Many Americans are familiar with Mark Steyn’s current run-in with the British Columbia Human Rights Commission. One of the most fascinating commentators on this controversy has been Tarek Fatah, a Muslim-Canadian author, activist and one of the founders of the Muslim Canadian Congress. He is well-known to Canadians who follow this controversy as a civil libertarian and a leading voice of Muslim moderates in Canada. He is also known to journalists as a candid interview.
Fatah’s position on the Steyn case is unique to many who have expressed strong opinions. He disagrees vehemently with Steyn and his book America Alone, against which the Muslim author has leveled some pointed criticisms. However, Fatah also publicly defends Steyn’s right to voice his opinions. As a best-selling Canadian author himself, Fatah has spared no criticism of the Muslim activists who denounced Steyn before the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.
While I may not agree with everything Fatah says in this interview, I felt it was important to offer his words unedited (except for a brief exchange in the middle, where a friend or family member chances in on the interview without realizing it). He offers some excellent insights and definitely lives up to his reputation for candor. That, and a fine sense of humor as he compares Canada’s human rights commissioners to angry mall cops and dares Canadian Islam’s more fundamentalist elements to drag him before the tribunal.
Please note that while the following is audio only.
Interview with Tarek Fatah, part 1
Interview with Tarek Fatah, part 2
Author: Pete Vere
Catholic Answers accused of promoting hate in Canada?
Unbelievable!
Only in Canada would a internationally-renown political writer like Mark Steyn be investigated for alleged hate speech because of a third-party posting on what appears to be the Catholic Answers web forum:
Click here for details.
Political state of grace: pro-choice politicians vex Church
From today’s Washington Times:
The debate over denial of Communion to pro-choice Roman Catholic politicians was rekindled last month when Bishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, Kan., told Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to refrain from partaking in the sacrament.
Similar actions by Catholic bishops in the past have led to strong debate among canon lawyers – those who function within the church’s internal legal system.
As Bishop Naumann joins the chorus of American bishops refusing Communion to wayward politicians, a new consensus is emerging among canon lawyers on the topic, which reached a boiling point four years ago surrounding Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Mrs. Sebelius, a Democrat, has been the subject of much speculation as a potential vice-presidential pick for Sen. Barack Obama.
“Eight or 10 years ago, when people first started advocating on this, they were voices crying in the wilderness,” says the Rev. Francis G. Morrisey, a retired professor of canon law at St. Paul University and one of the most respected canon lawyers in North America. “What we’re seeing is a consensus emerge; it’s more of a discussion now than a debate.”
Father Morrisey, who long had been among the most vocal opponents of denying Communion to politicians, admits that his thinking on the subject has shifted substantially, although he still does not think Communion should be denied in every case.
“It is very rare that truth is in the extremes,” he says. “We have to look at the individual conscience of each politician, and just when a person has overstepped the line.”
Read the whole article here.
Screwtape toasts the Commission
My dear Luciwa,
While I hope you will continue to consider me your uncle, I note you have broken up with my incompetent nephew Wormwood. Our family never understood what you saw with the lazy oaf; we always knew you were capable of much worse. And worse you have!
Your cunning has sharpened since leaving the isle for its scion between the seas. The breakup and the change in scenery have obviously renewed your vigor as a temptress. Particularly noteworthy are the new commissions and tribunals you have concocted as head of The Republican Underworld Defense’s Experimental Action Unit. These experimental commissions and tribunals function with more subtlety than those on the old continent during Screwtape’s era, or the Slavic revolutionary commissions inspired by my own generation.
Of course, you have chosen the best patients to oversee the experiment. Weak of soul and devoid of the talents needed to succeed on their own, they cling to officious titles and nebulous causes in order to bolster their sense of self-importance among their peers. Yes, these shaved apes zealously embrace tolerance, however, it is a tolerance devoid of charity. Charity is the Enemy’s chief weapon against us. How many souls have escaped into the Enemy’s clutches because of this horrid virtue?
There is no greater way to undermine charity than through the facade of tolerance. Few patients succumb to evil for evil’s sake. More often than not, the temptation comes as a lesser good. Tolerance is among the most effective and versatile of lesser goods. Yes, it requires some patience on the tempter’s part. Tolerance must be introduced to the patient in small doses – enough to cause the patient some discomfort, but not enough to inflame the level of moral outrage that rouses a patient into action. Thus tolerance is best prescribed as a moral painkiller, to suppress the pangs of conscience used by the Enemy to tether the patient to Himself.
The shaved apes occasionally catch on to our practices. The most perceptive among them coin expressions that force us to react quickly. ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’ is one such example, while ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing’ is another. We have now dulled these aphorisms into cliche, but at one time their prick awakened many a patient from moral slumber. And just because these cliches have lost their bite does not make them any less true.
In fact, good intentions and moral sloth have become the most effective tools of your temptress toolbox in carrying out your experiment. It was not long ago that shaved apes from your part of the planet were easily tempted into war, rape, racial and ethnic suspicions, and the repudiation of order within society. However, we grew too bold with the 20th Century wars we inspired in the old continent. Our patients have grown jaded and become suspicious of armed conflict between nations. So they choose tolerance to avoid civil unrest.
Don’t get me wrong: they still love their violence. They just prefer violence in smaller doses such as street gangs, abortion, soccer riots and anti-American protests. Anyway, that’s enough rambling from this old tempter.
