At least one of my Maclean’s colleagues reckoned that Ezra Levant and I blew it in Ottawa, but I felt we made modest incremental progress. There was a spring in my gait as I left Parliament, and then I thought about the difference between the Big Thinker Ignatieff and the Small Leader Ignatieff and it left me vaguely depressed. I chanced to read a Tarek Fatah column in the National Post headlined “Has Jack Layton Converted To Islam?” As is now traditional—a tradition going all the way back to 9/11, oddly enough—Ramadan and Eid were marked by the usual Islamoschmoozing from the political class, but Mr. Layton went a little further than just the usual enthusiastic pose with burka-clad women (the Ignatieff photo op: I assume they were Muslim women, and not just fellow Liberal MPs preferring to go incognito). The NDP leader’s Ramadamagram to his Muslim “brothers and sisters” informed them that “We are not celebrating the end of Ramadan, but thanking Allah for the help and strength given throughout this special month.”
As Mr. Fatah added: “We? Oui!”
As far as one can tell, Mr. Layton is not technically a Muslim, he just plays one at Eid. Maybe next year he could grow out his moustache and turn up with the full Khomeini. Given that he’s a secular lefty, I doubt he could stick Islam for a week. But nonetheless he feels it’s entirely natural for him to go around “thanking Allah” as “we” celebrate the end of Ramadan: Believer For A Day.
Tarek Fatah’s National Post colleague Jonathan Kay noted the curious evolution of Jack Layton’s NDP: on the one hand, it runs candidates who support gay marriage; on the other, it runs candidates who favour the introduction of sharia. This is the practical model of philosopher Ignatieff’s musings on “collective rights.” An effective political leader (if you’ll forgive me applying the designation to the head honcho of the NDP) collects specimens of approved identity groups and presents his party as the smoothest mediator between these jostling collectivities. And for the moment, as long as he doesn’t get confused and turn up to the Eid banquet in his outfit for the Gay Pride parade, he can just about pull it off.
But do collective rights come at the expense of individual rights and thus, as Ignatieff suggested, lead to tyranny? The evidence suggests so. In Britain, a land with rampant property crime, undercover constables nevertheless find time to dine at curry restaurants on Friday nights to monitor adjoining tables lest someone in private conversation should make a racist remark. An author interviewed on BBC Radio expressed, very mildly and politely, some concerns about gay adoption and was investigated by Scotland Yard’s Community Safety Unit for Homophobic, Racist and Domestic Incidents. A Daily Telegraph columnist was arrested and detained in a jail cell over a joke in a speech. A Dutch legislator was invited to speak at the Palace of Westminster by a member of the House of Lords, but was banned by the government, arrested on arrival at Heathrow and deported. The state, in mediating group relations in a multicultural society, is ever more assertive. If you point out that, for example, European Union prohibitions on “xenophobia” would be unconstitutional in the United States, the more thoughtful Europeans will respond ruefully that things like the First Amendment presuppose a social consensus that across the Atlantic simply doesn’t exist. There are certainly points of tension between post-Christian Euro-hedonists and the Continent’s restive Muslim populations. But Hindu businessmen and gay parenting and all the rest? The reality is that, as Ignatieff discerned, collective rights inflation diminishes the core rights, and provides a very wide licence for tyranny.
In Canada, I feel our campaign these last two years has made some modest progress on the restoration of lost liberties. But one small step forward for this northern Dominion, and a whole bunch of backward stumbles elsewhere. Under President Obama, the United States has now joined the UN Human Rights Council, an entirely fraudulent body which protects the world’s thugs and on which the Organization of the Islamic Conference dominates. In 2008, it rammed through a resolution restricting speech that “constitutes an act of racial or religious discrimination”—in effect, a planetary group-defamation law to insulate Islam from criticism: collective rights on a global scale, and at the cost of individual ones. The U.S., as part of its outreach to the Muslim world, has decided to go along with that after weeks of negotiations with that well-known human-rights beacon, Egypt. “Freedom of expression,” said Hisham Badr, the Egyptian ambassador, “has sometimes been misused.”
Indeed. The good news is such “misuse” seems unlikely to be much of a problem in the future. The free world is conceding great principles, inch by inch but faster and faster.
Pages: 1 2
