Abu Wabu

From time to time I've been subjected to the leftist idiot's favorite ploy of attempting to delegitimize my point of view by calling me a "hater". While it doesn't bother me to be lied about by an ignoramus, it has always concerned me that the same device could be used in Canada with it's so-called "Human Rights Commissions" to criminalize a point of view. It's already being used in countless lawsuits against the West by Islamist cover groups in an effort to stifle criticism of their activities in support of Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah and other purveyors of fascism, terror and mass murder.

Now the Canadian Islamic Congress has used this very device to attack Mark Steyn, and the extent to which they demand not only punishment for Steyn, but absolute control over the very means by which he will be publicly humiliated, should be alarming to everyone who values the right to freedom of speech. Stanley Kurtz at NRO:

Late yesterday I stumbled across an article about a "human rights complaint" filed by the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) against Maclean’s, Canada’s most widely-read news magazine, for running a "flagrantly Islamophobic" excerpt from Mark Steyn’s book, America Alone. At least two Canadian Human Rights Commissions have agreed to hear these complaints. Only then did I find Steyn’s too-easily-missed late-night post from Wednesday on the controversy.

This is a big deal. The blogosphere has so far largely missed it, but this attack on Mark Steyn is very much our business. There may be an impulse to dismiss this assault on Steyn, on the assumption that it will fail, that Steyn is a big boy and can take care of himself, and that in any case this is crazy Canada, where political correctness rules, rather than the land of the free. That would be a mistake. The Canadian Islamic Congress’s war on Mark Steyn and Maclean’s is an attack on all of us. I’ll say more in a moment about how a Canadian case can reach into America, but let’s first take a look at the goings on up north.

The complaints against MacLean’s for publishing an excerpt from America Alone have been filed by several Canadian law students and by Faisal Joseph, a former crown attorney. Maclean’s published a total of 27 letters over two issues in response to Steyn’s piece–more responses than any Maclean’s cover story received over the past year. Yet when the law student’s demanded a longer response, Maclean’s was willing to consider it. The students then insisted that Maclean’s run a five-page article, written by an author of their choice, with no editing by the magazine. They also demanded that the reply to Steyn be a cover story, with art controlled by them, rather than the magazine. At this point, Editor-in-Chief Kenneth Whyte showed them the door, saying he would rather let Maclean’s go bankrupt than permit someone outside of operations dictate the magazine’s content.

Kurtz is right: this is nothing less than an attack on Western freedoms, and on Western civilization itself. As Steyn himself has remarked on the case,

For a judicial body to rule that a book chosen by so many Canadians was beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse in Canada would be a remarkable and unprecedented blow to freedom of speech in a western democracy. So the CIC doesn't like my argument? Fine. Argue against it but don't try to criminalize debate. That's the way they do things in Sudan and Saudi Arabia, not Canada.

Critics of Steyn, including idiots who call him an "Arab-hater", will be delighted, but the intellectual laziness inducing that euphoria is the very thing that makes Steyn's critics so dangerous, even to themselves.

UPDATE
I see that the above sentiment is echoed by Steyn himself over at The Corner:

The "progressive" left has grown accustomed to the regulation of speech, thinking it just a useful way of sticking it to Christian fundamentalists, right-wing columnists, and other despised groups. They don’t know they’re riding a tiger that in the end will devour them, too.