Nutty or dangerous?

Last month

He claimed to have copyrighted the image of Mohammed. Of course, he's welcome to copyright any image that he himself makes -- go to it, start drawing. But the idea of copyrighting any and all depictions of Mohammed whatsoever - including those drawn by others, like the one at left, drawn by Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard -- doesn't make sense given the legal definition of the word copyright.

But that's not the point, of course. The point is to harass and intimidate people into submission to Islam. It's not the "hard jihad" of terrorist bombs, it's the "soft jihad" of intimidation. No-one will get killed -- at least not yet. But lawyers will need to be retained; time and money will need to be spent. It will be a hassle.

It's called lawfare, and it's the official policy of The Organisation of The Islamic Conference, a Saudi-funded mini-UN for people who think the current UN is too tough on terror and too soft on America, Israel and the Jews.

Well, today I got another letter from Fixhist. Instead of fisking it as I usually do, I tried out some of the features on Adobe Acrobat. I'm not very good at Acrobat yet, but I hope to get better. Here's my take:

The demand letter is a laugh – so far. And my Internet Service Provider is being great – so far. Fixhist has no legal case, and comes across as a bit of a nutty troll – which is magnified by his rough command of English.

He’s a crank.

But what if that crank, all of a sudden, had $100,000 from Saudi Arabia to spend on hiring a crack team of patent  and trademark lawyers, and a PR man to write his letters, typo-free? How funny would that be, then?

Sure, he’d lose in the end. But so what – that’s only a second or two worth of oil money to the Saudis. Bit it would probably cause me to burn up $20,000 to fight back. I’d “win” in the end – just like Maclean’s magazine will “win” its battle with the Canadian Islamic Congress’s lawfare exercise in Canada’s human rights commissions. But too many more of such win’s – at $150,000 in legal bills and counting – and Maclean’s will be done for. That’s precisely what the CIC is trying to do. It’s not about intimidating Maclean’s – they’re pretty tough. It’s about using Maclean’s as an example, a warning, to everyone else in the country: don’t even think about fighting against the soft jihad.

If you want a sneak preview of what that sort of laughable but dangerous censorship looks like when it’s backed up with real lawyers with fat budgets and fewer typos, look at Richard Warman and the Canadian Jewish Congress, and their illiberal attempt to get the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to start banning foreign websites that Warman and the CJC just didn’t like. They came within a whisker of getting such censorship powers – ex parte, no less. Again, those fools at the CJC are paving the way for the soft jihad by setting up the legal precedents for the Fixhists and OIC’s of the world to follow. Thanks, Burny.

The idea of a Muslim “copyright” on the image of Mohammed is nuts – today. But how nuts will it look tomorrow, with Burny and friends having softened up our fundamental freedoms, and then some litigious bully, backed with Saudi oil money, comes in to bat clean-up?

The answer to the question in the title of this post is: funny today, dangerous tomorrow.