It's just a flesh wound!

The "Journalism Doctor" is starting to look like The Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

For the last month, I have been trying to get Mark Steyn to verify a quotation he uses to characterize the threat that he feels Muslims pose to western civilization.

Now he has finally done that. What can I say? Congratulations. It's a start.

No, it's the finish. All the rest is mopping up. But, since you're a glutton for punishment, once more unto the breach. You have not spent the last month "trying to get Mark Steyn to verify a quotation". Instead, you suggested that I'd made it up: False. Then you said I'd failed to provide a citation: Also false. Finally you declared flat out that the cited book by Ayatollah Khomeini does not exist: False again, and laughably so. Three strikes, you're out. You're a fact-checker who attempted to fact-check a joke, and failed. How sad is that?

[...]

...Why do I resort to personal insults? Well, it's true I called you "Professor Waggy-Finger" and one or two other things you obviously find distressing. But you surely can't be that mystified as to why I have total contempt for you. I have left-wing critics all over the world - Johann Hari at The Independent in London, Glenn Greenwald at Salon in America, Phillip Adams at The Australian - who often say how repellent and disgusting I am. Had you done that, I'd have said pip-pip and bottoms up, and that'd be that. However, you're the only one who's attempted to intervene in a legal proceeding on behalf of the plaintiffs to argue in favour of the government's right to censor my opinions. Had you had your way and helped Mohamed Elmasry to win his case, the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal would have been statutorily obligated under Section 37 (2) of the province's "Human Rights" Code to issue a cease-and-desist order preventing Maclean's from publishing anything further by me related to Islam, the west, terrorism, etc, ever again. In other words, had your intervention succeeded, you would have de facto criminalized my writing throughout Canada.

Are you perhaps beginning to get a glimmer of a clue as to why I don't want to be your Facebook friend? ...

Meanwhile, BigCity "Lib" issues an apology to Steyn, albeit the kind of apology in which he still says Maclean's shouldn't be publishing him. "Vulnerable ethnic and religious groups" might get their feelings hurt, you see. (Surely a great religious leader like the Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of peaceful, progressive Iran, couldn't have condoned something disgusting! And, and...Christians have done bad things too! You're racist! Raaaaaacist!!!)

Damian P.

Posted by damian at December 4, 2008 01:10 PM