links for 2008-06-08
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“Unlike Africa, which Steyn dismissed as a “tribal” continent “riddled with AIDS,” the Islamic world poses a threat to the West because it is younger and more energetic, he argued.”
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“Moments before president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil was to address his country’s first national gay rights’ conference, Brazilian military police surrounded a Sao Paulo TV station to arrest an army sergeant participating in an interview with
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
Torontonian wrote:
Mark Steyn is so messed up. I have two blog posts about him, about incidents before this current case.
Posted 08 Jun 2008 at 12:59 pm ¶
Torontonian wrote:
Mark Steyn is a good example of how multiple oppressions are linked to a common thread of bigotry.
Posted 08 Jun 2008 at 1:01 pm ¶
Korolev wrote:
True, Steyn is a bastard who is clearly racist (his comments about Africa make that clear enough). However, the people who bring the complaints against him are just as bad. Steyn is insulting towards Muslims, yes, he hates them and yes, he is a bigot. However, he does not deserve to go to jail on those charges. By all means, boycott him, write counter-articles to him, fight him with words and ideas, but don’t lock him up.
From what I understand, he is being persecuted for being a bigot. However, it is not illegal to be a bigot, now is it? I do not like Steyn - he is clearly a white supremacist. But since he has not clearly advocated violence, only expressed his own, hate-filled views, it wouldn’t be legal to lock him up, even if locking him up would make me feel better.
Yes, I understand that many Muslims have been insulted by his article. But we should fight people like Steyn with WORDS, not false charges. Steyn is a bad man, but not a criminal. He shouldn’t be respected, but neither should he be imprisoned.
Posted 08 Jun 2008 at 2:54 pm ¶
Slush wrote:
The article also said that Steyn’s piece “…quotes a European imam who allegedly said Muslims are reproducing like “mosquitoes.” ”
Ugh. Why is it that who has babies and who doesn’t is the basis for so much bigotry? It’s okay - fantastic - to have babies if you are white and middle or upper class, but for anyone else, how irresponsible! How dare such people think that the world would be okay if they propagated their own kind!
@Korolev-
Fair enough, but no one was talking about Steyn going to jail. Not at all. In fact, they are just suing to make the court require the magazine to print their response.
The trickier question would be if Steyn should ever pay civil damages for hate speech. Some pretty insightful scholars would say yes…
Posted 08 Jun 2008 at 5:16 pm ¶
Torontonian wrote:
Korolev,
If the complainants win the case, then Macleans will print the complainants’ response article. Why do people assume that Mark Steyn’s rights are being trampled on by those ‘freedom-hating’ Muslims?
“By all means, boycott him, write counter-articles to him, fight him with words and ideas, but don’t lock him up.”
Yeah, yet another person who shoots off their mouth based on assumptions instead of reading the damn article, which actually states the complainants’ side accurately this time.
This just proves my point: When Muslims cry “freedom of speech!” … opponents cry “freedom of speech!”. All you see is something about Muslims going to court about something related to Islamophobia, and you assume that the Muslims are trying to put someone in jail and limit free speech. It doesn’t matter what the case is about, people will just think, “Everything I need to know about Islam I learned on 9/11″.
Posted 08 Jun 2008 at 6:16 pm ¶
Sniper wrote:
He shouldn’t be respected, but neither should he be imprisoned.
Prison? How on earth would a tribunal be able to send someone to prison? That’s not how hate speech laws work in Canada - all Steyn is going to get out of this, I’mk afraid, is free publicity.
Posted 08 Jun 2008 at 6:31 pm ¶
Sniper wrote:
Here’s a pretty good summary of the Keegstra case. As you can see, he was pretty extreme, and his punishment didn’t amount to much.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Keegstra
Posted 08 Jun 2008 at 6:35 pm ¶
Slush wrote:
Wow. I’m not Canadian and hadn’t heard of Keegstra but this Canadian law is quite interesting:
“Section 319(3)(a) of the Criminal Code of Canada, which states that a person cannot be convicted of promoting hatred if she or he establishes that the statement is true, but only where the accused proves the truth of the communicated statements on a balance of probabilities.”
This means you can spew bigoted stereotypes and then try to prove that they’re true to defend yourself in court. Fascinating. I am generally in favor of hate speech laws, but to suggest that they can be resolved by a court deciding whether or not the statement is true seems like a dangerous solution.
