Ezra Levant, the conservative, Jewish editor of the Western Standard, a magazine that used to be in print in Canada but is now only online, is being investigated by the Canadian Human Rights Commission for publishing the Mohammed cartoons in his magazine in 2006. Mr. Levant does an amazing job in his defense, nailing the Canadian government to the wall for interrogating him for thought crimes and attempting to censor his freedoms. I applaud Mr. Levant in his efforts to stand up to Orwellian behavior and hope that he has success in his endeavors. I'll leave you with an excerpt from his opening statement, and I highly encourage you to watch the videos he has on YouTube and read his website.

I am here at this government interrogation under protest. It is my position that the government has no legal or moral authority to interrogate me or anyone else for publishing these words and pictures. That is a violation of my ancient and inalienable freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and in this case, religious freedom and the separation of mosque and state. It is especially perverted that a bureaucracy calling itself the Alberta human rights commission would be the government agency violating my human rights....

We have a heritage of free speech that we inherited from Great Britain that goes back to the year 1215 and the Magna Carta. We have a heritage of eight hundred years of British common law protection for speech, augmented by 250 years of common law in Canada....

For a government bureaucrat to call any publisher or anyone else to an interrogation to be quizzed about his political or religious expression is a violation of 800 years of common law, a Universal Declaration of Rights, a Bill of Rights and a Charter of Rights. This commission is applying Saudi values, not Canadian values....

Labels: Islam, Politics