When it was yours truly and Ezra Levant, the publisher of The Western Standard, taking the heat, it was easy to write us off as a couple of right-wing blowhards. Mainly because we are. But the Islamophobe du jour is the Chronicle-Herald's Bruce MacKinnon, a cartoonist who's won an Atlantic Journalism Award and is the very soul of moderation. Alas for him, the head of the Nova Scotia "Human Rights" Commission is a fellow called Michael Noonan, last heard from comparing his job to that of the South African blacks who stood up to "the jackboots of the state" in the Sharpeville massacre. In other words, he seems just the sort of vainglorious stooge who'll be happy to do the Centre for Islamic Development's bidding and place the Halifax Chronicle-Herald's editorial content under government regulation — or, as he would say if he were less hilariously un-self-aware, under "the jackboot of the state."

Discussing the Maclean's case recently, the blog Dead Reckoning observed of our complainants:

"They think they are entitled to force Maclean's to simply allow them to publish whatever they want, and if they can't get it by bullying Maclean's they will get a government agency to do it for them.

"This is so Muslim. If you want to accuse somebody in an Islamic country of offending Islam, you go to an Imam and get him to issue a fatwa against the offender. In effect, the human rights commissions substitute for the Imams and issue the fatwas."

There's something in that. The Ontario Human Rights Commission's drive-by conviction of Maclean's was, indeed, a kind of fatwa — a pronouncement from doctrinal authority. In this case, the doctrine is political correctness, but, if only for the moment, its interests presently align with the Muslim lobby's. Many of us regard the "human rights" commissions as a parallel justice system at odds with 800 years of Canada's legal inheritance and dispensing with all the distinguishing features — due process, the presumption of innocence, etc. We should have realized earlier that its chief characteristics are also the closest our system comes to the capricious and authoritarian aspects of Islamic law. This week, in a brief objecting to a constitutional challenge to Section 13 of Canada's "human rights" code, the Justice Department declared:

"Mr. Lemire complains that the prohibition against disseminating hatred via the Internet is not accompanied by the defences of truth and fair comment that are available to traditional news media in torts ranging from defamation to seditious libel. This argument is misleading. The defences of truth and fair comment remain available to torts such as defamation and seditious libel, regardless of the medium in which they occur. However, none of the traditional media can avail themselves of these defences in cases of alleged hate propaganda, whether the communication appears in print, on television or on a website.

"As the Federal Court has explained, defences that may be available in tort actions are not available in cases of hate propaganda because the prohibition is concerned with adverse effects, not with intent."

My italics. Also my sprayed coffee. And my steaming pants and scalded crotch.

The government rarely expresses it that brazenly. Especially the justice minister of a supposedly Conservative government. By the way, by "adverse effects," they mean not anything that's actually happened but something that might potentially theoretically hypothetically happen maybe a decade or four down the road. If you create a justice regime predicated as a point of principle on disdain for objective reality, it's no big surprise to find perpetually aggrieved Muslim lobby groups eager to avail themselves of it — big time.

If you're an editor or a publisher, Canada's "human rights" regime is building a world in which the only choice on key issues of public debate is between state censorship or self-censorship. In Toronto last week, I had lunch in a fashionable eatery on King Street with a former editor who couldn't see what all the fuss was about. "You need to lighten up," she said. "Write about a movie." From next month, I'll have no choice. Although the Osgoode Hall law students protest that all they want is a "right of reply," when the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal finds us guilty, they are statutorily obligated to issue a cease-and-desist order that will have the effect of preventing Maclean's running any writing on Islam by me or anybody of a similar bent — even though the plaintiffs have not challenged the accuracy of a single fact or statistic or quotation.

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