Religious Freedom: It's Not About Secularism...

...At least not in the way 'secularists' believe

When the Conservative Party recently proposed the creation of an office within the department of Foreign Affairs dedicated to promoting religious freedom abroad, it was only a matter of time before they began to draw heat over the proposition.

The opposition is coming from various quarters: from the self-proclaimed secularists at the Centre for Inquiry to the thinly-veiled Islamists at the Canadian Islamic Congress.

The CIC's Wahida Valiante pointed to the Conservative Party's failure to deliver a proposed office that would promote democracy abroad by collaborating with foreign political parties. The Conservatives backed away from this proposal (which was probably for the best, as it was fraught with the possibility of interference in foreign domestic politics).

"Every country, every nation has their own laws to protect their citizens," Valiante declared. "We have our Charter rights in Canada. In that, our freedom to practice religion is guaranteed. That shows that Canada is a model in which diversity of religion is protected. We can only be a model to others."

To put it charitably, Valiante's statement is just untrue. There are no laws to protect religious freedom in countries like Iran, Saudia Arabia, China, Libya and a host of others. Moreover, Canada can do more than simply be a model of religious freedom. It can be an advocate of religious freedom. That's the point.

The Centre for Inquiry's Justin Trottier has reportedly suggested that religious freedom is a "sensitive area" for the government to venture into, and even suggested that the office could wind up taking sides in religious disputes.

Which is actually the polar opposite of what the office's mandate would be. Frankly, Trottier's objections are simply confusing.

Simply put, the establishment of an office to promote religious freedom isn't about secularism. At least not in the way Trottier seems to think.

Secularism cannot actually exist without religious freedom. Religious freedom, after all, entails the freedom to not be religious, and the freedom to be secular.

That kind of freedom is what this is about, and that's why the establishment of this office is so vital.

Not Backwards, Just Fundamentally Different

Paradise Found is, in many respects, a remarkable film.

Made mere days after the 7/7 bombings in London, the spectre of Islamic terrorism is clearly on the mind of the film's producer, but he decides to make the film regardless of the episode, choosing to set aside the antagonisms between the western world and the Islamic world.

One of the most intriguing things discussed in the film is that of a Muslim-produced map. At first, the map actually looks like something one would find printed inside the cover of a fantasy novel; it looks more to the Western eye as a fictional construct than the real world.

Yet when the map is turned upside-down, it becomes evident that the map is, in fact, that of the world as we know it.

If there is any greater metaphor for the way that many see the global relationship between the western world and the Islamic world, one would be significantly challenged to find it.

Dichotomous thinking regarding the predominantly-Christian (now actually multicultural) and Islamic (now slowly secularizing) Islamic world permeates theories such as Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. Such theories have treated the Islamic world as a threat to the western world and its values.

Meanwhile, the theories of various Muslim thinkers also treat the world as dichotomous. In this vein of thought, the western world is decadent and immoral, and this threatens to leach into Islamic society through close contact between the two.

In the western world, a distressingly popular meme is to think of the Islamic world as backward and barbarous.

But the beauty of Islamic art should put the lie to this idea. While an unfortunate degree of ugliness has sprung forth from the Islamic world, an equally degree of ugliness has emerged within the psyche of the western world as well.

The Islamic world is not backward, but it is fundamentally different. It's a failure to respect these differences for what they are that has led so many people from each world to view the other as menacing.

CHRC to CIC: Put a Sock In It

Human Rights Commission refuses to hear Steyn complaint

One of the many ongoing controversies swirling around the Canadian Human Rights Commission drew nearer to a close yesterday, as it dismissed the complaint raised by the Canadian Islamic Congress against Maclean's magazine.

The complaint stemmed from Maclean's publishing of "The Future Belongs to Islam", an excerpt from Steyn's (actually counter-factually titled) America Alone which insists that Muslims are a direct threat to the Western world due to higher birthrates and antithetical values.

The Commission did take some of the objectionable nature of the article into account when rendering their decision.

"The writing is polemical, colourful and emphatic, and was obviously calculated to excite discussion and even offend certain readers, Muslim and non-Muslim alike," wrote Commission secretary Lucie Veillette. "Overall, however, the views expressed in the Steyn article, when considered as a whole and in context, are not of an extreme nature as defined by the Supreme Court."

Naturally, the CIC has its own opinion regarding the decision.

