Canada as repressive as Afghanistan

Compare what is happening to journalists in Afghanistan to what Canada, with it's vaunted Human Rights Council, is trying to do to Mark Steyn. Granted Canada is not going for the death penalty, but the end results are the same, to shut up voices critical of Islam.
Afghan journalist sentenced to death

An Afghan journalist sentenced to death for distributing an article that allegedly violated Islam is actually being punished for reporting by his brother about abuses by northern warlords, a media group said Wednesday.
Sayed Parwez Kaambakhsh, 23, was sentenced to death Tuesday by a three-judge panel in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif for distributing a report he printed off the Internet to fellow journalism students at Balkh University.

Steyn: The Canadian 'Human Rights' Sham
NRO: Free Steyn

the radical Islamic front group calling itself the “Canadian Islamic Congress” has filed mindcrime complaints against author Mark Steyn with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, in an effort to stifle criticism of Islam and intimidate other writers. It’s the legal jihad in action.

One other word of caution. The AP article carries a by line from a Afghan reporter named Amir Shah, whom I mentioned in the case of the incident in Afghanistan involving Marines who were ambushed and then accused of killing several civilllians which resulted in a spineless general ordering the unit out of the country.

Free Mark Steyn

Via Doug Ross and reprinted here. Other bloggers, please join in and send a message to the Canadians, politely, of course.

Mark Steyn and Macleans Magazine stand accused of offending the human rights of Osgood Hall law students and the Canadian Islamic Congress for publishing excerpts of the book America Alone.

According to the Ottawa Citizen's John Robson, complaints have been filed with the first three Canadian Human Rights commissions. The first two have agreed to "launch inquiries" and the third is reportedly undecided.

1) Canadian Human Rights Commission
344 Slater Street, 8th Floor, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 1E1, Canada
Telephone: (613) 995-1151
Feedback: Contact form
Commissioners: Jennifer Lynch, Q.C. - Chief Commissioner, David Langtry - Deputy Commissioner, Aimable Ndejuru, Carol McDonald, Harish Chand Jain

2) British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal
1170 - 605 Robson Street, Vancouver, B.C. V6B 5J3, Canada
Telephone: (604) 775-2000
Feedback: Contact form
Email: BCHumanRightsTribunal@gov.bc.ca
Tribunal members: Chair Heather MacNaughton, Tonie Beharrell, Barbara Humphreys, Barbara Junker, Lindsay Lyster, Diane MacLean, Ana Mohammed, Kurt Neuenfeldt, Abraham Okazaki, Judith Parrack, Marlene Tyshynski

3) Ontario Human Rights Commissions
180 Dundas Street W. 7th Floor, Toronto ON M7A 2R9
Telephone: (416) 326-9511 (Human Rights Office)
Telephone: (416) 314-4500 (Head Office)
Email: info@ohrc.on.ca
Commissioners: Chief Commissioner Barbara Hall, Patrick Case, Pierre Charron, Ruth Goba, Kamala-Jean Gopie, Alana Klein, Raja Khouri, Fernand Lalonde, Christiane Rabier, Ghulam Abbas Sajan, Bhagat Taggar, Richard Théberge, Maggie Wente, Albert Wiggan

Let them know -- politely -- where you stand.

Unqualified Beclowning

When you write something stupid and try to match wits with Mark Steyn, the results are not pretty.

Hello, Mr Henley? Anybody home in there? Those are quotation marks, because they're someone else's words - not the blatant racism of the racist douchebag Steyn but of a prominent Scandinavian imam. It's tempting to say to Jim Henley, "Douchebag, douche thyself", and leave it at that. However, in an attempt to divine his thinking on the subject, I'd like to ask him this:

What is it precisely about this statement that makes it "blatantly racist"? That a Euro-Muslim imam uttered the words? Or that an "Anglo American" (if I can be said to count as such) was culturally insensitive enough to reveal the mullah's words to a wider audience? Is the problem Krekar's "frank bigotry", or "Anglo Americans" boorish enough to let the cat out the bag?

Or, if that's too much for him, perhaps he could at least issue a clarification.

Go check out the comments in the first link. Priceless.

H/T: Hot Air.

UPDATE: The idiot finally realized his mistake.

UPDATE: I see I made an embarrassing mistake in attribution in the original text of this piece. That was my error, careless on my part, and I apologize for it. I stand by the rest of what I wrote.

Weak. So I guess he'll still consider Steyn a racist douchebag but offer no evidence to make his case.

Unbelievable.

UPDATE II: LGF checks in. This is going to be fun.

UPDATE III: Remarkably, he's come back for more abuse.

Right now I and my new friends who follow links from NRO appear to have a major disagreement about how central the misattributed quote was to that blog entry specifically, and my claim that Steyn is a racist more generally. This merits another visit on my part. At the moment, though, I’m simply embarrassed by my mistake, so that will come later.

What an idiot.

World Should Give Thanks For America

I give thanks for Mark Steyn.

But on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens – a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan – the United States can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply.

Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in – shoring up Afghanistan's fledgling post-Taliban democracy – most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base.

If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It's not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history.

