Human rights watchdogs muzzling free speech
by George Jonas
CanWest Publications
April 6, 2006
The modern liberal state has its dogmas and taboos. It guards and enforces them almost as rigidly as Iran's revolutionary tribunals enforce their version of Islam. Canada still has a distance to go before it becomes anything like Iran, but it's edging closer to a kind of secular theocracy, genuflecting to political correctness, a long way from the free country it once used to be.
Ironically, the march towards the new dark ages started with the introduction of human rights legislation some thirty years ago. By now the Human Rights Commissions have become our Iran-style revolutionary tribunals. In Canada we've ways of dealing with people who think they've a constitutional guarantee of free expression. As Muslim activists haven't failed to notice, the way around the Charter leads through a thicket called human rights.
The Islamic Supreme Council of Canada -- yes, that's what it's called -- has recently requested the Alberta Human Rights Commission to deal with the Western Standard for its editorial decision to re-print some Danish cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed. For readers who have had better things to do than keep up with the minutiae of Muslim sensitivities, last fall a newspaper in Denmark published a series of cartoons of Mohammed. This sent Muslim mobs, incited by their mullahs, on murderous rampages in various parts of the globe. The riots having made the cartoons a legitimate news story, some papers, including Ezra Levant's Western Standard, decided to re-print them so people could judge for themselves what the bloody fuss was all about.
If Syed Soharwardy, president of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, felt offended by the Western Standard's exercise of its editorial discretion, he had an excellent remedy, available to any person in a free country. He could say so. He could denounce Levant's decision in speeches, in print, in letters to the editor, in peaceful protest marches or in public meetings. He could persuade Canadians -- or try to -- that reprinting the Danish cartoons was somehow wrong.
But Soharwardy and colleagues, in line with the authoritarian nature of their creed, preferred a top-down solution. They tried persuading no one except the authorities. Believing that disagreeing with them ought to be a police matter, they started with the Crown's office. Then, when told that running a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed wasn't a criminal offence in Canada, at least not yet, they went to the Human Rights Commission.
I suppose Alberta's Muslim leaders could have done worse. Like imams in other places, they could have tried inciting riots. To their credit, they made no attempt to do so. But neither did they consider that in a secular democracy people trade freely in a marketplace of ideas, opinions, and beliefs. Instead of debating Levant, they first tried to have him arrested, then turned to our society's nearest kin to theocratic repression, the Holy Inquisition of the shibboleths of super-liberalism, the politburo of Canada's multiculturalist-collectivist-feminist-environmentalist axis, where they struck gold. The Orwellian commissars of Alberta's human rights directorate, instead of advising Soharwardy & Co, to go soak their heads in cold water, started processing their complaint.
Can anything good come from such a "human rights" complaint? Can a pressure group's assault on fundamental freedoms make this country a better place? Yes, perhaps. Soharwardy's attack may, just may, cause Canadians to finally re-examine the concept of Human Rights Commissions.
Even a chief architect of the concept, Alan Borovoy, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, is beginning to notice the hideous chickens coming home to roost in his barnyard. "During the years when my colleagues and I were labouring to create such commissions," he wrote last month in the Calgary Herald, "we never imagined that they might ultimately be used against freedom of speech."
Borovoy should have imagined it, partly because it was self-evident, and partly because I told him so during our discussions of the subject some twenty years ago. We argued about it nearly every Saturday in the late 1980s, sitting with friends in a Toronto cafe. It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that Borovoy's crowd of left-leaning liberals could imagine all right how the "human rights" laws they promoted could be used against somebody else's freedom of speech -- some conservative fuddy-duddy's, for instance. What Borovoy's brand of "progressive" cosmopolitans couldn't imagine was that their laws might one day be used by conservative fuddy-duddies -- even veritable clerical-fascist imams -- against their own freedom of speech.
Well, hallelujah. The day is here.