More reviews for Shakedown

The Globe and Mail says I'm holding pretty steady at number 3 on their national bestseller list of Canadian non-fiction hardcover books. Both Chapters and Amazon have it on their bestseller lists, too, That's pretty great, three weeks after the release date -- thank you to everyone who has bought the book. I hope it meets your expectations.

Reviewers have been generous beyond my fondest hopes. Here are a few new ones:

Sun Media

Salim Mansur wrote this amazing review, entitled "Levant defends us all", published across the Sun chain today. Some excerpts:

Ezra Levant's book Shakedown released last month might be the most important publication of the year. It documents the state of free speech in Canada.

...In making his stand for free speech on the basis of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom, plus common law, reaching back to the principles set forth in the 800-year-old Magna Carta, Levant entered into the labyrinth of the human rights commissions from where no Canadian sued for "hate speech" has come out free and untarnished.

Levant did win despite such commissions' records of ruling unfailingly in favour of complainants. After more than a year of inquiry into the "Levant affair," the AHRCC dismissed Soharwardy's complaint. Yet the complaint's dismissal was not quite a win as Levant explains in his book.

The basis of the complaint -- the hate speech section of the human rights code -- remains and Canadians without Levant's abilities must speak warily or face likely prosecution knowing free speech is not free in their country.

Canada is one of the oldest democracies, rightfully proud of its traditions among which is the hard won and constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech. But social engineering of the 1960s gave Canadians the human rights commissions, with legislatively provided power to monitor free speech and punish those who run afoul of their codes. This is a stain on Canadian democracy.

...The lamest excuse for constraining free speech is preventing people from being offended.

Imagine if human rights commission-type commissars had prevailed at the beginning of the Renaissance and Reformation. The modern world would have been aborted at its conception.

In Shakedown Levant has compellingly demonstrated why it is not "normal" for a mature democracy to place any constraint -- apart from the criminal code provisions -- on free speech.

Levant deserves to be read widely and Canadians should be asking, in increasing numbers, why politicians are not moving fast enough to remove this stain from their democracy.

That's pretty amazing.

National Post

The Post had an official book review today, written by Patrick Keeney. Here's the link, and here are some excerpts:

...In Canada, we don’t burn heretics. We simply subject them to the ravages of one of our 14 Human Rights Commissions (HRCs), arguably a crueller fate. In Shakedown, Ezra Levant has summoned his considerable polemical energy to expose the farcical and parlous state of our HRCs.

Levant reveals one embarrassingly awful case after another. Juvenal wrote that, “In times like these, it is difficult not to write satire” and one is left to wonder, “Could this really be happening here?” For example, Levant cites the case of a man who became a woman, and who then wanted to work as a counsellor at a Vancouver rape-relief centre. Those responsible for hiring thought this a bad idea. The complainant insisted that this line of work was her “right,” used the British Columbia HRC to sue, and won. The net result is that the centre, which should have used its limited resources to help women, had to pay off a complainant. Sadly, common sense is often the first casualty in the promotion of human rights.

...some of the more high-profile advocates for HRCs would curtail all speech they feel is “discriminatory.” Heaven knows what this means, but presumably we should all now tiptoe around those whose delicate sensibilities are easily offended. Furthermore, unpleasant truths should either be ignored or denied, lest they encourage a volatile reaction in our fellow citizens. These retrograde notions are anathema to freedom and suitable only for totalitarian states and closed societies. 

...This public outing of the hitherto closeted star chambers of HRCs altered the nature of the fight. What was once done in secret now became public knowledge and, thanks to the Internet, a worldwide cause célèbre. The mainstream media, which until this point had been silent, began to echo the outrage of the bloggers. The B.C. HRC’s proceedings against Mark Steyn and Maclean’s attracted media from around the world. PEN Canada opined on the need for freedom of expression. Finally, the politicians began to take note.

The Toronto Star once referred to HRCs as “whacky.” After reading Shakedown, this epithet seems tame. If you want a reasonably accurate snapshot of how Canada’s HRCs operate, you need first to imagine an all-powerful government agency, inspired, say, by the fantasies of Philip K. Dick. Now imagine this agency has an investigative arm headed by Inspector Clouseau, who testifies in a court presided over by the Red Queen, who runs the proceedings according to the Lewis Carroll School of Jurisprudence. 

Ezra Levant has done his fellow citizens an enormous service in exposing this folly.

I love how HRCs are described as part sci-fi, part comedy, part Alice in Wonderland. I think that's spot-on.

And here's George Jonas, who has been fighting against HRCs long before they became a full-blown menace:

The publisher can't keep up with demand for Ezra Levant's book Shakedown, which appeared last week with a foreword by Mark Steyn. The slim volume is like an open whaling boat in which Levant sets out to harpoon Canada's Leviathan of a "human rights" industry.

