Western Standard Sued for Publishing Dreaded Cartoons
Charles Johnson
Thu Mar 30, 2006 at 8:21 am PST • Views: 568
Canadian political journal The Western Standard is being sued for hate speech by the Alberta Human Rights Commission, doing the bidding of Syed Soharwardy, a radical Calgary Muslim imam: Western Standard sued for publishing cartoons. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)
Imam Soharwardy first tried to have the police arrest the Western Standard’s editor. When that didn’t work, he went to the idiots at the Alberta Human Rights Commission—clearly understanding who would take his side.
Earlier this month, the Western Standard was sued in human rights court for publishing the Danish cartoons. It’s been ten years since I’ve graduated from law school, and I’ve never seen a more frivolous, vexatious, infantile suit than this.
But that’s the point — this complaint is not about beating us in the law. Freedom of speech is still in our constitution; we’ll win in the end. It’s a nuisance suit, designed to grind us down, cost us money, and serve as a warning to other, more timid media.
The hand-written scrawl and the spelling errors were what first disgusted me with the suit; but the arguments were what really got me. The complainant, Imam Syed Soharwardy, a former professor at an anti-Semitic university in Saudi Arabia, doesn’t just argue that we shouldn’t have published the cartoons. He argues that we shouldn’t be able to defend our right to publish the cartoons. The bulk of his complaint was that we dared to try to justify it.
He argues that advocating a free press should be a thought crime.
Frank says: