By Colby Cosh

NATIONAL POST, June 05, 2008

Whatever formal outcome emerges from the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal’s ongoing inquiry into the “Islamophobia” of Maclean’s magazine and Mark Steyn, our freedoms of expression and publication will have been well served by the attention now being paid to the human rights cadres’ ambitious policing of opinion. The BC HRT couldn’t possibly have acted any more like a kangaroo court this week if the members had pouches surgically attached to their abdomens. But, really, it might be more accurate to call them a chicken court, given their continual random clucking over what evidence to accept, what witnesses to certify, and what credentials make someone an “expert” on discrimination.

One exchange in the hearing room, however, deserves scrutiny more for its moral aspects than its constitutional ones. On Tuesday afternoon, Osgoode Hall law student Khurrum Awan was on the stand, testifying to the dire effects Steyn’s musings on Islam and demography had had on his soul. Mr. Awan is one of the students who have come to be known in the free-speech blogosphere as the “sock puppets”: he and three others were the complainants in the failed Ontario human rights case against Maclean’s, and the quartet had tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a settlement between the Canadian Islamic Congress and the magazine.

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