This is hate speech?”, defense lawyer Julian Porter said in closing arguments at the trial of MacLeans magazine at the BC Human Rights Tribunal. "This is hate speech?," Porter repeated. "What on earth have we come to."
MacLeans is accused of making Muslims the target of "hatred and contempt" and "Islamophobia" with their 2006 article, "The Future Belongs to Islam", an excerpt from Mark Steyn's book, America Alone.
“Beware”, Porter said in an exaggeratedly sinister tone that reminded me of that used by kids wearing Halloween masks. “Beware”, he repeated, this time unable to stifle a chuckle, “when we are reduced to having an expert on Bollywood mulling, sifting, through the work, prospecting for prejudice.”
Porter summed up MacLean's publication of Steyn's opinions as, "It's what journalism does for liberty”. MacLeans was engaging in the “essential trade of ideas and argument -- at this point, Porter's voice got loud -- argument, fierce argument, dissent, contrariness!"
And here he quoted John F. Kennedy, imitating his Boston accent. “Loss of liberty brings a long, clear road to Cuba!”
The second defense lawyer, Roger McConchie, noted in his closing arguments that this case did not appear to be high on the priority list of one of the complainants, Dr. Mohamed Elmasry, President of the Canadian Islamic Congress. Elmasry hadn’t shown up at the trial.
Mark Steyn did show up.
Steyn spoke to the media (photo above taken on Friday) -- is his accent Australian? -- outside the courtroom during the lunch break. He and MacLean’s are “terrified” that the lawyer for the complainants, Faisel Joseph, “put on such an inept case that they may lose”, thereby depriving MacLean’s and Steyn of the opportunity to have this case heard in a higher court.
8 comments:
The lawyer for Elmasry and the Sock Puppets reminds me of the opening of the Simpsons cartoon show where Homer, leaving his chair at the nuclear power plant after work, is replaced by a chicken.
The problme with this trial is that it was decided long before it began, that Mcleans and Steyn and the rest of the world outside the ideological confines of p.c. are together just one deep pit of racism and islamophobia. There was never any defense possible. "We are all guilty" as th ep.c. refrain goes. It's "systemic." The chicken could have sat quietly and slept, and still the verdict would be guilty. But the bloggers have come out to cover this nonsense "trial" and it seems the tribunes have come to find out about it in the last day, realizing very belatedly that Mcleans had a reporter inside who was actually reporting on their antics. Yes, it seems true they had no idea till Friday that Andrew Coyne was actually sending out reports as he sat in the room. The tribunes didn't know that because they didn't bother checking the Internet to find out how things were going for them. They must have assume they didn't have to bother. But now they sort of have a clue. Now they know thier bubble is transparent, and that those things outside, we call them citizens, they are looking in and seeing things, and they don't really like it.
There's only so much of $113.000.00 per year that a tribune is likely to toss away over some silly stuff like principle. Besides, if islamophobia is systemic, why worry about this hearing? Go for the next one, given that there will never be an end to the trials ever. Toss this one as tainted, go on to the next one when no one is looking. And keep that tax money rolling in.
This trial is aiding Steyn's sales of America Alone. Amazon Canada has sold out. But it is available at Indigo-Chapters; I guess they're no longer being used to prop up the table.
Well, that makes this much easier to read now that the lunatics from the Carnegie are shuffled off to the corner, their comments on growing tomatoes and such deleted.
Yes, I have a copy, and a couple of friends have taken the liberty of reading it. Also, I saw a friend who had it from the library has now bought a private copy. And there in the courtroom, others showed up with copies. Heather Reichman's tables at Chapters are probably all in danger of toppling over. Too bad for her. Good for Steyn. Good for the free world and its people.
Next stop, get Rachel Davis to write a book. And you.
