Robert Frost once said that writing “free verse” was like playing tennis with the net down. The relationship of “human rights” tribunals to real courts seems to be like that: Julian Porter can whack some legalistic ace down the middle, but Faisal Joseph hurls back a box of golf balls he’s flown in from Nunavut, and the umpires (three “judges” ignorant of law but expert in identity-group grievance) award him the point.
By the way, I see I’ve been nominated for one of the National Magazine Awards, to be handed out later this month. By then, Mr Joseph will have succeeded in getting the BC troika effectively to ban me from Maclean’s and from all Canadian journalism. An impressive achievement. My book was a Number One bestseller in Canada, and the new paperback edition was at Number Four the other day, and President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Governor Mitt Romney, Senator Joe Lieberman, Senator Jon Kyl and (at last count) six European Prime Ministers have either recommended the book or called me in to discuss its themes. But in Canada it’s a hate crime.
One thing I’ve learned these last few months is that it’s always worse than you expect. The willingness of the BC troika’s social engineers to trample over every basic rule of English law has embedded at the heart of Canadian justice a soft beguiling totalitarianism. I’ll be the first Number One bestselling author and National Magazine Award-nominated columnist to be deemed unpublishable in Canada.
But I won’t be the last.
THE DEPARTURE GATE
Notes on a show trial
I SEE OMAR Sharif, of all people, says that, when he has a problem with some guy, he finds it far easier to go to the neighborhood sheikh to sort it out than to have to mess around with all that western legal mumbo-jumbo. He’ll be happy to know they’ve introduced a similar system in British Columbia: The sheikhs sit on a “human rights” tribunal and sort it all out without any time-wasting rubbish about rules of evidence, presumption of innocence, etc. On the first day, the Canadian Islamic Congress lawyer, Faisal Joseph, says airily that freedom of speech is a “red herring”. If it were, it would be on the endangered species list. On the other hand, the New York Times guy tells Maclean’s Andrew Coyne he can’t believe what he’s seeing.
I don’t have a lot to add to what Andrew Coyne, Ezra Levant and others have written on the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal. Readers of this site have lived with the issues for six months and know most of the arguments – better, indeed, than the pseudo-judges in Vancouver. On Friday, the intervenor for the Canadian Association of Journalists referred en passant to constitutional challenges to Section 13 of Canada’s Human Rights Code, and Chief Commissar Heather MacNaughton asked whether any such challenges were currently proceeding, and he replied: Yes. Warman vs Lemire. Most SteynOnline readers would be aware of Mr Lemire’s constitutional challenge to the core “hate speech” weapon in the “human rights” armory, and know that it’s intimately entwined with the Maclean’s case. But Heather MacNaughton, British Columbia’s chief “human rights” inquisitor, apparently wasn’t.
Here are a few other observations:
1) When I arrived at the Robson Square courthouse, an officer of the BC Sheriff’s Department intercepted me and said because of “security threats” he’d be sticking by me everywhere I went in the building. I found this rather reassuring for about 90 seconds. Then I realized he meant not that the court had been apprised of security threats against me but that I myself was the security threat.
2) With their usual low cunning, the “human rights” sheikhs chose a courtroom that only seats 40 people. So a big crowd (including CBC reporters) were wedged up peering through the glass in the door until the head sheikh (a judge best known for fining the Knights of Columbus for declining to rent their hall for a lesbian wedding) said the pressed faces of the people were distracting her and shooed them away. Typical. A third-rate bureaucracy that tells everyone from McDonald’s to Maclean’s how to run their affairs can’t even organize a show trial with minimal competence.
Maybe the folks who can’t get in should file a “human rights” complaint against the “human rights” tribunal for denying them the human right to attend a human rights trial.
3) Tuesday was devoted in large part to discussion of my review of the CBC sitcom “Little Mosque On The Prairie” and to in-depth joke exegesis by Chief Sock Khurrum Awan. To the best of my knowledge, he was not sworn in as an expert witness, a Professor of Humorological Studies from the University of Saskatoon or whatever. But he clearly felt many of my jokes were not funny, and actionably so. In my “Loose Ends” days at the BBC, we occasionally used to do the show on the road from Edinburgh, Belfast and so forth, and I’d find myself checking in to hotels with my pals Carol Thatcher, Craig Charles & Co. And Craig was occasionally wont to say to the fellow at reception things like, “I pre-booked a couple of hookers. Can you have them sent straight up?” And the clerk would give him a frosty stare, and Craig would turn around and say to us: “Uh-oh! Humor bypass operation.” I never thought it was the greatest line, but it seemed oddly apt by the time Mr Awan and Faisal Joseph were done discussing my “Little Mosque” review. To be humorless in complaining about a complaint that a humor show was insufficiently humorous is an achievement of almost Platonic perfection.
4) Less surprising were the usual Islamic scholars flown in from hither and yon to testify that to the “overwhelming majority” of Muslims the word “jihad” has nothing to do with killing infidels or blowing stuff up or anything like that, but is a benign concept meaning “healthy-lifestyle lo-fat cranberry muffin” or whatever it is. So it’s nothing to be afraid of.
Years ago, I was on a BBC comedy quiz show with Stephen Fry and a question came up about Napoleon’s mummified penis being sold at auction. And, upon hearing the word “penis”, the audience tittered nervously. “Oh, come on,” said Stephen. “‘Penis’ isn’t a word to be afraid of. It’s a thing to be afraid of.” That’s the way I feel about “jihad”: pace the expert witnesses, whether or not it’s a word to be afraid of, it’s a thing to be afraid of.
5) I was very touched by the number of folks who came up to me in Starbucks, HMV and other Vancouver emporia and expressed support for me. On my first day at the hotel, I got into the elevator with two ladies, one of whom looked me over and exclaimed: “You’re that dastardly troublemaker Mark Steyn!” They told me to stick it to the kangaroos and got off a couple of floors ahead of me. Whereupon the Eastern European bellman, intrigued by the conversation, said, “So what brings you to Vancouver, sir?”
I replied, “I’m on trial at the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal for crimes against humanity.”
“Oh,” he said, with a nervous laugh. “You must lead a very interesting life.”
Not lately.
6) I’m no legal scholar, so, when I think of courthouses, I think of buildings like the one in Robin And The Seven Hoods. It’s Chicago in the Twenties, and, having been acquitted of this and that, Frank Sinatra emerges on to the courthouse steps and, accompanied by enthusiastic flappers, sings “My Kind Of Town”. That’s my kind of courthouse: steps and pillars. The Vancouver monstrosity was the exact opposite: A modernist hole in the ground, in which the courtrooms are windowless basements. Given the basic inversion of every fundamental legal principle, this seemed very appropriate. The only link with the outside world was a clock on the wall that was stuck at five past eight. And, as I gazed at its unchanging visage hour after hour, day after day, it struck – well, actually, it didn’t strike, it having stopped some months or years back – but it struck me as an interesting glimpse into the big-government mindset, into the gulf between its ambitions and its capabilities. The Government of British Columbia regards it as an entirely feasible project to eradicate “hate” from society, even though hate is a human emotion that has been beat in the human heart for all eternity. But they can’t get someone in to restart the clock.