The right to be loathsome
Censoring Hossain would be just as unprincipled as censoring Levant or Steyn
Lorne Gunter, National Post Published: Friday, February 01, 2008
The tough thing about free speech is that the only true test of one's belief in it comes from defending those one most vehemently opposes -- not merely those one agrees with. The case of Salman Hossain, a Bangladeshi-Canadian university student from Mississauga, Ont., illustrates my point.
This past Monday, I penned a column castigating Canada's politically correct bureaucrats, politicians and human rights investigators for abandoning the free-speech tenets of Western civilization in the face of a few loud complaints made by radical Islamists against writers they felt had slighted their faith. Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn are two prominent victims of this "suicide by tolerance," whereby governments and human rights commissions permit the desire of favoured interest groups not to be offended to trump our ancient and immutable right to free speech.
Then on Wednesday, the National Post's Stewart Bell exposed Mr. Hossain as a troop-hating, terrorist-sympathizing pimple who has recently been posting Internet death wishes against Canadian soldiers, civilians and politicians.
Many readers put two and two together -- my Monday column and Stewart's Wednesday article -- and wrote me saying, "You were right about our elites' unwillingness to defend our traditions, just look at the way they are refusing to act against Salman Hossain." But, frankly, that's not what I meant at all.
Mr. Hossain's remarks are vile -- both disturbed and disturbing. He has argued that the "best way" to get our troops out of Afghanistan is a "mass casualty" terror attack on Canadian civilians or soldiers here in Canada. "Canadian soldiers in Canadian soil," are "legitimate" targets for "Muslim militants." Our casualties in Afghanistan are "well deserved" because "if we could have enough of our soldiers killed, then we'd be forced to withdraw."
When police in Germany last year arrested Muslim militants plotting to blow up the Ram-stein Air Base, Mr. Hossain called them his "German brothers" and crowed, "We should do that here in Canada as well. Kill as many Western soldiers as well so that they think twice before entering foreign countries on behalf of their Jew masters." And when Defence Minister Peter MacKay was visiting troops in Afghanistan at Christmas, he wrote on a chat site, "I pray that the Taliban kill our MacKay motherf---er."
Mr. Hossain's worldview is repugnant. His arguments cannot go unanswered. But the instinct to arrest him for his views is as much a threat to free speech as the willingness of Canada's various human rights witch-hunters to bully Messrs. Levant and Steyn into silence.
My number-one point about free speech is: We don't want state functionaries determining which political opinions are and are not legitimate to express. In order to prevent your opinions and mine from being deemed illegitimate some day, we must today permit Salman Hossain to indulge in his malevolent rantings.
While he comes close to counselling others to commit criminal acts, he never quite crosses the line into incitement of a criminal offence. If he ever did, we have laws to deal with that, and he should be prosecuted under them to their full extent. But so far, this cheerleader for murder, dismemberment and mayhem has merely revelled in a desire for violence, he hasn't actually plotted to commit any or have others commit some.
In one of the most important free-speech cases to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court -- 1969's Brandenburg vs. Ohio -- Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan leader with views comparable to Mr. Hossain's in their de-testability -- was acquitted of "advocating
crime, sabotage, violence or unlawful methods of terrorism" after giving speeches calling for "revengeance" against blacks and Jews. As the justices unanimously agreed, free speech could only be curtailed when it degenerated into "incitement to imminent lawless action." Government "cannot constitutionally punish abstract advocacy of force or law violation."
Our governments would be failing our Western traditions if they refused to surveil Mr. Hossain. His obnoxious writings have earned him police suspicion of his potential to commit terrorism or spur on those who would. But governments would also be weakening the rights of all of us if they tried to shut up this hateful creature before he crossed the line into criminal conspiracy.
lgunter@shaw.ca
