Canada and Other Matters of Opinion

by Rex Murphy

  If there was genuine “rage” in what is too loosely called the Muslim world that rage was stimulated more by the fake inserts than the original cartoons. And they were inserted by those who first wanted to foment outrage, and who acted subsequently as spokespersons for the “Muslim community.”

  There was manipulation of the data, as the scientists say, interference with the actual occasion for the event. Parts of this crisis were in this sense a fraud. Why this point is not emphasized escapes me. Almost equally puzzling is why—with the original cartoons easily accessible on the Internet—they have not universally been judged as being, by the standards of modern caricature, as infinitely innocuous and bland. Certainly, not riot or fatwa material.

  THE CASE OF SALMAN RUSHDIE IS FRESH AGAIN | February 24, 2006

  Everyone will recall that when Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses, which contained what has been described as an irreverent depiction of the Prophet Mohammed, he became the object of a death sentence.

  No less a figure than the spiritual leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa requiring Mr. Rushdie’s execution, and the execution of all who had been involved in publishing the book, and called upon all “zealous Muslims” to pursue this grim end. This was not just a piece of token bluster on the Ayatollah’s part. It might be useful to recall the language of the edict: “In the name of God Almighty. There is only one God, to whom we shall all return. I would like to inform all intrepid Muslims in the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses, which has been compiled, printed, and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran, as well as those publishers who were aware of its contents, have been sentenced to death. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they find them, so that no one will dare insult the Islamic sanctities. Whoever is killed on this path will be regarded as a martyr, God willing. In addition, anyone who has access to the author of the book, but does not possess the power to execute him, should refer him to the people so that he may be punished for his actions.” It may also be useful to remember that, although Mr. Rushdie went into hiding and was under armed guard for years and has (so far) survived, others were not so fortunate. There were riotous protests in India, Pakistan and Egypt that caused several deaths, and Mr. Rushdie’s Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, barely survived an assassination attempt.

  Nothing in the modern culture of the West prepares us to comprehend the notion that a person can and should be sentenced to death for what that person writes, or that treats the publication of a novel, however poorly written, as, in itself, a capital crime.

  Everything written, if it has anything in it, will offend someone, and if the mere taking of offence were to amount to a licence to kill the offender, well, the world would be sadly underpopulated of novelists, columnists, bloggers and the writers of editorials.

  The publication of twelve cartoons in a Danish newspaper has triggered an even greater firestorm in portions of the Muslim world. There have been bomb threats against the newspaper; on Thursday, in Gaza, masked gunmen threatened to kidnap European citizens and to target European offices; protesters in Pakistan took to chanting “Death to France” and “Death to Denmark,” and, on an official level, there have been calls from several governments in the Arab world to shut down the “offending” newspaper and fire its editor.

  The connection with the Rushdie case is clear. Whole swaths—not all, be it noted—of the Muslim world believe that if their religious sensibilities are offended, they have both the right and the duty to threaten violence and death to those they choose to regard as offenders. They demand retraction and apology and trail their demands with threats of kidnapping and death.

  Furthermore, they insist that their values and their codes apply outside their own religion and their own countries. The insolence of such demands is astonishing. Considering the treatment that the press in some of these countries accord Christians and Jews—a recent mini-series on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion aired in Lebanon and Egypt, the frequent anti-Semitic editorial cartoons in major newspapers—it is levitatingly hypocritical, as well.

  It is worth noting that, however offensive the cartoons of the Prophet may have been, they cannot be as offensive as the many real suicide bombings that have been executed in the Prophet’s name. If portions of the Muslim world want to protest about a real offence against their religion, they might radically take to the streets in great masses to condemn what fanatics do in the name of their religion.

  All this is occurring in the wake of yet another searing illustration of the clash between fundamentalist Islam and Europe: the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was killed in 2004 by a Dutch Muslim extremist angered by the filmmaker’s depictions of Islam.

