I don’t want to get off the hook. I want to take the hook and stick it up the collective butt of these thought police.
Hence, this book. It reprints the essays of mine that the Canadian Islamic Congress and their stooges in the “human rights” racket attempted to criminalize: When an Islamist bully or a dimwitted PC apparatchik says you can’t say something, that’s all the more reason to say it again. So here’s the offending material, plus some additional essays exploring the relationship between Islam and the west; my thoughts on the civilizational self-loathing of which the Muslim lobby groups are merely opportunist beneficiaries; and, finally, some snapshots of a year under the Canadian “human rights” microscope. We made headway in the campaign to repeal Section 13 and restore freedom of speech to Canada, but there’s still a long way to go. And in the broader global battle to end one-way multiculturalism we are still losing turf. Indeed, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (a kind of Muslim Commonwealth, representing just under 60 nations) may well succeed in its drive to impose a de facto global law against Islamic “blasphemy”. Increasingly, in the public square, in the marketplace of ideas, in ancient nations that have been the crucible of freedom, the Muslim world’s prohibitions on intellectual inquiry now apply to all.
In February 2009, the British Government banned a Dutch parliamentarian, Geert Wilders, from entry to the United Kingdom, had him arrested at Heathrow, and deported. Minheer Wilders had made a “controversial” film about Islam called Fitna, and the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, justified the decision by drearily regurgitating the old no-right-to-shout-fire-in-a-theatre line (see Blowing Smoke). He then revealed he hadn’t seen Fitna. As the commentator Edmund Standing asked: “How is Miliband any better than Muslims who screamed about The Satanic Verses without bothering to read it?”
February was also the 20th anniversary of the Ayatollah’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses. Two decades on, who needs the mullahs? These days western nations are happy to fatwa their own. It’s now a familiar pattern. If you threaten violence (as Muslims do to Wilders), the authorities cave in, and do the mob’s bidding in the interests of “public order”. If you’re a “moderate Muslim” who gets death threats and complains to the police, they send round two Muslim officers to advise you to zip it lest you provoke more trouble. If Muslim girls in Ontario are being murdered in “honor killings”, the “Human Rights” Commissar of the “Human Rights” Commission will explain that they’re only a “small commission” and they have to be able to prioritize and that Mark Steyn is a far greater threat to the Queen’s peace than killers of Muslim women.
But, if you don’t threaten violence, if you don’t issue death threats, if you don’t kill anyone, if you just make a movie or write a book or try to give a speech, the state will prosecute you, ban you or (in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali) force you to flee your own country. In their appeasement of thugs, western governments are making it very clear that the state accords more respect to violence than to debate. That’s a dangerous lesson to teach.
Midway through my troubles, I was asked on the radio in the United States why I was bothering to defend myself. Who cares about Canada? Why not just write it off? Here’s my self-interested answer: I write for a living. If I go to my American publisher to pitch a book, she’ll listen to my précis and then figure, “Well, we won’t be able to sell it in Canada, so there goes ten per cent of the North American market. And we won’t be able to license a British edition, because some bigshot Saudi prince will sue in a London court. And we won’t be able to sell French and German translation rights because it runs afoul of European Union xenophobia legislation…” And pretty soon your little book is looking a lot less commercially viable. So it’s easy to say write off Canada, Britain, Europe, Australia, but at the end of the day there’ll be a lot of American authors affected by this and a lot of American books that will go unpublished in America.
As I said, that’s my self-interested answer as to why I’m fighting this thing. But here’s my high-falutin’ one. When my children are my age, I want western civilization still to be in business. The idea that America can survive as a lonely beacon of light on a dark planet is absurd. The United States is part of a global economy, a signatory to global agreements, a member of transnational bodies. To accept these brutish assaults on free speech in the rest of the west is to make inevitable a world in which one day they will be under assault in the heart of the superpower, too. Six months after my battle in Canada began, my book was published in France, and, if some French Muslim group wants to do the same as the Canadian Islamic Congress, I’ll defend it in court in my lousy Québécois-accented French (which I believe is a capital offence in the Fifth Republic). And I’ll do that in every western jurisdiction where bullies who can’t withstand honest, open debate decide instead to use the legal system to shut down that debate. President Bush liked to say about Iraq that we’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here. Same with me and the legal jihadists: I’m going to fight them over there because otherwise we’re going to be fighting them over here, and sooner than you think.
THE WEST AT TWILIGHT
Lights out on liberty
ON AUGUST 3rd 1914, on the eve of the Great War, Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, stood at the window of his office in the summer dusk and observed: “The lamps are going out all over Europe.” Today the lamps are going out on liberty all over the western world in a more subtle and elusive and profound way. The rest of the west doesn’t have a US-style First Amendment. British Commonwealth countries have robust instruments of freedom going back to Magna Carta; Continental Europe has a rather more erratic inheritance, but they are supposedly supporters of things like the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unfortunately, a lot of them are far too comfortable with the proposition that in free societies it is right and proper for the state to regulate speech. For example:
~ The response of the EU Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security to the Danish cartoons crisis a couple of years ago was to propose a press charter that would oblige newspapers to exercise “prudence” on, ah, certain controversial subjects.
~ The response of Tony Blair’s ministry to the problems of his own restive Muslim populations was to propose a sweeping law dramatically constraining free discussion of religion.
~ At the end of her life, Oriana Fallaci was being sued in her native Italy and in Switzerland, Austria and sundry other jurisdictions by groups who believed her opinions were not merely disagreeable but criminal.
~ In 2009, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal ordered that Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician and film-maker, be put on trial for statements that “harm the religious esteem of Islamic worshippers”.
~ In France, Michel Houellebecq was sued by Muslim and other “anti-racist” groups who believed opinions held by a fictional character in one of his novels were not merely disagreeable but criminal.
But it gets better. Among the “flagrantly Islamophobic” Steyn articles the Canadian Islamic Congress took to the “human rights” commissions was my review of a situation comedy – the taxpayer-funded Canadian Muslim sitcom “Little Mosque On The Prairie”. I reviewed it for Maclean’s, and it wasn’t exactly a non-stop laugh-riot. Which would be an unexceptional observation, especially with regard to taxpayer-funded CBC sitcoms. But the Canadian Islamic Congress alleged that finding Muslims insufficiently funny is deeply Islamophobic. Perhaps I should call several Iranian scholars as expert witnesses. You may recall that, in one of his many pronouncements, the Ayatollah Khomeini declared – definitively, one would have thought – that “there are no jokes in Islam.” But apparently the Canadian Islamic Congress disagrees: Their position is that not finding Muslims funny is no laughing matter. And in this case the joke’s on me.