Western Civilization is truly ending. America definitely stands alone:
VANCOUVER, British Columbia: A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article’s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States did not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.
Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.
Under Canadian law, there is a serious argument that the article contained hate speech and that its publisher, Maclean’s magazine, the nation’s leading newsweekly, should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their “dignity, feelings and self respect.”
The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of hearings on those questions in Vancouver last week, will soon rule on whether Maclean’s violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up animosity toward Muslims.
As spectators lined up for the afternoon session last week, an argument broke out.
“It’s hate speech!” yelled one man.
“It’s free speech!” yelled another.
In the United States, that debate has been settled. Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minority groups and religions – even false, provocative or hateful things – without legal consequence.
The Maclean’s article, “The Future Belongs to Islam,” was an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn called “America Alone.” The title was fitting: The United States, in its treatment of hate speech, as in so many areas of the law, takes a distinctive legal path.
“In much of the developed world, one uses racial epithets at one’s legal peril, one displays Nazi regalia and the other trappings of ethnic hatred at significant legal risk and one urges discrimination against religious minorities under threat of fine or imprisonment,” Frederick Schauer, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in a recent essay called “The Exceptional First Amendment.”
“But in the United States,” Schauer continued, “all such speech remains constitutionally protected.”
In other words America’s really the only free country left in the world. Read the rest if you want to be depressed. There is a movement afoot by Americans to limit free speech. Surprise, they’re “liberals” who think they can “fix” the First Amendment to make it better:
Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.
“It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,” Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, “when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.”
Waldron was reviewing “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment” by Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times columnist. Lewis has been critical of attempts to use the law to limit hate speech.
But even Lewis, a liberal, wrote in his book that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections “in an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism.” In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Court’s insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.
The imminence requirement sets a high hurdle. Mere advocacy of violence, terrorism or the overthrow of the government is not enough; the words must be meant to, and be likely to, produce violence or lawlessness right away. A fiery speech urging an angry racist mob immediately to assault a black man in its midst probably qualifies as incitement under the First Amendment. A magazine article – or any publication – aimed at stirring up racial hatred surely does not.
Lewis wrote that there is “genuinely dangerous” speech that does not meet the imminence requirement. “I think we should be able to punish speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience, some of whose members are ready to act on the urging,” Lewis wrote. “That is imminence enough.”
Attitudes like this on the left are why I’ll begrudgingly end up voting for McCain. The most chilling quote is here however:
“In Canada, the right to freedom of expression is not absolute, nor should it be,” the commission’s statement said. “By portraying Muslims as all sharing the same negative characteristics, including being a threat to ‘the West,’ this explicit expression of Islamophobia further perpetuates and promotes prejudice toward Muslims and others.“
I’d always thought Muslims promote prejudice toward Muslims through embassy bombings, honor killings and modern day slave trading.
Islam is a religion, a way of perceiving reality. Those of us who aren’t Muslims have the right to challenge that view. That’s a right we are born with regardless of what country we are in and it is a right fascistic ideologies steal from people, sometimes in the name of tolerance.
Look, I think people have the right to be Muslim. But that doesn’t change what Islam is. It is an imperialist, racist, expansionist, violent ideology that has the subjugation of the world as its ultimate goal.
Islam teaches Arab superiority and Black inferiority. God in Islam is understood to be an Arab. He speaks Arabic, he promotes Arabic culture and custom. This is why racist attitudes among Arab Muslims are, toward Blacks especially, so overt. Islam is similar to Christian Identity in that it presents believers with a god who is of a particular ethnicity and one that favors that group above all others. Unlike Christian identity, however, Islam is universalist, so it seeks to force all other groups to conform to the favored group’s status. In other words, Arabization.
Many people may disagree with my assessment, but the facts I use to form my opinion are all verifiably true. The Koran was recited in Arabic, it enshrines Arab culture as holy. Arab Islam in Africa was always a racist affair, and continues to be today. These are facts and in Canada and most western countries I’d be forced to ignore them in the name of harmony.
It is no wonder fundamentalist Muslims, unfettered by modern western pretentiousness, have made vast inroads into the other western countries. No one is allowed to speak out against them. No one is allowed to challenge them and their assertions. The First Amendment in America is literally protecting our country from Arabization.
So we can’t afford to let “liberals” alter it help spare Muslim feelings.
