Thanks to the great privilege afforded to me by living north of the 49th parallel, I find the American right really funny. The Bill O’Reillys, the “These Colours Don’t Run” American-flag T-shirts, and everything Fox News has to offer are far more entertaining and, frankly, far less disingenuous than the earnest approach to conservative ideas put forward by the “liberals” of the Democratic Party or our own Conservative Party of Canada.

Of course, every time I visit our neighbours to the south, I am faced with the painful reality of how unfunny the American right really is: as it turns out, close to half of the voting population thinks they’re being serious.

At the same time, I’ve never had the same tongue-in-cheek admiration for Canada’s brand of self-proclaimed “straight talk” reactionaries. Mostly, they just aren’t funny. When Bill O’Reilly wants to be homophobic, he hosts a show about “Hollywood’s radical homosexual agenda.” The O’Reillys of the world firmly understand their mission as appealing to an already-established, hate-based populism.

However, Canada’s reactionaries like to play the victim, mostly because they have failed as pundits of hateful garbage (see the complete financial collapse of the Western Standard and the pending financial collapse of the National Post). In playing the victim, they create a new market and make massive profits, as human rights lawyer – and certainly no radical – Pearl Eliadis pointed out in a recent article in Maisonneuve. She cites the examples of Mark Steyn, Barbara Amiel, and Ezra Levant, who were taken to human rights commissions over their hateful and hate-inciting writings, and became martyrs for the cause of speaking without consequence. I don’t say free speech, because they are welcome to believe that, as Steyn wrote, if we continue our current, allegedly too-liberal immigration policy, “the cities of the Western world will be filling up with sheep-shaggers” and tell their friends and family about it. No one is trying to police others’ thoughts. But, when Barbara Amiel chooses to sign her name to the statement that “Normally a people don’t willingly acquiesce in the demise of their own culture … but you can see how it happens. Massive Muslim immigration takes place,” there are definite consequences. Just as there were for Ernst Zundel and James Keegstra for attaching their names to statements on the evil Jewish conspiracy to defame the otherwise impeccable memory of Hitler. Yet somehow Steyn, Amiel, and the unimpressive Ezra Levant have become heroes for the cause of “free speech” in a country that has had anti-hate crime legislation on the books since the 1940s.

Now the “free speech” reactionaries are up in arms again over Ann Coulter’s recent speaking tour in Canada. Coulter represents Fox News for me more than any of the other sirens of stupidity: when she speaks, I first tend to laugh. Then I realize that not only might she take herself seriously (which is doubtful), but she is actually taken seriously by a large segment of the American population. And apparently some Canadians, too. I then become profoundly depressed.

Recently, Ann “Kill their [Muslim] leaders and convert them [Muslims] to Christianity” Coulter came on a multi-city speaking tour of Canada. At the University of Western Ontario, an early stop, Coulter was asked by a young Muslim student how she should get around should the government follow Coulter’s insane advice and place every Muslim on the infamous “No-fly List.” Coulter told the hijabi-clad student to “take a camel.”

So the University of Ottawa’s provost – doubtlessly under pressure to cancel Coulter’s upcoming lecture but refusing to do so in the interest of free speech – warned Coulter that hate speech can lead to prosecution in Canada. Students came to protest loudly, and the otherwise supporter-less reactionaries who organized the event chose to shut it down, citing the “attack on free speech” committed by those holding signs and yelling outside the venue.

And of course, Ezra Levant – whose every venture except playing the victim has failed miserably (lawyer, publisher, etc.) – was rewarded with a long op-ed piece in the Ottawa Citizen on the “venom” of human rights advocates. And Coulter can return once again to the hateful populism of Tea Party America and be greeted as the hero of a “free speech” controversy that was engineered from the very beginning.

Ann Coulter is a bit of a troublemaker, isn’t she?

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the firebrand conservative columnist. A strong advocate for small government, Coulter is also an unapologetic advocate for Western society’s ethics. She decries the silencing tendencies of political correctness and never gives in to moral relativism. She thinks that you’re wrong and she’s right. Really, though, we all think that way, and it’s nice that someone is actually willing to say it.

Still, I grew up in a tight-knit family headed by a spiritual and respectful grandmother. My family has always valued politeness to a degree that I find refreshing. Indeed, politeness is one of those stereotypical Canadian values that I’m glad we picked up from our British cousins. So even though I admire Coulter’s feistiness, I find that in her quest to outdo her left-wing adversaries she can be rude and hyperbolic. She has a talent for colourful quotes, to say the least.

