We head north once again to Canada, land of human-rights trampling "human rights commissions," to examine the case of the York University student union's effort to ban pro-life groups from campus, citing their inherently "sexist" nature:

In response to a series of controversies over abortion debates on Canadian campuses, the student government of York University in Toronto has tabled an outright ban on student clubs that are opposed to abortion.

Gilary Massa, vice-president external of the York Federation of Students, said student clubs will be free to discuss abortion in student space, as long as they do it "within a pro-choice realm," and that all clubs will be investigated to ensure compliance.

"You have to recognize that a woman has a choice over her own body," Ms. Massa said. "We think that these pro-life, these anti-choice groups, they're sexist in nature ... The way that they speak about women who decide to have abortions is demoralizing. They call them murderers, all of them do ... Is this an issue of free speech? No, this is an issue of women's rights."

The school's administration condemned the decision as contrary to its academic mission.

I realize that Canada doesn't have the First Amendment, and as such the freedom of speech isn't as protected there as it is here in the US. But come on. To simply preempt any discussion of the issue of abortion unless it comes from a "choice" perspective? These people can't be serious.

And yet, there it is in black and white. The horror of being exposed to a contrary view - one that views abortion as morally wrong to boot (imagine that!) - is just too much for these tender souls to bear. So rather than expose the student body to the dangers of persuasion, the student union is going to preemptively ban the offending speech.

Do these people have no clue how clueless this makes them look? How dictatorial? How fascist? Ah well, this can at least serve as yet another example of the vaunted "tolerance" of the left.

Uncalibrated Irony Meter Alert: It turns out that Ms. Massa, the spokesperson for the York Federation of Students, has a pretty selective idea of what constitutes "free speech":

Gilary Massa, the vice-president, external, of the York Federation of Students and the driving force behind the proposed ban on anti-abortion groups, earlier this year defended free speech as she called for the lifting of a ban on the phrase "Israeli Apartheid."

In a letter to McMaster's provost and the Students Union Executive, Ms. Massa said she was shocked and dismayed to hear that the administration and McMaster Students Union had banned the use of the phrase "Israeli Apartheid" on campus.

The letter called for the ban on the phrase to be rescinded "in accordance with a basic commitment to freedom of expression and organization in the democratic context of the public university."

The letter added, "This strange and unprecedented ban is a blatant violation of democratic freedoms of speech and dissent, and an attack on students' right to organize. It is the position of the YFS and GSA [Graduate Students] that universities are sites where discussions and debates about difficult geopolitical questions should be promoted, not stifled. International controversy about use of the phrase 'Israeli Apartheid' cannot be resolved through repression, but through ongoing intellectual exchange."

Here's some free speech for you: Massa is DUMBER THAN A SACK OF HAMMERS.

"Science, simply put... cannot account for human equality, and does not offer reasons to believe we are all equal. Science measures our material and animal qualities, and it finds them to be patently unequal."

Maclean's Magazine - which published the excerpt of Mark Steyn's America Alone that is now the subject of much "human rights" consternation in the great white north - has fired back at the tyrants who run the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Here's their side of the story regarding how this whole mess started:

Not surprisingly, the article generated enormous reaction from our readers. In the weeks following publication, we printed 27 letters to the editor, reflecting a broad range of opinion on the merits of Steyn's thesis. This is more letters than we've published on any other subject in recent years, and several of those we did publish were part of a campaign run by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Washington and its affiliate in Ottawa. But six months after the story appeared, and long after we believed the debate had subsided, we heard from a group of law students angry about the article, and demanding a meeting. Normally we wouldn't meet with aggrieved readers regarding a six-month-old story. But because it involved sensitive issues, we agreed to sit down with them and to discuss their concerns.

The students complained that the story and the cover image we used, presented a prejudicial and sinister image of the Muslim community and stoked unreasonable fears of a Muslim conspiracy to take over the world. To bolster their complaints they selected a handful of other articles from the magazine that they felt presented an unfair and negative portrayal of Muslim people.

We answered that Steyn's article was an interesting and well-researched essay expressing the opinion of the author. We pointed out that nowhere does it suggest there is a plot for global domination involving the entire Muslim community (in fact, he distinguishes between various factions in the Muslim world, moderate and radical). Furthermore, we had already printed many letters dealing with precisely the same counter-arguments the students were raising. We demonstrated that our magazine is staunchly supportive of peace-loving, law-abiding Islamic-Canadians. Indeed, we have taken several editorial positions explicitly in support of the Muslim community, including the right of Muslim women to wear whatever religious garments they choose, and the merits of public funding for Muslim religious schools. Finally, we explained that Maclean's is dedicated to asking provocative questions and fostering debate on important public issues.

