International support for blasphemy laws has been growing in recent years with Muslims pushing for them in Europe and Obama seemingly advocating for them at the U. N. In Quebec, a bill has been introduced that will target those who “write against the Islamic religion.”
Robert Spencer reports, initially quoting from The National Post:
“Bill 59 assigns new powers to the Quebec Human Rights Commission (QHRC) to combat hate speech, as well as a variety of other provisions meant to protect against extremism, by censoring speech that promotes ‘fear of the other.’ Ominously, the bill would allow the QHRC to pursue websites that in its estimation describe and denounce Islamism….Jacques Frémont, the commission’s president, explained that he planned to use the requested powers to sue those critical of certain ideas, ‘people who would write against … the Islamic religion … on a website or on a Facebook page.’”Come and get me, coppers. Bills like this effectively stifle honest discussion of how jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism, and to make recruits among peaceful Muslims. Legislation of this kind reveals why Islamic supremacist groups such as Hamas-linked CAIR and the purveyors of the “Islamophobia” myth so assiduously and relentlessly label any opposition to jihad terror and any discussion of its motivating ideology as “hatred”: they know that understanding of the importance of the freedom of speech is breaking down in the West, and the concept of “hate speech” is gaining wide acceptance among people, especially young people, who don’t realize what a weapon that concept would be in the hands of the powerful to silence dissent. They know that Useful Idiots like Jacques Frémont are busy helping them remove obstacles to their ultimate goal, and so they pat him on the back applaud his “resistance to bigotry.”
Social media users would not be the only target of this bill. The National Post has more:
The details of Bill 59 are chilling. Article 6 would “give the QHRC the power to initiate legal proceedings before the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal without having to wait for complaints from the public.” Article 3 allows members of an identifiable group as well as people outside the group to make complaints triggering suits for hate speech before the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal.If this has a déjà vu quality to it, it should. Bill 59 would pave the same well-travelled road to suppression of speech and opinion that led, via the similar Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, to the infamous pursuit of journalists Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant by Muslim activists determined to stifle normative expressions of opinion. The public’s disgust at such bureaucratic despotism happily led to its repeal at the federal level.
While this is taking place in Canada, it’s worth noting that a 2014 poll showed that here in America 51% of Democrats support criminalizing hate speech (i.e. blasphemy against Islam and other “others”).
Watch Alan Dershowitz discuss whether free speech should “yield to religious sensibilities”:
In 2014, Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced “legislation to examine the prevalence of hate crime and hate speech on the Internet, television, and radio to better address such crimes. The Hate Crime Reporting Act of 2014 (S.2219) would create an updated comprehensive report examining the role of the Internet and other telecommunications in encouraging hate crimes based on gender, race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation and create recommendations to address such crimes.”
While the bill died in committee, the rise of blasphemy laws in western nations is worrying for those who support freedom of speech.
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