CBC's The National

CBC's The National finally did a news item on the human rights complaint. It was a good enough news report, though I couldn't help but wonder if the CBC would have waited so long to do a story, and given it such perfunctory coverage, if it had been one of their own producers who had been summoned before a government investigator. But it was fair enough, and the quote from Alan Borovoy of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association was excellent.

What stuck in my mind, though, and still makes me shake my head, is that the CBC "pixellated" an image of one of the cartoons when they flashed a shot of a Danish newspaper. In a story about freedom of speech -- pegged not just to my own human rights interrogation, but to death threats against a Danish cartoonist -- the CBC opted for self-censorship.

The CBC will show just about anything -- nudity, swearing, extreme violence -- and not just late at night. The documentaries on the Passionate Eye fall into two broad categories: anti-American or anti-capitalist screeds, or soft porn. I can't remember the last time I heard a curse word "beeped" out. Photos of Abu Ghraib? Shown daily for two years.

And when it comes to any possible offence taken by other religions, the CBC makes sure you see exactly what the fuss is all about. Here's a story about Catholic complaints of blasphemy, complete with helpful photo; here's one about a Greek case of anti-Christian blasphemy, with photo.

Anyone who watches the CBC's R-rated treatment of other religions, and other taboo subjects, just has to laugh at the official explanation for not showing the Muslim cartoons:

At the CBC, we decided not to show the original cartoons in our extensive coverage of the controversy. We felt that we could easily describe the drawings in simple and clear English without actually showing them. This was intended, without embarrassment, as an act of respect not only for Islam but for all religions.

"Could easily describe the drawings?" But they didn't describe them, did they -- not in this story or any others that I have seen on the CBC. To describe them would be to describe banality itself; out of the 12 original cartoons, only a few had any political flavour at all, none of which exceeded the spiciness of what appears daily on every editorial page in Canada. And that's part of the point of pixellating them -- to make them seem more offensive than they are, to indirectly justify or excuse the violence "caused" by the cartoons.

But I suppose I shouldn't pick on the CBC -- CTV and Global also bravely declined to show the cartoons, and neither have done a news report on my case (though I've been interviewed by Mike Duffy; and Rex Murphy did a great CBC commentary on the human rights commissions a month ago).

A word about the actual content of the clip. My favourite part was when Syed Soharwardy explained that he quit his complaint when:

"people were looking at Ezra Levant as a martyr of the freedom of his speech" ... "taking this into a different direction that I did not want."

Well then! I'm sorry to have been so uncooperative, by saying things that he "did not want" me to say, such as that I (and he) live in Canada, not Saudi Arabia.

Time to take one more look at Soharwardy's complaint. Look at section F. It's not even about the fact that I published the cartoons -- it's that I dared to try to defend that decision. It wasn't the deed that bothered him the most, it was my unwillingness to back down. The bulk of the complaint is about me daring to speak my mind. He complains that I:

• am "constantly advocating hatemongering cartoons in the media";
• "called [Soharwardy] 'radical'";
• "said that the hateful cartoons are justified to be published".

In other words, it's not just that I published them. It's that I didn't submit to Soharwardy. I kept talking about my freedom. He's still complaining about that, even now.

Sort of puts a lie to his official excuse for dropping the complaint -- that he has now reconciled himself to free speech.