by Patrick J. Buchanan -- The trial is before a court with the Orwellian title of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. The accused are Maclean's magazine and author Mark Steyn. The crime: In mocking and biting tones, they wrote that Islam threatens Western values.
Had Steyn written that, given the Crusades, colonial atrocities in Africa and the slave trade, Christianity had been on balance a curse, he would not be in the dock. In the United States, these charges would have been tossed out by any federal judge, who would have admonished the plaintiffs that, here in America, we have a First Amendment. ... The United States, however, is an isolated exception, as Western nations seek to impose wider restrictions on what has come to be called 'hate speech.'