  Artists, writers and the press in Western democracies have the right to create and write what they please. And so they must. It is why we are democratic. And no fundamentalism, of religion or any other variety, should be given the slightest leverage over that right.

  It is not one of the many refreshments of irony that whenever, here in the West, we hear of some desperately out-of-date school board, or some “backwoods” librarian ruling a progressive book on sexuality “unsuitable” for certain age groups, or there is “resistance” to some of the more graphic “lifestyle guides,” all hell, so to speak, breaks out from the artistic and social activist camps. Prophecies of “theocracy rampant” rend the tormented skies, Hollywood types lend their plastic credibility to a fundraiser against censorship. But a filmmaker gets stabbed to death in Holland, or Hirsi Ali wanders the world hedged with bodyguards, or innocuous cartoonists are under death sentence—all instances of a blatant real-time theocratic view of the world—and the silence of the progressives is deafening. Someone should make a movie about it.

  COMING TO A HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION NEAR YOU | January 26, 2008

  Our esteemed human rights commissions are so busy these days, it worries me. The number of these gimlet-eyed scrutineers is, after all, finite.

  There is, therefore, only a limited store of intellectual energy and moral fervour for them to call upon. In a brutish world, righteousness is not inexhaustible; virtue, like oil, has its peak moments and, with their current agenda, Canada’s HRCs may run out of fuel.

  Alberta’s human rights commission, one of the keenest, a noble avatar of those old censor boards that used to guard public libraries from “steamy” literature and “brazen” language, is trying to contain—I think that is the only proper verb here—Ezra Levant.

  Mr. Levant has, as the jargon expresses it, “gone before” the commission to answer for the putative crime, offence, tastelessness of his (now-defunct) magazine’s, the Western Standard, publication of the Mohammed cartoons. But even the sturdiest tribunal can summon forces too large for it to manage. And even the deepest probing commissioner, alert as a tuning fork to the harmonies of political correctness, should have quailed before the thought of putting Ezra Levant under state-mandated interrogation.

  His initial hearing is an Internet hit. He videotaped it, you see, and, against the urgings of the commission, placed in on the World Wide Web.

  His performance, a marathon aria to free speech, looks to outpace even Jessica Alba beach footage as a web draw. More than 400,000 visitors have YouTubed Mr. Levant (a Daniel, I say, a Daniel come to judgment on Canadian free speech!). He is as a tidal wave breaking against a lone and solitary craft.

  So, Alberta’s HRC is, to put it timidly, busy with Ezra Levant. And now, three others have had the courage, folly, zeal, or, if you wish, the zealously courageous foolishness, to take on Maclean’s magazine and Mark Steyn. The martyrs in question are, respectively, the Ontario, B.C. and federal HRCs. It’s a busy time in the world of magazine censorship—and a bull market for the litigious and offended. John Donne comes to mind: “Lawyers find out still litigious men, whom quarrels move,” and, if you are both, well, Canada is ripe with HRCs that want your business.

 
; The question is, of course, does an HRC, or even a pack of them, really want to take on an institution as beloved as Maclean’s? Next only to the Eaton’s catalogue of sacred memory, Maclean’s is a talisman of the Canadian way, it is Tim Hortons in print. For more than a century, Maclean’s has stimulated minds, its back copies have intellectualized many a dental crisis; rolled up, it has been the fly swatter of choice for thousands. Approach Maclean’s at your peril.

  But, in addition, do they really want—after Ezra’s example, mind you—to call Mark Steyn, the Victoria Falls (“The Smoke That Thunders”) of prolific columnists, into one of their style less chambers to “explain himself”? If Mr. Levant contains multitudes, how to describe Mr. Steyn? He is a prodigy of immense resource and industry. Compared to him, Trollope was a slacker, Dickens a wastrel, and Proust a miniaturist. He inundates. Books, columns, blogs and obiter dicta in a thousand venues—if Mr. Steyn goes before one or all of these commissions, he will be firing off columns between questions. He’ll write a column on a question while it is being asked. I urge our guardians to consider their own interests: stay a while before essaying this profitless and useless venture.