I read the comment on cult leadership and cult leaders above, and though I find it highly interesting and informative, as a comment I would have preferred some indication of why it's here. Of course, my feeling is that it refers directly to the rulers of the political stations in the Lower Eastside of Vancouver, the Ethanols and Jean Swansons who manipulate the "poor" for their own emotional and financial ends. However, it's not my comment, and for the commentator who left it, there is still room enough and time to clarify just why. Yes, there is subdued talk of Ethanol, as the usual example, being a psychopath, and the profiles above show what that can be; but is Ethanol really one of those properly assigned this profile? I'd need evidence beyond the profile itself. With that, with concrete examples of behavior matched to the profile, then there might be some room to argue one way or another. As is, Ethanol appears on the surface to be a government employee performing her tasks according to the job description, which might well be best filled by a psychopath, given the nature of a bureaucracy, but that wouldn't be an argument (proving Ethanol is a psychopath) of any genuine standing. Further, even if it were provable that Ethanol is a psychopath, and I have no opinion, that wouldn't have any bearing on the work, as it were, that she does. The beauty of bureaucracy, rule of bureaux, is that it is compartmentalized, one person doing one task in order of the order without change in the routine, the routine being systematized in advance and impersonalized to the point it is simply a matter of the most unimaginative of people acting according to plan. In a bureaucracy, intelligence and creativity are harmful. Both lead to innovation and deviation from the norm, which disrupts the continuous flow of X from the stupid to the stupid without break. The essence of bureaucracy is the sequential rather than the creative. Imagine, if you will, an engine cylinder being creative, doing its own thing far better than the companion seven. Better is, in effect, destructive.
Thus, the point isn't importantly whether Ethanol is a psychopath; the question of import is whether the machinery of Povertarianism is grinding the poor to death for the sole benefit of psychopaths. If the system of Povertarianism is a psychopathological one, then to whose benefit does it continue to exist and why would anyone choose to submit oneself to it for such dubious gain? It wouldn't matter at all if Ethanol were replaced as Dear Leader of the Carnegie Centre if the only difference were in the name and person of her replacement, the system remaining in place.
Why does such a place exist, and why do people submit themselves to it? What, if anything, is a better alternative? Does anyone even care so long as Ethanol continues to keep some people off the streets of the wealthier suburbs so they don't mar the landscape with their presence? If Ethanol were to shoot some people for misbehaving, would it matter? Who'd actually do anything about it? Who does anything in the case of the dying now who are roaming the streets and alleys of the city as "victims" treated to sandwiches, cold coffee and free needles to kill themselves with, all to sustain the system of povertarianism?
so long as there is a victimology as ideology reigning in the nation, there wil be those who are truly psychopathic sustaining the drug culture to maintain the endless "community" of the dying. The marginal will be the certain losers, no hope of restraint, and they will die of it, of this inafantalization of the poor. It is more than an industry, it is a social philosophy. If one cannot see it for what it is, then psychopaths will definitely find a place within such a system, and more and continuously more will fall into the jaws of this Moloch, regardless of the niceness of those who run it, psychopaths or not.
I, too, would like to better understand why your comment was left here, how we are to apply it to the situation at hand. Interesting, yes, applicable....tell us how.
Thanks
dag,
It looks like the person who left the spam about cult leaders and psychopaths gave you enough rope to hang a few people.
I assume this spammer is the same one who previously pasted a long section from the same psychology text into the comments following the Enquirer post about the stacking of the Carnegie election. The fact that the spammer started just after the Carnegie election coverage gives us a hint about which side he or she is on.
I went to the site meter and copied the spammer's IP address and other info:
shawcable.net ? (Network)
IP Address 24.81.35.# (Shaw Communications)
ISP Shaw Communications
Location Continent : North America
Country : Canada (Facts)
State/Region : British Columbia
City : Vancouver
Lat/Long : 49.25, -123.1333 (Map)
Language French (Canada)
fr-ca
Operating System Microsoft WinXP
Browser Internet Explorer 6.0
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; FunWebProducts)
I'm going to delete the spam.
I have no idea about the commentator's intentions. Some of the information is interesting and valuable but not exactly relevant to the situation at hand. Rather than simply cutting and pasting from elsewhere, a comment that helps is one that analyzes, to the best of the commentator's ability, the text in question, preferably the post itself.
Some people don't have confidence in their own abilities as writer to put up original ideas or summaries of others, but one must make the leap and accept that this is a highly critical world we live in. Personally, I'm easy. One might find me sipping coffee and taking notes from books at McDonald's most afternoons at Main and Terminal, usually willing to chat if there's occasion and reason.
If anyone cares to chat, come and sit and see what happens. Or leave a message.
Hi, I hope you noticed the Ian Mulgrew article in the Sun today about the Steyn.
I was just going through some of my old emails and marveling at how some of the very things I'm accused of in Paul's article are things the board actually did to me, such as reviling me for my "tone" (I was told, in an email, as an explanation for her shouting at me in a meeting, by the Vice President, that my tone in a certain meeting meant I considered the board fascistic and stupid)
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