The remarkable Mark
Full coverage of the event here: FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN THE AGE OF JIHAD
- IBN WARRAQ, STEVE EMERSON: FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN THE AGE OF JIHAD
- ROBERT SPENCER: FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN THE AGE OF JIHAD
UPDATE: Steyn's thoughts on the onference here:
An Albertan in Manhattan Mark Steyn
My fellow hatemonger Ezra Levant was a big hit at yesterday's conference on legal jihad in New York. In fact, judging from his reception, he and his inquisitrex Shirlene McGovern seem to be the two most famous Albertans on the planet. If I were Shirlene, I'd be pitching some sort of hate-speech show-trial show to Court TV. Ezra writes about the conference here, but he also makes some sharp points about the preposterousness of the Section 13 prosecutions: Why is it okay for Richard Warman, a private citizen, to join Stormfront and say that gays are a cancer, but it's a crime for Joe Schmoe, a private citizen, to join Stormfront and say gays are a cancer? Whatever happened to equality before the law?
Likewise, why is it okay for Canadian Human Rights Commission bigshot Ian Fine to quote in public a lot of offensive speech by hateful white supremacists to show the virulence that's out there, but, if I quote in public a lot of offensive speech by hateful Islamic supremacists to show the virulence that's out there, I get hauled up before his crappy commission?
The contradictions in this racket are what render it preposterous. In what Paul Wells calls her "barely lucid, rambling meditation", Ontario's head commissar gives the game away: Unfortunately she doesn't have the jurisdiction to jail Steyn for "Islamophobia", but she would if she could - so she's going to seek the power to do so when the Ontario "Human Rights" Commission is "reformed". I hope the Government of Ontario is dumb enough to give her the extra powers she seeks, and perhaps then she'll be man enough to haul me and Ken Whyte into her pseudo-courtroom and actually convict us of the crime rather than merely issuing the verdict in a press release.
The Toronto Star has figured out where all this is headed and they don't care for it. Nor do all the impeccably liberal progressive types quoted in Charlie Gillis' profile of Richard Warman, in the new print edition of Maclean's. The "human rights" racket has no friends and no defenders other than current commissioners, former commissioners and others living high off the "human rights" hog - and Barbara Hall is too tone deaf (or hanging out with too many sharia-hungry Islamists) even to notice.
