Lawfare -- a tactic of the "soft jihad"
Here's Barbara Kay's excellent Op-Ed from today's National Post, about the soft jihad of lawfare. Lawfare, of course, is the hijacking of Western legal processes by Islamic radicals. It's no accident that the human rights complainants against Maclean's magazine, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, and the Western Standard and me were all filed by foreign-born jihadis.
Lawfare doesn't work without collusion of what Vladimir Lenin called "the useful idiots of the West". In Lenin's day, those were Western "intellectuals" who willingly, even eagerly, engaged in anti-Western propaganda, espionage and sabotage for the Soviet Union, usually without compensation except for their own misguided feelings of moral righteousness. In today's lawfare, the foreign-born jihadis are aided by domestic leftist busybodies, usually in the "human rights" industry.
It's a bizarre combination: secular leftists -- for whom, for example, sexual liberty is their political signature issue -- teaming up with the kind of medieval brutes. Radical Islam would ban abortion, put women in personality-obliterating niqabs, and kill homosexuals -- in other words, they're everything the Left abhors. The radical leftists who inhabit Canada's human rights commissions would never do the bidding of any other religion -- they love to persecute Christians. But when a second-rate imam issues a fatwa, they hop to it, using our tax dollars and government bureaucracies. Just read this crap, filed against me by Pakistani-born imam Syed Soharwardy. If such a semi-literate piece of theocracy were to be filed by any other group, it would be laughed at. In Soharwardy's case, it has been prosecuted for 900 days by 15 Alberta bureaucrats. Soharwardy abandoned his complaint this spring, but his jihadi allies in Edmonton have picked up where he left off with their own complaint.
Here are some excerpts from Kay's article:
...Ayatollah-prescribed fatwas are so pre-9/11. Nowadays, as liberal elites rush prophylactically to ward off charges of tolerating "Islamophobia," the fatwas (in all but name) against damn good books like Mark Steyn's America Alone aren't bruited in mosques; they issue forth from human rights commissioners.
An unintended but all-too-predictable danger inherent in the prosecution of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn (the latter via Maclean's magazine) was the encouraging message it would send to more fevered imaginations. As reported on his blog on Monday morning, Ezra Levant has received an anonymous e-mail death threat: "Ezra, you will be killed by my hands."
Although this is doubtless a hollow menace (real killers rarely serve notice), the sender's wish to sow fear in Levant, and by extension all journalists, is merely a cruder version of the impulse behind the human rights complaints.
...The soft jihad is gradualistic and law-abiding, but no less desirous of Islamic domination of the West than its violent counterpart. Soft jihad strategy exploits liberal discourse and weaknesses in our legal system to induce guilt about a largely mythical "Islamophobia."
The list of complaint-triggering speech offences is long in all Western countries, and ranges from the trivial to the politically existential: A decoration on a lid of ice cream distributed by Burger King offends because it resembles Allah in Arabic script; Fox Entertainment's drama 24 portrays South Americans, Bosnians, Germans and Muslims as terrorists, but only Muslims complain; a Turkish lawyer sues an Italian soccer team because the red cross on their jerseys reminds him of the Crusades.
...One way or another we must stop the fatwa industry in its tracks. Begin with removal of speech-regulation from the HRCs' legal mandate. Build on that with legislation that imposes costs and damages on litigious third parties who seek to chill journalists.
Canada should also pass legislation imitative of the U. S. Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) law, presently active in 24 U. S. states, which disallows harassment of those writing on matters of "public concern," as well as the Libel Terrorism Protection Act, a New York state initiative that will combat libel tourism.
The HRC crisis is not a tempest in a teapot. Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, says: "I don't think it's too strong to say that the [HRC] complaint against Mark Steyn is a totalitarian document."
It is therefore no exaggeration to say that Levant and Steyn are fighting for the defining ideal of Western civilization which, once lost, would spell the beginning of the end of all our other freedoms.
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