Posted on 12/7/2007, 10:50:18 PM by mojito
Writer Mark Steyn, and the Canadian journal Maclean’s are poised to go up against a tag team made in multicultural heaven: Canada’s federal, Ontario and British Columbia human rights commissions, and the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC). The CIC was outraged when Maclean’s published a piece titled “The Future Belongs To Islam,” an excerpt from Steyn’s America Alone, The End of the World as We Know It. They labeled Steyn’s work “flagrantly Islamophobic” and requested equal rebuttal space in the pages of Maclean’s. When the journal refused the CIC launched human rights complaints. The British Columbia hearing is scheduled for next June.
The Canadian judiciary is traveling a ruinous course in entertaining this tantrum. If Western courts begin to outlaw the kind of uncomfortable critical analysis already verboten at universities, neutralization of public opinion is complete.
Steyn is going to have his work cut out for him in British Columbia. Just a month or so back it was he himself who wrote about Muslims in Vancouver winning an exemption from a by-law that otherwise banned smoking in the city. Steyn quotes one Emad Yacoub who according to The Vancouver Sun said, “hookah lounges are essential for immigrants from hookah-smoking cultures, because it helps them deal with the depression common for newcomers and gives them places like they have at home.” How that differs from the experience and needs of cigarette smokers from say, Eastern Europe, isn’t clear, but the nature of the exception is. If British Columbia is making legal decisions in order to “[give Muslim immigrants] places like they have at home,” then silencing criticism of Islam is presumably the first order of business.
And what of this criticism? This is from “The Future Belongs to Islam”:
In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering their voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under sharia, but -- as much as parts of Nigeria, they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the "tolerance" of pluralist societies.
So, is that “flagrant Islamophobia” or a tragically prescient summation of the predicament in which Steyn now finds himself (sooner than “in a few years” I may add)? In fact, this case is more than a potential misstep for Canadian lawmakers; it’s also an example of “tolerant” Europe’s ability to team up with “tolerant” Canada and “tolerantly” force Canadians to be more “tolerant.” The London Free Press reports that London lawyer Faisal Joseph is leading the complaint against Maclean's. If nothing else, one begins to see why Steyn titled his book America Alone.
But, ultimately, this kind of legal leveling of opinion spells disaster for the U.S. too. In a recent response to the CIC charges, Steyn praises America for its First Amendment. It’s true, legislated speech codes may be hard to pass here, but then again they may not be necessary. A few years ago, in another life, I was involved in the writing of a social studies book for South Carolingian third graders. The text was to start with the native tribes of the region and go all the way to the present day. This covered, obviously, slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. One day, after we were well into the creation of the book I received, straight from the local education board, an alarming directive that would require us to go back and revisit a good deal of the work we’d already done. It turned out the word slave was not to be used anywhere in the text.
Government sanctioned “tolerance” spreads by osmosis, and if Steyn and Maclean’s are silenced a few miles north of the state of Washington it won’t have far to travel. Soft and cuddly Canada is already the fetish destination of so many enthusiastic multiculturalists in the U.S. I can think of at least fifteen people who swore to me personally they were northbound in the event of Bush’ reelection. I doubt any of them made good on it, but if they did they better watch what they say.
Recently I heard comedian George Carlin on a radio show dispensing his yawn-inducing brand of scorned hippie pop-nihilism. In talking about how the world had “jumped off the cliff” and was now in “freefall,” he said he was always on the lookout for censorship coming from the right, but had never expected the PC variety to overtake us from the left. Funny that Mr. Seven-Words-You-Can't-Say was blindsided, because quite a number of fussy right-wing thinkers saw it coming ages in advance. Allan Bloom wrote about it twenty years ago. Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz wrote about it decades earlier. This silliness moves so swiftly that Steyn’s ended up writing about his own troubles in real-time.
Abe apparently listens to Opie and Anthony.
The book America Alone is truly frightening. The demographics of the Europeans almost guarantees Islamic domination of the European Continent.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
I wonder how long those people will take it from the Sharia head hackers once they start setting policy. I expect huge "white flight" once it's rolling.
One thing we have going for us is that the latinos invading us aren't very amenable to Islam.
As I often point out to my students, most of the tens of millions of people slaughtered in the past 100 years were killed by supporters of leftist ideologies. I have my students read Solzhenitsyn. I have them think through the tenets of Marxism and see where the belief system is seriously flawed. I hammer away at the truth that most of the terrorists of the past century have been well-educated men and women who kill others to “make the world a better place,” starting with Lenin and the Bolsheviks and continuing through to rich kid engineer Osama bin Laden.
In this way, I am using the methods of Saul Alinsky and Antonio Gramsci against the Left itself by infiltrating the institution and slowly over time bringing one student at a time to an understanding of liberty and freedom.
Go ahead, try to fire me. I have tenure.
Allan Bloom is not a right-wing thinker. He describes himself in a speech at Harvard: “In the first place I am not a conservative — neo- or paleo-. I say this not to curry favor in a setting where conservatism is out of favor. Conservatism is a respectable outlook, and its adherents usually have to have some character to stick by what is so unpopular in the universities. I just do not happen to be that animal. Any superficial reading of my book will show that I differ from both theoretical and practical conservative positions. My teachers — Socrates, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Nietzsche — could hardly be called conservatives. All foundings are radical, and conservatism always has to be judged by the radical thought or events it intends to conserve...”
Got some bad news for you. Next time you are in a bookstore, find a copy of Why Geography Matters, by Harm de Blij, and turn to page 180 to see a map of the spread of Islam from South America, through Central America, to Mexico. It's a good book to buy and read as well, but at least check out the map.
It indeed is. I'm halfway through it and it makes a lot of sense. The West is truly sleepwalking through history.
When Christians gather to worship in Berlin a century from now, they may very well be doing so in Turkish. I'm praying for revival. Communism looked invincible for most of my life, then lost credibility on a global scale practically overnight. My church had missionaries planting daughter churches in Ukraine and Poland almost immediately. Will we be ready if God discredits Islam, and a billion of our fellow humans turn to us for answers on how to live?
Very good point. I should get out those Arabic tapes again.
“Just a month or so back it was he himself who wrote about Muslims in Vancouver winning an exemption from a by-law that otherwise banned smoking in the city.”
Better get the facts straight. From the British Columbia Ministry of Heath Q&A, http://www.health.gov.bc.ca/tobctrl/tcrc_pg3.html#q6:
Are there any exemptions to the ban on smoking?
There will be two situations where the ban on smoking will not apply:
Residents or persons in care of facilities licensed or registered under the Community Care and Assisted Living Act, and patients in extended care facilities or private hospitals (refer to Sec 1 and Part 2 of the Hospital Act) will be able to smoke in designated smoking rooms (but staff and visitors will not be able to smoke there).
Hotel rooms will also be exempt from this ban, but not the common areas of hotels.
Municipalities or health authorities may have more stringent restrictions in place for care facilities and those restrictions would apply.
And...
There is a hookah bar in my neighbourhood. How will this affect that local business?
Hookah bars will not be allowed to use tobacco or tobacco blends within enclosed or substantially enclosed bars.
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