Redstate

By Paul J Cella Posted in Canada | free speech | Mark Steyn | sedition | the Jihad | War — Comments (11) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.
— G. K. Chesterton.

Any reader involved in our long-running debate (recapitulated just last week) on Islam and Free Speech, should sit down a read this remarkable statement carefully. It concerns a complaint brought before the Ontario Human Rights Commission against Mcleans magazine, which reprinted a portion of Mark Steyn’s book America Alone. The complaint alleged that Mcleans and Steyn violated the Ontario Human Rights Code by unfairly “targeting Muslims.”

Read the statement, and then read on.

The Commission decided against pursuing the complaint, but only because it lacks “jurisdiction to deal with the content of magazine articles.” Nevertheless, the statement goes on to aver that Steyn’s article gave evidence of Islamophobia, which it defines as “a form of racism that includes stereotypes, bias or acts of hostility towards Muslims and the viewing of Muslims as a greater security threat on an institutional, systemic and societal level.” Furthermore, “by portraying Muslims as all sharing the same negative characteristics, including being a threat to ‘the West’, this explicit expression of Islamophobia further perpetuates and promotes prejudice towards Muslims and others.”

Let us take note of what is missing from the statement. We can, I think, discover more from what is not there than from what is.

The Commission never even considers the question of whether Islam is a threat. Not even for a moment. That question is closed from the very beginning. Emphatically closed — for the opinion that Muslims are a “greater security threat” is in fact defined as a feature of Islamophobia.

In other words, the truth of the view that Islam is a greater threat is not even open for consideration or discussion. The man who asserts it has no defense of truth; his assertion is not even granted a hearing as to its truth. No, he has committed a crime by uttering a view. (The Commission hastens to note that while its jurisdiction is exclusive of magazine articles, other human rights codes suffer no such constraint.)

To further observations:

(1) This definition of Islamophobia, compassing anyone who pronounces Islam “a greater threat,” is quickly becoming the operative definition for Liberalism. The Commission speaks for Liberals everywhere in moving vigorously to silence all public debate on the question, Is it true that Islam is a greater threat? One striking variation on this position, articulated at length in the above-linked thread, states that “You have every legal right to advocate [the] view that Muslims are dangerous,” but that view “should be unacceptable in polite society [just as] targeting blacks for their skin color is unacceptable.” So here the legal right remains, at least theoretically, but “Islam as such is a threat” is conflated with simple racism, the ultimate sin.

(2) This rather subtle effort to close an explosive question before it can even be examined in earnest must be recognized for its radicalism, even within the Liberal tradition. Once upon a time Liberalism stood for the proposition that all questions are open questions, that even unpopular opinions may be heard. Consider: the dread Sedition Act of 1798, regarded by Liberals as one of the first legislative sins against Liberalism in America history, contained an entire section protecting the defense of truth, and assigning to juries the judgment of truth:

SECT. 3. And be it further enacted and declared, That if any person shall be prosecuted under this act for the writing or publishing any libel aforesaid, it shall be lawful for the defendant, upon the trial of the cause, to give in evidence in his defence, the truth of the matter contained in the publication charged as a libel. And the jury who shall try the cause shall have a right to determine the law and the fact, under the direction of the court, as in other cases.

Which means, of course, that we are in the presence — right here, right now — of an effort to shut down public deliberation, free speech on a controverted subject, more thoroughgoing than the Alien and Sedition Acts.

It has been said that societies are defined by the questions they chose to close. The society envisaged by Liberalism, it appears, is one where this question of the character of the Islamic religion is firmly closed. I for one shall go on regarding such a society as a particularly awful amalgam of tyranny and feebleness; to servility it adds despotism; to impotence it adds the boast of heroism. One thing, at least, it is not: a self-governing republic.