"We are disappointed that the Tribunal made this decision without hearing the compelling evidence of hate and the expert testimony we recently presented to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal," CIC lawyer Faisal Joseph said in a news release. "The Commission’s decision contradicts the findings of its own Investigator’s report which states that this Article contains hallmarks of hate identified by the Commission in its earlier case law."

While Steyn's article is, indeed full of some rather alarming generalizations, the CHRC's decision should serve as a reminder to the most litigious amongst Canada's Islamic community that, when confronted by sensationalist commentaries that do, unfortuantely, contain kernels of truth (no matter how small or potentially distorted), the onus remains on them to rebut it -- not on human rights law to insist that some unpleasant kernels of truth about Islam may never even be spoken.

Of course, Steyn and various individuals like him have their own fair share of questions to answer about Islam and their treatment of it.

For example, one wonders what they would have to say about Muslims Against Sharia, a blog run by moderate Muslims -- the very moderate Muslims that many of those who subscribe to Steyn's teachings insist don't exist -- that has actually supported them in the past.

But so long as Islam, and its impact upon Canada, remain controversial the debate will very much remain necessary. The CHRC's decision in this case is a welcome one, although the triumph is far from complete: this case is still being considered against Macleans in the British Columbia Human Rights Commission.

Hopefully, the BCHRC will make the right decision as well.

CIC Complaint Reveals Disturbing Matters Regarding Human Rights Commission

Human Rights Commissions being abused for political motivations? Seemingly so

In a recent op/ed column published in The National Post, Ezra Levant takes aim at the recent filing of a human rights complaint against Maclean's magazine.

According to Levant:

"Its crime? Refusing the CIC's absurd demand that Maclean's print a five-page letter to the editor in response to an article the CIC didn't like."

It's unsurprising that Levant would have something to say about this matter, as he himself has found himself subject to such manipulations of Canadian human rights law.

The complaint deals with a feature ran in the 20 October, 2006 issue of Maclean's. Entitled "The Future Belongs to Islam", the feature is a reprint of a chapter from America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It by Mark Steyn.

Now, for those who pay close enough attention to the work at hand, there should be little question that Steyn's column is unmitigated intellectual garbage. It paints a very unflattering portrait of Steyn's feverish worldview, wherein somehow every evil at work in the world today, including Islamic terrorism, can be conveniently blamed on the very concept of social security and universal health care.

In the end, the intended point of the article becomes agonizingly clear: if only westerners would have more babies, we wouldn't need to fear the big, bad Muslims who are "transforming Europe into Eurabia".

In fact, "The Future Belongs to Islam" deals in many of the same logical fallacies pedalled by many dilletantish "foreign policy experts" such as David Frum and Michael Ignatieff, including the "Islamic death cult" plopper (god forbid anyone should ever believe that perhaps Islamic terrorists do have grievances or goals, be they legitimate or illegitimate).

A good number of the ideas in "The Future Belongs to Islam" don't stand up to precursory scrutiny, just as the very premise of his book, America Alone, melts before the listing of the NATO states currently involved in Afghanistan (America Alone... oh, except for Canada, Britain, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands...).

That being said, its in this vein that the best way to combat the kind of ignorance being spread by Steyn and his ilk isn't in a Human Rights Tribunal. The best way to combat Steyn's sophistic trash is by refuting it in the media.

But that doesn't mean that Maclean's should be legally obligated to print a five-page letter to the editor refuting Steyn's work. That being said, Maclean's isn't the only game in town. There are plenty of other publications in which Steyn's feature could be refuted (although all of them will draw the line at a five page letter to the editor).

Virtually every publication in North America places some limits on the length of the letters it will consider publishing. Yet Levant predicts that the Human Rights Tribunal may rule against Maclean's magazine:

"It may shock those who do not follow human rights law in Canada, but Maclean's will probably lose.

Forcing editors to publish rambling letters is not a human right in Canada. But that's not how the CIC worded their complaint, filed with the B.C., Ontario and federal human rights commissions. Maclean's is "flagrantly Islamophobic" and "subjects Canadian Muslims to hatred and contempt" according to a CIC statement. "I felt personally victimized," said Khurrum Awan at the CIC's recent press conference. All this because Maclean's dared to run a column discussing the demographic rise of Islam in the West."

Levant notes that the CIC has tried to use the courts to silence those critical of Islam before, but also notes that using the Human Rights Commission may prove to be more productive than tactics used in the past.