This did not satisfy the students. They demanded the right to respond with an article of equivalent length, by a writer of their choosing and with a cover of their own design. The editors of this magazine would have no opportunity to edit the article except for spelling and punctuation. According to their terms, they would be free to write anything they wanted, however inaccurate or unreasonable or offensive or libelous or criminal or otherwise unsuited for our publication.

They also wanted a substantial sum of money donated to a charity of their choice. If we refused any of their terms, they said they planned to bring a human rights complaint against us. They said they were also contemplating a criminal action against us.

We told them that we couldn't possibly meet their demands. No publication could. It would violate an editor's responsibilities to his publication, his readers, and his profession. We told them we would rather go out of business than to give over complete control of space in the magazine to anyone on such terms. We stand by that decision. Faced with their ultimatum, we asked if there was anything else we could do to satisfy them. They said "no" and smiled.

They overplayed their hand. Now they're running the risk of having their illiberal cudgel of a commission shut down. Nice work, gang. And be sure to read the whole thing; it's an excellent summation of and response to this whole mad situation

Cliff May explains:

Not only do Hamas members oppose a “two-state solution,” they believe that nation-states are un-Islamic. Instead, an Islamic caliphate is to be re-established, an empire that is to expand until the Dar al-Islam, the world ruled by righteous Muslims, consumes the Dar al-Harb, the world in which infidels and apostates currently hold sway. “Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our prophet Muhammad,” Hamas member and Palestinian parliamentarian Yunis al-Asal pledged this month on a Hamas television program.

Does Carter sincerely think he can convince Meshaal to reject such ideas and embrace the Carter Center’s kumbaya mission of “waging peace and building hope”? Does he really believe he can change Mashaal’s mind, much less open his heart?

Carter can't go away soon enough as far as I'm concerned.

It seems that you can still be critical of islam in the Netherlands.

Mark Steyn, commenting on the disturbing trend in the UK:

Thatcherism liberated the British economically and, despite ten years of Blair and Brown, they still pay less tax than most of their Continental neighbors. But, lacking any meaningful equivalent to America's social conservatives, values voters, small-government types, Second Amendment gun nuts and other familiar figures of the US scene, Britain has become a land of economic plenty with a welfarist sensibility. The "yobs" who rampage through town shopping centers turn out to be not downtrodden and impoverished but living in suburban cul-de-sacs with two-car garages. This is a very contemporary problem: an underclass that's too rich.

Geert Wilders' film on Islam is out. I find it hard to see the film as "controversial" unless one defines controversial as quoting Islamic leaders and their holy book accurately and showing the logical conclusion of their statements. It's odd to think that this film is likely to get Wilders killed, and yet I fear that is the most likely outcome of all of this.

Richard Kirk reviews Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, and points to the root of many of our modern problems in the US:

Woodrow Wilson is the unexpected villain of Liberal Fascism. Based on a review of his academic writings, Goldberg demonstrates that Wilson was a devotee of power—power utilized according to the pragmatic lights of John Dewey. Consequently, the twenty-eighth president denigrated, with the confidence of a divinely anointed leader, those constitutional provisions that limited his ability to mold the nation into a healthy organism that worked for the good of all. This “evolutionary” vision of history provided the intellectual justification for that modern legal theory that dissolves all governmental boundaries—the living Constitution. It also paved the way for an approach to education that transferred the locus of pedagogical authority from parents to the state. In Professor Wilson’s words: “Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life…[but] to make them as unlike their fathers as we can.”

Mark Steyn:

And thus "progress" comes full circle. In Minneapolis last year, the airport licensing authority, faced with a mainly Muslim crew of cab drivers refusing to carry the blind, persons with six-packs of Bud, slatternly women, etc, proposed instituting two types of taxis with differently colored lights, one of which would indicate the driver was prepared to carry members of identity groups that offend Islam. Forty years ago, advocating separate drinking fountains made you a racist. Today, advocating separate taxi cabs or separate swimming sessions makes you a multiculturalist.

I want to cry.

