Reclassifying Censorship

Ezra Levant has begun to report on his attendance as an invited speaker before the U.S. Congress' human rights caucus meeting he attended July 11, 2008:

"Asma Fatima is the Second Secretary of the Embassy of Pakistan in Washington, D.C. She was on the panel with me at the U.S. Congress's human rights caucus meeting yesterday.

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She wants Western countries to ban critical comments about Islam -- and she mentioned the Danish cartoons of Mohammed in particular. It was well pointed out by others on the panel that Western defamation law deals with the vindication of improperly besmirched reputations using the truth, as determined by courts of law -- but when it comes to clashing religions, the truth of any faith is in the heart of the beholder. The only legal system that would hold the Koran to be "the truth", and subordinate every other faith beneath the Koranic truth, would be a sharia legal system, such as that in Saudi Arabia. In other words, she wants to replace our secular legal systems with a Muslim legal system. I appreciated the honesty.

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Fatima's demands for an end to the "defamation" of "Islam" was undone masterfully by two of my fellow panellists. The first was Zia Meral, of Turkey, who pointed out that the real "hurt" we ought to be looking at was not Fatima's hurt feelings, but the real physical hurt suffered by Islam's dissidents and he described, in gruesome detail, how non-Muslims -- and worse, apostates -- are dealt with in Muslim countries from Sudan to Malaysia to Saudi Arabia. I will not recount the horrific details....