The Steyn show trial
An excerpt from Kathy Shaidle's and Pete Vere's "The Tyranny of Nice." Here, Shaidle and Vere rip into Canada's main stream media, and its collective demure attitude towards the Human Rights Commission hearing against Mark Steyn and Maclean's.
Kathy Shaidle and Pete Vere - September 22, 2008
- Steyn’s accusers called a deconstructionist Buffy the Vampire Slayer scholar as an expert witness on the media’s portrayal of Muslims.
- Khurram Awan, representing Mohammed Elmasry (who’d decline to attend the tribunal for reasons never made clear) admitted under oath that he’d misrepresented his group’s initial demands to the media. “After obfuscating for a few rounds,” Levant reported, “Awan acknowledged that he never in fact offered a ‘mutually acceptable’ article -- that was simply an after-the-fact lie, a little bit of taqqiya that Awan et al. has told the press.” Rather, the CIC had initially demanded during their meeting with Ken Whyte that Maclean’s publish an author of their own choosing, without vetting or approval. It was an unprecedented demand -- tantamount to hijacking a magazine for the purpose of running 5000 words of radical Muslim propaganda, without editorial oversight.
- Websites that had merely linked to Steyn’s offending Maclean’s article -- including U.S. based sites like FreeRepublic.com and Catholic Answers -- were offered as proof of Steyn’s contagious “Islamophobia”. This testimony startled and angered many of those site’s American readers, who inferred that their internet surfing was now being monitored by Canadian government agents. One site asked ominously: “Catholicism: A Hate Crime In Canada?”
- Unable to refute Steyn’s statistics and facts, or to deny that the portions of the article they found most offensive were in fact chilling quotations made by radical Muslims themselves, Steyn’s accusers condemned his “tone”, use of “sarcasm” and reliance upon “subtle intellectual arguments.”
Not a few bloggers noted ruefully that the last day of Steyn’s trial coincided with the anniversary of D-Day, and wondered what the Canadian soldiers who’d died on Juno Beach would make of their nation today.
Excerpted from "Tyranny of Nice: How Canada Crushes Freedom in the Name of Human Rights (And Why It Matters To Americans)" by Kathy Shaidle and Pete Vere to be released by Interim Publishing on September 29. To order TON, go to Tyranny of Nice.com
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