Mark Steyn rings in the month of March with a heckuva column:

The "human rights" racket is a disgrace. Canadians are not notably "hateful" people. To be sure, deep in the human heart lurk dark prejudices that may occasionally be furtively expressed to like-minded persons over a drink or two. But discrimination in housing and employment on the grounds of gender and race — the original justification for creating the "human rights" pseudo-courts — is all but extinct, so a self-perpetuating nomenklatura has moved on to invent new rights — like the human right to a labiaplasty or a joint on someone else's property. You'll recall the Osgoode Hall law students who objected to my book excerpt in Maclean's demanded a five-page cover story in response, unedited, with the students determining the artwork and the cover art, along with a financial contribution to their "cause." As any self-respecting publisher would, Kenneth Whyte told them he would rather go bankrupt — much as Mr. Kindos seems likely to. The Osgoode students have since explained that they went to the "human rights" enforcers because they were only trying to "start a debate," and mean old Maclean's was preventing their voices from being heard. They have repeated this mournful plea in lengthy editorials they've written for, at last count, the Globe And Mail, the National Post, the Toronto Star, the Toronto Sun, the Ottawa Citizen, the Calgary Herald, the Montreal Gazette, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, the London Free Press, and no doubt a few other publications. That's the reality of Canada's "Islamophobic" media: they've been given acres of op-ed real estate to yell that their voices are being silenced and all they want to do is start a debate — even though, in none of their many columns, do they actually start it.

One giant on another:

In remarks at National Review’s 30th anniversary in 1985, President Reagan joked that he picked up his first issue of the magazine in a plain brown wrapper and still anxiously awaited his copy every two weeks — “without the wrapper.”

“You didn’t just part the Red Sea — you rolled it back, dried it up and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism,” Mr. Reagan said.

“And then, as if that weren’t enough,” the president continued, “you gave the world something different, something in its weariness it desperately needed, the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom.”

One of the better editorials you're ever likely to read:

NATIONAL REVIEW is out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and the New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place. It is out of place because, in its maturity, literate America rejected conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation. Instead of covetously consolidating its premises, the United States seems tormented by its tradition of fixed postulates having to do with the meaning of existence, with the relationship of the state to the individual, of the individual to his neighbor, so clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic.

"I happen to prefer champagne to ditchwater," said the benign old wrecker of the ordered society, Oliver Wendell Holmes, "but there is no reason to suppose that the cosmos does." We have come around to Mr. Holmes' view, so much so that we feel gentlemanly doubts when asserting the superiority of capitalism to socialism, of republicanism to centralism, of champagne to ditchwater — of anything to anything. (How curious that one of the doubts one is not permitted is whether, at the margin, Mr. Holmes was a useful citizen!) The inroads that relativism has made on the American soul are not so easily evident. One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things.

Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals'. Drop a little itching powder in Jimmy Wechsler's bath and before he has scratched himself for the third time, Arthur Schlesinger will have denounced you in a dozen books and speeches, Archibald MacLeish will have written ten heroic cantos about our age of terror, Harper's will have published them, and everyone in sight will have been nominated for a Freedom Award. Conservatives in this country — at least those who have not made their peace with the New Deal, and there is serious question whether there are others — are non-licensed nonconformists; and this is dangerous business in a Liberal world, as every editor of this magazine can readily show by pointing to his scars. Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.

There are, thank Heaven, the exceptions. There are those of generous impulse and a sincere desire to encourage a responsible dissent from the Liberal orthodoxy. And there are those who recognize that when all is said and done, the market place depends for a license to operate freely on the men who issue licenses — on the politicians. They recognize, therefore, that efficient getting and spending is itself impossible except in an atmosphere that encourages efficient getting and spending. And back of all political institutions there are moral and philosophical concepts, implicit or defined. Our political economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles, on ideas — not by day-to-day guess work, expedients and improvisations. Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain operative; and the medium of such exchange is the printed word. A vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion is — dare we say it? — as necessary to better living as Chemistry.

We begin publishing, then, with a considerable stock of experience with the irresponsible Right, and a despair of the intransigence of the Liberals, who run this country; and all this in a world dominated by the jubilant single-mindedness of the practicing Communist, with his inside track to History. All this would not appear to augur well for NATIONAL REVIEW. Yet we start with a considerable — and considered — optimism.

After all, we crashed through. More than one hundred and twenty investors made this magazine possible, and over fifty men and women of small means, invested less than one thousand dollars apiece in it. Two men and one woman, all three with overwhelming personal and public commitments, worked round the clock to make publication possible. A score of professional writers pledged their devoted attention to its needs, and hundreds of thoughtful men and women gave evidence that the appearance of such a journal as we have in mind would profoundly affect their lives.

