[T]he point of Steyn’s testimony to the hearing — echoing the sentiments of great thinkers throughout history including Voltaire, George Orwell, Noam Chomsky and Thomas Jefferson, just for a start — is so simple, and yet so in need of repeating in Canada, in Ontario, in Toronto today. The right to free expression is the most fundamental of all rights in a democracy — it is in fact the one right that allows the very existence of democracy.

Another frequently repeated truth is that if you don’t believe in free speech for the most offensive, hateful, moronic people you can imagine, you simply do not believe in free speech at all. It’s so self-evidently true that one would think it wouldn’t even bear saying. And yet it is a point constantly missed by a shocking number of people wielding influence in Canada today.

Among those missing that point, besides “human rights” commissioners, are the little Stalins running student unions and universities across Canada. Pro-life opinion is being stifled and suppressed at Saint Mary’s, Carleton, Calgary, Guelph, Lakehead, York, and elsewhere. Why are they so unwilling to defend their views with rational argument? One can’t help thinking it’s because they can’t.

If only the powerful people who disagreed with him [Steyn] — and with pro-lifers and whoever else — spent less time trying to shut him up and more time trying to argue with him, maybe we’d get somewhere.

Amen to that.

h/t: Mark Steyn

It was her response to Steyn’s criticism of OHRC’s silence on honour killings that shocked me.

“There are thousands of things that happen in the province of Ontario on a daily basis and we don’t comment on all of them,” she said.

But, I spluttered, women are being murdered.

“As I said, we are a small commission.

“There are many problematic things that happen in our community and we have to make choices because we can’t respond to everything,” Hall said.

So honour killings are merely “problematic”?

It’s a question of priorities. The OHRC hasn’t got time to worry about women getting killed for disrespecting a male relative. Barbara Hall has bigger fish to fry, like sitting in judgment of every word published by Canadian newspapers, magazines, and websites.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission is calling for Parliament to force all Canadian magazines, newspapers and “media services” Web sites to join a national press council with the power to adjudicate breaches of professional standards and complaints of discrimination.

For Barbara Hall and the OHRC, some things are simply more important than human rights.

h/t: Kathy Shaidle and Ezra Levant

Strangely, Miller even claims that there are essential differences between two independent translations of the ayatollah’s notorious teaching on treatment of shagged sheep. I beg to differ. I can’t comment on the original text because I don’t know Farsi, but the two English translations convey the same meaning. (Miller doesn’t claim to know Farsi, either.)

Last month, John Miller made this categorical statement:

[N]o one has verified that the Ayatollah ever said: “A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin.”

Steyn had quoted that in his Macleans magazine review of Oriana Fallaci’s The Force of Reason.

In response to Miller’s allegation, Steyn cited another translation of the ayatollah’s book of teachings.

[W]hen she [Fallaci] and I refer to the Ayatollah’s “Blue Book” we’re referring to that Nashr I Sharia’t edition of the Resaleh. It was translated into English, unabridged, by J Borujerdi and published in 1984 by Westview in London and Boulder, Colorado under the title A Clarification Of Questions.
[…]
Here is a page from Mr Borujerdi’s translation. In case you’re on a slow dial-up in Mexico and the j-peg’s taking its time a-loading, I’ll reprint a bit:

#2631. It is loathsome to eat the meat of horse and mule and donkey and if somebody makes coitus with them, that is an intercourse, they become unlawful and they must be taken out of the city and sold elsewhere.

#2632. If they have intercourse with a cow and sheep and camel their urine and dung becomes unclean and drinking their milk will also be unlawful and they must be killed and burned without delay, and the person who had intercourse with them must pay money to the owner. Further, if he had intercourse with any beast its milk becomes unlawful.

Miller acknowledges this as confirmation of, well, something.

I am willing to accept this as evidence that the late Ayatollah did indeed have something to say about having sex with animals.

But, for some reason, Miller insists that the translation used by Ms Fallaci impugns Muslims, whereas Mr Borujerdi’s does not.

Do you not see a fundamental difference between the Fallaci version and the version you now cite from A Clarification of Questions? You say in your most recent blog, “Now, it’s true that La Fallaci’s wording differs from Mr. Borujerdi’s. But so what?” I’ll tell you so what: Fallaci, and you, use the quotation to imply that the Ayatollah, and in fact a great many Muslims, condone bestiality. The quotes from A Clarification of Questions, on the other hand, make clear that he considered the practice “loathsome” and “unlawful.”

