Ezra Levant talks about his fight for freedom of speech

March 18, 12:50 PMConservative Politics ExaminerKathy Shaidle

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Ezra Levant

Canadian magazine publisher Ezra Levant became famous as the first and only person prosecuted for printing the controversial "Danish Mohamed" cartoons.

While undergoing his expensive, three year legal ordeal, Ezra Levant discovered that others were being prosecuted under "hate speech" legislation, often for saying or writing politically incorrect things that challenged the liberal Establishment status quo.

His new book, Shakedown: How Our Government is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights , tells the shocking tale of what happened to him, and is still happening to others. Free speech is being crushed in the name of "multiculturalism, tolerance and diversity," and Levant is determined to fight back.

He spoke to me recently about his case, his new book, his childhood heroes and his future plans.

EXAMINER:
Has anything happened since the book was printed that you'd like to tell people about, to keep them up to date on certain cases you covered in the book?

EZRA LEVANT:
"To my surprise and delight, the cabinet minister in charge of Alberta's human rights commission -- the one that had fifteen bureaucrats and lawyers investigate me for 900 days -- has denounced his own agency as a 'kangaroo court', has appointed a real judge to oversee it and has given him a mandate to reform it. That cabinet minister -- a black man himself -- has said there is no right not to be offended. It's a hopeful sign that the campaign of reform is moving from the court of public opinion into the legislatures of the land."

"At the federal level, the Canadian Human Rights Commission has gone into damage control mode. It has quietly dropped some of its more political cases, such as against the Christian Heritage Party. It is clearly hoping that by just getting out of the headlines, it can weather its PR storm without being reformed. I hope they're wrong, and I think they're wrong.

"My book contains some explosive facts about the CHRC that will likely shock 'severely normal' Canadians, including evidence that the CHRC is Canada's largest disseminator of anti-Semitic, anti-black and anti-gay bigotry. I just don't see how any government other than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's could accept the fact that staff from their 'human rights' agency has actually joined various neo-Nazi organizations, and made literally hundreds of bigoted comments (e.g. gays are 'deviants' and a 'cancer on society'; an apartheid city called 'Whiteville' should be formed; Canadian neo-Nazis need to get 'dangerous', etc.). This is a scandal of the first order, and political heads should roll."

EXAMINER:
People ask me where you get your energy from and how you keep your sense of humor. What is your secret?

EZRA LEVANT:
"Right around the time of my interrogation by the HRC, I spoke with Mark Steyn and we talked about how the chief weapon used by HRCs is psychological. Usually, their formal punishments aren't enormous -- typically in the tens of thousands of dollars (though they are occasionally more extreme, including lifetime bans on publicly or privately saying certain words, and even orders to people to publicly issue false apologies: see the Lund v. Boissoin case).

"The real punishment is the process -- biased, slow, uncertain, capricious, lawless, costly, unfair. The process is designed to so demoralize political dissidents as to make them abandon hope, leave the jurisdiction, or spiral down in a rage. Many people who are caught in HRCs actually become, over time, the caricature that they are accused of being -- they're turned into obsessive cranks, which is a wholly predictable outcome when a Canadian expecting Canadian justice is subjected to Soviet-style 'justice.'

"So I simply decided I wasn't going to become like that. If I were to 'obsess' over the unfair charges against me, it would take the form of a relentless campaign for reform, using my time and whatever talents I have to spread the word about the corruption and abuse of the system. I knew I was luckier than pretty much any other HRC target in the past: I had friends in politics and journalism, and it would be pretty tough to tag me, a Zionist Jew who had actually started a multi-racial club in law school called Minorities Against Discrimination, as a 'neo-Nazi' or 'white supremacist.' So, unlike the HRCs' previous targets, I would actually have a chance to be heard when I pointed out the rot in the system.

"I decided I would try to live up to the title of Mark Steyn's column in the National Review: the 'happy warrior', and to use mockery and ridicule where appropriate.

"I spent time researching HRCs, and found that they were actually everything they claimed to be against -- everything they accused me of being.

"CHRC staff joined neo-Nazi organizations -- and are still members to this day. A CHRC 'hate speech' investigator was a former cop kicked off her police force for corruption. An Alberta HRC lawyer was a Muslim supremacist. A CHRC manager actually said that free speech was an 'American' idea, so he didn't care about trampling on it. And HRCs everywhere are the political dumping grounds for extremist politicians who couldn't cut it in real elections (Giacomo Vigna of the CHRC is a three-time election loser, Richard Warman of the CHRC is a four-time election loser, Barbara Hall of the OHRC was fired as mayor of Toronto, etc.).

"In sum, I wasn't the extremist radical; they were. I wasn't the one abridging 'human rights', they were. I wasn't the fringe element who needed political 're-education' about our country's values; they were. I wasn't a humourless crank; they were -- as they proved en masse when they hit me with more than 20 vengeance lawsuits, human rights complaints and complaints to the law society to have me disbarred. (The first six of those complaints and suits have been heard and dismissed, and I expect the rest will be too. What a perfect snapshot of the nuisance, vengeance and censorship genes in the HRC industry.)

"They richly deserved to be mocked. I tried to do that, and of course Steyn is the master at that.

"I should note that, from time to time, I did indeed worry, but only about the money needed to fend off the lawfare. But through the Internet, people from across Canada and the U.S. (and even around the world) each chipped in a little to help me cover the cost of fighting all these nuisance suits. That financial help -- and the moral support it implied -- greatly boosted my spirits, and still does. I knew I wasn't alone even if I felt alone."

EXAMINER:
Who were your heroes growing up and how did they influence you?

EZRA LEVANT:
"In high school I participated every year in the Sir Winston Churchill Society debates, and they were always about some element of Churchill's life. So I must have read twenty books about him. I'd say he's a hero. In college I read Ayn Rand's books. I wouldn't call myself an objectivist, but I believe her analysis about society's 'moochers and looters' was bang on. And I've tried to read some of the Austrian economic thinkers, though they're probably above my head."

EXAMINER:
Do you think you'll ever run for office again?

"I might run for office again, but not imminently. Although I am a Conservative Party partisan, I have tried my best to make the fight for free speech and against HRCs a bi-partisan fight. And, to my delight, a number of Liberal and even Bloc Quebecois MPs have agreed with the need for reform. That's encouraging, because freedom of speech is important for everyone on the political spectrum. The fact that several traditionally liberal or even left-wing NGOs and publications have come out forcefully for my freedom of speech is a welcome sign that many Canadians really do 'get it' when it comes to protecting ideas, even and especially dissident ideas."