several journalists who have interviewed Elmasry's sock puppets that they are demoralized and truly surprised by the negative reaction they've received.

So the media pressure that Sharpon and Jackson rely on in the U.S. just hasn't materialized. And -- thankfully -- most Canadian Muslims simply ignore the bigoted buffoonery of the CIC, so a mass boycott of Maclean's or other Rogers affiliates just won't happen.

Thus today's gambit by the CIC: use the threat of HRCs as leverage for a shakedown against Rogers. As Debbie Gyapong points out, the CIC has also used the threat of criminal charges as leverage, too. You'd think the three sock-puppets, each being law school grads, would know that trying to pressure someone into doing something by threatening to file charges against them is a crime in itself, called extortion (a threat to file a civil suit is specifically exempted, but not a criminal complaint.)

I wonder what Maclean's will do. They've been immune to public pressure from Elmasry. If anything, the battle in the court of public opinion is going overwhelmingly in their favour. The only leverage Elmasry has is the near-certainty of a conviction by the HRCs.

Will Maclean's blink? Will they pay off Canada's Al Sharpton wannabe -- the Jew-hater Mohamed Elmasry and his PR front of law students?

I don't know Ted Rogers but I know Ken Whyte. I think he'll say the same thing he said when Elmasry's agents came to shake them down the first time: he'd rather go bankrupt than to be a party to their extortion.