I shook my head when I read that. I hate to challenge Prof Miller’s understanding of the English language, but that is simply wrong. In fact, the two translations say substantially the same thing.

The quotations from A Clarification of Questions say only that eating the meat or drinking the milk of sodomised animals is “loathsome”. Like Fallaci’s quotation, Borujerdi’s quotation does not state that bestiality itself is “unlawful”.

In #2631, the pronoun “they” refers back to “horse and mule and donkey”, so it is the animals that become “unlawful”, not the “somebody” who had intercourse with them.  Likewise, #2632 calls for the burning of the animals, not of the persons who had intercourse with them.  Neither 2631 nor 2632 mandates a reprimand or any other kind of sanction against anyone who had intercourse with an animal, so the teachings present no “clear” condemnation of bestiality.

Miller has read into the texts something they do not actually say.

Moreover, neither the Borujerdi quotation nor the Fallaci quotation says that any Muslims “condone bestiality”, unless one mistakenly assumes that failure to condemn is equivalent to condoning.

John Miller is grasping at ever thinner straws in his efforts to avoid admitting that Mark Steyn is right about this.

UPDATE (4 Dec.): In no uncertain terms, Mark Steyn tells John Miller to get lost.

Along the way, he slips in yet another drive-by smear of his nemesis Mark Steyn.

My fact-check analysis of Steyn’s book excerpt and columns in Maclean’s told me that he does most of his research on blogsites. He was guilty of multiple distortions. I don’t think that is “responsible.”

He’s conducted a “fact-check analysis” of Steyn’s Macleans columns?  I hope he’s not referring to his repeatedly disputed assertion that a notorious quotation from Ayatollah Khomeini that Steyn cited was made up.

Be that as it may, since Prof Miller doesn’t receive comments at his blog, I sent a message via his “contact” box, asking him to send me a copy of his fact-check analysis.  When I sent my request, this friendly message popped up: “Thank you for your submission! I’ll be in touch with you shortly.”

UPDATE: That was fast.  Miller responded and says his findings are posted at his blog and a discussion ensued at the Canadian Journalism Project.

Miller levels two allegations against Steyn’s journalistic practices: (i) using “blogsites” as sources, and (ii) committing multiple distortions.  In Miller’s view, apparently, using blogs as references is ipso facto evidence of irresponsible journalism.

He must be very disturbed, then, to see newspapers and reporters making increasing use of blogs.  The Globe and Mail and the National Post actually give considerable server space over to blogs by reporters and columnists.

By no means is this happening only in Canada.  Some of the most venerable newspapers in the English-speaking world are allowing—indeed, encouraging—their reporters to blog: The Guardian, the Telegraph, and The Times of London.  In fact, the first newspaper blog I ever read back in the mid-90s was the Guardian’s.

The New York Times and Washington Post are getting in on the blogging act, too, but they’re American so perhaps that’s to be expected.

The worst of all, for Miller, must be to see his former employer, the newspaper he reported for and edited for many years, fall into the abyss of irresponsible journalism.  It’s sad but true: The [Toronto] Star posts reporters’ blogs at its website.  The Star has rather a lot, in fact: more than twenty.

That must just rot John Miller’s socks.

Be sure to read Binky’s rumination on the travails of Prof Miller.

The Blue Book “is a collection of quotes purportedly from him, but without any documentation”.
[…]
[N]o one has verified that the Ayatollah ever said: “A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin.”

Mr Steyn says that quotation appeared in Oriana Fallaci’s The Force of Reason.  Prof Miller rejects Ms Fallaci’s reliability because she wrote that book after 9/11, when she had morphed from an internationally respected journalist into an unmitigated Islamophobe.  Pre-9/11, she was sound; afterwards, unfortunately, she lost all good sense.

“In three books beginning with “The Rage and the Pride” (Rizzoli: 2002) and many interviews (after 9-11), she [Oriana Fallaci] attacked not only Islamic extremists but Islam itself, as well as a West that she said had become too complaisant and tolerant to realistically understand the threat.
[...]
Fallaci, unlike you, was charged in Switzerland and Italy for violating laws against vilifying religion, and many regarded her as a racist in her later years. So discount the late Oriana Fallaci as an unimpeachable source.

