Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Levant and Freedom of Speech/That Was Cool!

For those of you that have not heard about the whole Ezra Levant scandal, a Canadian Human Rights Commission or whatever those things are called has brought him up for publishing cartoons in a magazine that he worked for that were deemed Islamaphobic, and also prompted a complaint from one of the magazine's Muslim readers. The Commission is trying to get Levant to apologize/pay a fine or something along those lines. This case completely walks all over Levant's right to free speech as a Canadian citizen, and has, as it should, sparked outrage. I thought Levant's response to to this charge was well-put, well-informed, and had some dude that was cool! factor to it. You can see his opening statement here. The link goes to Youtube, and contains links to other videos of Levant's 'interrogation', as he puts it. Some nice, logical speeches on the topic of radical Islam in there. One of my favorite lines from one of them: "She's a thug, you're a thug, your whole company is a thug..." The 'she' in there refers to another HRC creepy person, I believe, and the 'you're' refers to his 'interrogator'. And he's right, too...the whole dang company is made up of thugs, thugs that want to take away some basic freedoms for the sake of 'multicultural' butt-kissing.

While whoever wrote in to complain about Levant had every right to do so, it is seems to me that all the scandals concerning these cartoons poking fun at Islam (this case, the scandalous Danish cartoons published a while back) attract attention from those who do not like freedom of speech. I would encourage Muslims to go out and protest these cartoons by, say, pointing out that they were very exaggerated, misrepresenting, (I've never seen them, and I'm not saying that they were) or something like that, but the main argument I've heard against the publication of the cartoons was, basically, that the protesters didn't like them. Once again, while you have every right to speak out and protest, in a country where the press has the freedom to print what it likes, you can't simply demand that they shut up because you don't want to hear what they're saying. If people are publishing things that offend you, go and point out why they are offensive. Use some logic. But if you like censorship so much, perhaps you'd like to live somewhere besides a free and democratic country, instead of trying to make a free country conform to your ideals.

1 comment:

Ranting Kid said...

It's good to see moderate Muslims themselves speaking out against this sort of thing...it weakens the positions of the HRCs, and people who support that kind of thing.