Further to this, a few thoughts culled from yesterday’s comments. 

There’s a debate rumbling over at Harry’s Place, part of which revolves around Ezra Levant’s character and motive, as if they were the issue on which one’s view should hinge. But if Levant wished to be gratuitously offensive towards the deceased founder of a dismal superstition, why shouldn’t he? That wasn’t his intention, of course, as is clear from the original article (which was about press freedom, cowardice and intimidation) and subsequent statements; but the point remains that once state bureaucracy presumes to divine a person’s innermost motives in this way, the road to hell is being paved.

The state cannot be empowered, or trusted, to avenge hurt feelings – or injured pride, or vanity, or delusions of heresy. And it cannot extend preferential protection to those who may choose to be “offended” in order to gain political leverage or to censor ideas they happen not to like. Being “offended” has often been the claim of bad people hearing good ideas, and those who find their censorious umbrage rewarded will be inclined to seek it out more loudly than before.

Vitruvius has provided the following quote, by H. L. Mencken,

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

Yet I’ve seen several commentators, chiefly on the left, indulging in self-satisfied ad hominem and hoping for whichever outcome will do most harm to Levant’s standing, as if the actual outcome and actual precedent were of no intrinsic importance. But those who hang their argument on whether or not they happen to like Levant, or on whatever they take his motives to be, are missing the fundamental point he’s raised, which exists whether or not he’s a scumbag or a saint. This isn’t about whether one feels Levant’s political views make him a bad person or a terrible dinner guest. This isn’t simply about personal animosity and the individuals in question. If Levant is subject to this bureaucratic harassment, then others may share his fate – people whose views and personality one may be less hostile towards. If I moved to Canada, I might conceivably find myself in a similar situation, given time. Would that be okay? Or would I warrant some exemption because I’m such a nice guy? 

If Levant can’t publish those cartoons, or other things deemed heretical or “hateful” by Islamist ideologues, then freedom of conscience and freedom of expression are profoundly compromised. If Levant isn’t free to “insult” or “defame” Muhammad, or to disdain the religion he founded, then a precedent will have been set and all Canadians will have a new problem. And it’s unlikely that this problem will be confined to Canada. If Syed Soharwardy and the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada prevail, rational debate will most likely be inhibited when similar subjects arise, as they no doubt will. As Levant makes clear, “the process has become the punishment” and the potential risk of similar, costly, experiences will affect decisions as to what may or may not be published and what facts may or may not be stated. The threat of nuisance complaints, considerable expense and state interference will influence serious public debate in areas of religious sensitivity – or at least in areas of Islamic sensitivity, which, unfortunately, covers quite a lot.

For instance, one would have great difficulty explaining in detail and with rigour why it is one isn’t a Muslim, or why the Qur’an is not the “uncreated” word of some hypothetical deity, or why one finds Islam to be an absurd contrivance. That so many people calling themselves “progressive” should hesitate to extend this basic right to someone they happen not to like is, if not offensive, then hazardous, self-preoccupied and somewhat depressing. 

If you haven’t yet watched this stirring exchange between MoToons publisher Ezra Levant and Officer Shirlene McGovern of the Alberta Human Rights Commission, I urge you to do so now.

Here’s Levant’s opening statement. Note Officer McGovern’s expression throughout.

And on the subject of ‘permissible’ intentions, 

Officer McGovern said “you’re entitled to your opinions, that’s for sure.” Well, actually, I’m not, am I? That’s the reason I was sitting there. I don’t have the right to my opinions, unless she says I do.

A transcript of Levant’s opening statement can be read here. Here’s a brief extract:

For a government bureaucrat to call any publisher or anyone else to an interrogation to be quizzed about his political or religious expression is a violation of 800 years of common law, a Universal Declaration of Rights, a Bill of Rights and a Charter of Rights. This commission is applying Saudi values, not Canadian values. It is also deeply procedurally one-sided and unjust. The complainant – in this case, a radical Muslim imam, who was trained at an officially anti-Semitic university in Saudi Arabia, and who has called for sharia law to govern Canada – doesn’t have to pay a penny; Alberta taxpayers pay for the prosecution of the complaint against me. The victims of the complaints, like the Western Standard, have to pay for their own lawyers from their own pockets. Even if we win, we lose – the process has become the punishment.

The cartoons were published to illustrate this article (free registration required), which is also discussed here. Words of support can be sent via Mr Levant’s website, where more clips and commentary are available, including this on the causes of Islam’s image problem.

Update. 

Related. And. Also. Plus.

Please bankroll my insensitivity. 

The Huffington Post isn’t one of my regular haunts, but in light of the following perhaps it should be. Behold the bewildered psychodrama of Ms Erica Jong.

I am so tired of pink men bombing brown children and rationalising it as fighting terrorism… I am so tired of pink men spouting nonsense on TV. I am so tired of pink men arguing, blathering, bloviating, predicting the future – usually wrongly – and telling women to shut up. I am so sick of hearing that another pink man has dropped his children out a window, off a bridge or killed his pregnant wife or killed his unpregnant wife because he was infatuated with another pregnant woman. I am so sick of pink men making war and talking about peace… Don’t tell me about women who kill. I know there are some – but fewer. So let’s just remember our mothers – who bore us, protected us against our fathers and grandfathers and all the pink or brown men who wanted to rape us or kill us or starve us because we were girls.

This measured yet devastating critique is followed by,

I am not stupid.

And by,

I know all generalisations are false.

(Via Protein Wisdom.)

Further to comments on the ideological shaping of young minds, Newsweek’s European economics editor, Stefan Theil, casts an eye over some of France’s remarkably loaded school textbooks.

“Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer,” asserts the three-volume Histoire du XXe siècle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to… prestigious French universities. The past 20 years have “doubled wealth, doubled unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, whose ill effects constitute the background for a profound social malaise,” the text continues. Because the 21st century begins with “an awareness of the limits to growth and the risks posed to humanity [by economic growth],” any future prosperity “depends on the regulation of capitalism on a planetary scale.” Capitalism itself is described at various points in the text as “brutal,” “savage,” “neoliberal,” and “American.” This agitprop was published in 2005, not in 1972.

When French students are not getting this kind of wildly biased commentary on the destruction wreaked by capitalism, they are learning that economic progress is also the root cause of social ills… The ministry mandates that students learn “worldwide regulation as a response” to globalization… The overall message is that economic activity has countless undesirable effects from which citizens must be protected… And just in case they missed it in history class, students are reminded that “cultural globalization” leads to violence and armed resistance, ultimately necessitating a new system of global governance.

French students… do not learn economics so much as a very specific, highly biased discourse about economics. When they graduate, they may not know much about supply and demand, or about the workings of a corporation. Instead, they will likely know inside-out the evils of “la McDonaldisation du monde” and the benefits of a “Tobin tax” on the movement of global capital. This kind of anti-capitalist, anti-globalization discourse isn’t just the product of a few aging 1968ers writing for Le Monde Diplomatique; it is required learning in today’s French schools.

The whole thing.

If, as Theil suggests, students are being steered towards an absurdly loaded outlook and zero-sum thinking, one has to wonder what impact this may have, not only on the individuals concerned, but on the economic performance of the country more generally. Teaching teenagers that capitalism causes cardiovascular disease and “according to some, even the development of cancer” hardly seems a recipe for inspiring the entrepreneurs of tomorrow, or for instilling rationality and a sense of proportion.

Further to comments on how stating the obvious can scandalise PC sensitivities, this seems relevant. Andrew Bostom comments on the firing of jihad terrorism specialist, Stephen Coughlin, and notes the contrast with America’s first encounter with the jihad phenomenon, some two hundred years earlier.   

Bill Gertz, Washington Times national security columnist, reports that the Pentagon has fired Stephen Coughlin, its most knowledgeable specialist on Islamic Law and jihad terrorism. As Gertz observed aptly, the Pentagon thus ended the career of its most effective analyst attempting to prepare the military to wage ideological war against jihadism.

This past September, 2007, I lectured with Mr. Coughlin, a US Army Reserves Major, at The Naval War College, and witnessed his brilliant, tour de force presentation which elucidated the reliance of contemporary jihadism on Islamic Law. Coughlin demonstrated meticulously that Jihad fi Sabil Allah – “Jihad in the cause of Allah,” is the animating principle which underlies the threat of global jihad terrorism, and how this understanding should form the basis for rational, effective threat development assessment, and war planning. That Coughlin’s analyses would even be considered “controversial,” or worse still lead eventually to his firing… is pathognomonic of the intellectual and moral rot plaguing our efforts to combat global jihadism…

Coughlin’s reasoned conclusions simply update and complement, exquisitely, what serious scholars of jihad have long argued about revivalist movements throughout Islamic history. For example, forty years ago (in 1967), John Ralph Willis observed regarding the 19th century jihadist movements in West Africa, specifically, and such historical movements in general,

The jihad… is essentially an instrument of revival, employed for the purpose of extending the frontiers of Islam and leading the faithful back to [its] roots.

…In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as American ambassadors to France and Britain, respectively, met in London with the Tripolitan Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. These future American presidents were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty which would spare the United States the ravages of jihad piracy—murder, enslavement (with ransoming for redemption), and expropriation of valuable commercial assets – emanating from the Barbary States (modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya). During their discussions, they questioned Ambassador Adja as to the source of the unprovoked animus directed at the nascent United States republic. Jefferson and Adams, in their subsequent report to the Continental Congress, recorded the Tripolitan Ambassador’s justification:

… that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their [Qur’an], that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Stephen Coughlin understands and enunciates what was stated openly to then Ambassadors John Adams and Thomas Jefferson – and what they apparently understood – by the Tripolitan Ambassador Adja. During his September 2007 presentation… Coughlin updated this timeless Islamic formulation into its modern context:

If the enemy in the War on Terror states that he fights jihad in furtherance of Islamic causes that include the imposition of Shari’a law and the re-establishment of the Caliphate; And Islamic law on jihad exists and is available in English; Then professionals with WOT responsibilities have an affirmative, personal, professional duty to know the enemy that includes all the knowable facts associated with the law of jihad.

Stephen Coughlin has been fired for reminding his peers of this basic obligation.

The whole thing.

As former jihadist Tawfik Hamid has repeatedly pointed out,

Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it… It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence… The grave predicament we face in the Islamic world is the virtual lack of approved, theologically rigorous interpretations of Islam that clearly challenge the abusive aspects of Sharia. Unlike Salafism, more liberal branches of Islam typically do not provide the essential theological base to nullify the cruel proclamations of their Salafist counterparts.

It is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals have become obstacles to reforming Islam… They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism… If the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror… All of this makes the efforts of Muslim reformers more difficult. When Westerners make politically correct excuses for Islamism, it actually endangers the lives of reformers and in many cases has the effect of suppressing their voices.

And yet there are those, among them the incorrigible Seumas Milne, Madeleine Bunting and Karen Armstrong, whose lists of “root causes” include almost anything except the obvious, of which we must not speak.

Andrew Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad and The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism.

Related. And. Also.