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One of the greatest ideas, if not the single most defining ideal, of Western culture is the value of freedom of speech. Unfortunately, for the rest of the Western World, the United States of America is the only Western country that has this basic human right built right into its constitution — via the First Amendment.
Earlier this month the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC), had announced that it had filed a complaint with three “human rights commissions” in Canada against Maclean’s a Canadian weekly newsmagazine and Mark Steyn, author of a October 2006 piece in the magazine that the CIC had issue with.
The CIC accuse Maclean’s and Steyn, of advocating the idea that Islamic culture is incompatible with Canada’s liberalized, Western civilization. They insist that this is not the case and want opinions that express that banned from publication.
Two separate groups, one Provincial and one National, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Canadian Human Rights Commission, have agreed to hear the case.
The article that has caused this outrage, adapted from Mark Steyn’s book America Alone, which argues that Western society is on the verge of destruction, by unassimilated Muslim immigration.
While I admit that this idea is somewhat controversial, I do agree with Steyn’s work and further believe that America Alone is one of the most important books written in recent years.
The problem is that the CIC’s complaints and the “human rights commissions” agreeing to hear the case only serves to prove Mark Steyn’s point. Muslims who immigrate to Western countries, at an alarming rate, refuse to accept the values of those Western countries.
The banning of opinions, even ones that may not be “popular,” go against everything that Western culture’s notion of freedom of speech stands for. Mark Steyn is right, through reverse assimilation Islam is gradually conquering the West. Unfortunately for Canada, they have seemed to fail to realize this — I just hope the same doesn’t happen here in America.
