Canada's Human Rights Commissions pawns in the hands of "political Islam"

Ain't it the truth, B'nai Brith?

"Rights bodies vulnerable to 'political Islam': B'nai Brith: 'Human rights commissions just don't get it,'" by Joseph Brean for the National Post, August 30: Canada's human rights commissions have shown "a disastrous combination of investigative zeal and substantive ignorance" that has left them vulnerable to abuse by "political Islam," the same ideology that has hijacked the United Nations human rights council, according to B'nai Brith Canada.

In a submission to an independent review of the Canadian Human Rights Commission's hate speech mandate, the Jewish human rights group states that "when it comes to this particular threat to human rights, human rights commissions just don't get it."

"Human rights commissions, like generals, are fighting the last war. They do not see new threats until they are overwhelmed by them. If, out of generosity than for no other reason, we should assume ignorance rather than wilful blindness, then the remedy is education and training," reads the report, written by B'nai Brith's senior legal counsel, David Matas.

His central thesis is that political Islam, an ideology that seeks to limit freedoms by marshalling the power of the state in defence of religion, constitutes the gravest threat to Canada's human rights system. He points to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, an international Muslim group that "successfully hijacked UN institutions to impose its own radicalized agenda," and to the utter failure of many UN anti-racism initiatives, which have degenerated into outright anti-Semitism.

The Canadian Islamic Congress, which brought three high-profile human rights complaints of Islamophobia against Maclean's magazine, and has close ties to the OIC, did not respond to requests for comment yesterday.

Tarek Fatah, the co-founder of the reform-minded Muslim Canadian Congress, said Canadians are "not at all" aware that Islamists are "using Western law to attack Western values."

"Neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals have any interest in this. Their effort is to appease these Islamist groups. They don't wish to offend, and therefore the Islamists can walk over and literally blackmail politicians and the liberal intelligentsia into not saying a word about it," he said.

Mr. Fatah described the Islamist strategy as two-fold. Non-Muslim critics of Islam are labelled "Islamophobic," which is equated in the public mind with racism, one of the most serious accusations in civil society. Muslim critics, however, such as Mr. Fatah himself, are labelled "apostates," which he called a "hidden death threat."

It is this context that Canada's human rights commissions have failed to appreciate, the B'nai Brith report says.

It singles out Barbara Hall, chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, for her "egregious" and "appalling" treatment of the complaint against Maclean's, which she dismissed as out of her jurisdiction, but went on to denounce the magazine for racism. Mr. Matas said this "made a human rights threat more acute."