The silliness is wearing me down.
With the recent launch of 3 human rights complaints against conservative writer and full-metal dingbat Mark Steyn and Macleans Magazine for publishing an excerpt from Steyn's book "America Alone", the escalating absurdness of the persecution parade has finally hit critical mass.
"The Future Belongs To Islam" the article's heading warns ominously. Ooh. Steyn writes for those people I think of as "the Psychological Casualties of 9/11": people who, 6 years later, remain in the same shattered state of shock that was universal in late September of 2001. Most of us respectfully moved on, the memory of 9/11 a reminder of what still needs to be fixed in the world, not some kind of ugly sign on the road warning of the sheer cliff we're speeding towards. Some did not, and continue to autoambulate through life in a stunned state of paranoia. This is Steyn's constituency, and his writing panders to their shell-shocked notions. It's a shtick. But it ain't hate speech.
There are certainly legitimate examples of hate-mongering speech that's potentially dangerous because it could incite some nutbar to take things to the next level and go beat someone up, or worse. But the Steyn article isn't one of them. While Steyn does a lot of swooning and pearl-clutching about the possibility that Europe might be "overrun" by Teh Muslims in the next 50 years because they're so much more prolific than Teh Non-Muslims, and hypothesizes that this may in fact be a world-wide Muslim conspiracy, it's more of a paranoid fantasy than deliberate hate speech. With a few other minor tweaks, you could replace "Islam" with "Catholicism" and the article might be about the feeling in North America in the 60's and 70's, when it was widely thought that fecund anti-birth control Catholics squeezed out babies while standing in line at the grocery store, and in so doing were perpetuating a papal conspiracy to take over the world.
If the CIC doesn't like what Steyn writes, and neither do I most of the time, then I'd suggest they meet him on the same ground. Rebut his arguments -- there are any number of media available to do so, starting with the lowly internet and including panel discussions, magazine articles and even books. Human rights complaints have a place and serve a purpose, but this isn't one of them.
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