  A Maclean’s/Steyn confrontation, in tandem with the prairie whirlwind we all know as Levant rampant—this is too much at one time for the meticulous and tidy tribunals that alone are our guardians against every stray thought that might fracture our fabulously delicate Canadian sensibilities. While they are preoccupied with Steyn-Levant; overwhelmed, exhausted and undone by Steyn-Levant; battered, borne-down on and befuddled by Steyn-Levant; who will watch out … for us?

  Who will there be to read before we read, and tell us what is proper for us? Who will there be to edit the editors, to copy check the copy checkers? Who will shield our vulnerable law students, and who will tend to the commission’s most industrious serial complainant? There is one person so eggshell brittle that he has drummed up a fierce amount of business for the HRCs. Is so loyal a customer now to be ignored because the Steyn-Levant tsunami is about to rumble mercilessly on shore?

  Mostly I fear that, if the HRCs are tied up, Canadians will be reading, unguided, what they choose to read, deciding for themselves what they like and what they don’t, discarding a book or passing it to a friend, liking a column or cursing one, lit only by the light of their own reason.

  The horror! Before we know it, we’ll have an unstoppable epidemic of free speech, free thought and freedom of the press. And, surely, no one wants that. Otherwise, why would we have human rights commissions?

  Canada’s human rights commissions are a blight and an absolute contradiction in terms. They are not about “human rights.” They are censor boards, vehicles of activist politics masquerading as “judicial” tribunals. They are riven with an unspoken agenda, procedureless and grotesquely unfair, and structurally biased against anyone who falls under their determined gaze. They are an offence against Canadian democracy. (See also the section beginning on page 252.)

  It has been very pleasing to see how vigorous has been the resistance to the notion that Canadians, in their exercise of the right to free speech, free thought and a free press, have to genuflect to the rulings of provincial or federal human rights commissions. It is less pleasing that it has not been even more vigorous. Two people, both of them highlighted in the piece above, have been the most durable and worthy champions of real freedom of speech, and the most durable and worthy opponents of the commission commissars: Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn.

  Ezra Levant has shown the fortitude of a lion and the tenacity of a bulldog in his contest against the state’s bureaucratic infringement of democracy’s most fundamental concept. It is too bad that because Mr. Levant is self-identified as a conservative his efforts are seen or painted as a partisan campaign. Though to be fair, many from a part of the political spectrum Mr. Levant would never visit have had the wideness of mind to support him. He has waged a costly and I am certain an emotionally draining war, and he has waged it on first principles. He deserves great respect for this.

  Mark Steyn, as I took care to note, is relentless in this cause. And he is right, which is even more important. His “visibility” gave a charge to the campaign against Section 13, and his appearances before the B.C. Commission, on TVOntario, and subsequently before a committee of the Ontario legislature, gave energy and style to the cause. It does not matter what Mark Steyn’s politics are: on this issue he is defending a concept that enables the idea of politics. The two of them deserve an Order of Canada citation for their work, and a generous country would throw in a good party for the both of them after the award as well.

  OBAMA RISING

  POWER OF SPEECH | October 20, 2007

  Mention John Kennedy and most people will quickly recall the famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” I am not sure why this is so.

  To begin with, the line was not his own. It is commonly ascribed to his courtly speechwriter, Ted Sorensen. But even were it really Mr. Kennedy’s, it is still difficult to see why it clots the pages of every modern quotation book and is so often invoked as a touchstone of public eloquence.

  It is clumsy, for one thing. “Ask not what your country can do for you” is a very odd sequence in modern English. You don’t run into a lot of “ask nots” these days. “Ask not” is an idiom of a time long gone; it has the feel of the overtly poetic about it, the fake suede of greeting-card prose.

