Mark Steyn - Lights Out

Incidentally, although they characterize themselves as the “complainants” in these suits, they’re not. In the two “human rights” complaints against Maclean’s that are going forward, the complainants in British Columbia are Dr Mohamed Elmasry, president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, and Naiyer Habib, and, in the federal case, Dr Elmasry alone. Mohamed Elmasry is the man who announced on Canadian TV that he approved of the murder of any and all Israeli civilians over the age of 18. One can understand why such an unlikely poster boy for the cause of “anti-hate” campaigns would prefer to hide behind his fresh-faced Osgoode sock puppets. But the fact that every major newspaper in Canada has opened its page to turgid recitations of imagined victimhood by three students who have no standing in these cases tells you everything about how “excluded” and “marginalized” they are. That’s the “racist” Canadian media of 2008: All you have to do is claim to represent some community with a grievance and, even though there’s no evidence you represent anything other than your own peculiar obsessions and you have nothing substantive to say, nine out of ten editors will turn their pages over to you – no matter what your interminable victimological prose does to their circulation.

Dr Keith Martin, a Liberal Member of Parliament, the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (ie, John Ralston Saul and the rest of the CanCon literati) support the repeal of Section 13 of the Human Rights Code, under which Maclean’s and Ezra Levant, former publisher of The Western Standard , have been hauled before the “thought police”. Others talk of Maclean’s appealing its case (after we lose, as all federal Section 13 defendants do) to the Supreme Court. Last time round, their lordships upheld Section 13 by a four-three majority, announcing confidently that there was “little danger that subjective opinion as to offensiveness will supplant the proper meaning”. Of course, that’s exactly what has happened, as could have been foreseen by anyone but a Supreme Court judge. This is a philosophically flawed and corruptly administered system that is an affront to Canada’s legal inheritance.

That may be why, as even Liberal MPs and PEN Canada understand what’s happening, the only defenders of the system are its beneficiaries, like Pearl Eliadis, the former director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, who accused me in the Montreal Gazette of “disturbing tactics” for having the impertinence to resist being ruled a hatemonger by a kangaroo court. She claims that I am trying to “disentitle” acknowledged human-rights experts, by which she means herself and other members of a small and unrepresentative clique that has done huge damage to real human rights like the presumption of innocence. “Human rights” plaintiffs are professional activists: Since filing her complaint, the lead transsexual in the labiaplasty case has been given a government job investigating the health status of transsexuals. Richard Warman, the plaintiff in over half of all federal Section 13 cases, is not even a transsexual or a member of any other approved victim group. You can write a piece about Jews, gays, Muslims, transsexuals that offends not a single Jew, gay, Muslim or transsexual. But if Mr Warman, a former employee of the CHRC, decides to get offended on their behalf he’ll drag you before the kangaroo court. He has been a plaintiff on every single federal Section 13 case in the last six years. No other provision of Canada law has such a deformed profile that it is, in effect, the personal plaything of one very strange man.

Oh, and the bit at the top about the space lizards? That’s a chap called David Icke, former Coventry City goalie and BBC sports anchor turned …well, “turned” pretty much covers it. One day, David was anchoring the World Cup. The next, he’d called a press conference to announce he was the Son of God. Shortly thereafter he concocted a grand conspiracy theory to explain everything that happens anywhere in the world. David believes in a secret world government run by child-abusing Satanist Illuminati controlled by the Queen and the Bush family who are, he says, reptilian humanoids descended from the blood-drinking space lizards of the star system Alpha Draconis. As I recall, a friend of the late Princess of Wales has confirmed to him Her Royal Highness’ belief that the Royal Family are shape-shifting space reptiles. I apologize to David if I’ve lost a bit in translation. It has been many years since he and I shared a BBC talkshow sofa together, and our paths have diverged somewhat. At any rate, Richard Warman took against him and decided to shut him down, telling The Independent On Sunday in London:

He has taken all the conspiracy theories that have ever existed and melded them together to create an even greater conspiracy theory of his own. His writings may be the work of a madman, or of a genuine racist. Either way, they are very dangerous. There is an unpleasant anti-Semitic undercurrent in his work that must be brought to people’s attention. If he’s unstable, then so are his followers, who hang on to his every word. What benefit can there be in allowing him to speak?

If you want to know what’s gone wrong with the Canadian state’s conception of human rights, it’s perfectly distilled in that one line from the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission’s longtime investigator and current serial plaintiff: “What benefit can there be in allowing him to speak?”

Look, if David Icke was a racist, he wouldn’t find it prudent to give seven-hour speeches in Brixton. Icke isn’t a racist, he’s a kook who believes the world is run by shape-shifting space lizards. Why should it be illegal to advance that theory? Has the Queen or any other shape-shifter filed a “Human Rights” Commission complaint alleging that Icke has exposed her to “hatred or contempt”? No. I should imagine Her Majesty is laughing the socks off her sinister reptilian feet over it. Which is the healthy reaction. But instead Richard Warman decided to get affronted on her behalf. And this is the standard that the Canadian government’s former senior speech investigator sets:

What benefit can there be in allowing him to speak?

Who died and made Richard Warman Speech God? Er, well, the Canadian government did the latter. And it’s freedom of expression, in any meaningful sense, that’s died. A longtime “human rights” officer thinks that it’s the state’s role to “allow” citizens to speak if they can demonstrate some “benefit” in doing so. With human rights like that, who needs lack of human rights? The question is not whether I’m “disentitling” Canada’s human rights nomenklatura, but who entitled them in the first place, to the point where Mr Warman and Ms Eliadis think the state commissars should be determining who should be “allowed” to speak. Sorry, but that’s not my definition of human rights. And I’d rather take my chances with a shape-shifting space lizard than an endlessly morphing, ever expanding star chamber that shames Canada.

In his way, Richard Warman is nuttier than David Icke. Icke has flown the coop. He’s out there in Alpha Draconis having a ball. But Warman is still more or less in the real world, and the assumptions underpinning that rhetorical question to The Independent have advanced dramatically, from neo-Nazi losers in basements to conspiracy-theorist gurus and now to Canada’s leading news weekly. In such a world, how many more of us will discover the state can find no “benefit” in “allowing” us to speak?

ONE OF THE striking features of my current troubles with Canada’s “Human Rights” Commissions is the way, in the name of ersatz “human rights”, these pseudo-courts trample on one of the bedrock human rights: the presumption of innocence. Instead, you’re presumed guilty unless you can prove that you’re not. That’s why Section 13 has a 100 per cent conviction rate. So I’m sorry to see the Aussies going down the same grim path. According to the Melbourne Age :