It is only a matter of time before human-rights censors come after Muslims. Like the Bible, Muslim scripture contains a lot of material that, by modern standards, would be considered sexist, homophobic or even anti-Semitic. One statement attributed to the Prophet Mohammed, for instance, declares that “Judgment day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Muslims will kill the Jews, and then the Jews will hide behind stones or trees, and the stone or the tree will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ ”
Is this the sort of thing that a human-rights mandarins will someday judge as “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt” — to quote the applicable language from the Canadian Human Rights Act (HRA)?
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Since 9/11, there has emerged a cottage industry of pundits seeking to explain why so many Muslim nations remain mired in dictatorship and violence. A leading theory is that Islam has no tradition of separation between mosque and state, and that traditional Muslim religious authorities tend to be totalitarian in outlook — the result being that Muslim societies are intrinsically hostile to the liberal values required for democracy to prosper. Whether or not you see any truth in this political stereotype, there is no denying that the CIC’s efforts to forcibly shut up Islam’s critics play right into it.
