...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

Elmo’s warm-up: Prior to lodging official complaints about Maclean’s magazine’s purported “Islamophobia” to several of our nations august panels of officious busy-bodies, the CIC’s Mo Elmasry got in some practice by complaining to the Ontario Press Council. The subject of his complaint: a column in the Toronto Star by Rosie DiManno, the paper’s token non-loon, on the occasion of the assassination of the founder of genocidal terror outfit Hamas. Mo and his co-complainant, Hajara Kutty, said the entire column was “racist and wilfully promoted hatred against Arabs,” but, in particular, they objected to this passage:

The Arab world is in acute lamentation over Yassin’s extermination, which says a lot about what passes for leadership in societies infused with choler, where wickedness is bred in the bone, and where the very idea of Israel as a sovereign state, with the right to exist, is anathema. Yassin was an arch-terrorist by any definition of the term, a viper in a wheelchair, and if his murder is now inducing shrill promises of revenge from radical groups that actually have little use for each other, sharing only an irreversible enmity for Israel, then it only underscores how depraved some societies have become, how far they have slithered away from even the most basic respect for human life.

The phrase that really sent them into a tizzy was the one about wickedness being “bred in the bone.” They claimed that the concept of hatred been passed from one generation to the next is inherently “racist”. They were also distressed by the word “extermination,” which they said compounded the “racism”.

The Ontario Press Council, not unexpectedly, caved. It held that, while DiManno was certainly entitled to her opinions, that’s fer shure (or words to that effect),

it considers such words as “bred in the bone” to be denigration of a whole society and that some of the language crosses the line between acceptable and unacceptable comment and is unnecessarily hurtful.

The complaint was upheld, the requisite apologies were made, and, several years later, the man with the “hurt” feelings felt confident enough to take on Maclean’s.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:57 | link | comments (1)

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