It has been interesting to watch the firestorm of controversy erupting over Coulter’s cancelled speech at the University of Ottawa. It all began with a small-minded letter from University of Ottawa Vice-President Academic and Provost François Houle. He warned Coulter that “Canadian defamation laws … limit freedom of expression and may differ somewhat from those to which you are accustomed.”

Then there was the protest. A boisterous crowd went mad outside the lecture hall where Coulter was scheduled to speak. Acting on the advice of police and security officials Coulter and the event’s organizers decided to cancel the talk.

There’s been plenty of commentary about the cancellation, and it’s been fascinating trying to decipher Canada’s concept of freedom of expression.

Dare I say these un-Canadian words, but our American neighbours seem to have the right idea on freedom of speech. They don’t have agencies ready to impose lifetime publication bans on those who say what they wish. In Canada, truth doesn’t seem to matter when you’re dragged in front of a human rights commission for saying something the government considers out of line. Here, for speech to be free it seems it must fulfill the legally imposed requirement of being “polite” and “politically correct.” As long as you say something relatively agreeable, you’re welcome to your two cents.

Ann Coulter, who isn’t polite, was told by the provost that she didn’t have the right to say what she wanted. He told her that “what may, at first glance, seem like unnecessary restrictions to freedom of expression do, in fact, lead not only to a more civilized discussion, but to a more meaningful, reasoned, and intelligent one as well.”

Congratulations, Canada: in order to publicly express an opinion, we have to make sure we are civilized, reasoned, and intelligent. I like reason and intelligence as much as the next person, but speech shouldn’t have to be civilized, reasoned, or intelligent to be legal. Speech is an inherent right – to paraphrase Trudeau, the state has no business in the words of the nation.

This attitude of free speech as a privilege and not a right permeates our student culture. This attitude led to the angry reaction of protestors who caused Coulter’s speech to be cancelled. This attitude led to pro-life activist Jose Ruba, at our own university, getting yelled down by protestors whose sole intention was to silence his “Echoes of the Holocaust” presentation.

Hypocrisy permeates these restrictions. Just last year, George Galloway, a strongly pro-Palestine British member of parliament, was determined inadmissible by a border services officer on the grounds that his activities violated Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act. Galloway had, in the past, provided Hamas – which Canada considers a terrorist organization – with financial aid.

Despite this damning evidence, the federal New Democratic Party painted the move by Border Services as a violation of Galloway’s freedom of speech. Then last Thursday, the NDP complained that the government had allowed a conservative like Coulter to enter Canada and “preach hate.”

Financier of terrorists? No problem for the NDP. Outspoken conservative? Get her out of my country. Seems like a double standard to me.

Throughout my short life, friends and colleagues have often asked me why I wear a veil when I travel abroad, and why I choose to hold on to my Islamic values and Egyptian traditions. For some of them, this is something quite odd and surprising.

I came to Canada a couple of years ago to pursue my PhD at McGill. With my Islamic veil and values, and my Egyptian traditions, I have been welcomed with respect, support, appreciation, and encouragement from my neighbours, colleagues, professors, university, the government, and the whole community in Quebec and Canada. Almost everyone who knows me is aware that I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t eat pork, I return home before 9 p.m., I can’t be alone with a man in a closed area, and I don’t talk to men on the phone unless it is for work or an emergency. It is simply my identity, something that I am proud of, and everyone accepts me and respects me just the way I am.

That’s why two weeks ago, I was shocked to read about the Egyptian Muslim girl who was asked to leave a French-language school after refusing to remove her niqab. I was shocked not by the incident itself, but by the reaction of the girl, who filed a complaint with the Quebec Human Rights Commission, as she felt that her freedom of religion had been violated, according to CBC News. Is this a logical reaction? I am not sure. I am neither “with” nor “against” her decision. I am neither attacking nor judging. I am not an Islamic scholar, yet I am an Egyptian Muslim and fully aware that in Egypt the niqab is controversial. The need for a niqab is not clearly stated in the Qur’an and the Sunna. This is why opinions on the niqab have always been varying and always will be.

Sheikh Mohammed Metwally Shaarawy, a renowned Egyptian Islamic scholar, emphasized that the “Niqab is a virtue, not an obligation.” In October 2009, Sheikh Tantawi, Egypt’s highest Muslim authority, asked a girl to remove her niqab while he was visiting Azhar University. Subsequently, Egypt’s minister of higher education, Hany Helal, decided to ban the niqab in Egyptian public universities. The need for a niqab is a debatable area full of questions marks.

