ping.
"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
We are aware of it and are ready and willing to offer permanent asylum.
Mark Steyn has no reason to return to that frozen gulag of the North, does he?
I’m sure he could find someplace civilized to call home.
This piece from Steyn on Friday was a beaut:
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/child-birth-homeless-1942317-year-percent
ping
They need to move to the USA, where they may be free for a little while longer.
BTTT!
Anti-freedom jihad from the greatest anti-individual, anti-life collective in the history of civilization is propagated by Canadian dhimmies? This is a very interesting case. Anti-freedom collectives may join forces.
Excellent piece. I thought it was by Marc Steyn himself, until I looked twice at the credits. And that’s a compliment.
I don’t know. This may be the case that breaks the tribunals’ backs. They can get away with gagging an Evangelical minister who preaches against homsexuality, for instance, or maybe a Catholic bishop, but I wonder if they can get away with shutting up Steyn, without living to repent it?
And what will this do to the reputation of the Conservative government if they sit back and let this happen?
I have read Steyn’s book, and I can well understand why the Islamists don’t like it. But there’s nothing hateful in it, or even especially provocative, in the Ann Landers style of writing. It’s just a well researched and well written wakeup call.
I gotta be honest - if your sister says “brubber” for “brother,” she has issues.
As to the law of unintended consequences, laws and even constitutional provisions are frequently applied in ways never anticipated by their authors. Those who voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were assured that it would not result in racial quotas. Civil service laws may have reduced the use of political patronage, but they have also contributed to the rise of an anti-democratic entrenched beauracracy. FDR would not recognize today's Social Security Aministration. The Founders did not anticipate that the Establishment Clause would be used to ban all religion from the public square, rather than to prevent the creation of a state church.
As to the Second Rule of Political Dynamics, those who are in government believe in its beneficence and efficacy. They will therefore seek to extend its reach and power to every corner of society if they are legislatively and financially enabled to do so.
Well intentioned conservatives forget these principles when faced with legislation which may have at least one laudable goal. Here in California our esteemed Legislature has passed legislation banning the use of instructional materials in public schools if those materials cast aspersions on a whole list of protected groups. Our even more esteemed Governor has signed this abomination. I cannot convince some of my conservative friends that this law will result in lawsuits to ban the use of important literary works and ultimately to mandate the use of specific works on the theory that the absence of equal treatment constitutes the casting of an aspersion.
What does Mott The Hoople have to do with this?
Thanks for informing us of this travesty.
It is a case that should clang alarm bells right across Canada and our country.
Viva Mark Steyn!!
I mentioned last week the case Mohamed Elmasry and the Canadian Islamic Congress have bought against McLean's Magazine for publishing Mark Steyn.....
As Wikipedia states, this is the same Professor Elmasry who openly supports Hamas and Islamic Jihad in as far as fund raising in Canada is concerned. He had thrown out that Israeli civilians were a fair target of suicide bombers. He backed up and said he meant those 18 years and over, because they would eventually serve in the Israeli armed forces.
He was not prosecuted for hate crime. The stench of fear is abroad in the Dominion.
McLeans Magazine will not let it rest without Superior Court review, neither will Steyn.
Another landmark case will now begin.
And what will be considered? ( see 2(b) below)
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Constitution Act, 1982 (79) PART I
Canadian charter of rights and freedoms
Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law:
Guarantee of Rights and Freedoms
Rights and freedoms in Canada
1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
Fundamental Freedoms
2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
a) freedom of conscience and religion;
b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
d) freedom of association.
....................etc.
*****************************************************
On one Canadian forum, I posted excerpts of the Supreme Court decision Times v. Sullivan and freedom of speech was derided as freedom to libel and slander.
Freedom is not for cowards. The people who cower at offensive remarks and seek to heal their verbal boo-boos at Human Rights Commissions lack any real courage.
But I see nothing like: " Death to all the Jews."
The Human Rights Commission may have to eat its panties on this one.
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The little mosque that couldn't
We're so boundlessly tolerant we tolerate endless dreary shows about how intolerant we are
MARK STEYN | Feb 05, 2007
The other day I was giving a speech in Washington and, in the questions afterwards, the subject of Little Mosque on the Prairie came up.
