National Post (National Edition)
Author cleared of slandering Muslim school
MONTREAL• The criticism Djemila Benhabib levelled against a private Muslim school during a 2012 radio interview was harsh. The school was providing small children indoctrination worthy of a military camp in Afghanistan, she said. It was grooming “fundamental activists.” It offered as a model a society “where men are probably going to commit honour crimes against their sisters.”
But in what her lawyer called a victory for free speech, a judge cleared Benhabib of slander Tuesday, ruling her comments were neither erroneous nor made in bad faith. “Certainly, these remarks are severe and could have been hurtful,” Superior Court Justice Carole Hallée wrote. “However they have a place in a democratic society like ours.”
Benhabib, an author and outspoken critic of Islamist fundamentalism, had begun looking into the Muslim School of Montreal after seeing a brochure in which the female students all wore hijabs. She learned on the school’s website that children were memorizing Qur’anic passages that spoke of beautiful virgins awaiting male believers in the afterlife, while non-believers endured the fires of hell.
She told radio 98.5FM that the school was instituting a “sexual apartheid” and that it was “very far from the values of our society.”
The school sued for defamation, seeking $95,000 in damages from Benhabib. It claimed the interview had led students to fear for their safety, necessitating additional security and provoking a drop in enrolment.
Ahmed Khebir, president of the school’s board of directors, said her interview, linking its curriculum to military camps, sparked fears within the school that it would be targeted by anti-Muslim fanatics. “I was devastated, appalled, horrified, insulted and worried,” he testified. “How was it possible that someone who had never set foot inside our school could make such damaging and insulting statements?”
In her ruling, Hallée questioned Khebir’s credibility and said the school had presented no evidence that its reputation suffered as a result of the interview. She accepted Benhabib’s testimony that, when she spoke of military camps, she was not referring to terrorist-training camps but simply to a rigid military mindset.
Hallée found enrolment figures did not support the claim of a drop, and it seems likely security improvements in 2015 were the result of terror attacks in Paris, not an interview three years earlier.
More importantly, she ruled that Benhabib had not slandered the school or its students. The issues she was raising — the wearing of the hijab and memorization of religious passages in school — were matters of public interest. “Everyone must be allowed to express themselves as freely as possible on these questions,” Hallée wrote.
Benhabib’s remarks, she continued, “are at the heart of freedom of expression’s raison d’être, that is, to favour active participation in debates on subjects of public interest.”
Benhabib was out of the country, but her lawyer, Marc-André Nadon, said she is very happy. “In this case, the court acknowledges the very important role of freedom of speech and freedom of expression,” Nadon said.