Tolerance is why your commissions and tribunals have devastated the Enemy’s forces. In the name of tolerance, you have lulled your patients – that is, acclimate them through a series of self-compromises – into intolerance toward the Enemy and His doctrine. What thirty years ago the shaved apes denounced as unthinkable and a perverse inversion of nature is today the law of the land. This is no small victory you have wrestled from the Enemy – especially in the realm of marriage, which as the foundation of the family determines how the next generation is raised. (Or whether there will be a next generation.) Moreover, those who still defend the Enemy’s ways are ostracized from polite society and declared criminals.
Yes, a minority still cling to the Enemy’s doctrines. This is where your commissions and tribunals have proven versatile for the lowerarchy – in the name of tolerance no less! The majority who still believe in the Enemy’s will not speak up, less they themselves appear intolerant and unfashionable among their neighbors. (Or should that be neighbours?) You have correctly deduced that the greatest fear to most shaved apes is not the loss of their freedom, but of their temporal comforts. Thus your experiment has silenced their dissent, not through physical violence and torture, but through the fear of inconvenience. This is why you must continue to involve yourself directly in your experiments’ processes. Let them become even greater bastions of inconvenience.
Tolerance is also an efficient tool with which to browbeat the few who speak up for the Enemy’s ways. Let those who cling too tenaciously to the Enemy be ostracized and browbeaten into silence. Tolerance is not intended for them, however, physical violence would turn them into martyrs. This in turn would cause others to sympathize with the Enemy. Which brings us to the real genius of your commissions and tribunals: the violence they inflict upon the Enemy’s followers is not physical – but social, political and moral.
And so I commend you my impish niece. You have taught this old devil many new tricks, and others as well. Your experiment with the commissions and tribunals has surpassed even our most optimistic projections, decimating the Enemy’s ranks while providing us with countless new souls to feast upon..
Your affectionate uncle
Screwtape
Canadian Government not sure if Catholicism a ‘hate’ crime
Some of you may have come across the following from LifeSiteNews.com:
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CHRC Spokesman Will Not Say if Christian Teaching on Sexuality is “Hate”
Calgary Bishop Henry says “we’re into a new form of censorship and thought control, and the commissions are being used as thought police.”
By Hilary White
OTTAWA, May 30, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A spokesman for the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) has refused to say whether Christian moral opposition to homosexual activity constitutes a “hate crime”.
Pete Vere, a Catholic writer who has been working on the clashes between the Human Rights Commissions and Christians, asked Mark van Dusen, a media spokesman for the CHRC, “If one, because of one’s sincerely held moral beliefs, whether it be Jew, Muslim, Christian, Catholic, opposes the idea of same-sex marriage in Canada, is that considered ‘hate’?”
van Dusen replied, “We investigate complaints, Mr. Vere, we don’t set public policy or moral standards. We investigate complaints based on the circumstances and the details outlined in the complaint. And …if…upon investigation, deem that there is sufficient evidence, then we may forward the complaint to the tribunal, but the hate is defined in the Human Rights Act under section 13-1.”
“Our job is to look at it, compare it to the act, to accumulated case law, tribunal and court decisions that have reflected on hate and decide whether to advance the complaint, dismiss it or whether there is room for a settlement between parties.”
Currently, two Christian organisations have Human Rights Commission complaints leveled at them for their outspoken defence, one in the political realm and the other in print, of the meaning of natural marriage and Christian sexual morality.
Homosexual activist Rob Wells, a member of the Gay, Lesbian and Transgendered Pride Center of Edmonton, filed a nine-point complaint last February with the Canadian Human Rights Commission in which he accuses the magazine of promoting “extreme hatred and contempt” against homosexuals. The commission is investigating a similar case initiated by Wells against the Christian Heritage Party, a political party co-founded by pro-life Catholics and Protestants. The party holds that marriage can only exist between one man and one woman.
Vere quoted Father Alphonse de Valk, the founder and editor of Catholic Insight, in an article on Zenit Catholic news agency. Fr. de Valk said that Catholic Insight “bases itself on the Church’s teaching and applies it to various circumstances in our time.” He noted that some of the statements that allegedly promoted hatred and contempt against homosexuals were taken from recent Vatican pronouncements.
The issue before the CHRC, therefore, is whether Christian and Catholic teaching itself is considered under Canadian law to be “hate speech”.
Bishop Fred Henry of Calgary said the issue is whether Christians can continue to maintain their freedom of religious expression. Bishop Henry has also been through an Alberta HRC complaint by homosexual activists in 2005 after publishing a pastoral letter defending the traditional definition of marriage earlier that same year.
“I really feel that we are into a crisis situation here where we are experiencing a trumping of religious freedom,” said Bishop Henry.
Despite assurance from politicians that Canadian faith communities would not be affected when the government legalized same-sex marriage, the number of complaints against Christians have significantly increased since 2005.
Bishop Henry feels that Canada’s human rights tribunals are censoring the expression of traditional Christian teaching: “The social climate right now is that we’re into a new form of censorship and thought control, and the commissions are being used as thought police.”
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This comes as several Catholics and evangelical protestants are being hauled before Canada’s human rights tribunals for holding to the traditional definition of marriage. Here’s the audio from the interview: