Canadian Islamic Congress: Mark Steyn is like a neo-Nazi criminal

The Canadian Islamic Congress is back in the news, comparing Mark Steyn to James Keegstra, a convicted criminal and Nazi sympathizer.

Of course, it wasn't Mohamed Elmasry, the president-for-life of the Canadian Islamic Congress, who uttered that defamation. He doesn't like to talk to journalists -- they're too prone to ask him about his comments on national TV that any adult in Israel deserves to be murdered by terrorists.

It was Wahida Valiante, Elmasry's deputy.

She was speaking at a conference of Canada's human rights commissions, paid for by tax dollars.

Stop right there for a moment: the CIC, which currently has two live cases before Canadian HRCs -- the case that just finished a five-day hearing in British Columbia, and a pending case at the Canadian Human Rights Commission -- was on a panel at a conference organized and paid for by human rights commissions.

The CIC is still suing Maclean's. It is a party before two HRCs. And yet the HRCs invited the CIC as their guest -- surely paying for her expenses, if not an honorarium.

In other words, they invited one side of the lawsuit. They didn't invite Maclean's or Mark Steyn.

It's the moral and legal equivalent of a judge in a criminal trial inviting the police and prosecutors over to his home for dinner while the trial is still going on.

Such an act of bias would immediately lead to a mistrial, and disciplinary action for the judge. But that's real courts, and real trials -- you know, with boring old rules written by dead white men. That law stuff about being "neutral" isn't for kangaroo courts.

According to this report:

...Wahida Valiante, national vice-president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, said the commissions are the only recourse available to minorities treated unfairly in the media.

She repeated the CIC's complaints that membership in press councils is optional, and that criminal hate speech charges require the consent of the federal Attorney-General, which leaves human rights commissions as the only option.

She compared Mark Steyn, the author of the Maclean's article in question, titled The Future Belongs to Islam, to James Keegstra, an Alberta high school teacher who taught and tested his students on how Jews "created the Holocaust to gain sympathy."

"They basically talk about the same theories," she said. "This is not a civil dialogue."

She said that, in Germany, long before the Holocaust, "it was the words that set the stage for what happened later on.... We may end up with the same fate, and that is at the heart of why [the complainants] wanted to take this on."

It is staggering chutzpah for a member of an officially anti-Semitic organization like the Canadian Islamic Congress is, to invoke the memory of the Holocaust. The CIC are avid supporters of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who proudly brags about the next Holocaust, one that he's planning. And the CIC themselves endorse Jew-killing, as Valiante's own boss, Elmsary, told us on TV.

But put aside her Jew-hatred for a moment; and put aside the outrageous bias that the HRCs show by feting her at their conference.

She's comparing Mark Steyn to James Keegstra, a convicted criminal. She says that Steyn's theories are "basically the same" as Keegstra's neo-Nazism. I have no doubt that Valiante received applause from the assembled HRC bureaucrats, especially from the Muslim supremacist who works for Alberta's HRC, Arman Chak, if he was there.

Mark Steyn is a great man, with international success. He is invited to meet with presidents, prime ministers, kings and queens, with leaders of industry and media and charity. He operates at the highest levels. So it might not make sense for a man of his stature to stoop down so low as to file a defamation action against Valiante.

But I'd love to see that little Jew-hater on trial, explaining how Steyn -- a philo-semite and Zionist if ever there was one -- was "basically the same" as an anti-Semite of the rank of James Keegstra.

It would be a waste of Steyn's time and a distraction from his more important work. But I think it would be a useful missile into that anti-Semitic rats nest.

And: Steyn has a precedent to follow. Several years ago, Valiante wrote a similarly defamatory remark about Daniel Pipes, the American scholar who studies Islam. She said nearly the same thing about him -- claiming that he supported a Nazi-style genocide against Muslims in America. Needless to say, Pipes said no such thing, and the bigoted CIC, fearing a massive loss in court, agreed to publish an apology on their website, which you can read right here:

In the April 29, 2005 edition of the Friday Bulletin, the Canadian Islamic Congress and Ms. Wahida Valiante published on its website an article entitled Worth Repeating: Media Propaganda: Hitler, Bush and the "Big Lie". The Canadian Islamic Congress and Ms. Valiante apologize without reservation and retract remarks in the column that suggest that Dr. Daniel Pipes is a follower of HItler or that he uses the tactics of Hitler or that he wants to ethnically cleanse America of its Muslim presence.

Clearly, Valiante hasn't learned her lesson. Maybe it's time Steyn had a lawyer teach it to her again.