Mark Steyn: Sticks and stones
Mark Steyn, National Post | 16/10/13 | Last Updated: 16/10/13 8:46 AM ET
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Five years ago, I and my fellow rightwing blowhard Ezra Levant were in the midst of a spirited campaign to rid Canada of its disgusting censorship laws and restore a centuries-old tradition of free speech to a land that, in the name of “human rights,” had surrendered it too easily. The Canadian Islamic Congress had brought simultaneous complaints before the federal, Ontario and British Columbia “human rights” regimes against Maclean’s magazine for publishing an excerpt from my book. Despite the advantages of triple jeopardy, they struck out all three times, and at the federal level their suit so damaged the reputation of “Section 13” (the national censorship law with a 100% conviction rate) that last year Parliament finally repealed it.
But the urge to litigate disagreement is never far from the surface in contemporary discourse. So both Ezra Levant and I find ourselves back in court yet again. In my case, I’m currently being sued in the District of Columbia by Dr. Michael Mann, the eminent global warm-monger, for mocking (in America’s National Review) his increasingly discredited climate-change “hockey stick.” So Dr. Mann has sued for what his complaint to the court called “defamation of a Nobel prize recipient.” (For those who are not fully conversant with the idea, the "Hockey Stick" graph purports to show global climate for the last 1000 years. Oddly enough, during that time period the "Hockey Stick" fails to show the Medeival Warm Period or the Little Ice Age, but does show a dramatic upturn in temperature during the 20th century. The various algorithms used to derive the "Hockey Stick" graph have not, to my knowledge, been released for impartial scrutiny and review by other scientists either.)
In fact, Dr. Mann is not a “Nobel prize recipient.” But, as Donna LaFramboise recently pointed out in these pages, he has spent many years passing himself off as one. The nearest he got to a Nobel was as one of several thousand contributors to one of various reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which in 2007 shared a Nobel Peace Prize. So Dr. Mann is a Nobel laureate in the same sense that my mother is: She’s Belgian, and Belgium is in the European Union, and the European Union was collectively awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year. My mum does not claim to be a Nobel prize winner, but Dr. Mann did, on an industrial scale, including in his publicist’s bio, his book jackets and his website — until, in the wake of his false complaint, the Nobel Institute in Oslo declared that he was not a Nobel laureate at all. In that sense, Dr. Mann is, indeed, a fraud. It is a fascinating legal question whether a man guilty of serial misrepresentation can, in fact, be defamed. But it’s not that fascinating, and certainly not worth the court’s time and seven-figure legal bills.
Other than that, it’s a pretty basic free speech case. Dr. Mann, whatever his other gifts, is an inveterate name-caller. Consider his recent Guardian column defending his “hockey stick” from the bad case of brewer’s droop it’s acquired over the last 15 years of non-warming: Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish professor named (unlike Mann) by Foreign Policy as one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers,” is dismissed as “career fossil fuel industry apologist Bjorn Lomborg”; Judith Curry, a member of the National Research Council’s climate research committee, winner of awards from the American Meteorological Society, and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences, is billed by Dr. Mann as “serial climate disinformer Judith Curry”; and anyone else who has the impertinence to disagree with him is lumped under the catch-all category of “climate change deniers.”
As masters of devastating put-downs go, Dr. Mann isn’t exactly Oscar Wilde. Nevertheless, plonking and leaden and witless as his insults are, he has a perfect right to make them. Unfortunately, he’s one of those pathologically insecure types who feels he should be able to dish it out but that he shouldn’t have to take it. So he is suing because he didn’t like being described by Rand Simberg of the Competitive Enterprise Institute as, metaphorically, “the Jerry Sandusky of climate change” (a line I quoted). Jerry Sandusky is the Penn State football coach currently serving 30-60 years in the slammer for sexual abuse of children. In court, our notably unimpressive judge Natalia Combs-Greene declared, even before we got anywhere near the trial, that she was with Dr. Mann: “The court agrees with the arguments advanced by Plaintiffs. To place Plaintiff’s name in the same sentence with Sandusky (a convicted pedophile) is clearly outrageous.”
So what? It’s equally outrageous to call anyone who disagrees with you a “denier,” a slur with a very particular pedigree, and one which would be distressing to any critic of Mann with family who died in the Holocaust. And in the case of Dr. Mann, he was in fact (which is what courts used to concern themselves with) a colleague of the pedophile Sandusky at Penn State University for six years. So it’s not in the least bit “outrageous” to put Mann and Sandusky in the same sentence, even if only when compiling the Penn State faculty list, or drawing up guest invitations for its now indicted president’s Christmas cocktail party. If Dr. Mann doesn’t like being linked to Penn State’s scandals, he should get a new job.
