Quebec’s Proposed Imposition of Blasphemy Laws Will Affect Us All

Lebuis is rightly aware that Quebec’s proposed law will not be applied uniformly just as Section 13 was not. In 2008, Lebuis filed a complaint against an Imam whose writings lauded beheading and exterminating homosexuals, denigrated Jews, and called for violent jihad in any place Muslims had the power to overthrow non-Muslim rule.

The Human Rights Commission declined to hear the case.

The effort to ban so-called criticism of Islam is not limited to Canada, and if the QHRC is successful in its gambit, similar efforts are guaranteed to spring up elsewhere, including in the United States.

As Deborah Weiss documents in her monograph, The Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s Jihad on Free Speech, the United States Department of State has played an outsized role in facilitating efforts by the OIC to encourage governments worldwide to impose criminal penalties for what the OIC considers blasphemy against Islam. Weiss writes:

Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton asserted that the US would not push for the enactment of speech restrictive laws (at least for the time being) and she extoled the virtues of free speech. But she also proclaimed that the US advocates for other measures to achieve the same results. Those other measures included interfaith dialogue and the use of “good old fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming.”

It is not a great jump from “peer pressure and shaming” to implementing fines of up to $10,000, as the QHRC will be empowered to do under Bill 59.

For this reason free speech defenders, not just in Canada but also around the world, should rightly be concerned, and raise their voices in opposition to Quebec’s proposed bill and similar restrictions wherever they are proposed.