It flashed around the world, with only minute variations, and has to be one of the oddest sentences ever written, as a headline or otherwise: “Saudi king pardons gang-rape victim.”
You know you’ve entered a strange country of the mind when the same sentence contains pardon and victim as verb and object. But you have found a passport to some utterly arcane territory indeed—a mix or compost of the absurd and sinister—when pardon, the verb, governs (as used to be said in those now archaic grammar lessons) as object this most grim noun phrase: gang-rape victim.
With victim we might associate verbs other than pardon: treat, sympathize, commiserate, care or pray for. These are the obvious candidates.
Saudi king offers deepest sympathy to gang-rape victim—no one would start at that sentence. Or Saudi king pledges all possible support to medical treatment of gang-rape victim. I don’t think that would leap off the newspaper page as something extraordinary. The world would read it, very likely think a little better of that Saudi king, and then go about its business.
But Saudi king pardons gang-rape victim. This sentence, as we say now, simply does not compute. We do not know a world in which gang-rape victims are the ones seeking or receiving pardons, from Saudi kings or other potentates either less or more exalted. We know instead a world where those who have been raped, and most especially those who have endured the near-unendurable torments and dehumanizing outrages of gang rape, inspire the most profound sympathy and concern.
Not so, it seems, in the petroleum kingdom, where a gang-rape victim receives a pardon from her king.
The headline springs from the story of a most unfortunate nineteen-year-old who was charged with the “crime” of being in a car with a man who was not a relative, when both were set upon by seven men, both raped—she most violently, for two hours, by all seven, and more than once. She was reduced to numbness, shock and near-suicide and suffered horrific psychological and physical trauma.
But in the Alice in Wonderland meets Kafka meets 1984 world of Saudi Arabia’s sharia jurisprudence, the gang-raped nineteen-year-old had to appear before her Islamic judges and be tried for the crime of sitting in a car with a man. At first, her sentence was, by the standards these judges set for themselves, considered lenient—a mere ninety lashes and some months in jail.
She—poor, tormented woman—seems to have had both the dignity and simple force of character to protest this monstrous verdict, and sought appeal with the help of a lawyer of some courage and resource. He—brave soul—protested the infamy of putting to the lash a woman who had already been gang-raped. For this noble and worthy exertion, he earned for himself severe reprimand and the threat of removing his right to practise law—such as the law is, and such as it is practised there—in Saudi Arabia.
She, for the temerity of appealing a mindless and barbaric sentence, and for the publicity that was the result of her appeal, had her sentence increased to two hundred lashes. Sharia justice is very scrupulous of its own honour, and the tenets of Islamic law as it applies to the monstrous horror of a woman being in the company of a man not her relative, will not be mocked by appeals to mercy or sense. Hence, two hundred lashes and six months in jail—the six months presumably necessary to give the stripes from the whip time to burn into scars.
The world at large found this excessive and, to be truthful, both odd and cruel, too, beyond even the odd and cruel bounds of the ancient codes that, sadly, still are imposed on so many of the women in so many countries.
Through her lawyer, with the help of some genuine human-rights organizations, the case was not allowed to rest on the pronouncements of the three-man tribunal that upped her lashes from ninety to two hundred. I expect the Saudi king felt the wave of revulsion and contempt that followed on the world’s press coverage of this outrage, and thus it came to pass that a nineteen-year-old who had been raped, shamed and tormented by seven men was relieved of the further shame and torment of two hundred lashes and incarceration in a Saudi jail for half a year of her young sad life. But “King pardons gang-rape victim” remains, in my mind, anyway, an atrocious declaration, a simultaneously absurd and mean statement.
He has no pardon to give her; she none to receive from him.
An apology, that is within his gift: for the fact that he presides over a kingdom where laws still exist to punish a woman who has been brutally raped, and where they multiply the lashes if she has the strength or character to decry such insanity.
Such a king should be seeking clemency, not confusing himself with the delusion that he has the moral or political authority to exercise it.
Time was when “human rights” was a truly large and noble idea. I associate the concept with, and its birth out of, some of the great horrors of the past century: the bestial depredations of the Nazis, their “race science” and death camps, the horrors of unbridled totalitarianism—under which, the whim of the rulers was sufficient warrant to mutilate, torture and destroy lives, collectively or individually or send millions to arctic slave camps—and the debasement of internal exile and psychiatric rehabilitation.
More currently, I associate real human-rights advocacy with the case of a young Saudi woman who was repeatedly gang-raped and then she—the victim—was charged and sentenced by a Saudi court to two hundred lashes and six months in jail for being in a car with a man not her relative. The sentence, after international protest, was voided—but that young woman’s case represents a real example of the violation of basic human rights.
