Rex Murphy's review of Shakedown in the Globe
Rex Murphy reviewed Shakedown for the books section of Saturday's Globe and Mail. It's an extremely generous review. Here are some excerpts:
Ezra Levant is the No. 1 advocate for, and defender of, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of thought in modern Canada. His story, and the reason he has written Shakedown, began with the now famous Danish "Mohammed" cartoons.
In Calgary, an imam, who claims to be a descendant of Mohammed — having first tried to have Levant arrested — made a complaint to the Alberta Human Rights Commission.
Now, some people do not like Levant's style. They say he is too aggressive, too noisy and assertive, that he courts controversy and publicity. They should read Shakedown, and they will quickly realize that anyone less "aggressive" or "noisy" would have long ago been suffocated by the remorseless, inequitable, taxpayer-funded, bureaucratic grinding of Canada's human rights tribunals and commissions.
On the matter of his alleged taste for controversy and publicity, again, after reading Shakedown, they will realize that without his ability to withstand controversy and generate publicity, an insidious and largely unaccountable process of diminishing the central concepts of our democracy — freedom of speech, press and thought — would largely have gone unnoticed, and what is far worse, unchallenged.
Next there is the matter of Levant's politics. He is a stalwart conservative, a Harper supporter....
But in judging the cause that he has for three years now championed, and the gruelling effort he has been forced to put in to defend that cause, of which Shakedown is both the diary and the rationale, partisanship should have zero leverage over judgment.
...And he has — with courage and no little cost — stood up to them in a manner so straightforward and clear that he is positively un-Canadian. On this issue — Liberal, New Democrat, Conservative, Green — it should matter not. Were he to elope tomorrow with Jane Fonda, he would still be right, and I would still support him in this matter.
It's very much worth noting here that while Levant's personal politics may have stayed the enthusiasm of Liberals and New Democrats for giving him the support in his fight he clearly deserves, they haven't carried an opposite dividend. Where has Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper been on this issue? It is a cause of deepest principle. It isn't just a Tory thing. But Harper has been craven on the subject.
...I read Shakedown and I am awed at Levant's persistence and powers of endurance.
Aside from the rigours of defending himself over three years, at costs that exceed $100,000 (for a complaint withdrawn almost on a whim toward the end of that marathon), he has also been sued on numerous occasions by his opponents, by members of the Canadian Human Rights Commission itself, and he has been put under a hail of complaints to the Alberta Law Society — in an effort to have him, for all his pains, disbarred.
In any other society, what Levant has endured would be seen and spoken of for what it is: a persecution. I wonder why the lawyers of Canada, particularly those of Alberta, have not seen this blizzard of lawsuits and complaints to the Law Society for what they are: attempts to shut Levant down by other means, payback for being "noisy" and "assertive" and "controversial" and refusing to accommodate the soft tyranny (not so "soft" now that I think of it) of provincial and federal tribunals and commissions.
...Some of the particular cases he details — the case of the lesbian hecklers at the comedy club; the case of the Wiccan working at Boston Pizza who didn't like the rock music in the kitchen; the case of the Self-Medicating Pot Smoker who wanted to smoke in the doorway of Gator Ted's, a Burlington, Ont., pub, even though the patrons didn't like it and in Ontario there are those "smoke-free" regulations, leaving the owner of Gator Ted's on the prongs of two bureaucratic forks — are simultaneously absurd and frightening, Kafka dipped in Wodehouse. Welcome to the strange new world of political correctness roaming the landscape, seeking whom it may devour.
Levant has been mocked, pilloried, sued, harassed and abused — yet he soldiers on. It is but just to note that he had one great help along the way. That came, inadvertently, when his cause commingled with the complaints made to three human-rights commissions against Mark Steyn and Maclean's magazine by Mohamed Elmasry. That brought a second hero of real Canadian human rights into the lists against the abridgement of free speech, Steyn, who contributes a foreword to the book.
...Ezra Levant's Shakedown, and his three-year advocacy, have been the "blast of the trumpet" against this trespass. And we should be grateful for his effort. Support him, too. Buy the book.
That's an overly generous review. I'm thrilled that it will appear in the Globe tomorrow. It is my hope that it will impel many "severely normal" Canadians to read the book -- people who wouldn't, for example, find their way to a blog like this one.
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