We are all too familiar with the phenomenon of Twitter and Facebook police knocking on the doors of people in Europe for apparently typing out a ‘crime’. Is uttering a threat a crime? Yes, of course. Is libel a crime? It can be, yes. And both of these crimes can be typed out on Twitter and Facebook. Is bigotry a crime? Well, in Europe it is. In North America it isn’t. Is criticizing the writings of Islam a crime? Well, in Europe it certainly can be. In North America it isn’t. The same goes for typing out that you hate someone or something, or a group of someones or somethings.

But Canada may be the first to allow speech crime creep. As we speak, the federal government is proposing a bill that would criminalize ‘Islamophobia‘. What is this thing? Well, the fun part is that it can mean a whole lot of things, depending by whom, and on whom, it is used. It’s main raison d’etre though is to criminalize the criticism of Islamic writings, most especially as those writings relate to stealth and violent jihad in our western Dar al-Harb.

At the end of the 1970s, Iranian fundamentalists invented the term ‘Islamophobia’ formed in analogy to ‘xenophobia’. The aim of this word was to declare Islam inviolate. Whoever crosses this border is deemed a racist. This term, which is worthy of totalitarian propaganda, is deliberately unspecific about whether it refers to a religion, a belief system or its faithful adherents around the world. [Pascal Bruckner]

Whether Bruckner is right or not doesn’t really matter as this is how it actually works in practice. So-called hate-crime laws are popping up all over the place in Canada, such as Quebec’s Bill 59. And police are starting to pop up all over people’s doorsteps who may have typed the wrong thing. Now it sounds like Antonio¹ may have uttered a threat, and as we agree this could be a crime. But Antonio was also charged with ‘public incitement of hatred’. This is the brilliant European legal invention of allowing speech crime creep – in Canada!

Canada is inching toward a broadly-based law that would codify “Islamophobia” as a hate crime without even defining Islamophobia or demonstrating that it is a phenomenon requiring legal action.²

¹ Toronto Star, Sidhartha Banerjee; ‘Montreal police see rise in hate speech complaints, arrest man for alleged social media posts‘
² Daily Caller, David Krayden; ‘Canada Inching Toward ‘Islamophobia’ Law‘