Our own views, as expressed in a memorandum drafted a year ago, and directed to our investors, are set forth in an adjacent column. We have nothing to offer but the best that is in us. That, a thousand Liberals who read this sentiment will say with relief, is clearly not enough! It isn't enough. But it is at this point that we steal the march. For we offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D's in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town.

Mark Steyn, as usual, is correct:

My book's thesis — that most of the Western world is on course to become at least semi-Islamic in its political and cultural disposition within a very short time — is "alarmist."

The question then arises: fair enough, guys, what would it take to alarm you? The other day, in a characteristically clotted speech followed by a rather more careless BBC interview, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that it was dangerous to have one law for everyone and that the introduction of sharia — Islamic law — to the United Kingdom was "inevitable." No alarm bells going off yet? Can't say I blame you. After all, de facto creeping sharia is well established in the Western world. Last week, the British and Ontario governments confirmed within days of each other that thousands of polygamous men in their jurisdictions receive welfare payments for each of their wives. Still no alarm bells? I see female Muslim medical students in British hospitals are refusing to comply with hygiene procedures on the grounds that scrubbing requires them to bare their arms, which is un-Islamic. Would it be alarmist to bring that up — say, the day before your operation?

Western Culture continues to cut its own throat:

The British government has cleared the way for husbands with multiple wives to claim welfare benefits for all their partners, fueling growing controversy over the role of Islamic Shariah law in the nation's cultural and legal framework.

Bigamy is outlawed in Britain, but authorities have never prosecuted Muslim men who had legally married more than one woman abroad and continued to live with them after immigrating. Shariah permits men to have up to four wives at one time.

Now, after a review that began in November 2006, a panel of four government departments has decided that all the wives of a Muslim man may collect state benefits, provided that the marriages took place in a country where multiple spouses are legal.

Neither the review nor the decision was announced publicly, and their discovery by newspapers late last month triggered an uproar in the largely Christian nation — a fury exacerbated by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams' remark last week that some aspects of Islamic law could be embraced within Britain's legal system.

Hat tip to Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, who comments:

The Left seems to believe that legalizing polygamy, or polyamory as they prefer to call it, will result in a Marin County Hippie Love Fest with all the Birkenstocked commune members sharing household and childcare tasks and getting along nicely. But once multiple marriages are sanctioned by the state, there will be no stopping Muslim-style polygamy, which, will not be, shall we say, a Hippie Love Fest. Polygamy as practiced in the Muslim world is a not a pro-woman institution. And because Muslim-style polygamy will certainly produce more children than the typical Leftist group marriage, it will not take long for Sharia-style polygamy to crowd out feminist-style polygamy.

Happy Valentine's Day, indeed.

Syed Soharwardy has dropped his "human rights" complaint against Ezra Levant, who had the temerity to engage in free speech in a (supposedly) western nation. This isn't really a victory, as Soharwardy will not face any legal repercussions for his illiberal abuse of the system. That is, unless Levant gets his way:

I understand that Soharwardy has an Op-Ed in tomorrow's Herald in which he effectively admits his complaint was motivated by Saudi-style censorship, not any Canadian belief in human rights. In other words, he admits what I've alleged all along: he was hijacking a secular "human rights" commission for his radical Islamo-fascist agenda. But now he wants us all to pretend he didn't.

Well, back in the land of real laws and real rules of court, there's a tort called "abuse of process", and Soharwardy has just admitted to it.

For two years, this corrupt, radical imam has hunted me using the resources of the taxpayers of Alberta for the "thought crime" of publishing a cartoon he didn't like. I had a preliminary discussion with my lawyer today. My aim is to file an abuse of process claim in the Court of Queen's Bench within the month. Whether or not I sue the commission itself, and its inquisitor Shirlene McGovern, is something I haven't discussed yet with my lawyers.

When the chief complainant in a two-year censorship exercise admits the whole thing was improper, an abuse of process suit is not just about recouping my losses. It's about holding a little fascist, and the government agency he hijacked, to account, and having grown-ups -- that is, real judges in real courts -- tell them that what they've been doing is morally and legally wrong.

Go get 'em, Ezra. Ace offers this comment:

Have at 'em, Ezra. Make sure the Canadian authorities go on record, one way or another, as to whether freedom of speech and freedom of thought are "peculiarities of American law" or the natural rights of Canadians as well.