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

Kay at sea: The National Post’s Jonathan Kay is a bright guy, but he rather misses the boat, I think, with this one:

Last week, at Toronto's Noor Centre --a cultural organization for liberal Muslims --I participated in a panel discussion on the question of whether the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) is justified in bringing human rights complaints against Maclean's magazine for publishing Mark Steyn's (now famous) cover article, The Future Belongs to Islam. What follows is adapted from my opening remarks.

No, I don't think the CIC's complaints have any merit. In fact, I find it quite creepy that government officials even take the case seriously. "Human rights" bureaucrats should focus on real human rights issues, like protecting Canadians from bigoted landlords and employers --not censoring journalists.

But you've heard all this before. I've made this case many times in editorials and columns, and so have lots of other journalists. So rather than repeat familiar arguments about the value of free speech, I want to focus on an aspect of the issue that relates directly to Canadian Muslims. The other panelists you've heard from take it for granted that Muslims will benefit from censorship imposed in the name of human rights -- because it will protect your community from Islamophobia. I'd like to challenge that assumption. Even putting aside all the usual principled reasons for upholding free speech, there are several utterly practical, self-interested reasons why the people in this room should be wary about hitching their carts to the thought-police horse.

It is only a matter of time before human rights censors come after Muslims. Like the Bible, Muslim scripture contains a lot of material that, by modern standards, would be considered sexist, homophobic or even anti-Semitic. One statement attributed to Muhammad, for instance, declares that "Judgment day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Muslims will kill the Jews, and then the Jews will hide behind stones or trees, and the stone or the tree will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' " Is this the sort of thing that human rights mandarins will someday judge as "likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt" -- to quote the applicable language from the Canadian Human Rights Act (HRA)?

The prospect of a human rights tribunal telling you which Suras and Hadiths you are and aren't allowed to preach in your mosques may sound ridiculous.

But it's not. A few months ago, an Alberta pastor named Stephen Boissoin was slapped down by a human rights tribunal for the crime of proselytizing his socially conservative Christian attitudes toward homosexuality. As part of the judgment against him, he is now legally forbidden from commenting on matters of sexual orientation -- even in his sermons. The same sort of judgment was previously rendered against a Saskatchewan Christian named Hugh Owens, who cited Bible passages such as Leviticus 18:22 to denounce homosexuality.

Human rights mandarins haven't gone after mosques and mullahs -- yet. But that will change once Muslims have exhausted their usefulness as frontmen in the battle against Christians and conservatives. If Leviticus is now hate speech, how long before the Koran gets the same treatment?...

There’s something seriously awry with Jonathan’s argument. I think it’s that there’s no getting around the fact that portions of the Koran do indeed constitute hate speech, and that the hateful passages are part and parcel of the book’s Divinely-decreed doctrine of supremacy that motivates hard and soft jihadis alike to press for sharia to prevail over our godless democracies. However, there’s no way our Human Rights apparatchiks—leftists, Marxists, socialists, multicultists and Third Worlders, the lot of them—would entertain a complaint about the Koran, the holy book of one of Canada’s designated “victim” groups. And even if by some remote chance they ever did consider a complaint, the result would most likely be similar to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council’s ruling about VisionTV. The Council affirmed that it was okay for an imam to preach hate and call for jihad over Canadian airwaves because he did so in “the context” of the Koran, and didn’t raise his voice.

Jonathan may be a good guy, but when it comes to an understanding of Islam, he’s no Robert Spencer (or Ibn Warraq, or Andrew Bostom, or, for that matter, Mark Steyn).

Update: Speaking of Robert Spencer, he has some questions for and concerns about the "liberal Muslims" of the Noor Centre.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:24 | link | comments (5)

Comments:

#1  22 July 2008 - 11:36

 

So, email him with a cogent precis of your comments in this thread. Give him a brief, select bibliography on Islam, and let him educate himself if he is so intelligent.

If you really want to educate him (as Blatchford, Wente and diManno have been educated by other miso-Islamists), buy a copy of the Umdat al-Salik and send it to him. I can guarantee you- the results (assuming Kay refers to the fiqh manual) will immediately manifest itself in his writing on Islam.

Blogging here is definitely worth your time, and is cheap and easy, but the heavy lifting is done by educating those with access to the bully pulpit of the national media.

Anonymous

#2  22 July 2008 - 11:38

 

I've already emailed him my comments (and have been in contact with him before). Unfortunatley, he seems to have real blind spot when it comes to religion, and seems unwilling to do anything about it.

scaramouche

#3  22 July 2008 - 12:03

 

Good work.

Now, hit him with his very own copy of the Umdat al-Salik. It's well indexed and easily-accessed. The best $20 you can spend in the fight against the Islamists.

Anonymous

#4  22 July 2008 - 14:39

 

I would doubt, however, that Mark Steyn or Robert Spencer would ever uphold having the Koran censored or banned as hate speech.

I think Kay's argument is quite apt. If Muslims don't want their holy book cut to resemble Jefferson's famous Bible (cut to remove all the supernatural elements) they had better get on the anti-censorship bandwagon. I think his article is right on.

That doesn't mean Spencer et al are wrong in pointing out how portions of the Koran are interpreted--i.e. taken literally. But censoring them? No.

Anonymous

#5  22 July 2008 - 18:45

 

My point was that, given the Left-Lib slant of the Human Rights apparatchiks, Muslims need never fear that the the Koran will be the target of HRC complaints. In any case, in the area of free expression, our human rights codes are already sharia-compliant.

Also--Spencer et al have no desire to "censor the Koran." In fact, they want the opposite--i.e. they get Muslims to own up to what's in their "perfect" doctrines, since that's the first step in admitting there's a problem, and finding a way to address it.

scaramouche

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