Mark Steyn - Lights Out

Wow, was that the longest hour in TVO history or what? You could tell Steyn was ready to blow a fuse during the first three seconds… Lots and lots of very ‘unCanadian’ yelling, which frankly I enjoyed enormously… I don’t see how you can blame Steyn since this was his first face-to-face encounter with the twerps who are costing him six figures in legal fees.

My e-mail ranges from ‘My TV set needs an exorcism and I need a Valium’ to ‘Best 60 minutes of Canadian television EVER!’

Unintentionally funniest line of the night:

Mohammed Elmasry declined our invitation to appear on tonight’s program…

While Angry Chick on the Left takes home the We Don’t Get The Whole ‘Irony’ Thing ribbon for:

What Mark Steyn really wants is to become a martyr!

Now I have to go clean the spittle off my TV screen.

WELL, WE DID the TVO show and I doubt it was Must-See TV, even by the standards of Canadian public broadcasting. I succeeded in bouncing the Sock Puppets into agreeing to a face-to-face discussion, though it wasn’t my finest hour or theirs. I believe the final words of the show were me saying, “Do you wanna go to dinner?”, and Khurrum Awan yelling back, “No.”

We didn’t go for dinner, but we did have a relatively pleasant conversation after the broadcast that I thought was much more productive than the show. Khurrum was a bit chippy but the two ladies, Muneeza Sheikh and Naseem Mithoowani, are rather cute, even when they’re damning me as a racist and hater. (Years ago, the BBC used to keep putting me up against humourless Marxist feminists only to find that on air I’d go all sweet on them and just make goo-goo eyes.) One confessed to finding me “mildly funny”, which I took as a tremendous compliment until she remarked that she found “Little Mosque On The Prairie” funnier. Evidently by “mildly funny”, she sets the bar down at world-champion limbo level. Heigh-ho. Still, even with dear old Khurrum, if I’d met him in an airport lounge on the other side of the world and we were stuck waiting for a flight, I think the conversation would go okayish. The post-show chit-chat was a useful reminder that everybody’s media image is a reductio.

Nevertheless, we are stuck in our respective roles. I believe these Canadian Islamic Congress lawsuits – and, yes, I can hear the Socks yelling, “That’s a lie! They’re not ‘suits’, they’re ‘complaints’,” but that’s a distinction without a difference if you’re paying lawyers’ bills and you regard, as I do, the “human rights” commissions as a parallel legal system that tramples over all the traditional safeguards of Common Law, not least the presumption of innocence. Where was I? Oh, yeah. I believe these lawsuits are deeply damaging to freedom of expression. If they win ( when they win) and the verdicts withstand Supreme Court scrutiny, Canada will no longer be a free country. It will be a country whose citizens are on a leash whose length is determined by the hack bureaucrats of state agencies.

And that leash will shrink, remorselessly. I was struck by something Naseem said to me on the sidewalk. I’d mentioned that I’d heard her on NPR saying that it was improper for me to attack “multiculturalism” because multiculturalism was officially embedded in Canada’s constitution. And I said: So what? A free society shouldn’t have an official ideology, but, if it has, I certainly reserve the right to object to it. If I’d lived in Italy 70 years ago, I would have objected to their official ideology (Fascism), and I object to Canada’s, notwithstanding its touchy-feelier name. And she looked at me as if I was bonkers. I feel rather bewildered at meeting graduates of an elite institution in one of the oldest settled democracies on the planet who seem to think just because Pierre Trudeau cooked it up it’s chiselled in granite. You can only marvel at what an amazing job he did of wiping a society’s collective memory.

What was the most depressing part of the post-game show for me was realizing that for my accusers the assumption is that every defect in society can be corrected by government intervention. They said one reason they went to the “human rights” thought police is because they’re worried Rogers might buy, for example, The Toronto Star and install Ken Whyte, yours truly and the rest of the Islamophobes. Well, maybe. But look: right now, I’m “excluded” from The Toronto Star and so’s every other conservative. We’re “excluded” from the CBC, which is paid for by the tax dollars of Canadian conservatives. But so what? Society is not perfectible, and for a government tribunal to order the Star to run one Steyn column for every Haroon Siddiqui column it runs would only make things worse.

There’s some talk on TVO’s part of getting us together for a more civilized discussion, so we’ll see how that works out. My only real objection was when Naseem said “Mark Steyn wants to be a martyr.” Actually, that’s not true. I’d love to do as that alleged Islamic terrorist did, attempting to flounce out of his trial in Toronto the other day and shouting, “I’m outta here!” I’d like nothing more than never to appear on a single TV or radio show in the deranged Dominion ever again. But the “remedy” the Socks seek for Maclean’s “Islamophobia” is incompatible with a free society. This is a point of principle. Here I stand. I can do no other. So on we go.

A few days after my appearance on “The Agenda”, the Attorney-General of Canada broke his silence. And, to be honest, I wish he’d stayed in the Witness Protection Program. Instead, in a memorandum defending the constitutionality of state censorship, he unleashed 50 pages of sentimental and ahistorical twaddle:

The triumphs of Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany through audaciously false propaganda have shown us how fragile tolerant, liberal societies can be.

No Canadian who had a proper respect for the history of his country could write that sentence. Which is why it alone is a good example of why we need free speech. Nobody who gave it ten minutes’ study would think that the Dominion of Canada, one of the oldest, peacefully evolved, constitutional democracies on the planet, is as “fragile” as the Weimar Republic or the Kingdom of Italy. So the most obvious “audaciously false propaganda” on display there is from the audaciously false propagandists on the Justice Department payroll. (As to the general accuracy of the thesis, see the preceding chapter on the proto-Trudeaupian “hate” laws of pre-Hitler Germany.) And how does the government’s “audaciously false propaganda” strikes the fellows suing Ezra Levant and Maclean’s ? If you were Elmo and his Sock Puppets, wouldn’t you read the Justice Department’s nonsense and feel the wind at your back? The Attorney-General’s memorandum is a grim read, wallowing in Orwellian bilge such as this:

History teems with examples of times when lies, distortions and propaganda empowered groups like the Nazis to repress speech.

In other words, we need to “repress speech” because otherwise someone worse will come along and “repress speech”. This horrible report is the product of a supposedly “Conservative” government but reads like the most cobwebbed clichés of any campus Marxist. Deborah Gyapong writes:

I feel like a coup d’état has taken place and I have awakened to the aftermath.

And this egregious affront to civil rights and to the freedom to speak the truth in Canada is being perpetuated now by the Conservative government.