"Muslim is the new gay," I said. Which got a laugh. "That's off the record," I added. "I want a sporting chance of getting home alive." And I went on to explain that back in the nineties, sitcoms and movies began introducing gay characters who were the most likeable and got all the best lines, and that Muslims were likely to be the lucky beneficiaries of a similar dispensation. In both cases, the intent is the same: to make Islam, like homosexuality, something only uptight squares are uncool with.
At the time I hadn't seen so much as a trailer for Little Mosque. But it seemed a reasonable enough assumption that nine times out of 10 the joke would be on the "irrational" prejudices and drearily provincial ignorance of the Saskatchewan hicks. And sure enough, if you settled down to watch the first episode, it opened up with some stringy stump-toothed redneck stumbling on a bunch of Muslims praying and racing for the telephone. "Is this the Terrorist Attack Hotline? You want me to hold?"
Well, of course, the local Anglican vicar tries to explain that he's just rented the parish hall to a harmless group of local Mohammedans. "This is simply a pilot project," he says reassuringly.
"Pilot?" gasps the redneck. "They're training pilots?" And off he goes to the talk-radio blowhard who is, naturally, a right-wing hatemonger.
Meanwhile, the mosque's dishy new imam is waiting to board his flight and yakking into his cellphone about how taking the gig in Mercy, Sask., is going to be career suicide. Another passenger overhears that last word and the cops pull the guy out of line, and give him the third degree: "You lived for over a year in Afghanistan?" "I was volunteering for a development agency," says the metrosexual cappuccino-swilling imam, who's very droll about his predicament: if my story doesn't hold up, he cracks, "you can deport me to Syria." "Hey," warns the bozo flatfoot sternly, "you do not get to choose which country we deport you to." Fair enough. Never mind that, in the real Canada, the talk-radio guy would be off the air and hounded into oblivion by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission; and that, instead of looking like Rick Mercer after 20 minutes on a sunbed and being wry and self-deprecating and Toronto-born, your typical Western imam is fiercely bearded, trained in Saudi Arabia, and such linguistic dexterity as he has is confined to Arabic; and that airline officials who bounce suspicious Muslims from the flight wind up making public apologies and undergoing sensitivity training; and that, in the event they do bust up a terrorist plot, the Mounties inevitably issue statements saying this in no way reflects on any particular community in our glorious Canadian mosaic, particularly any community beginning with "Is-" and ending with "-lam"; and that the most prominent Canadians "volunteering" for good works in Afghanistan were the Khadr family, whose pa was sprung from the slammer in Pakistan by Prime Minister Chrétien in order that he could resume his "charity work" and, for his pains, he had to suffer vicious Islamophobic headlines like "Caught in a muddle: an arrested aid worker appeals for Chrétien's help" (Maclean's).
Never mind all that. There is after all no more heartwarming tradition in Canadian popular culture -- well, okay, unpopular culture: it's the CBC, after all -- than the pleasant frisson induced by the routine portrayal of rural Canadians as halfwit rednecks. One would characterize it as Canadophobic were it not for the fact that the CBC's enthusiasm for portraying us as a nation of knuckle-dragging sister-shaggers reinforces our smug conviction that we're the most progressive people on the planet: we celebrate diversity through the ruthless homogeneity of CBC programming; we're so boundlessly tolerant we tolerate an endless parade of dreary sitcoms and dramas about how intolerant we are. In that sense, the relentlessly cardboard stereotypes are a way of flattering the audience. In the second episode of Little Mosque, for example, the non-Muslim gals of Mercy stage a protest against the mosque: every single woman in the march is large and plain and simple-minded. The only white folks who aren't condescended to are the convert wife of the Muslim patriarch and the impeccably ecumenical Anglican minister (though his church, unlike the mosque, is dying). But in this cross-cultural gag-fest, what of the jokes on the other side? Well, these are the cuddliest Muslims you've ever met. They're not just moderate Muslims, they're moderately funny! Not screamingly funny like, say, Omar Brooks, the British Muslim comic whose boffo Islamostand-up routine was reported in the Times of London last year: "At one point he announces dramatically that the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center 'changed many people's lives.' After a pause, he brings the house down by adding: 'Especially those inside.' "
He didn't bring the house down literally. He leaves that to Mohammed Atta. By contrast, Little Mosque's creator, Zarqa Nawaz, opts for Ozzie and Harriet in a hijab. The nearest thing to an Islamist fire-breathing mullah in the cast warns sternly about how Canadian society lures Muslims into decadent ways: "Wine gums. Rye bread. Liquor-ish. Western traps designed to seduce Muslims to drink alcohol . . . The enemy," he warns, "is in the kitchen."