There are 7-billion people on this planet, which the environmental crowd thinks is way too high. But, until they do as a U.S. weatherman and Dutch artist recently did and start having vasectomies and tying their tubes to reduce their carbon footprint, all seven billion are entitled to insult Dr. Mann, just as Mann is entitled to insult me and Judith Curry and anyone else who has the temerity not to prostrate themselves before him. It is remarkable that an American jurist is too obtuse to grasp this, and to presume that her court has the right to adjudicate who can and can’t be “placed in the same sentence.”
Meanwhile, my old comrade Ezra Levant is back in court, at the behest of Khurrum Awan, a plaintiff in the Maclean’s suits. These days, Mr. Awan is a solicitor at the impeccably respectable Regina law firm of MacPherson Leslie & Tyerman, and has been named by CBC Saskatchewan as one of its “Future 40,” which is not an accolade ever likely to befall Levant or me. But he’s suing Ezra for calling him a “liar” half-a-decade ago. Awan was the key witness in the Maclean’s trial at the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal. On cross-examination, Julian Porter, QC, did indeed reveal that Awan had been guilty of telling an untruth about one of the central facts of the case. This was reported by dear old Ezra under the headline “Khurrum Awan the Liar.” Reasonable people can disagree whether it might have been more sensitively rendered as “Khurrum Awan the Untruth Teller” or “Khurrum Awan the Dissembler”; Colby Cosh in this newspaper opted for “inventing details.” But, in a technical sense, Mr Awan said something that was not so and was exposed in court for so doing, and in a free society Ezra ought to be well within his rights to characterize such a person as he pleases.
What else? Awan complains that Levant called him an anti-Semite. Big deal. Awan called Levant a racist. He’s called me and my book racist, Islamophobic, virulent and hateful. Likewise: big deal. One could argue that Ezra was more responsible than anybody else for getting Rahim Jafer, a Ugandan-born Muslim elected to Parliament, which isn’t the usual thing your average Ku Klux Klan Kleagle spends his time doing. One might also argue that Mr. Awan spent many years as a member of an organization headed by Mohammed Elmasry, a man who declared to Michael Coren on Canadian television that every Israeli over the age of 18 was a legitimate target for terrorism — which, to put it at its mildest, indicates a certain breezy insouciance toward Jew-haters.
But it shouldn’t be necessary to do this, and certainly not in a court of law: These days, calling someone totally racist is totally gay. These are the playground insults of the diversity sandbox. I hasten to add, before he reaches for m’learned friends, that I’m not implying Mr. Awan is a practicing homosexual: In 2005, he testified to the House of Commons against same sex marriage. For all I know, some gay guys would call him “homophobic.” Again, big deal. As the comedienne Sarah Silverman likes to say, “I mean ‘gay’ like ‘retarded.’ ” I hasten to add, before he amends his complaint, that I’m not implying Mr. Awan is mentally ill. And yes, Sarah Silverman is a sinister Jewess, but the point is that suing over the back-and-forth of public discourse turns the entire citizenry into an enfeebled child: To litigate every offense is to give a not especially distinguished judiciary the power to micro-regulate social relations.
In his own complaint to the court, Khurrum Awan says that as a result of Ezra’s characterization of him he has been “shunned by his friends.” Oh, dear. He’s the loneliest man in Saskatchewan’s “Future 40.” But who’s to say his friends aren’t shunning him for his attack on free speech? Or his public stand against gay marriage? Or maybe he’s a lousy dancer, and a dull conversationalist. I feel rather as I did when David Gest, in his petition for divorce from Liza Minnelli, claimed Liza had beaten him up: There isn’t enough money on the planet that could make me confess to being beaten up by Liza Minnelli, and there certainly isn’t enough money in an Ontario court judgment to complain that Ezra Levant turned me into a social loser.
But this poignant complaint inadvertently makes a useful point: In free societies, the appropriate restraint is social; if you go around shrieking insults hither and yon, your friends may indeed decide to shun you — and that is as it should be. But it is ridiculous for what in Canada is an already sclerotic court system to adjudicate the rougher asides of vigorous debate on matters of public policy, whether climate change or speech censorship. If you’re going to be a partisan warrior in the public arena you need, as the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle likes to put it, “insensitivity training.” Miss Shaidle also argues that the matter of honour was better handled before the libel laws replaced dueling. When a fake Nobel laureate and a frontman for a terrorism-sympathizer are suing for their “reputation,” I’m inclined to agree. If Dr. Mann’s up for it, how about hockey sticks at dawn?
