Calgary Magazine May Get Charged With Hate Crime Over Muslim Cartoons

The Globe and Mail reports:

The Western Standard, a political magazine based in Calgary, will today reprint eight of the 12 Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed that have caused riots and controversy around the world, and one Canadian Muslim leader warns that hate-crime charges may follow.

Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant, a former Reform and Canadian Alliance activist, calls the cartoons "innocuous" and accused Canada's "mainstream media," including The Globe and Mail, of failing to stand up for free speech for refusing to print the images.

"I was prepared to see the most outrageous, depraved, blasphemous cartoons," Mr. Levant said in an interview yesterday. "I was surprised by how tame they were."

But the leader of the Canadian Islamic Congress, Mohamed Elmasry, warned yesterday that his organization will seek to have charges laid against the magazine under Canada's laws against distributing hate literature.

When you are a country that likes to regulate health care no suprise that regulating speech would be part of the program.