Saturday, January 12, 2008

"The last house of worship torched in Edmonton was my synagogue"   [Mark Steyn]

I've been in the wilds away from the Internet all day, but I wanted to draw attention to this - yesterday's interrogation of my old boss Ezra Levant by one of Canada's many "human rights commissions" for publishing the Danish cartoons. Much to the irritation of the Alberta thought police, Ezra has posted portions of the video at his site (start at the top and scroll down - or, if that's too busy, try radio station CHQR). There are three sections, starting with Ezra's opening statement, which points out that his freedom of speech is not the gift of Canadian bureaucrats but an inalienable right bolstered by 800 years of English Common Law as well as more modish documentation such as the UN's Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

Then come two sections - one in which "human rights agent" Shirlene McGovern quizzes him on his intent in publishing the cartoons, and another in which she raises the fear that his publishing them could lead to violence against Muslims “particularly in today’s world post-9/ 11 that has made a number of Muslims more vulnerable to hatred and contempt”.Ezra's answer speaks for itself, but Ms McGovern's question reminds me of a passage from Melanie Phillips' book Londonistan:

Minority-rights doctrine has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a 'victim' group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the 'oppressive' majority.

Ms McGovern, a blandly unexceptional bureaucrat, is a classic example of the syndrome. No "vulnerable" Canadian Muslim has been attacked over the cartoons, but the cartoonists had to go into hiding, and a gang of Muslim youths turned up at their children's grade schools, and Muslim rioters around the world threatened death to anyone who published them, and even managed to kill a few folks who had nothing to do with them. Nonetheless, upon receiving a complaint from a Saudi imam trained at an explicitly infidelophobic academy and who's publicly called for the introduction of sharia in Canada, Shirlene McGovern decides that the purely hypothetical backlash to Muslims takes precedence over any actual backlash against anybody else.

Thus the unending valse macabre of our times, as the supposedly progressive forces of tolerance are whirled around the floor by the avowedly intolerant. Ezra is rightly contemptuous of these "human rights commissions". Canadians should be ashamed of this show trial.

01/12 08:55 PMShare