After running articles critical of Islamism and Canada’s lackadaisicalness in confronting it, Canada’s largest newsweekly, Maclean’s, is looking at a slew of complaints filed with the nation’s Human Rights Commission that could turn into a serious curtailment of free speech. The charges were filed by the Canadian Islamic Congress, the largest Islamic nonprofit in Canada, and implicate Mark Steyn, author of the New York Times-bestselling America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, which Maclean’s excerpted last year.

Those siding with the newsmagazine have called it a “totalitarian” attack likely to put free speech in Canada — where it lacks First Amendment-type protection — “on its last legs.” Some Muslims agree, and the Muslim Canadian Congress has spoken out in Maclean’s defense.

But the CIC says, in a report available here, that the magazine’s content represents an injurious pattern of “promoting Islamophobia and fear of Muslims.” Maclean’s style of journalism, it argues, “has become increasingly pervasive in Canada in the last few years and has . . . been the leading factor in the growth of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment in Canadian society.”

Created to mediate charges of discrimination and pass unresolved matters along to a tribunal for adjudication, the Human Rights Commission has been a sore spot for many Canadian journalists, both liberal and conservative. The CIC’s complaints have multiplied new cries for its abolition, even from American journalists. Hudson Institute fellow Stanley Kurtz says that the CIC is “making a bogus claim of religious and racial discrimination, in order to persecute a writer, thereby launching a lawsuit on frivolous grounds.”

The CIC denies that its demands are tantamount to “burning books of learning,” but it wants more than Maclean’s articles to be blue-penciled ex post facto; it wants their entire genre preventatively banned, including all future offensive books like Steyn’s that deal with problems borne in the clash between the West and growing, unassimilated Muslim immigrants and powerful extremist imams — a maneuver similar to the SLAPP techniques Islamic groups have begun employing to stifle critics in the United States.

In 2004, CIC president Mohamed Elmasry wrote in Canada’s National Post: “In a democratic society, all voices should be heard — even ones whose viewpoint some of us might oppose.” This was a direct reference to the then-ongoing debate about whether the news station Al Jazeera should be permitted on Canadian airwaves. Elmasry continued that Canadians needed to question any decision “to sacrifice Canadian rights of free speech to silence an Arabic-language news network whose only sin, ironically, is that it believes in the Western notion of freedom of speech.” Elmasry has also stated that all adult Israelis are terrorist targets and that homosexuals “will be held accountable” for their “forbidden” behavior, two things critics say should legitimately have run him afoul of the Human Rights Commission.

Steyn says that “in practice neither [Elmasry] nor the speech commisars behind the Maple Curtain of the 49th Parallel will have difficulty reconciling their commitment to ‘free speech’ with the need to punish my ‘hate crime.’”