What I do not associate with this deep and noble concept is getting ticked off by something you read in a magazine—or, for that matter, hear on television—and then scampering off to a handful—well, three—of Canada’s proliferate human rights commissions, seeking to score off the magazine. This is what four Osgoode Hall law students and graduates—a very definition of the “marginalized”—under the banner of the Canadian Islamic Congress have done after reading an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s America Alone in Maclean’s. The complainants read the article as “flagrantly islamophobic.”
Maclean’s magazine? Well, we all know what a hotbed of radical bigotry and vile prejudice Maclean’s magazine has been. Go away …
For what seems like a century, Maclean’s was no more “offensive” (that is the cant term of choice these days) than a down comforter on a cold day, and if Mark Steyn’s article offended them, so what? Not every article in every magazine of newspaper is meant to be a valentine card addressed to every reader’s self-esteem. Maclean’s published a bushel of letters following the article’s appearance; some praised it, others scorned it. That’s freedom of speech. That’s democracy. That’s the messy business we call the exchange of ideas and opinions.
But where does the B.C. Human Rights Commission, the Ontario Human Rights Commission or the Canadian Human Rights Commission come into this picture? Has anyone been publicly whipped? Has someone or some group been hauled off to a gulag? Is there a race frenzy sweeping the land?
Why is any human rights commission inserting itself between a magazine, a television show or a newspaper and its readers or viewers? Is every touchy, or agenda-driven, sensibility now free to call upon the offices of the state and, free of charge—to them, not their targets—embroil them in “justifying” their right to write and broadcast as they see fit? The Western Standard magazine, during the so-called Danish cartoon crisis, got hauled before the Alberta Human Rights Commission for publishing the cartoons that all the world was talking about. The action drained the magazine’s resources, but it was free to the complainant.
Meantime, real human-rights violations—threats of death against Salman Rushdie, riots after the cartoons, death threats against the artists, the persecution of Hirsi Ali, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto—neither inspire nor receive human-rights investigations.
Maclean’s and its columnists—especially of late—are an ornament to Canada’s civic space. They should not have to defend themselves for doing what a good magazine does: start debate, express opinion and stir thought. And they should most certainly not have to abide the threatened censorship of any of Canada’s increasingly interfering, state-appointed and paradoxically labelled human rights commissions.
Jennifer Lynch, chief of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, participated in this week’s ceremonies at the National War Memorial by laying a wreath. It’s nice to know the commission honours Canada’s veterans and the cause for which so many fought and died.
The cause, distilled to its fundamental point, was freedom. The Second World War framed that cause in the starkest form imaginable. It is impossible to conjure up an example more pervertedly perfect of the odiousness (Churchill’s term) of tyranny than Hitler’s regime. There was only one freedom in Hitler’s Germany, as there would have been only one freedom in Europe or the world should Hitler’s insatiable nightmares been realized: his freedom to cancel every freedom of everyone else.
One lesson that grieving millions took from that war was that the only certain antitoxin to the “after-Hitlers”—those lesser or greater avatars of tyranny an always-changing world will almost certainly force on us again—was freedom. The second lesson was how massive the cost, how massive the sacrifice, to extinguish tyranny once it’s taken hold in one country and marches on to others.
This is what makes Remembrance Day so solemn—remembering those costs, those sacrifices, that are tallied in millions of dead and wounded. Freedom does not fall from the air. Freedom (ask the vets) is never free.
At the heart of this freedom the Second World War taught us so dearly to cherish is the notion of the individual’s intrinsic or, as we say now, human right to think, speak and write as he sees fit, circumscribed only by certain time-tested laws (defamation, libel, public safety) evolved over centuries and subject to the oversight of a trained and independent judiciary.
The essential point is that the most basic rights, those of freedom of thought, speech and expression, belong to the individual. That is why we call them intrinsic or human rights. They are rights that inhere in our basic status as human beings. They are our most profound rights, belonging to our character as human beings. And, for that reason, we neither multiply them trivially nor dilute their force and meaning by placing them in piecemeal cohabitation with less fundamental accommodations. Like the right not to wash one’s hands while working in a fast-food restaurant, or the alleged right to strip past a certain age, or the right not to be offended by a Mark Steyn article.
These “cases” may have merits, and some wild-eyed philosopher may articulate those merits. But they do not abide, as rights, on the same plane as freedom of thought, speech and expression. They may be something, but what they are will not be inscribed on any cenotaph: They are not human rights.
Human rights, the real ones, are ours from the beginning. They are not bestowed by the state, because the state does not “own” them; they are not a state’s or a ruler’s—or, for that matter, a human-rights commission’s—to give. It equally follows that they are not a state’s or a commission’s to abridge, circumscribe, tamper with or make a toy of.
