Monday morning round-up

Fundraising dinners

Sorry I've been away from blogging for a few days -- I was kept pretty busy with back-to-back speeches in Calgary, Red Deer and Edmonton in support of Rev. Stephen Boissoin, the pastor who was bullied by Alberta's human rights commission. They sentenced him to a lifetime ban, gagging him from criticizing gay marriage for the rest of his life, in public (including sermons) and in private (including personal e-mails). You can read the full text of this Stalinist order here.

The events were a success, and the funds will go to help pay for his appeal to a real court.

Metro Op-Ed

I love the Metro newspapers -- they're the free transit dailies from Vancouver to Halifax, with a combined daily readership of over a million. They asked me to write a short Op-Ed on what I think the state of freedom of speech is. Here is my effort, and here is a brief excerpt:

Freedom of speech is something we take for granted, so we rarely think about it. But the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

We’ve got to reform these HRCs, to get them out of the censorship business. And we’ve got to remind Canada’s other censors — from university “speech code” enforcers to the radio and TV regulators at the CRTC — that freedom is a Canadian value and we won’t give it up easily.

A Rabbi's view on HRCs

The London town hall meeting that I attended last month along with Kathy Shaidle and Salim Mansur was organized in part by Jewish leaders in that city. One of those in the audience was Lazer Gurkow, the rabbi of that city's Beth Tefilah congregation. Here's his thoughtful assessment of what he heard. Here are some excerpts:

...The idea of abolishing a body committed to the protection of human rights seems absurd to most, but I must admit that I found the arguments compelling.

...Laws are as imperfect as those who legislate them and as grossly misapplied as those who enforce them. It is not practical to empower imperfect humans with the legal authority to enforce moral standards. That is a situation ripe for abuse and cannot work. The only workable solution is a democratic system of checks and balances. Imperfect as democracy is, it is the best we humans have.

On the other hand, a Torah society is not democratic and free; it is a theocracy. Its laws are absolutely binding on its adherents. Its authority to mandate and to legislate, to obligate and to require is truly above the law. Such power in the hands of human beings can only corrupt. The Torah has remained pristine because it derives its authority from the Creator; a supreme moral being.

Human beings can only achieve approximate perfection through freedom of expression and a system of checks and balances. The Torah, because it speaks for G-d, articulates the values that are absolutely correct.

...Humans, who can barely govern their own feelings, cannot be entrusted with governing the feelings of others.

Malcolm Mayes

That reminds me of Malcolm Mayes' great editorial cartoon about HRCs:

I'm honoured that my friend Conrad Black has reviewed my book for the prestigious New York-based arts and culture magazine, The New Criterion.

You have to subscribe to get the whole review (or pay $3), but here are a few excerpts:

...As Mark Steyn writes in his foreword, Americans may think Canada is a long “chorus of Barney the Dinosaur singing ‘Caring is Sharing.’” But Ezra Levant introduces us very quickly to Canadian notions of Orwell’s “thoughtcrime,” in a wildly perverse laundry-list of abuses in the human rights industry.

...There are other astounding and disturbing examples of how the human rights commissions functioned. People were routinely convicted without facts or demonstration of intent. There was no need for harm or damage, only the notional possibility of future harm: in terms of cash penalties, a de facto criminalization of unstated, imputed thoughts that could be acted upon by a biased interrogator, unchecked by any balanced fact-finding process. It is enough that a randomly selected commissioner perceive a “likelihood” that something undesirable might have happened, arriving at that conclusion by abusing untrammeled powers in the name of nonexistent rights that can only be exercised at the expense of real rights that generations of brave people fought for in Canadian courts and Canadian uniforms, on foreign battlefields, and in contested skies and oceans.

...In their zeal for self-preservation and crusading belligerence, the human rights inspectorate infiltrates suspect and target organizations. Thus, crypto-Nazi and white supremacist organizations are first bloated with disguised official infiltrators and then decried as having achieved worrisome dimensions. Search and seizure can be conducted without a warrant or even notice after the fact; breaking and entering, theft, and vandalism are immune to sanction. Completely innocent and uninvolved people are set up by official computer-hacking as conduits to targets and infiltrators. The frontiers of the sting have been extended beyond the horizon.

