Human rights interrogator Shirlene McGovern: ignoramus or dhimmi?

She talks about the "most offensive" Danish cartoon -- the one with "mohammed as animal/pig; sex with animal".

But no such cartoons were ever published by a Danish newspaper, nor by our magazine. Here are the original 12 cartoons exactly as published in Denmark: we chose eight of those.

What McGovern is referring to are three cartoons fabricated by Danish imams, designed to be as offensive as possible, in order to whip up ignorant Muslim mobs that might not get sufficiently excited about the actual Danish cartoons.

In other words, McGovern was duped by jihadist propaganda. Soharwardy must have smiled like a cat when he heard her regurgitate those lies as if they were truths.

Now there are two possible explanations for why McGovern asked that false question.

The first possible explanation is that she is ignorant. That's probably the case. One would have to show a degree of intellectual curiosity to see what the real cartoons looked like, rather than accepting jihadist propaganda at face value. That might include such advanced investigative tactics as a quick Google search.

But, really, why should a second-rate bureaucrat at a third-rate government agency be an expert in jihadi tactics? Human rights commissions have expertise in precisely nothing; Alberta's Workers Compensation Board is expert in rehabilitation; Alberta's Energy Resources Conservation Board is expert in oil and gas development; etc. Human rights commissions are filled with people whose uniting characteristic is their mediocrity. My favourite example at the Alberta HRC is one of their in-house lawyers, Arman Chak. Besides being a Muslim supremacist bigot, he's most famous for placing dead last in the Alberta Law Society elections, where every lawyer in the province gets a vote. That's the kind of talent pool the Alberta HRC recruits from.

Human rights commissions are home to such anti-experts as the Vancouver clown, Judy Parrack of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, who ruled that McDonald's couldn't force its employees to wash their hands, since "there was no evidence about the relationship between food contamination and hand-washing frequency," to quote her exactly.

These are the bureaucrats who propose to tell me what I can or can't write about Danish cartoons -- bureaucrats who don't even know what cartoons were published in Denmark, and lack even a child's curiosity to find out.

Not that any purported "expertise" gives any government agency the right to censor a free press. But the outright buffoonery of the HRC is just insult on top of injury.

I think it's likely that Shirlene McGovern was just lazy and ignorant.

But there's another possibility: that she actually knew her file, that she actually did a moment's research, that she actually tried to give value for dollar to Alberta taxpayers, and that she spent, oh, say, one percent of the amount of time studying the Danish cartoons as I did and our magazine did.

And that she knew about the fake cartoons.

And that she knew they were a radical Islamist hoax.

But that she still went along with the hoax, in her role as the HRC's house dhimmi.

It's the less likely of the two theories, but it's possible. The secular Government of Alberta has put 15 bureaucrats to work prosecuting an Islamic fatwa against me for 800 days. If the Alberta HRC is now part of the soft jihad against radical Islam's critics, why not take another step down that road?

For now, I'll go with the ignornace excuse. But if, at my trial, I see Shirlene McGovern in a burka, I'll know I've got my explanation wrong.