Down With Everybody

Jimmy Carter, in The Guardian:

All Arab nations have agreed to recognise Israel fully if it will comply with key United Nations resolutions. Hamas has agreed to accept any negotiated peace settlement between the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, provided it is approved in a referendum of the Palestinian people.

The rest.

The province’s teachers say they have won a significant freedom-of-expression victory in a dispute with their employers over what information they may send home with students.

An arbitrator ruled this month that Southeast Kootenay school district violated teachers’ rights when it refused to allow them to give a union pamphlet to students for delivery to their parents. The pamphlet criticized standardized tests known as the Foundation Skills Assessment and urged parents to request that their children be excused from writing them.

The rest.

(Angus Reid Global Monitor) - More Canadians believe their government should follow Australia’s example and extend an apology to its Aboriginal population, according to a poll by Angus Reid Strategies. 53 per cent of respondents think an official apology is warranted, up 11 points since March.

The rest.

Huh. Maybe Steyn’s on to something. French Muslims seem to agree.

Tensions between Algerians, the larger community with an estimated 3.5 million people in France, and Moroccans, numbered at one million, have hobbled the project from the start.

But according to Abdelwahab Meddeb, a Tunisian-born poet and Islamic scholar, the council’s troubles also reflect the wider battle gripping the Muslim world, “between traditional Islam, official or state brands of Islam, and Islam as a militant ideology — i.e. Islamism.”

He believes the Paris mosque — though it will not say it outright — fears losing ground to the radical Union of Islamic Organisations in France (UOIF), the third major force in the CFCM with 10 of the board’s 43 seats.

…

For Meddeb, “the Paris mosque doesn’t know where it stands, just like the whole of traditional Islam. They are are petrified, they don’t dare confront Islamism.”

Intelligence reports suggest only a few dozen French mosques are under the influence of hardline radicals, but Meddeb says it is a “fact” that many more mosques are warming to the UOIF’s tougher brand of Islam.

The rest.

How did we know we’d see a Human Rights commission show up somewhere in this article.

“The rooms are reserved for teaching. But he can sit on a bench, pray in the corridors or anywhere. I cannot provide a room for him because if I did that, I would have to provide rooms for every other faith.”

Ms. Charest said she would provide a private room for prayer if the law required it.

A spokesman for the Quebec Human and Youth Rights Commission said employers must accommodate devout people of any faith who need a private space for prayer.

The rest.

A Malaysian Islamic court allowed a Muslim convert Thursday to return to her original faith of Buddhism, setting a precedent that could ease religious minorities’ worries about their legal rights.

Lawyers said the Shariah High Court’s verdict in the northern state of Penang was the first time in recent memory that a convert has been permitted to legally renounce Islam in this Muslim-majority nation.

The rest.

In 2003, The Economist declared that a “cautious case can be made that Canada is now rather cool.” The freedom-loving publication was impressed with the country’s support for gay marriage and marijuana decriminalization, which it felt were “both excellent liberal ideas.”

Five years later, The Economist is probably eating its own words – thanks to Canada’s astonishing rejection of a truly excellent liberal idea, freedom of speech.

The rest.

We’re sure Mackey will allow us to respond, in print, to a new afterword in his books.

Lloyd Mackey:

I would agree that human rights bodies have gone too far in believing that they are appropriate bodies to limit the speech or writing of Canadian media.

But I would also agree that it is quite in order for Maclean’s, free of the constraints of the tribunal, to work out with the CIC an arrangement which will permit the Islamic group to respond, in print, to some of Steyn’s allegations. (Incidentally, some of those allegations were direct and indirect quotes from some of Islam’s internal leaders and/or critics.)

The rest.

Sounds like a joyride to us.

I applaud the Stephen Harper government for declaring the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg as the first national cultural institution located outside the capital. I truly believe it will be a magnet for people around the world to learn about human rights issues and bring people to Winnipeg.

The rest.

Members of the Tian Guo marching band will complain to the Ontario Human Rights Commission if they don’t get to play at the Tulipfest.

“This is a principle issue. We’re Canadian citizens. I thought we were a multicultural society,” Lucy Zhou, whose 12-year-old son plays in the band, said yesterday.

Band members say they weren’t allowed to play at the Canadian Tulip Festival because they are members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement banned in China by the repressive Communist regime.

The rest.