Until this morning when several readers drew my attention to his battle before the Alberta Human Wrongs Commissariat in Canada, I had no idea who Ezra Levant is. Pictured right, Ezra Levant is a hero. Like The Free Radical and several of NZ's newspapers and TV channels, Ezra Levant's magazine The Western S tandard republished the Danish cartoons that outraged Islamofascists around the world (that's one below), but unlike local magazine editors like myself the Standard's editor was hauled before the state for his temerity in expressing this particular political opinion. Levant himself summarises the case here.
I would hope I would be both as brave and his eloquent if I were to be placed in his shoes. We've all learned a lot about free speech and its many enemies in the last few years; it seems Levant has learned every lesson, and on his blog and in the many YouTube videos of his ninety-minute interrogation by Alberta's Human Wrongs Commissariat, he gives an object lesson in free speech, and in facing down the scum to whom the words 'free speech' are as unwelcome as pesticide is to a room full of cockroaches.
These are confrontations the defenders of western culture cannot afford to lose. The right to freedom of speech is a precious one that must be defended. As Lindsay Perigo said in publishing the cartoons in The Free Radical, free speech cannot be defended, and will only be betrayed, "by apologetic weasel-worders appeasing militant, murderous morons whose savage pseudo-sensibilities have been stirred, not by sticks and stones, but by words. May men of righteous rationality reignite the flame of reason and fight an unapologetic philosophical jihad in its holy name, that it may illumine the globe and save the world from another Dark Ages."
It is brave men such as Levant who carry that flame. As he says in introducing his Opening Statement, "This is what an interrogation in 2008 looks like. It's not in a dungeon, or even a secure government facility. It's not done by paramilitaries in uniforms. It looks banal -- in a meeting room at a law office, with a bored bureaucrat. It's what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil"."
As I've said here before, when they come for you it won't be with a gun but with a clipboard. Watch Levant in action and see what it takes to resist.
7 comments:
The video clips are amazing and inspiring.
Its wonderful to see a man stand up to the weasels in a totally unapologetic, combative manner and demand his right to free speech.
And his quote "the process has become the punishment" gets to the core of what these totalitarian scum are all about.
This guy must be awarded a medal of some kind for standing up for his rights. Hehe, I enjoyed that part when he pointed his finger at that woman saying, she's a thug and you're thug.
A voice of reason.
Something we don't get to hear too often, but when we do, it is like standing in the sunlight on a crisp Winter morning.
Having just finished reading Atlas Shrugged I could not think of a better practical example than those video's
Today Levant is my John Galt.
I'm trying to learn body language.
The crossed arms and set mouth by the end of his opening speech seemed like she wasn't ready to 'take on board' his comments in a 'free and frank' exchange of ideas leading to some kind of 'recognition of viewpoints' and perhaps 'acceptance' or at least a 'broad-based consensus' and a 'positive and productive way forward'.
Was I reading too much into her body language? What do you guys think?
Spot on on the body language Tiger, I'm no student of it myself, but the crossed arms and lemon sucking expression says to me she wasn't "being conducive in facilitating free and open discussion"
Mark Steyn who is also being brought before the Canadian Human Rights Commission has some telling observations.
"Nonetheless, even in this craven environment, Canada's "human rights commissions" are uniquely inimical to the marketplace of ideas. In its 30 years of existence, no complaint brought to the federal HRC under Section XIII has been settled in favour of the defendant. A court where the rulings only go one way is the very definition of a show trial. These institutions should be a source of shame to Canadians.
So I'm not interested in the verdict--except insofar as an acquittal would be more likely to legitimize the human rights commissions' attempt to regulate political speech, and thus contribute to the shrivelling of liberty in Canada. I'm interested only in getting the HRCs out of this business entirely. When it comes to free speech on one of the critical issues of the age, to reprise Sir Edward Grey on the eve of the Great War, the lamps are going out all over the world--one distributor, one publisher, one novelist, one cartoonist, one TV host at a time."
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