No Law Means No Law... Except for Islam

Hugo Black, the legendary free-speech absolutist of the US Supreme Court, must be rolling over in his grave with news that some of the very worst of Europe and the rest of the world might soon find a home "in the land of the free."

"Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress say the magazine, Maclean’s, Canada’s leading newsweekly, violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up hatred against Muslims. They say the magazine should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their 'dignity, feelings and self-respect.'"

In other words, they don't seek a mere strengthening of the British Columbia law, they seek humilation. This is akin to saying a father, having heard his daughter's date criticize some of her faults, is entitled to a public apology and punitive damages from the date or his family.

Punitive damages, always.

As I have said before, in a few decades, just don't say you weren't warned. We are moving towards a world where ANY criticism of that-which-shall-not-be-named will result in fines and/or imprisonment. This has consequences. This incident occurred in Canada, aside from England and Australia the country most analogous to our own.

If I have said it before, I nonetheless feel obliged to say it again: Islam is different, folks. This does NOT mean all Muslims are supporters of mass murder for crass political ends. But, as yesterday's NYT story proved yet again, they are not like the West. Their women stand in line for surgeries in Europe to replace their ruptured hymen so as to conceal their loss of virginity. Their men, louder and louder, are demanding that their religion is sacrosanct.

And, as the old song lyric went, something's happenin' here...

"Canada, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all have laws or have signed international conventions banning hate speech. Israel and France forbid the sale of Nazi items like swastikas and flags. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Canada, Germany and France."

This, along with its new religion (climate change), represents the part of the Left I cannot stomach very well. Each facet wishes to force cloture and end any discussion. Al Gore is a prophet and if you don't think so, you're bankrolled by "Big Oil." Hate speech is terrible and if you don't move to outlaw it, you're as wretched as a Nazi-sympathizer and no better than the killers of James Byrd.

"Earlier this month, the actress Brigitte Bardot, an animal rights activist, was fined $23,000 in France for provoking racial hatred by criticizing a Muslim ceremony involving the slaughter of sheep."

Chills. Racial hatred? All of this is about Islam, much in the same way slavery so tethered itself to states rights arguments in the 1850s. How far are we, truly, from the days when the US Congress refused to debate slavery and when mobs intimidated and/or murdered Elijah Lovejoy and other abolitionist printers???

Apparently, not close enough:

"'It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,' Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, 'when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.'"

Atmosphere of mutual respect? BS. And, sir-whom-I-would-not-share-a-foxhole-with, what is meant by "certain forms"??? But more troubling is the apparently-shifting disposition of an old liberal lion:

"Mr. Lewis wrote that there was 'genuinely dangerous' speech that did not meet the imminence requirement."

Woodrow Wilson, perpetuator of the greatest subversion of the First Amendment in US history, must be smiling somewhere...

Fortunately, some sanity:

"When times are tough, there is a tendency to say there is too much freedom... Free speech matters because it works...

--Harvey A. Silvergate, civil liberties lawyer in Cambridge, Massachusetts

As for an eye-opening comment, look no further than Jason Gratl, a key figure in Canadian law:

"'Canadians do not have a cast-iron stomach for offensive speech... We don’t subscribe to a marketplace of ideas. Americans as a whole are more tough-minded and more prepared for verbal combat.'"

The phrase "marketplace of ideas" of course originates from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s dissent in Abrams (1919). Mr. Holmes believed that poisonous ideas would not survive public scrutiny and would thus self-marginalize without the need of the Feds.

International courts, of course dripping with sophistication and nuance, convict teachers for expressing negative opinions about Jewish people. The Keegstra case (1990) remains instructive: a Canadian teacher was criminally convicted for his statements. While he should have lost his job, yet his freedom too??? Yes, because to Canadian Chief Justice Brian Dickson:

"The international commitment to eradicate hate propaganda and, most importantly, the special role given equality and multiculturalism in the Canadian Constitution necessitate a departure from the view, reasonably prevalent in America at present, that the suppression of hate propaganda is incompatible with the guarantee of free expression."

Ah, multiculturalism, of course. Silly me, I thought other matters were more important. And, no, people will not realize this, en masse, until it is far too late.

A penny for Mr. Obama's thoughts on the Maclean imbroglio...