Steyn on Amnesty Capitulation

Mark Steyn labels this travesty Capitulation, from A------ to Z.

Are you a fine upstanding member of the Undocumented-American community? That's to say, are you (if you'll forgive the expression) an illegal immigrant?

Great news! Being illegal is now perfectly legal! Just for being one of the circa 12 million people who shouldn't be here, you can now be here indefinitely! If you were living and working in America illegally before Jan. 1, 2007, you're now entitled to one of the new Z-1 "probationary" visas. And your parents and spouses are entitled to one of the new Z-2 visas, and your children to the new Z-3 visas.

Don't worry: It's not an "amnesty." Every politician in America is opposed to amnesty -- if not the concept, then at least the word. That's why the visa starts with the letter that's furthest away from the one "amnesty" begins with. "Z" stands for zellout . . . no, hang on, zurrender or Zapatista, or some other word way up the other end of the alphabet from "amnesty." But the point is, at a stroke there will be no more illegal immigrants. Because being illegal means you're now legal.

Read the whole thing.

This bill needs to die quickly.

Steyn: No Yankee Ingenuity

Mark Steyn laments our lack of ingenuity and puts it in historical perspective.

The glamor boys of the moment -- Obama, Edwards -- run on watery pabulum from the easy-listening oldies playlist. Five years after 9/11, we're not looking ahead, we're looking back -- in the legislature, in the courts, in the media: Bush's "lies" about WMD, the Senate vote to authorize the "use of force" against Iraq, Joe Wilson's trip to Niger, Joe Wilson's self-leaking of his mischaracterization of his trip to Niger . . . rear-view mirror stuff, all of it, endlessly. On the dark shapes looming in the windshield -- Iran, Sudan and much else -- we operate ineffectually through yesterday's institutions, like the U.N. and the EU. Two billion dollars from American taxpayers go to the government of Egypt and in return they give Hezbollah's TV network a slot on the state satellite system. At the gas pump, we fund Hugo Chavez and the Saudi radicalization of Muslim populations around the planet. The obvious transformative technology -- an alternative to the global economy's oil dependence -- is as far away as it was on Sept. 10, and the Alexander Graham Bells of our day are busy inventing the ''self-repairing condom'' -- a marvel of nanotechnology to be sure, but not one with much strategic use unless you can supersize it and unroll it down every Wahhabi mosque.

Read the whole thing.

Headed for Defeat?

Certainly the Democrats are striving for us to lose in Iraq. That much is clear. Their all-consuming hatred for the President has rendered them into unpatriotic, vengeance-drenched enemies of freedom. Still it's sobering to read the brilliant Mark Steyn reminding us of the perhaps inevitable conclusion.

So "the Murtha plan" is to deny the president the possibility of victory while making sure Democrats don't have to share the blame for the defeat. But of course he's a great American! He's a patriot! He supports the troops! He doesn't support them in the mission, but he'd like them to continue failing at it for a couple more years. As John Kerry wondered during Vietnam, how do you ask a soldier to be the last man to die for a mistake? By nominally "fully funding" a war you don't believe in but "limiting his ability to use the money." Or as the endearingly honest anti-war group MoveCongress.org put it, in an e-mail preview of an exclusive interview with the wise old Murtha:

"Chairman Murtha will describe his strategy for not only limiting the deployment of troops to Iraq but undermining other aspects of the president's foreign and national security policy."

"Undermining"? Why not? To the Slow-Bleed Democrats, it's the Republicans' war. To an increasing number of what my radio pal Hugh Hewitt calls the White-Flag Republicans, it's Bush's war. To everyone else on the planet, it's America's war. And it will be America's defeat

Steyn: Climate Holocaust Denier

The denier community continues to grow. Consider me onboard.

Our Thought For The Week comes from the Boston Globe's Ellen Goodman: "I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future."

That would be yours truly: the climate holocaust denier. I wrote last week about "global warming," or "cooling," or "climate change," or (the latest term) "climate disruption" -- for those parts of the world where the climate isn't really changing but you get an occasional blip: a warm day in winter or a flurry of snow in late April, or (for British readers) a summer's day where it rockets up to 58 and cloudy instead of being 54 and drizzling. As a result of my climate holocaust denial, I received a ton of letters along the lines of this one:

"Your piece gave most of my students, most of whom are conservative, a laugh. A journalist's word against six years of peer-reviewed research conducted by world authorities on the subject.

"But, as one my student's [sic] put it: 'Steyn's piece could prove valuable: We often run out of toilet paper here.'

"How is it that you can make a living writing what you do is a wonder. But then, the vulgar wish to be deceived, after all.

"Steve Pierson,

Professor of English."

Presumably Professor Pierson signs himself "Professor of English" to establish his credentials for opining on how I can make a living writing. To be honest, I'm flattered to know I'm being discussed at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, N.Y.: Did I displace Shakespeare? Or Maya Angelou? Or the class where you learn not to put an apostrophe in noun plurals? Has Professor Pierson's judgment of my writing also been peer-reviewed by world authorities?

Read the rest.

UPDATE: Blue Crab Boulevard has More About Alternative Theories.