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Human Wrongs Commissions assault Maclean’s magazine

June 4, 2008 on 5:44 pm | In Social & Political Issues | No Comments

When zombie-talking Barbara Hall was anointed commissioner of human rights for Ontario, it was to be expected she would do as she had done as mayor and botch things. Although she had the nerve to enter her name in the first post-conglomeration Toronto mayoral election—as did disgraced ex-councilor Tom Jakobek—she never had a chance to be returned to the job she did so poorly.

Sick at heart by the mess Mel Lastman had made in the wake of the Mike Harris curse of amalgamation against our city, Torontonians were not going to have another wingnut presiding.

Basically, Barbara doesn’t get most things. She is so bound up in political correctness that she sees only through a narrow slit. This has never been so evident as with her quixotic crusade against Maclean’s magazine for publishing a fair and thoughtful piece by Mark Steyn about Islam in Canada.Some Muslim students took unreasonable umbrage and demanded equal space in the newsmag to tout their own take on the issue. If that were the standard of “fairness” required of all publications, nobody would read them. They’d be full of equal-time,  equal-space rebuttals in a never-ending stream of protests and counter protests.

The remedy is and has always been to publish letters to the editor where objections and counter arguments can be aired. A few hundred well-selected words can state practically all arguments and certainly the objection the Muslim students had. Their complaint was the statement that Muslim immigrants have more children than others, that Muslim youth can be easily radicalized, that Islamists’ goal is to Islamicize the whole world and that violence isn’t out of the question for many Muslims in attempting that.

That can be denied or countered in very few words and it’s not necessary to devote a large part of a magazine to do so.

Into the fray jumps Barbara in her official capacity. Though she realizes she has no lawful authority to compel Maclean’s to do what the complainants demand, or even to rule on the matter, she nonetheless—and against all common decency which would have her keep her opinion to herself—broadcasts her predictable stance.

So the case has been moved to the Human Rights Commission in British Columbia, which does—wrongly—have the power to compel the media to perform according to the sometimes illicit demands of that sometimes hare-brained body.

Frank Touby