And, eavesdropping outside, the Muslim women joke that, if the enemy's in the kitchen, perhaps he could do the washing up. Boy, I loved that gag when Samantha did it to Darren on the second season of Bewitched, and it's just as funny in a hijab. This is the point, of course: the Muslims on the show are scaled down, from a global security threat to warm low-key domesticity, to all the same generation-gap and battle-of-the-sexes japes as every other hi-honey-I'm-home sitcom. Miss Nawaz is certainly capable of a sharp line -- " 'Good-looking terrorist'? Isn't that an oxymoron?" -- but for the most part she holds off: for a cross-cultural comedy, it's striking that both groups operate to white stereotypes -- it's just that the Muslims have been handed the blandly benign stereotypes of Life With Father. The synopses of upcoming episodes -- "Yasir's overbearing mother wants him to try something new -- a second wife," "Rayyan and her mother end up on opposite sides of the fence over coed swimming" -- suggest the familiar issue-of-the-week format of long-forgotten, worthily controversial sitcoms like Maude, the ones that won all the awards and are never in reruns. But here controversies are painless: when gender-segregating barriers are proposed for the mosque, the savvy quasi-feminist women have no problem running rings round the menfolk; the stern dad determined to put his adolescent daughter into her veil crumples without a fight. "Next week confusion abounds when Rayyan has a pronounced bulge in her belly and her brother arranges an honour killing. But it turns out she's just hiding the latest huge edition of The Oxford Anthology of Islamofeminist Writing!"
I would love to see a really great Muslim sitcom. After all, one of the worst forms of discrimination is to exclude someone from the joke. Gags are one of the great pillars of a common culture, which is why bicultural societies tend toward the humourless: see Belgium. (Before you call in a hate crime to the Council on Belgo-Canadian Relations, I should point out I'm semi-Flemish.) You don't have to look hard to find comedy in the Muslim world. In a debate at Trinity College, Dublin, recently, the aforementioned Omar Brooks said that Muhammad's message to non-believers was: "I come to slaughter all of you." He meant it, but come on, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter. Warming to his theme, he said, "We are the Muslims. We drink the blood of the enemy, and we can face them anywhere."
He won't be getting a call from Little Mosque any time soon. But, on the other hand, he is a genuine practising Muslim, which is more than can be said for any of the cast of the CBC's sitcom. The Muslim members of ACTRA decided to sit this thing out, and so every warm fluffy moderate Muslim on the show is played by a Protestant or Catholic, Italian or Indian. As comedy of bicultural manners goes, it's like a surreal latter-day PC version of the old vaudeville act "The Hebrew and the Coon," where the Hebrew was the genuine article and the Coon was played by Al Jolson. So today, Muslim funnymen are happy to stand up in public and threaten to drink your blood but won't risk doing anodyne CBC sitcoms. Which is also pretty hilarious when you think about it.
As for my throwaway that "Muslim is the new gay," well, Washington isn't like Swift Current. D.C.'s a sleepy backwater with not much going on. So, on a slow news day, a Beltway reporter picked up on the line and sought a reaction from a local Islamo-big shot, Hady Amr. Predictably enough, Mr. Amr denounced my observation as "inappropriate":
" 'American Muslims are taking their rightful place at the political table,' Amr said, 'and America needs to come to terms with that in terms of its rhetoric.' " Oh, dear. You try to pay a compliment and it gets taken as a beheading offence. Zarqa Nawaz has done her best, but for most of her co-religionists Islam remains no laughing matter.
How can we help Mark Steyn?