ninme

Macleans – I’m starring in one of those movies<br/> You know, the one where only the maverick investigator knows something scary’s going on, by MARK STEYN

Here’s the thing: two years ago, the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada took The Western Standard to the Alberta “human rights” commission for republishing the Danish Muhammad cartoons. A few months back, the Canadian Islamic Congress took Maclean’s to the Canadian, Ontario and British Columbia “human rights” commissions for publishing an excerpt from my bestselling hate crime, America Alone. Last week, the Centre for Islamic Development took the Halifax Chronicle-Herald to the Nova Scotia “Human Rights” Commission for publishing an editorial cartoon of a, ah, person of an Islamic persuasion.

Have we got a trend yet?

Skipping a bit of restating his own and the Western Standard’s case…

When it was yours truly and Ezra Levant, the publisher of The Western Standard, taking the heat, it was easy to write us off as a couple of right-wing blowhards. Mainly because we are. But the Islamophobe du jour is the Chronicle-Herald’s Bruce MacKinnon, a cartoonist who’s won an Atlantic Journalism Award and is the very soul of moderation. Alas for him, the head of the Nova Scotia “Human Rights” Commission is a fellow called Michael Noonan, last heard from comparing his job to that of the South African blacks who stood up to “the jackboots of the state” in the Sharpeville massacre. In other words, he seems just the sort of vainglorious stooge who’ll be happy to do the Centre for Islamic Development’s bidding and place the Halifax Chronicle-Herald’s editorial content under government regulation — or, as he would say if he were less hilariously un-self-aware, under “the jackboot of the state.”

Lord alive. These people need a hobby. Or a war.

If you’re an editor or a publisher, Canada’s “human rights” regime is building a world in which the only choice on key issues of public debate is between state censorship or self-censorship. In Toronto last week, I had lunch in a fashionable eatery on King Street with a former editor who couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. “You need to lighten up,” she said. “Write about a movie.” From next month, I’ll have no choice. Although the Osgoode Hall law students protest that all they want is a “right of reply,” when the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal finds us guilty, they are statutorily obligated to issue a cease-and-desist order that will have the effect of preventing Maclean’s running any writing on Islam by me or anybody of a similar bent — even though the plaintiffs have not challenged the accuracy of a single fact or statistic or quotation.

So four weeks from now I’ll be banished from the Canadian media, which will undoubtedly be distressing to my loyal reader (I use the singular advisedly). But a year or two down the line, many other subscribers to Maclean’s and the Chronicle-Herald and eventually the Globe and the Toronto Star will be wondering why there are whole areas of debate that no longer seem to get much of an airing in the public prints. In 1989, Muslims who objected to Salman Rushdie burned his novel in the streets of England. Two decades on, they’ve figured out that it’s more efficient to use the “human rights” commissions to burn the offending texts metaphorically, discreetly, offstage . . . and (ultimately) pre-emptively.

Pace my old comrade, I don’t need to see a movie because I’m in one. We’re at that point in the plot where the maverick investigator takes the call saying a third example of the strange spore has been found in a field in Idaho, and he pushes another pin in the map and goes “Hmm” thoughtfully.

But he still can’t get his colleagues to see that something’s going on.