Globe and Mail

So who's fuelling the prejudice?

Margaret Wente

December 6, 2007

Canadian Muslims get a bad rap. They're suspected of being super-touchy types who aren't all that interested in vigorous debate and democracy.

Personally, I don't think that's true. The problem is that Muslims in this country are tainted by the noisy few -- people like those jolly folks at the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations who were so offended by the way an economist used the phrase "mullah or sheik" that they demanded he apologize and take sensitivity training. (They got their way.)

For grievance-mongers such as these, no insult is too small to whip up into a hate crime. This week's example is supplied by the Canadian Islamic Congress, a grandly named lobby group that, for all I know, consists of six people and a website. They're mad about a Mark Steyn piece called The Future Belongs to Islam that ran a year ago in Maclean's. This week, they launched a bunch of human-rights complaints against the magazine for promoting hatred against Muslims. "This article completely misrepresents Canadian Muslims' values, their community, and their religion," said Faisal Joseph, a lawyer for the CIC. "I felt personally offended," said complainant Naseem Mithoowani.

Mr. Steyn, a regular contributor to Maclean's, has probably offended 99 per cent of the readers at one time or another. That's the kind of guy he is. The offending piece is vintage Steyn: provocative, highly coloured and wildly overdrawn. It argues that the West is in demographic and cultural decline, while Islamic populations, by contrast, have high fertility rates and a new cultural assertiveness. It doesn't talk about Canadian Muslims at all.

Curiously, the four complainants in the case are all law students or graduates from York University's Osgoode Hall. You might think that law students, of all people, would be very big on stuff like civil liberties, tolerance and free speech. I guess not.

"There is a fine line between freedom of expression and promoting hatred," said Muneeza Sheikh, one of the complainants. "Our feeling was that the article definitely did promote hatred."

Darn those feelings. They can make you feel so bad. If feelings were facts, no one in Canada would be allowed to state a controversial opinion.

Standing in solidarity with the CIC is the Ontario Federation of Labour. "You can visibly see folks being stereotyped in this article," said OFL executive vice-president Terry Downey. "There is proper conduct that everyone has to follow, including the media."

Yet, it's not as if Mr. Steyn had the last word. The magazine ran pages of angry reader mail in reaction to his article. Editor Ken Whyte even met the offended law students to find out what would satisfy them. They wanted a five-page article, written by an author of their choice, to run without any editing, and art-directed by themselves. He said no.

As you read this, human-rights investigators in Ontario, as well as federal investigators in Ottawa, are deciding whether to accept the CIC's complaint against the magazine. The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal already has. The next step will be mediation in an effort to reconcile the aggrieved parties, and, if that fails, four days of hearings next June. Those tax dollars will be hard at work.

In case you haven't guessed, I'm no fan of the CIC. Its chair, Mohamed Elmasry, once let slip that he thinks all Israeli adults are legitimate targets for terrorists. Nor is the CIC a fan of mine. It tracked my sins for years, and concluded The Globe and Mail scores high on the Islamophobia meter.

The CIC has lots to say about Islamophobia in Canada, but not a word to say about rape victims being flogged in Saudi Arabia or teddy bear demonstrations in Sudan. Plenty of Muslims wish it would just shut up, and for good reason. If the CIC wants to know who's fuelling prejudice against Muslims, maybe it should look in the mirror.