This could be a cautionary tale for Americans, whose legal system and constitutional protections for real rights have rotted and decomposed far beyond anything that has afflicted Canada. The Fifth-, Sixth-, and Eighth-Amendment guarantees of due process, the grand jury as protection against capricious prosecution, the assurance of no seizure of property without just compensation, speedy justice, access to counsel, an impartial jury, and reasonable bail are all unattainable relics of a gentler and more officially honest time...

I'd love to reprint the whole thing, but you should just go spend the $3 to buy it!

Pique Magazine

Pique Magazine is based in Whistler, B.C. Here's their peppy review of the book. Here are some excerpts:

...If you're a liberal and you hear the name Ezra Levant, there's an immediate compulsion to just wave him off. "He's a loudmouth blowhard," you may be thinking, "A conservative douchebag." That's irrelevant here. In this book he puts aside all his tribal affiliations and expresses genuine concern for Canadians' right to free speech - and for all Canadians, from Spartacists to Western Separatists.

...Naturally, "blowhard" that he is, Levant fought back with research - much of which he has documented in Shakedown, which stands as the single biggest PR fallout the human rights commissions will ever experience. It's a vicious, nonpartisan polemic that every Canadian should read. It comes from the mouth of a journalist and lawyer who took the brunt of a commission's punishing process and set out to keep it from happening to any Canadian ever again.

...Human rights commissions in Canada have clearly devolved into fascistic, punishing interrogations that are literally making up human rights on a case-by-case basis. Even if you don't get convicted, Levant makes it clear that the commission prozess is punishing enough. He's the loudest advocate for free speech in Canada and everyone, journalists, lawyers, and the public alike, ought to be infuriated by what he has to say.

I thought that was pretty friendly!

Metula News Agency

The Metula News Agency, or Menapress, is an interesting mix of political analysis and leading-edge Middle East intelligence. Much of it is written in French, as was this lengthy review of Shakedown.

I'm delighted that Menapress translationed it into English. I can't seem to link to the exact entry, but for the next little while you'll be able to find it quickly from the main page, here. Some excerpts:

If you asked an educated Westerner to draw a list of countries where fundamental freedoms are best protected, Canada would probably be among the first mentioned.

 

…It is all the more revealing to discover how, in one of the most mature democracies and the quietest on the planet, a branch of government can adopt the logic of a totalitarian state.

 

…Human Rights Commissions are not bound, as are real courts, by the constraints of procedure. There are no rules defining what type of evidence may be accepted or not. The decision to try in public or in camera is at the sole discretion of judges. A fundamental inequality is established between the plaintiffs, all of whose costs are borne by the State, and the defendants, who must pay for all their costs.

 

Neither are they subject to the ethical and professional obligations of real courts. No legal training is required to work there: they have been staffed for the most part, by fervent human rights activists who have the political connections necessary to be appointed, but without qualifications as judges.

  

 …More importantly, the commissions were protected from outside scrutiny by their name and their mission. When “human rights” is part of your title, and when you are responsible for fighting discrimination, you can only be a Good guy.

 

Such, at least, was the reasoning held by majority of Canadians until early 2008. They only made the same error as most of us. We all often forget that words are not the real thing. You can be called “progressive” and passionately strive to hold back civilization, or call a “people's democracy” the rule of a small elite that hates and suppresses the people. You can also call “Human Rights Commission” the main threat against human rights to have appeared in an advanced democracy.

Tour dates

I'm off to Ottawa for some private book events tomorrow. I'll be in Winnipeg on May 7 for this event. I'll be in Victoria and Nanaimo on Friday, May 22. Details here and here.

My event in New York City on the evening of May 19 is a private event. If you're in the city and are interested, send me an e-mail. I'll have more news from that visit to come, including a list of the media events I'll be doing.