"It's a new strategy for the CIC, which in the past has tried unsuccessfully to sue news media it disagreed with -- including the National Post -- using Canada's defamation laws. But Canada's civil courts aren't the best tool for that sort of bullying. In a defamation lawsuit, the CIC would have to hire its own lawyers, follow the rules of court and prove that it suffered real damages -- and the newspapers would have truth and fair comment as defences. Launching a nuisance suit against Maclean's would result in an embarrassing loss for the CIC, a court order to pay the magazine's legal fees and it would deepen the CIC's reputation as a group of radicals who don't understand Canadian values. (Three years ago, Mohamed Elmasry, the CIC's Egyptian-born president, declared that every adult Jew in Israel is a legitimate target for terrorists).

So civil lawsuits won't work. Criminal charges are a non-starter, too: Canada's hate-speech laws are reserved for extreme acts of incitement, and charges can only be laid with the approval of the justice minister. And in criminal court, the accused must be proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. No chance there."

Levant contends that the activist nature of the HRC favours complainants:

"That's why human rights commissions are the perfect instrument for the CIC. The CIC doesn't even have to hire a lawyer: Once the complaint has been accepted by the commissions, taxpayers' dollars and government lawyers are used to pursue the matter. Maclean's, on the other hand, will have to hire its own lawyers with its own money. Rules of court don't apply. Normal rules of evidence don't apply. The commissions are not neutral; they're filled with activists, many of whom aren't even lawyers and do not understand the free-speech safeguards contained in our constitution."

Those who have paid even passing attention to the human rights debate in Canada are well aware of the fact that many self-described right-wingers oppose the human rights commission.

It isn't as if they're disinterested individuals, either. Consider the recent furor over a decision by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission to impose a lifetime ban on Bill Whatcott from criticizing homosexuality. He had recently published and distributed a pamphlet he alleged quoted a classified ad for "Men seeking boys". Whatcott more recently ran for mayor of Edmonton, and filed his nomination papers wearing a "homosexuality is a sin" T-shirt (classy guy).

Yet in the Maclean's complaint, these individuals may have finally found themselves a horse to race.

If the Whatcott example is held up as an example of the punishment that Maclean's could recieve if found guilty (perhaps a permanent ban on publishing articles criticizing Islam), the Whatcott precedent could actually be transformed from something relatively reasonable (although this will inevitably be in the eye of the beholder) into something outright sinister.

Even merely ordering a retraction and apology could turn out to be very troublesome.

"The punishments that these commissions can order are bizarre. Besides fines to the government and payments to complainants, defendants can be forced to "apologize" for having unacceptable political or religious opinions.

An apology might not sound onerous, yet it is far more troubling than a fine. Ordering a person -- or a magazine -- to say or publish words that they don't believe is an Orwellian act of thought control. The editor of Maclean's, Ken Whyte, maintains his magazine is fair. But human rights commissions have the power to order him to publish a confession that he's a bigot -- or, as in one Ontario case, even order someone to study Islam. Even convicted murderers cannot be "ordered" to apologize."

In fact, as it turns out, using the human rights commission to attack Maclean's may turn out to be an abuse of the very human rights codes these commissions are charged with administering.

"Some of Canada's human rights codes cover "publications." Those powers were originally meant to cover things like signs saying No Jews Allowed or Whites Only (in human rights jargon, symbols that "indicate discrimination") or a swastika or burning KKK cross planted on someone's yard.

You don't need to be a lawyer to know that a magazine article is not what the founders of human rights commissions had in mind. As Alan Borovoy, the general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association -- and one of the architects of modern Canadian human rights law -- wrote last year, "during the years when my colleagues and I were labouring to create such commissions, we never imagined that they might ultimately be used against freedom of speech." Censoring debates was "hardly the role we had envisioned for human rights commissions."

Borovoy's warning has gone unheeded. The opposite, actually -- it signalled to the CICs of the world that human rights commissions are the perfect instrument to pursue their agenda of censorship. At the federal Canadian Human Rights Commission, for example, one single activist -- a lawyer named Richard Warman, who used to work at the commission himself -- has filed 26 complaints, nearly 50% of all complaints under that commission's "hate messages" section. He's turned it into a part-time job, winning tens of thousands of dollars in "awards" from people he's complained about in the past few years. Warman is a liberal activist, who likes to complain against Web sites he calls racist or homophobic. He's had the common sense to stick to suing small, oddball bloggers who can't fight back. But surely the CIC has observed Warman's winning streak, and will use his precedents to go after Maclean's."

However, Levant also cites the case of Reverend Stephen Boissoin who wrote a letter to the editor of the Red Deer Advocate, published on June 17, 2002, wherein he railed against an alleged pro-gay agenda in Canadian schools, and exhorting that "enslavement to homosexuality can be remedied."

