Ezra Levant Is Not Being Persecuted By The State
by Transmontanus, 14 January 2008
I’m not going to bother linking to any of the innumerable cases of derangement and hyperventilation set off by the overnight elevation of Ezra Levant from D-List conservative libertarian to free-speech martyr. Watch his own videos of the event if you like, and join the roughly 200,000 people who have tuned in since last week.
I did, and I’m sorry, but I didn’t see a Star Chamber interrogation of a persecuted journalist. I saw a junior civil servant trying to do her job, being harangued and bullied and browbeaten by a lawyer in a nice suit.
I’ve made it plain that I’m generally against human rights tribunals being used to police reasonable limits on free speech and I hope and expect Levant will win in his fight with the human rights commission, but I confess that I can’t talk myself into becoming a free-speech absolutist. I harbour too much uncertainty about the frontier between the territory where individuals must have a right to say whatever they like, and where the people, by enacting laws, are entitled to tell individuals to shut the hell up. I confess.
Still, I like to think I know the trampling of free speech when I see it, and Ezra’s case, prompted by a ludicrous complaint arising from his decision to publish the Motoons in his Western Standard magazine (now a blog), isn’t it.
This is a case of a libertarian conservative earning Paypal donations and cult-hero status by successfully going viral in an assault on one of those dreaded tentacles of the state conservative libertarians are always going on about. If it wasn’t the Alberta Human Rights Commission it would be the Alberta Labour Relations Board or the Workers Compensation Board. Conservative libertarians are not just against the folly of human rights tribunals trespassing upon free speech questions they have neither the competence nor the jurisdiction to adjudicate. They’re against human rights tribunals.
This is the same Ezra Levant, let’s not forget, who expressed rather less than absolute support for the free speech rights of nutcase Vancouver imam Younus Kathrada not long ago. Not charging Kathadra, who’d been giving out of himself about Jews being related to monkeys and pigs and so on, would be a misguided act of political correctness, Levant wrote. “He should be made an example of, not have excuses made for him. Justice calls for it.”
This same Ezra Levant is himself not above bullying when it comes to the free speech rights of people who think he’s a jerk. As Warren Kinsella puts it: “The fraud, in this case, is my friend Ezra Levant. He is full of crap, actually.”
No matter how the Human Rights Commission rules, Ezra will have full recourse to the courts, and undoubtedly the full support of Canada’s national media. If he loses in any way at the commission level, you can bet that the ruling Conservative parties in the province and the country where he is so fortunate to live will come to his aid and his comfort and his cause.
So for all the free speech champions on the right and the left now working themselves into paroxysms about the iron heel of the state in Canada, a question or two.
Where were you when Rafika Tagi and Samira Sadagatogli were sent to jail for publishing the Mohammed cartoons? Did any of you set up a Paypal account for any of the 13 newspapers and magazines shut down for publishing the cartoons in Morocco, Yemen, Algeria, Jordan, Indonesia and Malaysia? Have you ever even heard the names Mohammed al-Asadi, Abdulkarim Sabra, or Yehiya al-Abed?