  The best we can say of Kennedy/Sorensen is that at least they were trying. Mr. Kennedy was still alert to the rapidly thinning air of a quite ancient tradition: one that understood that public utterance, especially on ceremonial occasions, should strive for elevation, elegance and dignity. Mr. Kennedy may have been the last major leader in the West to carry that ambition. In his case, it probably survived because he was a leader who grew up under the long shadow of Winston Churchill, one of history’s great word-smiths, a man to whom leadership was inseparable from the ability to fashion speech, to draw from words something of their elemental power to bind and inspire.

  The energy with which Mr. Churchill composed his illustrious speeches is common knowledge. So, also, is the care he gave to his studiously offhand or “spontaneous” remarks, jibes and witticisms. One of those same witticisms tells us so: “I’m just preparing my impromptu remarks.” Mr. Churchill represents the end of that great tradition, which is at least as old as the great Latin and Greek orators.

  Abraham Lincoln is perhaps his only superior, for his oratory had a lyric and affecting quality that Mr. Churchill’s did not. Mr. Churchill could stir: he was a master of the sonorous and martial mode. Mr. Lincoln could move: much of his language had the subtlety and strange power we associate more with poetry than the platform. Mr. Lincoln was quiet and deep. Mr. Churchill reached for the accents of defiance and glory—as he said himself, to “give the lion’s roar.”

  The volumes of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien are now competing in our nation’s bookstores, but we shall not be going to them to savour or resavour favoured passages from some of their most memorable speeches. That’s because there aren’t any, which is not as dismissive as it sounds. It may still be possible for leaders to write and give great speeches—Vaclav Havel certainly tried during his tenure—but it is getting more difficult with each advancing year. There was no evidence, for instance, of any exertion toward eloquence in this week’s Throne Speech, whose entire elegance was contained in the person who read it.

  We are in the culture of the sound bite. We remember of Mr. Mulroney his onslaught against John Turner (“You had a choice, sir …”), just as of Mr. Chrétien we recall a telling and petty riposte (“For me, pepper, I put it on my plate.”) Considering the great number of debates in which these two participated, the number of state occasions during which they spoke, this is a pathetic harvest.

  The premiers fare no better. Dalton McGuinty, Jacques Parizeau or Ralph Klein, to take but three large names, may all be remembered in time, but they will not
cheat oblivion because they crowded the public mind with imperishable speech.

  It is not, by any means, all their fault. Mr. Churchill spoke in an age, despite its horrors, more confident of its public men, and during a time when politics itself still retained some association with noble practice. He could speak the largest of words—such as “honour” and “country”—and make appeals to the glory of his people, and neither those words nor appeals sounded hollow in his mouth.

  Today, the large words have shrunk, and even in their shrunken stature do not fall obligingly from lips that have had them “poll-tested” and “focus-grouped” beforehand. Even in the many debates we have had on Afghanistan, I cannot recall any sentiment expressed touched with the fineness and depth of that most honourable undertaking.

  From Lincoln’s day to ours, soapbox to satellite, the means of communication have proliferated. Yet, not even Google will search up a more affecting and noble tribute than a few words spoken at Gettysburg nearly a century and a half ago.

  Modern words can blanket the whole world in an instant, and that is as long as most of them will endure. They steal from light nothing but its speed.

  It is, to my taste anyway, one of the most interesting questions associated with Barack Obama’s ascendancy into American politics: whether Mr. Obama’s almost single-handed revival of the set speech marks something of a return to what many had thought—in this text-messaging, TV-saturated, electronic age—was the utterly defunct practice of stage oratory.

  Marshall McLuhan and other masters of vague speculation thought that TV (the Internet had not yet been spawned) had killed the speech. My intuition suggests quite otherwise. The speech, and the ancient unkillable art of demagoguery which is its malign offspring, may find new vigour, and deeper application in the wild regions of twenty-first-century communication. Words are older than the many BlackBerrys and text-messages that maul them, and far more potent.