The concept of human rights, real human rights, has been long with us. But only in modern times did we learn what immeasurable darkness falls on the world when they are nullified. The butcheries of Auschwitz and Buchenwald followed as a straight and bitter line from Hitler’s assumption of absolute power in 1933 and his cauterization and extinction of the concept of freedom in the German Reich. Nothing less than the Holocaust underwrites the modern understanding and appreciation of human rights.
Human rights are as profound and central a concept to the democracies of the world as we have. They constitute the core of human freedom. They are the antidote to tyranny. They are fundamental.
Of late, however, in Canada, this most painfully acquired understanding has been utterly unmoored. The various provincial human rights commissions and their federal godfather have been cutting away at the core of, and extending into utter fatuity, the term “human rights.” They are capricious, agenda-driven, a great mishmash of political correctness and “right thinking” bulldozing away at the basic freedoms of thought, speech and expression while they, under some osmotic impulse, investigate, prescribe and torment with zealous and self-righteous abandon.
Which is why I find Ms. Lynch’s presence at Remembrance Day ceremonies odd. Because Canada’s human-rights commissions are diluting and trivializing and thereby offending the very core of the concept that gives them their name. And a Remembrance Day ceremony is an awkward occasion to be reminded of that.
I read in Thursday’s newspaper of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s determination to declare Bill C-10, dealing with tax credits that support the making of Canadian films, a matter of confidence. C-10 is an attempt to tie which films receive tax credits to certain government-determined standards with respect to violence and sex.
Bill C-10 has, to my mind, rightfully inflamed what we often refer to as the artistic community. It is not quite, as is argued, censorship, but it is close enough to it to be worrisome. When it comes to the making of films, the matter is best left, however imperfectly, to the judgment and skill of the writers and filmmakers who will actually make them. Mrs. Grundy and her prissy avatars should be kept out of the screening room.
I’m still puzzled, however, that Mr. Flaherty—and, by unquestionable extension, Stephen Harper—should make this a matter of confidence. Should a government fall over an argument about tax credits and whether a film is too “sexy” for its overseers? Good luck with the next election.
Were Mr. Harper, however, looking for an issue centred unequivocally on a matter of the most profound principle, I think we would have heard from him by now on the wretched intrusion of human rights commissions into the domain of this country’s free expression and free speech.
These commissions have stealthily migrated from their original and defined mandate to prevent discrimination in housing or employment, from deeds of discrimination, to an activist and capricious role of monitoring speech or thought. Under the hopelessly elastic and malleable rubric of “any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt,” they investigate and rule on everything from bishops to magazine editors, from genital surgery to hand-washing protocols at McDonald’s.
A single complaint triggers their attention and zeal. Their procedures conform to a pattern known only to them. They leave those complained against to endure the process entirely on their own resources, while those who originate a complaint are nursed with all the resources of the state. They travel wide waters. Their writ runs from letters to the editor to the furthest reaches of the Internet.
Complaints may be started and then idly dropped by the complainant, dropped without penalty, or indeed, remark, from the commissions concerned. This was the case just recently when one of the complaints against former publisher Ezra Levant, for printing the controversial Mohammed cartoons, was withdrawn by the Calgary imam who first brought it. Mr. Levant, for nearly a year, bore the cost of the aborted “investigation” and wore the shadow of having been under investigation for exposing people to hatred and contempt—not a pretty allegation for a citizen of an exemplarily tolerant country. And then, poof, the process ends, without comment, apology or compensation. Eerily, another on the identical issue still continues.
The rulings of human rights commissions have the flavour of an agenda. They seem to have a problem with traditional religious organizations and religious speech. They are the very hall prefects of “progressive” political correctness, answerable in their judgments and methods, it seems, only to themselves.
These commissions have wandered so far from their original purpose as to be, in these matters of speech and expression, disowned by the respected civil libertarian Alan Borovoy, who, more than any other man, brought them, in their early restricted mandate, to birth. They are, in their very real capacity as censors and judges on what is to be said and not to be said, a blot on the central dynamic of any self-respecting democracy.
Yet Mr. Harper, with all his tactical prowess, has let the controversy over human rights commissions go on without so much as a comment. The Ontario Human Rights Commission, outlandishly, can decline the now-celebrated complaint against Maclean’s and then proceed to mercilessly slag Maclean’s in public, and Mr. Harper’s Tories sheepishly let the whole mess pass by without a word.
He will have Mr. Flaherty say that an election will be triggered over the grey question of tax credits and film content. But he is mute as a beach rock over a fundamental offence to democracy. So, too, it should emphatically be noted, is one of Pierre Trudeau’s successors as leader of the Liberal Party, Stéphane Dion. Liberals used to have regard for free speech.
Real Liberals—take a bow, Keith Martin—still do. Dr. Martin has presented a motion calling for the repeal of the most noxious provisions of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Dr. Martin still knows what a real parliament is about. Mr. Harper, and Mr. Dion, should adopt his cause and tame these commissions.