Throughout my journey, I have come across minorities complaining about the values of foreign cultures, including the Canadian culture. Personally, this has always annoyed me. If you are rejecting these values and can’t get along with them, this means they don’t suit you. So why have you made this choice to come here? It was your decision, not an obligation. Is it logical to come to a foreign country and start criticising the way people live? To keep complaining about them? To try to impose your own ideas from your own single perspective? Don’t you think that such an attitude is unfair to others who have welcomed you in their homeland?

On the other hand, I also find it totally unfair when women wearing a niqab are thought of as oppressed or pictured as locked in prisons, like the cartoon on CBC News two weeks ago. All the people I have met wearing a niqab are highly educated people. It was their own decision, initiating from deep faith, something they felt would bring them closer to God and Paradise. Nobody has the right to judge others except God because He is the only one who knows their intentions.

A few years ago, during a conference I attended in Turkey, I was invited to visit Fatih University. At the main gate of the university, the security officer informed me that I had to remove my veil as per the university regulations. I politely thanked the officer for the information and left. Life is always based on choices, compromises, and decisions. It was my own decision to wear the veil and my own decision not to remove it. My understanding is that rules and regulations have been created so that people abide by them. Allah says what can be translated into: “O believers, obey God, and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you. If you should quarrel on anything, refer it to God and the Messenger, if you believe in God and the Last Day; that is better and fairer in the issue.”

It is vital to define our comfort zone within the laws that govern the community in which we live together with the values and moral codes we bring along as part of our personality and heritage. With reasonable compromises, we can accommodate each other. This is how we can co-exist with respect and harmony. And this is my vision of both world peace and inner peace.

Being a student sucks sometimes. Crazy stress, daily intellectual calisthenics, and intense sleep deprivation are all part of the day-to-day routine. By now, you’re probably used to the stress – you may even enjoy it on some level. Still, many of you, like me, have likely been wishing for a lighter course load since you started learning fractions, or at least for a break from homework that didn’t coincide with getting a summer job.

Luckily, I got such a break this semester. Thanks to some transfer credits, I’ve had a light course load, which I thought would be paradise. I thought I’d have the free time to do everything I wished I had done in past school years. In some ways, the reduced course load was great. But not being a full-time student changed my life in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I lost a part of my identity and I had no idea how to fill the void.

Chances are that this will happen to you in a few months (or a few years). You’ll enter the real world where, at least for a little while, you’ll work during the day and come home at night to watch TV and make dinner. (Or, you’ll move back in with your parents and experience a weird Twilight Zone version of high school.) It’ll be disconcerting, but a bit of aimlessness and confusion is warranted after 17 years of tightly regimented time.

Even if you have great plans for post-grad, organizing your life is difficult when you can no longer claim that you’re a student. Outside of school, no one forces you to think. I underestimated the power of an intellectual environment to make me want to read and engage with ideas that were not my own. Most people’s minds are occupied with their finances, their relationships, and their health. There isn’t a lot of room for McLuhan if you’re barely making ends meet, or if you’re focussed on becoming a CEO. The masses aren’t forced to think, because it doesn’t necessarily benefit them to do so. This is probably why the Twilight movies grossed more than just the combined allowances of all 11-year-old girls.

Not having to think about complicated ideas made me question the mundane with the alarming frequency of a Jewish grandmother. Things like whether buying organic dryer sheets was necessary, and whether it reflected on my character that I part my hair on the right. These inane questions were an attempt to fill the gaps in my self-conception. I am now the kind of person who buys organic dryer sheets. This articulation of values (however small) is the valuable product of less stress and more free time. It isn’t revelatory, but it’s an easy way to start rebuilding your identity.

Many people use their jobs to fill this identity gap, and for people in careers they enjoy, this seems logical. I am a doctor or I am a welder are very similar to I am a student. By this logic, the identities of people in jobs they dislike must be incredibly volatile, abjectly negative, or defined entirely by another aspect of their personality. I only worked 20 hours a week and was surprised by how soon and how frequently all three of those descriptions applied to my perception of my identity.

Obviously, there are preexisting parts of identity that remain once studenthood is gone – your ethnicity, your religious beliefs, even your sports affiliations probably won’t change once you leave school. But your identity will be scrambled. After over a decade of rigorously scheduled time in an intensely intellectual environment, the relatively free time of the real world is dumbfounding. On the upside, though, you’ll be able to address questions you may have neglected in the past (whether you buy organic or non-organic dryer sheets, for example), and it’s my optimistic suggestion that this leads to a happier and more cogent selfhood.