Among the things to note about the scourge of our human-rights commissions (HRCs), one is that Levant isn't actually against them. This may be news to the beleaguered commissars who reel under the relentless blows of the plucky pamphleteer's crusading journalism, but it seems to be the case.

Paradoxically, Levant's book is all the more convincing and effective because he isn't basically opposed to the institutions whose demise -- if it happens -- he will have contributed to so much. He's against the commissions' excesses, their extra-legal methods, thuggish associates, bureaucratic arrogance, cloak-and-dagger gambits and their encroachments into areas that he feels were never meant to be any of their business. He would certainly reform the "rights" commissars, make them obey the law and bar them from the nation's newsrooms. Levant might even say that the HRCs have outlived their usefulness and should now be retired. But -- and it's a big but -- he seems to have no philosophical dispute with the impulses that gave birth to the "human rights" industry in the first place.

...A person whose dispute with HRCs is more fundamental than Levant's might say that these institutions didn't go wrong but were wrong from the word go. Far from making Canadians tolerant, they got away with fostering discord only because Canadians were basically tolerant to begin with. As instruments of government coercion, HRCs had to evolve into Orwellian "Ministries of Love" from the pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four because they weren't set up to promote human rights any more than Big Brother's infamous ministry was set up to promote love. On the contrary, HRCs were established to promote human ambitions at the expense of human rights.

...Discriminating -- that is, choosing -- is the most fundamental human right. On whatever grounds, including ugly, stupid, prejudicial grounds, the human right is to choose. To be chosen is only a human ambition. Often a fine ambition, to be sure; an ambition to endorse and cherish, but an ambition nevertheless. When we institutionalize human ambitions of which we approve to trump human rights, of which we do not, we create conditions that inevitably result in all the things we are now astonished to read about in Shakedown.

Will the harpoon claim the Leviathan? It certainly seems to have found its mark.

Jonas raises an interesting point, one noted today by Mark Steyn. In my book, my main arguments against HRCs are practical: in a word, they're nuts. I describe the nuttiness in their substance (e.g. the human right not to have to wash your hands when you work in a restaurant) and the nuttiness in their procedures (no neutral judges; no rules of court; no legal aid, etc.) And I give the benefit of the doubt to the founders of HRCs -- men like Alan Borovoy who, like Dr. Frankenstein, have come to repent the foul deeds that their creations have wrought. I even called HRCs a beautiful idea that failed.

But I think that Jonas extrapolates too much from those two points. I'm not against HRCs merely because they are kangaroo courts in their operations. I wouldn't want counterfeit rights -- like the made-up right not to have to wash your hands, or the made-up right not to be offended -- to be adjudicated by a real court, with a real judge and real rules of court. As I told my interrogator last January, this is junk law, for which HRCs have become a dump:

And where I describe HRCs as a beautiful idea gone awry, I was referring to the noble dream of the Borovoys of this world for a way for races and religions to live together harmoniously. In addition to Borovoy's public renunciation of today's HRCs, I have heard from several provincial human rights commissioners from a generation ago who swear to me that what HRCs have become is not at all what they were meant to become. I think I have to take them at their word about their intentions. As I note in the book, Jonas and Borovoy have had great debates on this subject, with Jonas pointing out that he knew immediately that the HRCs were a flawed project, whereas Borovoy said he didn't realize that until decades later. Jonas was merely more prescient -- perhaps the result of his own escape from a totalitarian regime.

I know that the above sounds defensive; but it's simply because I actually do share Jonas's view that human desires (he calls them ambitions) are not human rights. I think it's that Jonas thinks the HRCs' founders were at best wilfully blind to the perils they were launching. When I meet HRC founders, I sense a feeling of betrayal that feels genuine. Perhaps that's me going soft -- a mere look at HRC legislation shows how they were destined to become tools of tyranny.

In any event, Jonas thinks my wishy-washiness adds to my book's persuasiveness, as it makes me seem moderate. I'll accept that as a compliment, as an author whose goal was to write an advocacy book calling for the weeding-out of these commissions. But perhaps Jonas is in fact accurate: perhaps my views are mainstream and moderate -- the uniformly positive reviews I've received seem to support that -- and one has to have an extra helping of skepticism and radicalism, like Jonas has, to be anywhere close to "right wing" on the issue of HRCs in 2009!

In any event, Jonas is a great friend of liberty and a first-rate thinker, and wherever he and I disagree, it would be safe to assume that he's right and I'm wrong, and I just need to think about things a little longer! I'd love reader comments on this subject.