Posted 08 Jun 2008 at 8:52 pm ¶
Mira wrote:
You have to wonder why Maclean’s is refusing to print the complainants’ article in the first place. Wouldn’t a followup to a controversial article be a way to sell lots of magazines? I have to say, I think forcing a magazine to print an article is a bad idea, but there really has to be a platform for people to counter the bullshit Mark Steyn is spewing, and if that’s not being provided in the media as it is…
Posted 09 Jun 2008 at 7:10 am ¶
Eric Grant wrote:
A few things about the Steyn deal:
He would not be imprisoned, but he could be banned from writing anything about Muslims ever, and publications could be forbidden from ever publishing him.
He hasn’t been taken to court, he’s been taken to a “Human Rights Tribunal” where they seem to make things up on the fly about what is admissable and what isn’t, and the people on the tribunal don’t go through any kind of rigorous selection process. A lot of the heat around the case is about how goofy the whole tribunal process is.
He could (theoretically) be charged with criminal hate speech in Canada, in a real court, but he has not been.
Macleans keeps saying that they ran plenty of responses on the letters to the editors page, and that the complainants demanded, many months after the original publication, that they be allowed to commandeer six odd pages and the cover of an issue of the magazine for their own selected response, over which the magazine editors would have no influence (there’s been some back and forth about the actual nature of their demands).
Short version that I’ve seen: the people bringing the complaint are not the most capable critics of Steyn, neither in terms of their political savvy nor on the merits of their arguments.
Posted 09 Jun 2008 at 10:41 am ¶
Torontonian wrote:
He would not be imprisoned, but he could be banned from writing anything about Muslims ever, and publications could be forbidden from ever publishing him.
How does this follow? The case isn’t even about Mark Steyn; it’s about Macleans. Mark Steyn makes himself out to be the victim when he’s not even on trial. Notice how in the video they gave him so much air time to speak and gain sympathy when it’s not even about him, and the Muslim complaints get cut off in mid-sentence.
Short version that I’ve seen: the people bringing the complaint are not the most capable critics of Steyn, neither in terms of their political savvy nor on the merits of their arguments.
Really? I’ve found that Mark Steyn and his defenders are not that competent at logic and use up a lot of energy attacking straw men.
Posted 09 Jun 2008 at 6:41 pm ¶
Molly wrote:
People like Steyn are why I can get behind Canada’s speech laws. They’re not perfect by any means, but neither are anyone else’s, and Canada’s, overall, allow dissent and unpopular speech while stopping cases of unmistakable hatred and threat. I guess, on the whole, while it’s nice that in the US the ACLU has the same freedoms as the KKK, I’d rather live in a place where the KKK isn’t as free to spread hatred, misinformation, and subtle threats—and it still doesn’t impinge on the ACLU or anyone else who’s not out there spreading hate.
Posted 09 Jun 2008 at 7:34 pm ¶
Torontonian wrote:
I don’t think this case is about Canada’s laws against hate speech. I also doubt that the complainants will win the case, as the ‘precedent’ complaint in Ontario was not heard by the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC).
Naseem Mithoowani, one of the complainants of the earlier, Ontario complaint, forwarded me the results of the OHRC decision in April to reject hearing the (Ontario) complaint. This the news release:
The official OHRC statement is available here.
Posted 09 Jun 2008 at 11:38 pm ¶
Slush wrote:
Blah. That’s a chickenshit response by the Commission. If that’s beyond their jurisdiction, when where would such a complaint go? And if the answer to that question is nowhere, then the entire hate speech law is pretty meaningless.
Posted 10 Jun 2008 at 9:07 am ¶
Torontonian wrote:
Okay, this is not about the hate speech law, and I think the complainants purposely avoided invoking the hate speech law because of stereotypes about Muslims restricting free speech, just a guess. Instead of restricting free speech like Muslims are stereotyped of doing and which Muslims in West Asia and South Asia usually agree with more, these Canadian Muslims are trying counter Islamophobia with words and ideas, but the media, as always, does not give voice to the people being marginalized and stigmatized. They try to take it to court because they are law students, at least the Ontario complainants.
If they actually tried to invoke the hate speech laws against Mark Steyn, then there would be a public outcry about Muslim Canadians trying to supplant Canadian law and Western values with ‘their’ ‘third-world’ ’sharia’ laws that restrict freedom of speech, which would actually be evidence in support Mark Steyn’s point, in the public’s perception. This is why I think they don’t want to go that route, because it would be ‘proving’ Mark Steyn’s point.
However, regardless of what the case is about, the media still paints it that way, that the Muslims are trying to restrict freedom of speech because they take offense to people insulting their religion. I guess it’s a lose/lose situation, because the general public will think that they know what this case without investigating, based on their past experience of the Muhammad cartoons and their general inability to process complexity and novelty.
Posted 10 Jun 2008 at 6:13 pm ¶