The Latest on Mark Steyn

David Warren gives us the latest on Mark Steyn and the Canadian human rights courts:

As was perfunctorily reported on Thursday, the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, one of three HRCs to which Islamists took Maclean’s magazine for having published Mark Steyn, has self-protectively dismissed the case before it could come to tribunal. The Ontario HRC had previously dismissed it: but with an outrageous statement from its chief commissioner, Barbara Hall, to the effect that Maclean’s was guilty of publishing “hate,” nonetheless. She regretted that her commission had no mandate to try the case, but looked forward to a time when this mandate would be extended . . . .

All of the complainant’s expenses are paid by the taxpayer, as well as all of the overheads and expenses of the jet-setting “human rights” bureaucrats, who do all the prosecutorial work, as well as providing both judge and jury. The system is, in principle, indistinguishable from that in place during the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China. It was perpetrated by leftwing activists on the Canadian people while they were sleeping. It is a system of the activists, by the activists, and for the activists . . . .

Given what has already occurred, it is not enough to simply fire the people responsible for specific abuses. The Human Rights Code must be rewritten to eliminate future challenges to free speech and press, and the HRCs themselves taken down. The very notion that “your freedom ends when I begin to feel offended” must be shown for what it is: totalitarian flotsam in the foetid swamp of “politically correct thought.”

The full text of the article, which first appeard in the Ottowa Citizen , is reproduced on Real Clear Politics .