So, says Miller to Steyn, send me The Blue Book if you want—but it won’t prove a thing.

Like I said, Miller’s position is now unassailable.  His mind is made up before he reads the alleged source material.

But note, first of all, that Miller’s slagging of the latter-day “Islamophobe” Oriani Fallaci is a smokescreen.  The ayatollah’s book (or what purports to be the ayatollah’s book) was published long before 9/11 and long before Ms Fallaci got interested in it.  She is merely the immediate source of Steyn’s quotation.  As far as the veracity of the quotation is concerned, she is a side issue.

Note also that Miller’s approach is completely ad hominem.  Personal attacks on Fallaci and Steyn have no direct bearing on the authenticity of the quotation.

As others have pointed out, the impeccably liberal magazine Harper’s published the quotation at issue in its June 1985 issue.  (Not the exact wording, but close enough to be a translation of the same original text.)

The Ayatollah’s book of etiquette
By Ruhollah Khomeini and J. Borujerdi (Trans.)

From “A Clarification of Questions,” by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, published in 1985 by the Westview Press. Khomeini’s treatise sets out his position on 3,000 questions of everyday life. Translated by J. Borujerdi.
[…]
2,631. It is loathsome to eat the meat of a horse, a mule, or a donkey if someone has had coitus with the animal.

The URL for that quote is http://www.harpers.org/archive/1985/06/0010032, which appears to me to be a page at Harper’s website.  But, I dunno, maybe one of Mark Steyn’s “blog puppets” hacked the site.  You just can’t believe everything you read on the internet.

Assuming Harper’s did not fabricate the existence of the book, the question turns to Westview Press.  Is this a reputable publishing house with a track record of credibility and integrity?

Well, it bills itself as a “distinguished publisher of academic and college books in the social sciences, humanities, and sciences” and claims to have been selected as Publisher’s Weekly Publisher of the Year for 2007.  Sounds pretty respectable—but maybe the Westview Press fact checkers on duty when A Clarification of Questions passed through the review and approval process were all Islamopohobes.  Who knows?

Obviously, the accuracy of the ayatollah’s alleged quotation is an empirical question.  As such, it must be assessed using criteria that focus on the quotation itself and not on the political and religious views of the messengers who have passed it along.  What is the original provenance of the quotation? A good place to start, it seems to me, would be with the 1985 book credited to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and translated by J. Borujerdi.

For some reason, however, “Journalism Doctor” Miller would prefer to avoid such an investigation.  His mind is made up.

UPDATE (14 Nov.): Here’s another reputable reference to Ayatollah Khomeini’s published sayings: A commenter informs us that the Globe and Mail reviewed the ayatollah’s Little Green Book on 29 January 1980. Read the review here.

At a recent Halifax Free Speech debate, Prof Miller said that he was unable to locate the source of a quotation from Ayatollah Khomeini that Mr Steyn had cited in a column. The only place Miller mentioned searching for the quotation was on the internet.

That seems bizarre because the Ayatollah went to meet his maker in 1989, before the internet was in general public use. If someone were to quote from a 1989 book or a 1989 newspaper article and Miller wanted to verify the quotation, would he first resort to an internet search?  Then, if he failed to locate the reference online, would he immediately throw up his hands and declare the citation unconfirmed? That seems to be how he fact-checked Steyn’s quote from the ayatollah.

Last week on his blog, Miller went further and pronounced the quotation phony: “I suspect it was made up”.

Deborah Gyapong then found the complete text of the ayatollah’s book online. Miller was out-Googled again.

Steyn responds today. Bottom line: He’s going to send Miller a copy of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Blue Book, so he can read the troublesome quotation in its original context.

If I don’t hear from you, I’ll ship it to your employers at Ryerson, together with a polite suggestion that either you might like to apologize or they might be advised to offer refunds to any students who paid good money to be taught journalism “ethics” by your good self.

Will Prof Miller be able to salvage any credibility at all from this debacle?

h/t: Kathy Shaidle

UPDATE (13 Nov.): Prof Miller fires back: He’s not convinced that Ayatollah Khomeini is the source of the words that Mark Steyn and Oriana Fallaci attributed to him. Read my two cents’ worth on that here.