You Know What?

"And we have to tell them, you know what, if you're not going to allow us to do that, there will be consequences. You will be taken to the human rights commission, you will be taken to the press council, and you know what? If you manage to get rid of the human rights code provisions [on hate speech], we will then take you to the civil courts system. And you know what? Some judge out there might just think that perhaps it's time to have a tort of group defamation, and you might be liable for a few million dollars." YAHHH!!!

All right, so I made up the scream.

The rest of it is Khurrum Awan at a weekend conference, as quoted in the National Post. He's one of the guys that wants the government to tell Maclean's to run an article by an author of their choosing. When I read his speech above, I thought for sure he was doing a Howard "The Scream" Dean send-up. "You know what?...You know something?...We're not just going to New Hampshire...We're going to South Dakota, and Oregon, and Washington, and Michigan, and then we're going to Washington DC to take back the White House. YAHHH!!!"

If we have to get serious for minute, then it's worth remembering that Khurrum Awan is not one of the complainants against Maclean's. He's on TV and in the papers so much that it's easy to forget that fact (as the Post has). Mohamed Elmasry and Naiyer Habib are the official complainants, not Awan. The Post: "Awan is a recent graduate of Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, and one of the main complainants against columnist Mark Steyn and Maclean's magazine...[Awan] and his co-plaintiffs are demanding the magazine give Islamist messages space equal to the amount it devoted to Mr. Steyn's work."

No he isn't, and no they aren't. Awan isn't a co-plaintiff of anything. He's just in the papers a lot. The Post has done a hell of job at keeping this issue in the news, but like everyone else they have to be careful and avoid the Kool-Aid. In their June 9th editorial, they referenced Awan as a complainant more than a few times, and didn't mention Elmasry or Habib even once. That's a Kool-Aid alert if ever I saw one.

Awan obviously had an agenda by inserting himself into this complaint, and I don't think it had much to do with "free speech." For him, the issue seems to be more about about punishment for Steyn and Maclean's, and a healthy dose of publicity for himself. Last year, he was just some guy. 6 months later and he's in the papers every other day, and making the rounds on the TV circuit. It'll be interesting to see if he can handle it, but to judge by the speech above, he hasn't yet hired a publicist.

As for the punishment deal, I can't see it as being much else. If, as he says, the human rights code gets ammended, that doesn't mean there's any hope of a civil court telling Maclean's to run an article written by anybody, and a group defamation suit (does that exist?) wouldn't get the presses rolling either. So what's the answer? "A few million dollars."

Funny. This all started with the complainants and their allies claiming they just wanted an open debate. They've received all kinds of press, including a TV showdown with Mark Steyn, but it hasn't been enough. So the quest for an "open debate" continues. If they fail at that altruistic goal, it will now be about boring old cash?

Whatever the case, this is the first time that I have heard someone from the complainants' camp mention the possibility of the human rights commissions being brought to heel.

You know what? That's interesting.