[BretLudwig]

Boycott Canada


"From the New York Times:

Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech

By ADAM LIPTAK

VANCOUVER, British Columbia €” A couple of years ago, a Canadian
magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened
Western values. The articles tone was mocking and biting, but it said
nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not
say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress say the magazine,
Macleans, Canadas leading newsweekly, violated a provincial hate
speech law by stirring up hatred against Muslims. They say the magazine
should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a
rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their €œdignity,
feelings and self-respect.€�

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of
hearings on those questions here last week, will soon rule on whether
Macleans violated the law. As spectators lined up for the afternoon
session last week, an argument broke out.

€œIts hate speech!€� yelled one man.

€œIts 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
minorities and religions €” even false, provocative or hateful things €”
without legal consequence.

The Macleans article, €œThe Future Belongs to Islam,€� was an
excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn called €œAmerica Alone€� (Regnery,
2006). The title was fitting: The United States, in its treatment of hate
speech, as in so many other areas of the law, takes a distinctive legal
path.

€œIn much of the developed world, one uses racial epithets at ones
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 €œThe Exceptional First
Amendment.€�

€œBut in the United States,€� Professor Schauer continued, €œall
such speech remains constitutionally protected.€�

Canada, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa,
Australia and India all have laws or have signed international conventions
banning hate speech. Israel and France forbid the sale of Nazi items like
swastikas and flags. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Canada,
Germany and France.

Earlier this month, the actress Brigitte Bardot, an animal rights
activist, was fined $23,000 in France for provoking racial hatred by
criticizing a Muslim ceremony involving the slaughter of sheep.

By contrast, American courts would not stop a planned march by the
American Nazi Party in Skokie, Ill., in 1977, though a march would have
been deeply distressing to the many Holocaust survivors there.

Six years later, a state court judge in New York dismissed a libel
case brought by several Puerto Rican groups against a business executive
who had called food stamps €œbasically a Puerto Rican program.€� The
First Amendment, Justice Eve M. Preminger wrote, does not allow even false
statements about racial or ethnic groups to be suppressed or punished just
because they may increase €œthe general level of prejudice.€�

Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider
its position on hate speech.

€œIt 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, €œwhen they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative
responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against
certain forms of vicious attack.€�

It's totally obvious how Liptak is slanting this New York Times article to
get readers to presume that Steyn's article is "hate speech." There's not a
single quote from Steyn's essay "The Future Belongs to Islam" in Liptak's
entire 1,838 word article. On the other hand, Liptak uses the word "hate"
(or "hateful") 18 times, "Nazi" three times, and "Hitler" once.

The real story here is, once again, about how diversity dooms free
speech.

And it's time we did something about Canada's repeated violations of the
basic human right to free expression. It's time to boycott vacationing in
Canada until Canada improves its human rights situation.

Granted, I can only afford to vacation places where I can pitch a tent;
but let the word go out to Canadian firewood retailers that they won't be
getting any of my business until they help pressure their government to
stop persecuting writers."

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/06/f...-others-u.html

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