...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

Pearl’s world:  Former head of the Ontario Human Rights Commission and full time member of the “human rights” community Pearl Eliadis (Ezra Levant wrote about her here, and the Canadian Human Rights Commission profiles her here) has a long article in the Fall 2008 issue of Maisonneuve Magazine. The piece—THE CONTROVERSY ENTREPRENEURS—details the travails of three little sock puppets and their struggle to make big, bad Maclean’s stop saying all those nasty things about every single Muslim around (even though as anyone who doesn’t live in Pearl’s world—dar-al-Pearl—knows, it did no such thing), and argues that Canadians must allow Human Rights Commissions to get on with this difficult but crucial task. (Sorry, no linky as yet online.) The article is adorned with a some ‘toons of some of said “entrepreneurs—Ezra, Mark Steyn and Barbara Amiel. Ezra is got up like a Saudi Saudi; Mark is wearing a turban a la Islam’s founder in those “controversial” Danish ‘toons; Barbara is dressed as, well, Barbara, with pearls and designer sunglasses. As in real life, each wields a large threatening writing implement (even though they probably do most of their “dirty work” on a keyboard). Pearl and Maisonneuve (a magazine with a fraction of Maclean’s readership which bills itself as an “ECLECTIC CURIOSITY—or, er, maybe that’s a trait it regards its readers as having) want us to know that “the Maclean’s hate speech debate has turned into the biggest false issue in the country today—and obscured more troubling threats to free speech.” What are these more troubling threats? As far as I can tell, they’re the threats to the entire Human Rights apparatus which have arisen as a result of the aggrieved sock triad’s complaints.

Since I have neither the sitzfleish nor the wherewithal to sum up the whole thing (which includes a rousing tribute to a “crusading” Nazi hunter who’s single-handedly been keeping the Section 13 apparatchiks in business for years now, until  the socks and their sting-puller, Elmo discovered the censorship provisions, that is), I’ve decided to give you a taste of Pearl's "wisdom" by posting the article’s opening few paragraphs. Here goes:

By all accounts, Khurrum Awan, Naseem Mithoowani and Muneeza Sheikh had had enough. Over a two-year period, starting in 2005, the Osgoode Hall law students had read twenty-two articles in Maclean’s by columnists Barbara Amiel and Mark Steyn that, they felt, painted a portrait of Muslims that “went well beyond simply being offensive and became dangerous.”

The students met with Maclean’s in March 2007 and asked that the magazine print a “counter article.” Editor-in-chief Kenneth Whyte refused, preferring, according to the students, to “go bankrupt.” Julian Porter, Maclean’s lawyer, syas the student’s request—space for a 5,000 word rebuttal—went too far. The students appealed to Maclean’s parent company, Rogers Publishing and in late May CEO Brian Segal reaffirmed Whyte’s initial refusal, hinting that the students should consider the Letters page.

In December, Awan, Mithoowani and Sheikh—a fourth complainant has since dropped out—filed human rights complaints against Maclean’s with the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC). The complaints singled out Steyn’s article “The Future Belongs to Islam,” which predicts a Muslim global takeover, and Maclean’s refusal to provide space for a rebuttal, as discriminatory. (Steyn clarified that he was not trying to say that “the cities of the Western world will be filling up with sheep-shaggers.”) In another article, “Celebrate tolerance, or you’re dead,” Steyn describes Ayatollah Khomeini’s instructions about sex with nine-year-olds and bestiality as “livelier examples” of “contemporary Islam.” The students also targeted statements like this one by Amiel: “Normally, a people don’t willingly acquiesce in the demise of their own culture, especially one as agreeable as Western democracy, but you can see how it happens. Massive Muslim immigration takes place…”

Dot, dot, dot, indeed. Now, I don’t know about you, but since I don’t happen to live in dar-al-Pearl, the above examples of “dangerous” speech don’t strike me as being particularly, well, “dangerous”. Funny, scathing, caustic—to be sure. But “dangerous,” as in  “likely” to promote hate dangerous? I can’t see it. (Did Mark really make that comment about “sheep-shaggers”? If he did, Pearl must be engaging in something which apologists for the contents of the Koran often accuse others of doing—i.e. “cherry-picking”.) And Pearl seems to want to have it both ways—to make a case that the trio really had grounds to feel offended and seek redress for it, and, at the same time, claiming that the media went way overboard in reported this, after all, small little case, thereby needlessly turning it into a firestorm. (Again—in Pearl’s world, it’s a firestorm. In reality, most mainstream media avoided the story like the plague, reporting on it as rarely as possible. Where the whole thing really took off was in the blogosphere, with Levant and Steyn—and the indefatigable binky of freemarksten—leading the charge.) Seems to me what she’s really kvetching about is the fact that the sock case exposed a corrupt system that had been left to fester in darkness for a very long time, and that now that Canadians have been able to see it for what it is, there’s no going back to the “good old days” when HRCs got to harass and silence Canadians without question, and with complete impunity.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:51 | link | comments (4)

Comments:

#1  18 October 2008 - 22:29

 

Pearlbat is even offside with PEN. Which truly places her blatherings in perspective.

Anonymous

#2  19 October 2008 - 14:13

 

A “human rights” cowgirl named Pearl
Tried to take her dead nag for a whirl.
But flogging that pony
Involved so much baloney
That everyone started to hurl.

scaramouche

#3  19 October 2008 - 15:49

 

Yeah, those comments are not particularly dangerous, at least not in any context presently imaginable.

But much more generally, it is true that the fundamental human problem is that each of us IS a potential or real danger to each other. In other words, we have more to fear from our fellows than from mother nature or anything else. But that's the unavoidable human condition.

Given this it is understandable why Pearl fears. However, the problem is that she is completely dishonest in recognizing this. Her position is implicitly Utopian. She assumes that fear is not a human necessity, which it is, but something that with the right kind of government can be overcome. She would shut people up, maybe even lock them up, so that we don't need to live in fear of our fellow humans. But of course this is to deny the reality that this fear is necessary and inescapable, though we should keep things in healthy perspective - we do have many ways to defer our capacity for violence.

It is necessary for non-Muslims to fear Islamic expansion, just as it is necessary for Muslims to fear the rest of us if things get out of order. This is the human condition; we can't avoid it. And when we try, out of Utopian foolery, we are likely to precipitate greater resentment and danger. Once the law shows its interest in protecting one party or another against its other, all bets are off. If the law, however, makes it its business to maximize every person's freedom, this will be the best strategy for deferring the potential for violence that should never be denied - or imaginatively legislated "away" as an unnecessary fear - in any healthy political thought. There is nothing more dangerous and worthy of fear that the kind of Utopian nonsense that is so common in the Western left and in certain religious sensibilities.

Anonymous

#4  22 October 2008 - 15:08

 

All that having been said, it is also a distinct possibility that Pearlbat is cookieputz - and i don't just mean intellectually.

Anonymous

Comments: