Mark Steyn - Lights Out

While I was being hauled up for “flagrant Islamophobia”, Brigitte Bardot found herself dragged into court on a similar charge in France. The former sex kitten is a big animal rights activist and was prosecuted and convicted by the French state for expressing her objections to Muslim slaughtering practices. In the course of a radio report on various of these “free speech” cases, the correspondent attempted to link Mlle Bardot’s travails with mine and explained to his listeners: “Basically, Brigitte Bardot is the Mark Steyn of France.” Well, I know she’s getting a bit long in the tooth, but I thought that was uncalled for. If you’d held a competition 30 years ago to construct a combination of words the English language would never have any use for, “Brigitte Bardot is the Mark Steyn of France” would be pretty close to a shoo-in for first prize.

Brigitte Bardot and I are small pieces of a very big picture. In the years since 9/11, the most prominent Muslim lobby groups have devoted much of their energy to attempts to suppress open debate, whether it’s the media pressure applied by the low-membership but lavishly Saudi-funded Council on American-Islamic Relations (an unindicted co-conspirator in an FBI terrorism-funding investigation), or at the international level the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s subversion of the UN “Human Rights” Council. In the deranged Dominion, it was the grandly named Islamic Supreme Council of Canada which took my friends at The Western Standard to the Alberta “Human Rights” Commission for republishing the Danish “Mohammed” cartoons. In fact, if you want a snapshot of what’s happening in our world, consider this: For reprinting those pictures, Ezra Levant was hauled before a government tribunal in Canada and spent two years and a six-figure sum defending himself, while in London the masked men who objected to the cartoons by marching through the streets with signs reading “Behead The Enemies Of Islam” (and who promised to rain down both a new 9/11 and a new Holocaust on Europe) were protected by a phalanx of London policemen. Multicultural societies are so invested in “tolerance” that they’ll tolerate the explicitly intolerant (and avowedly unicultural) before they’ll tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance.

It’s been that way for two decades now, ever since 1989, when large numbers of British Muslims marched through English cities openly calling for Salman Rushdie to be killed. A reader of mine recalled that he’d asked a policeman on the streets of Bradford during one such demonstration why the various “Muslim community leaders” weren’t being arrested for incitement to murder. The policeman told him to “fuck off, or I’ll arrest you .” Salman Rushdie was infuriated when the then Archbishop of Canterbury lapsed into root-cause mode. “I well understand the devout Muslims’ reaction, wounded by what they hold most dear and would themselves die for,” said His Grace. Rushdie replied tersely: “There is only one person around here who is in any danger of dying.”

That’s the way it always goes. For all the talk about rampant “Islamophobia”, it’s usually only the other party who is “in any danger of dying.” And the response of the state to explicit Islamic intimidation is to find ways to punish those citizens foolish enough to point out that intimidation. The Council on American-Islamic Relations understands that, and the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada understands that, and so does the Supreme Islamic Council of New South Wales down in Australia, and the Supreme Islamic Council of Pocatello and all the rest of them. (I love these names. My favorite is a group I get press releases from occasionally – the Supreme Islamic Council of Ireland. They’re one of the more moderate lobby groups, but the notion of a “Supreme Islamic Council of Ireland” still gives me a chuckle. Makes you wonder what the Catholics and Protestants bothered fighting over all those years. Any future sectarian strife on the island seems likely to be between Sunni and Shia.)

How did we get to this state of affairs? I was reminded the other day of an observation by the American writer Heywood Broun:

Everybody favors free speech in the slack moments when no axes are being ground.

I think that gets it exactly backwards. It was precisely at the moment when no axes were being ground that the west decided it could afford to forego free speech. There was a moment 30 or so years ago when it appeared as if all the great questions had been settled: There would be no more Third Reichs, no more Fascist regimes, no more anti-Semitism; advanced social democracies were heading inevitably down a one-way sunlit avenue into the peaceable kingdom of multiculturalism. And so it seemed to a certain mindset entirely reasonable to introduce speech codes and thought crimes essentially as a kind of mopping up operation. Canada’s “human rights” tribunals were originally created to deal with employment and housing discrimination, but Canadians aren’t terribly hateful and there wasn’t a lot of that, so they advanced to prosecuting so-called “hate speech”. It was an illiberal notion harnessed supposedly in the cause of liberalism: A handful of neo-Nazi losers in rented rooms posting white supremacist messages on unread websites? Hold-out groups of homophobic fundamentalist Christians flaunting the more robust passages of Leviticus? Hey, relax, we’ll hunt down the basement losers and ensure they’ll trouble you no further. Just a few recalcitrant knuckledraggers who decline to get with the program. Don’t give ’em a thought. Nothing to see here, folks.

Canada is not under any threat from Nazis. If any “white supremacist” were really a “supremacist”, he wouldn’t be living in his mom’s basement. The real “supremacists” are the moral poseurs fighting, as moral poseurs often do, phantoms. The Nazis are gone. We won that one, a long time ago now. Nevertheless, the human rights establishment started shutting up neo-Nazis who don’t like Jews, and fundamentalist Christians who disapprove of gay marriage and whiled away the idle moments in between by chastising a few kooks who think the Royal Family are giant space lizards. (Seriously. See First they came for the giant space lizard conspiracy theorists… .) As I said, just a bit of mopping up en route to the great multicultural utopia.

And at that point Islamic lobby groups figured out, hey, if liberals are so eager to police speech, why not let them? After all, Canada and much of Europe have statutes prohibiting Holocaust denial, and everybody seems to think that’s entirely reasonable, notwithstanding the befuddlement of many eminent Muslim intellectuals. “Nobody can say even one word about the number in the alleged Holocaust,” says Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the favorite Islamic “scholar” of many Euroleftists, and a key associate of the big new mosque in Boston. “Even if he is writing an MA or PhD thesis, and discussing it scientifically. Such claims are not acceptable.” And a savvy imam knows an opening when he sees one. “The Jews are protected by laws,” notes Mr Qaradawi. “We want laws protecting the holy places, the prophets, and Allah’s messengers.”

In other words, he wants to use the constraints on free speech imposed by Europe and Canada to protect Jews in order to put much of Islam beyond political debate.

The free world is shuffling into a psychological bondage whose chains are mostly of our own making. The British “historian” David Irving wound up in an Austrian jail because of his Holocaust denial. It’s not unreasonable for Muslims to conclude that, if gays and Jews and other approved identities are to be protected groups who can’t be offended, why shouldn’t they be also?

They have a point. How many roads of inquiry are we prepared to block off in order to be “sensitive”? And, once we’ve done so, will there be anything left to talk about other than Paris Hilton and Jamie Lynn Spears? Holocaust denial should be ridiculous and contemptible. But not illegal.