The Internet saved my tongue: how I beat Canada's "human rights" censors.

• Author: Levant, Ezra
• Position: Culture and Reviews

EARLY ON THE morning of February 13, 2006, nearly 40,000 copies of the Western Standard rolled off the presses in Edmonton, Alberta. Tucked inside that week's issue of Canada's only national conservative magazine, on pages 15 and 16, was a story about the international controversy over a Danish newspaper that had printed a dozen satirical cartoons featuring the prophet Muhammad. Our article, which was illustrated by eight of the cartoons, would soon trigger a three-year government investigation of whether I, as the Western Standard's publisher, had violated the rights of Canadian Muslims by "discriminating" against their religion.

The investigation vividly illustrated how Canada's provincial and national human rights commissions (HRCs), created in the 1970s to police discrimination in employment, housing, and the provision of goods and services, have been hijacked as weapons against speech that offends members of minority groups. My eventual victory over this censorious assault suggests that Western governments will find it increasingly difficult in the age of the Internet to continue under mining human rights in the name of defending them.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

By commissioning the Muhammad cartoons, the Danish newspaper, the Jyllands-Posten, was making a point about the West's fear of insulting Islam. A Danish author and longtime leftist activist named Kare Bluitgen had written a children's book about Muhammad, but because some Muslims consider visual depictions of their prophet taboo, Bluitgen found it difficult to find an illustrator. Jyllands-Posten editors wanted to highlight this Danish culture of self-censorship and show the newspaper's support for freedom of speech by publishing their own cartoons of Muhammad.

A few of the images were critical of radical Islam, but the criticism wasn't any harsher than that routinely heaped on other religions and ideologies in the editorial cartoons of Western newspapers. One showed Muhammad in heaven, saying, "Stop, stop, we ran out of virgins!" as suicide bombers floated up to the clouds. Another depicted Muhammad wearing a turban in the shape of a bomb.

The cartoons were published in September 2005, but they didn't make international news until the next year, when a group of Danish imams went on a world tour to drum up Muslim anger against Denmark. The imams brought three additional cartoons along with the original dozen. Those three additions, which hadn't been published in Denmark or anywhere else, were grotesque, including one showing Muhammad having sex with a dog. They were the imams' own handiwork, added to the bundle in case the Jyllands-Posten efforts didn't achieve the desired response.

Up until that moment, the phrase cartoon violence had summoned to mind images no more harmful than Wile E. Coyote fighting the Road Runner. But after the imam tour in the spring of 2006, more than 100 people died in purportedly spontaneous riots against the cartoons. Half a dozen terrorist plots to avenge the artwork were uncovered across Europe. Demagogic governments from Tehran to Damascus seized the opportunity to deflect attention away from their own problems.

Every newspaper and TV station in the Western world covered the story of the riots, but almost none of them showed the original cartoons themselves. The media's self-censorship was based on the same fear exhibited by Denmark's illustrators. As a journalist, I was appalled by this cowardice masquerading as sensitivity. Western Standard editor Kevin Libin and I knew our readers would be interested in this story and would want to see for themselves what all the fuss was about.

As our publication date drew nearer, we couldn't help noticing that no other mainstream publication in Canada was planning to reprint the cartoons. We'd be the first, and possibly only, one. We sent the magazine to our printers on Friday, February 10, for printing over the weekend. The next day, word of the deed somehow leaked. By Sunday our decision had become national news, even though no one except our staff and our printers had seen the spread.

I must have done 100 interviews that week. The first would be particularly memorable. At 7 a.m. on Monday, February 13, while our magazine was being trucked from our printers to the post office, I appeared on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Eye Opener radio show in Calgary. The amiable Jim Brown was the host, and the other guest was Syed Soharwardy. All I knew about Soharwardy at the time was that he was a Pakistani immigrant to Canada who worked for IBM and had a part-time gig as a preacher at a tiny mosque in a northeast Calgary strip mall. Soharwardy had very few followers--about 40 congregants in a city that was home to thousands of Muslims. But he was a big-time media hound, always trolling for interviews while the city's more prominent imams rolled their eyes.

I explained the newsworthiness of the cartoons. But...