Ezra Levant still going strong

It’s against the law in Canada to publish anything that is: “Likely to expose a person to hatred or contempt.” Steve, that’s crazy. Exposing a person to feelings is against the law? I mean – according to that definition, if you go to Yat Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel, and you leave with hateful feelings towards Germany, Yat Vashem the Holocaust memorial is guilty of a hate crime…

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Freedom of speech is the strangest thing, Steve, it’s a gift you’ve got to give your enemies, if you want to keep it to yourself. [...] It’s something we have to give to the folks we totally despise, people who are wrong and rude and offensive, because if they can’t have it, well then we won’t have our rigth to be dissidents.

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From this 18 minute interview with Ezra Levant, who is still going strong (I was unable to embed the video, but I recommend it, especially to those of you who haven’t heard the name of Ezra Levant before). These two articles are great too – do follow the link in the latter to the Power Play episode – the whole setup is just hilarious.

The daily (monthly?) work of a human rights commission

Ezra Levant is back:

In her letter to me today, Dagenais says she’s finally [US: after two months have passed] going to pass my defence along to the commissioners who will rule on whether I’ve commited a hate crime by republishing an Op-Ed by an Alberta pastor named Rev. Stephen Boissoin. You’ll recall, Rev. Boissoin has been fined, given a lifetime ban on expressing his faith, and ordered to publicly renounce his faith, for daring to express a politically incorrect religious view.

If the commissioners find me guilty, they’ll prosecute me before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. In the thirty years they’ve been prosecuting section 13 “hate speech” cases, they’ve never lost. Political prosecutors in Iran and China would be impressed.

But here’s where Dagenais becomes a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the CHRC and its censorship fetish: she blacked out portions of my defence before passing it on to the commissioners. Seriously — she censored what I wrote in my own defence, before she passed it along to the people who will sit in judgment of me. She’s only allowing me to say things in my defence that she approves in advance.

This is surrreal.