"An even more terrifying precedent recently was set in Alberta. The case involved a letter to the editor written by a Christian pastor and published in the Red Deer Advocate newspaper. The letter was a zealous, even rude, expression of the pastor's belief that homosexuality was a sin, and that there was a homosexual political "agenda" that had to be stopped. But instead of joining the debate by writing a letter to the editor, a local teacher complained to the human rights commission.

The commission's one-woman panel--a divorce lawyer with no expertise in constitutional rights -- ruled that "the publication's exposure of homosexuals to hatred and contempt trumps the freedom of speech afforded in the Charter." That was it: Freedom of speech, and of the press, and religion, all of which are called "fundamental freedoms" in our Constitution, now come second to the newly discovered right of a thin-skinned bystander not to be offended."

Levant actually fails to mention that University of Calgary Education professor Darren Lund waited until after a 17-year-old gay teenager was assaulted until he decided to file a complaint.

Whether the assault was coincidental or not (the assault took place two weeks after the article was printed; one may make of that what they will), Lund may have been justified in feeling the letter caused harm.

“I do stand on the principle that I think the letter did expose people to hatred and I think the government, if it’s serious about its human-rights legislation, needs to make a ruling in this case and I think it’s very clear what they need to do,” Lund remarked.

Yet, the Boissoin case did take a turn for the unsettling, when the government itself chose to get involved, and certainly not on behalf of a pastor who was already finding himself in a position of legal disadvantage.

"In a rare move, the Alberta government sent a lawyer to intervene in the case -- against the pastor. The government lawyer argued that "if people were allowed to simply hide behind the rubric of political and religious opinion, they would defeat the entire purpose of the human rights legislation." Borovoy's well-intentioned laws aren't about making sure aboriginals can get taxi rides anymore.

The human rights panellist in question -- Lori Andreachuk, a former Tory riding association president -- wholeheartedly embraces this expansion of the definiton of "human rights." "It is, in my view, nonsensical to enact human rights legislation, to protect the dignity and human rights of Albertans, only to have it overridden by the expression of opinion in all forms," she wrote. Though no harm was proved to have come from the pastor's letter, it "was likely to expose gay persons to more hatred in the community" -- precisely the same language used by the CIC in their complaint against Maclean's.

In a ruling that spanned some 80 pages, Andreachuk spared just two paragraphs to explain why she was overruling the Charter's guarantee of freedom of speech. In real courts, a demanding legal hurdle called the Oakes Test must be passed before that can be done. The reason for infringing a Charter right must be "pressing and substantial," the infringement couldn't be "arbitrary or irrational" and it must be as "minimal" as possible. None of that analysis was even attempted by Andreachuk -- that's boring legal stuff for real judges in real courts. The Oakes Test was named after David Oakes, a man charged with trafficking of hash oil, who beat the rap using the Charter. Accused drug dealers get the benefit of the Constitution, but not accused pastors."

It is indeed troubling that Canadian human rights commissions are allowed to operate in a manner so contradictory to Canadian legal traditions, while handing down rulings that are still legally binding.

With the filing of the recent complaint against Maclean's magazine, there may finally be no way around this.

"There will be more human rights complaints like the CIC's, and more staggering rulings like the Alberta decision. It's odd: Mohamed Elmasry, an apologist for Islamo-fascism, using the same tools as an "anti-racist" leftist like Richard Warman. At first glance, they may seem like opposites, but they're actually identical: Both are illiberal censors who have found a quirk in our legal system, and are using it to undermine our Western traditions of freedom. Until last week, I would have thought that Maclean's magazine was too big a fish for them to swallow. I don't think that anymore."

While one of the principal functions of any healthy democracy is protecting its most vulnerable members from abuse, it may be time for Canadians to finally admit that two wrongs don't make a right.

While a belief in human rights is unquestionably one of the most important foundations of Canadian society, so is the belief in the rule of law. Yet when the principle of legal equality -- another fundamental foundation of Canadian society -- begins to take a backseat to the political motivations of those who use them to further their agenda.

It's time for Human Rights Commissions to start functioning like actual courts of law. If those administering these Commissions aren't up to this task, then the time has come to discard these commissions altogether, and start enforcing Human Rights Codes through the courts.

The CIC complaint against Maclean's magazine is both an abandonment of the CIC's responsibility in this matter -- namely, refuting Steyn's original article -- and an abuse of the system.

It cannot be allowed to stand.