ninme

Macleans – I prefer living with space lizards<br/> Human rights commissions seem to believe that Canadians have some surprising rights, by MARK STEYN

The “human rights” racket is a disgrace. Canadians are not notably “hateful” people. To be sure, deep in the human heart lurk dark prejudices that may occasionally be furtively expressed to like-minded persons over a drink or two. But discrimination in housing and employment on the grounds of gender and race — the original justification for creating the “human rights” pseudo-courts — is all but extinct, so a self-perpetuating nomenklatura has moved on to invent new rights — like the human right to a labiaplasty or a joint on someone else’s property. You’ll recall the Osgoode Hall law students who objected to my book excerpt in Maclean’s demanded a five-page cover story in response, unedited, with the students determining the artwork and the cover art, along with a financial contribution to their “cause.” As any self-respecting publisher would, Kenneth Whyte told them he would rather go bankrupt — much as Mr. Kindos seems likely to. The Osgoode students have since explained that they went to the “human rights” enforcers because they were only trying to “start a debate,” and mean old Maclean’s was preventing their voices from being heard. They have repeated this mournful plea in lengthy editorials they’ve written for, at last count, the Globe And Mail, the National Post, the Toronto Star, the Toronto Sun, the Ottawa Citizen, the Calgary Herald, the Montreal Gazette, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, the London Free Press, and no doubt a few other publications. That’s the reality of Canada’s “Islamophobic” media: they’ve been given acres of op-ed real estate to yell that their voices are being silenced and all they want to do is start a debate — even though, in none of their many columns, do they actually start it.

Incidentally, although they characterize themselves as the “complainants” in these suits, they’re not. In the two “human rights” complaints against Maclean’s that are going forward, the complainants in British Columbia are Dr. Mohamed Elmasry, president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, and Naiyer Habib, and, in the federal case, Dr. Elmasry alone. Mohamed Elmasry is the man who announced on Canadian TV that he approved of the murder of any and all Israeli civilians over the age of 18. One can understand why such an unlikely poster boy for the cause of “anti-hate” campaigns would prefer to hide behind his fresh-faced Osgoode sock puppets. But the fact that every major newspaper in Canada has opened its pages to turgid recitations of imagined victimhood by three students who have no standing in these cases tells you everything about how “excluded” and “marginalized” they are. That’s the “racist” Canadian media of 2008: all you have to do is claim to represent some community with a grievance and, even though there’s no evidence you represent anything other than your own peculiar obsessions and you have nothing substantive to say, nine out of 10 editors will open their pages to you — no matter what your interminable victimological prose does to their circulation.

Nice, huh?

Emphasis mine. As usual I’ve skipped lots of good bits. But now I have to surrender the computer back to Peter’s ninme-ministrations.