The enemies of free speech are on the march (Part 9)

Shut up in the name of 'diversity'

By Wes Vernon

If there is anything the jackboots cannot take, it is humor at their expense. They don't like it when you sass them back in serious discourse, either. But a touch of "irony" that shows the emperor has no clothes? That is when they reach the breaking point.

Lighten up? No way

Hell hath no fury like a police state mentality made a laughing stock.

Such appears to be the lesson currently being learned by columnist Mark Steyn. A Canadian citizen who spends half the year living in the U.S. writing for U.S. newspapers, magazines, and book publishers, Steyn is in hot water with stone-faced Canadian authorities.

His "crime?" He wrote a book — laced with his brand of humor, and issuing a serious warning on the demise of Western civilization, specifically Europe and North America.

"Diversity" as a one-way street

It seems that excerpts of Mr. Steyn's New York Times best-seller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it" were reprinted in Maclean's — the most widely-read weekly north of the border. The Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) received a complaint from the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) — the equivalent of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has successfully driven at least one talkshow host off the air here in Washington and which backed six Imams who wanted to sue Americans frightened by their provocative behavior (post-9/11) aboard a flight in Minneapolis.

CHRC is an ersatz judicial body that resembles nothing so much as a kangaroo court whose tolerance for freedom of expression is on a par with the tribunals that handed out assembly-line death sentences during Moscow's "purge" trials in the thirties. Steyn notes that there is "no presumption of innocence" in CHRC's "hate" cases, other than for the so-called "Canadian Nazi party," which "got off scot-free on the quaint grounds that it did not exist." CHRC has not sent anyone to the gallows — yet — preferring fines and the equivalent of cease and desist orders.

The "offending" passage

Here's what Mark Steyn wrote that so offended the industry of the "perpetually-offended."

"The Muslim world has youth, numbers, and global ambitions. The West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it. It's the end of the world as we know it."

That is Steyn's case in a nutshell. In his book, he verifies it in spades. Here's the book's inside flap:

"Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a muezzin. Europeans already are.

"And liberals will still tell you that 'diversity is our strength' — while Talibanic enforcers cruise Greenwich Village burning books and barber shops, the Supreme Court decides sharia law doesn't violate 'separation of church and state,' and the Hollywood Left decides to give up on gay rights in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy."

The future, Steyn opines, belongs to the fecund and the confident. The Islamists are both, while the Western nations are neither. In the West, we are reproducing ourselves at a declining rate. Our rising population is facilitated in large part by immigrants from the Third World, legal and illegal. In contrast, Islamist populations are growing — non-stop.

Rolling it all into focus — the decline of the West can be chalked up to a "multiculturalism that undermines [the West's] confidence, a welfare state that nudges it toward sloth and self-indulgence, and a childlessness that consigns it to oblivion [and thus it] is looking ever more like the ruins of civilization."

In filing the complaint against Steyn, CIC's Faisal Joseph — apparently an ambulance chaser not unlike our own trial lawyers — charges, "This article completely misrepresents Canadian Muslims' values, their community, and their religion."

Really? Then why not debate it out in the open in reasoned discourse, rather than rushing to the intellectual attic to haul out the club of the iron-fisted state? What is Mr. Joseph afraid of, anyway? Filing a complaint before a kangaroo court (with a record of near zero acquittals) is a means of stopping debate, not advancing it.

Update

Author Steyn now reports that (at last count) the "plaintiffs" have also taken their case against him to two more of "Canada's many 'human rights' pseudo-courts." Thus he is forced to defend himself in three venues, no doubt upping the ante — both in terms of penalty and (presumably) in lawyers' fees.

It's the humor that bugs them

Nothing demolishes the pompous self-righteous fool more quickly than becoming the object of ridicule. And much of Mark Steyn's case on the extremely serious business of the impending collapse of our civilization is tinged with enough humor, or the "ironic," that one can read his cleverly written tome and marvel at never having had so much fun getting depressed.

And that is important because how can one expect to "buck up" and join the fight at this pivotal time in history without some humor to put the world in perspective? Here are excerpts from the book.

Example 1

In Spain, the gods of political correctness decided to replace the words "father" and "mother" on birth certificates. Henceforth, the "less offensive" terms were to be "Progenitor A" and Progenitor B." Just "bureaucratic spring-cleaning," you understand.

"No point renaming the terms if you no longer play the game," asserts Steyn. "That might at least encourage young Spaniards to wander into the Barcelona singles bars and try out the line: 'Do you want to come back to my pad and play Progenitor A and Progenitor B?' 'Well, okay, but only if I can be Progenitor A."

Example 2

Steyn cites Spain's ruling Socialist Party for having introduced in a bill in Parliament aiming to bolster the population statistics by legislating "that apes [such as orangutans] be included in the category of persons."

The book notes that the socialist/liberal agenda of abortion, gay marriage, and endlessly deferred adulthood leads to "a literal dead-end."

"As fertility dries up, so do societies." the author writes. "Demography is the most obvious symptom of civilizational exhaustion, and the clearest indicator of where we're headed. These countries [in Europe and North America] are fading into oblivion unless they can change their ways, or train those orangutan citizens to serve food at the seniors' community center."

Example 3

We used to call the Nazis our enemies — because they were.

We used to call the Communists our enemies — because they were (though some guilty-conscience liberal socialists somehow found excuses for them).

Why then do we not call Islamofascists our enemies? They are our — read my lips — our e-n-e-m-i-e-s.

But in this case, our enemies are shouting "Death to America" in mosques in towns and cities right here in America. This time, we must shut up in the name of diversity. To call them our "enemies" is attacking religion, you see.

How odd. As Steyn points out, "The Germans and the Japanese had to make do with Lord Haw-Haw and Tokyo Rose. If only they could have had Third Reich academies in every English city and Hirohito Highs from Alaska to Florida and St. Adolph's Parish Church in every medium-sized town around the world."

Or, put it this way: "The Saudis are our______. Whoops, sorry, friends. The Saudis are our friends. No matter how many they kill."

Another voice weighs in

We turn now to the words of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the young woman who was raised in a Muslim home in Somalia where on some days her teacher would beat her in school for the slightest deviation from Islamic orthodoxy. Then she would go home and her mother would "finish the job."

In her book Infidel, Hirsi Ali writes:

"The little shutter at the back of my mind where I pushed all my dissonant thoughts snapped open after the 9/11 attacks and it refused to close again." She adds that "most people think Islam is about peace. It is from these people, honest and kind, that the fallacy has arisen that Islam is peaceful and tolerant."

Putting a fine point on it, Ali — who later became a member of the Dutch Parliament, and ultimately came to the U.S. — says, "The inhuman acts of those nineteen hijackers [were] the logical outcome of this system for regulating human behavior. Their world is divided between 'us' and them — if you don't accept Islam, you should perish."

As for the here and now

Freedom-loving Americans, Canadians, and freedom-lovers the world over will rise in defense of Mark Steyn's right to speak out and write freely of his worldview and the facts as he perceives them. The Canadian jackboots are trying to make an example of him. It behooves us to dispense with the blinders of "tolerance" and "multiculturalism" and pay heed to the oldest rule of warfare — know your enemy.

© Wes Vernon