My supposedly Islamophobic book, America Alone, isn’t really about Islam, it’s about us. And the single most important line in it isn’t by me, it’s a famous and profound observation by the historian Arnold Toynbee:
Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.
One manifestation of that suicidal urge is the willingness of government ministers, judges, police agencies, social workers and other officers of the state to make common cause with an ideology explicitly committed to overturning the liberal utopia they claim to be working for. Up north, the Ontario Federation of Labour decided to support the Canadian Islamic Congress’ case. As Terry Downey of the OFL primly explained, “There is proper conduct that everyone has to follow” – and she and her union clearly feel my article is way beyond the bounds of that “proper conduct”. Don’t ask me why. I don’t pretend to understand the peculiar psychological impulses that would lead the OFL to throw its lot in with Dr Elmasry, the openly, cheerfully, judeophobic homophobic misogynist head of the CIC – except that there seems to be some kinky kind of competition on the western left to be, metaphorically speaking, Islam’s lead prison bitch.
Oh, dear. Is that “offensive” to the executive committee of the Ontario Federation of Labour? Very probably so. I may well have another “human rights” suit on my hands. Heigh-ho. Might as well be hung for a sheep (see Precepts of ejaculation) as a lamb.
Or we could all grow up and recognize the dangers in forcing more and more legitimate debate into the shadows. As the columnist David Warren summed up Canada’s “human rights” laws, the punishment is not the verdict, but the process – the months of time-consuming distractions and legal bills that make it easier for editors to shrug, “You know, maybe we don’t need a report on creeping sharia, after all. How about we do ‘The Lindsay Lohan Guide To Celebrity Carjacking’ one more time?”
And, if you do get hauled up before the kangaroo court, bear in mind that no complaint brought to the Canadian “Human Rights” Tribunal under Section 13 has been settled in favor of the defendant. A court where the rulings only go one way is the very definition of a show trial. These institutions should have been a source of shame to Canadians for many years.
Instead, the Canadian Islamic Congress and Muslim lobby groups throughout the west are now using the pieties of political correctness to enforce a universal submission to Islam’s self-evaluation. And their multiculti enablers seem happy to string along: Australian publishers decline novels on certain, ah, sensitive subjects; British editors insist forthcoming books are vacuumed of anything likely to attract the eye of wealthy Saudis who happen to have a flat in Mayfair. These are the books we will never read, the plays we will never see, the movies that will never be made.
I said when this legal battle started that I wasn’t interested in the verdict – except insofar as an acquittal would be more likely to legitimize the “human rights” commissions’ attempt to regulate political speech, and thus contribute to the shriveling of liberty in Canada. I’m interested only in getting the HRCs out of this business entirely, in repealing Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Code and its provincial equivalents, and in helping restore freedom of expression to those parts of the western world where it has been ever more circumscribed by the PC-Islamist alliance. To reprise Sir Edward Grey, when it comes to free speech on one of the critical issues of the age, the lamps are going out all over the world – one distributor, one publisher, one silenced novelist, one cartoonist in hiding, one sued radio host, one murdered film director at a time. It’s time to stop it and to reverse it, and to relight the lights of liberty.
I
THE CASE AGAINST MACLEAN’S:
A FLAGRANTLY ISLAMOPHOBIC READER
There is proper conduct that everyone has to follow.
On December 4th 2007, the Canadian Islamic Congress announced that it had filed three separate “human rights” complaints over an excerpt from my book, America Alone. Simultaneously, it published a report called Maclean’s Magazine: A Case Study Of Media-Propagated Islamophobia by five students from Canada’s supposed leading law school, Osgoode Hall. The “case study” cited 19 “Islamophobic” articles from Maclean’s. I was responsible for the highest number, although it was a close-run thing: There were eight Steyn columns, seven by my eminent colleague Barbara Amiel, nipping at my Islamophobic heels. Linda Frum and Steve Maich contributed one apiece, and a pair of staff news reports made up the rest.
So here are my thoughts on the various examples of Maclean’s Islamophobia – plus the Steyn columns that the CIC and their “human rights” stooges sought to ban from the Dominion of Canada:
EXHIBIT #1
The future belongs to Islam
THE PRINCIPAL exhibit in the Canadian Islamic Congress case against me and Maclean’s was the cover story of October 23rd 2006. It was not my regular column for the magazine but an excerpt from my then new book, America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It. As is customary when a new tome launches down the slipway, portions therefrom are published hither and yon – in my case, in The New York Post and National Review, The Times of London and The Australian, and various Continental publications.
Unfortunately, Regnery, my publishers in Washington, also licensed an excerpt to Maclean’s, Canada’s oldest news magazine. I say “unfortunately” not because the cover story wasn’t a big hit: It certainly was, generating more reader mail than any other story that year. What was unfortunate was that, in their innocence, my publishers were unaware that the Canadian state no longer believes in freedom of speech. And so, unlike the US, British, Aussie and European publications, in Canada the biggest-selling news weekly published an excerpt from a Canadian Number One bestseller and found itself embroiled in three law suits.
The extract in question was billed on the cover as “Why The Future Belongs To Islam”. Inside it bore the more representative headline “The New World Order”: The piece touched on a lot more than Islam, including such non-Muslim-related issues as the unaffordability of the welfare state, the lack of obstetricians in Japan, and the likelihood of transhuman experimentation. We’re not reprinting the excerpt here because it’s available in hardback and paperback in America Alone, and it’s still posted at the Maclean’s website for anybody who wants to read what I actually wrote. Not a lot of my critics do, as we’ll discover. Sadly, taking Dr Mohamed Elmasry and the Canadian Islamic Congress’ word for it led many a pundit astray. If you plough your way through the CIC’s long list of enumerated grievances, you’ll find that Number 28 objects to the following “assertion” from my piece:
The number of Muslims in Europe is expanding like ‘mosquitoes’.