BrianGarst.com

The Spanish Inquisition may be long gone, but a new intellectual and religious chill, exemplified by the attacks being lodged against Mark Steyn and Macleans magazine by a gaggle of Canadian “human rights commissions”, has descended upon Western civilization. In a paroxysm of multicultural self-flagellation, guilty white busy-bodies are tripping over themselves in a rush to bring Shari’a to Canada. This ongoing kangaroo proceeding, along with a similar inquisition launched against a publisher of the Muhammed cartoons, illustrates just how little the principles once magnanimously articulated by the West’s greatest classical liberal thinkers matter to those who worship at the alter of political correctness.

Following publication of Steyn’s book, America Alone, which warns against the rise of radical Islam and its infiltration of Western societies, a Canadian magazine ran an excerpt of one of the book’s chapters. In the article, entitled “The Future Belongs to Islam,” Steyn quotes a Muslim imam speaking about demographics:

“We’re the ones who will change you,” the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. “Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children.” As he summed it up: “Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours.”

Demonstrating their understanding that modern Western society, unlike liberal societies of old, places higher value on lawsuits and grievance-mongering than such quaint concepts as freedom of speech and press, four young Muslim law students, in conjunction with the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC), ran to three separate “human rights commissions” and registered complaints against both Steyn and Macleans, the magazine that ran the article. Included in their litany of woe was a complaint that, no joke, Muslims were compared to mosquitoes. Never mind that the comparison under question came from a Muslim imam. Pointing this absurdity out, however, should not be taken as a legitimization of the idea that the ideas and thoughts of free citizens have to meet certain government standards. Rather, I point out the silliness of the merits of their complaint, as well as the fact that any such government mechanism exists in the first place, to highlight how far these groups will go to abuse our government to achieve their ends.

Another victim of the Canadian Inquisition has turned the tables on his inquisitors. Ezra Levant aroused the angry of the dhimmi’s by exercising his right to freedom of the press when he chose to publish the now-infamous Muhammed cartoons. In his opening statement, Mr. Levant lambastes the misnamed “human rights commission” for its role in subverting the rights recognized by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (watch the video below). The Charter clearly states:

Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association.

The prosecution of Mark Steyn, Macleans, and Ezra Levant for what can only be described as thought-crime proves just how willing the multiculturalists are to toss aside the freedoms our societies were founded on, all in a misguided attempt to placate radical Islamists who take offense at any slight, real or imagined. We must not pretend that this can only happen in Canada. The ideological brethren of the Canadian “human rights commissions” are hard at work right here in America as well.

(More videos of the interrogation can be seen at Ezra Levant’s website)