Okay, I’ve had dozens of requests from people–media, advocacy groups, etc–looking to get a soundbite on the current tizzy about Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, and their current tussle with Canada’s Human Rights Commissions. Until now, I’ve been politely refusing comment, saying that the Muslim community as a whole probably has a mosaic of individual opinions on the subject and it’s unfair to ask lil ole me to speak to it. I’m starting to lose hope that that’s the case. So let me give out one Muslim’s opinion:
Ezra Levant is a mealy-mouthed jerk. Mark Steyn is an ill-educated clown who realised some time ago that genocidal musings about the sand people was a more profitable line of inquiry than reviews of musical theatre. And neither of them have done anything that should cause any government anywhere to interfere with their right to free speech. In simpler terms, being a jerk or a clown isn’t against the law, and nor should it be. They’re not yelling “Fire” in a crowded theatre–”Sandnigger” maybe, but there’s no crime in that.
I let this opinion slip in a private conversation. “But what about our rights?” was the predictable reply. What rights? The right not to be offended? We don’t have that. No, this person was thinking about our freedom of religion, which we do have. But I fail to see how insulting my spiritual sensitivities, which both Levant the turd and Steyn the clown have done, infringes on my right to practice my religion. It makes me angry that these two neocon shills are given licence from the conventional media to bring the stupid as prolifically as they do. But again, making me mad isn’t against the law.
Levant, that inconsolable boob, really pulls on our heart strings as he bitches about the process he’s undergoing in his latest column in the Globe and Mail. He’s asked about his intentions. And, curse the little bugger, he makes a powerful point: His intentions, his private emotions, thoughts and feelings, aren’t any business at all of the government. I firmly believe he’s full of crap when he tells the world he was only interested in fleshing out the news story when he made the decision to publish the insulting, demeaning cartoons from the Jyllands Posten in his now-defunct print magazine the Western Standard. He did it to insult the Muslim community, and to provoke a response, in which he was successful, in order to keep his magazine alive, in which he was an utter failure.
I don’t want my government investigating either Levant or Steyn, because I don’t want to live in a country where I can’t say what I want for fear of insulting or offending someone. I feel so strongly about it, I’m half-tempted to donate to Levant’s legal fund, and probably would if it were zakat-elligible. I hate the fact that Imam Sowahardy and the Canadian Islamic Congress have decided to make these two utter goofs into heroes of liberty.
What the CIC and Imam Sowahardy seem to oppose is exactly what I want, and exactly what I would argue the vast majority of Canadians want, which is an open marketplace of ideas. Put Steyn and Levant in that marketplace, and put reason, common sense, facts, and truth in opposition to them, and they’ll fail. Ask their customers, the thinking public, exactly why they should go to an obvious racist with a high-school education who used to write about show tunes for “informed comment” (and we’ll use that phrase loosely) on multiculturalism, and ask them to give that comment the credence it deserves, which is exactly none. Levant’s inconsequential little rag has gone bust, so the marketplace has already spoken to him. Fighting words with government bureacracy doesn’t work, and we don’t want it. I don’t think the Canadian Muslim community is prepared to live in a world in which it does anyway, and if it is, and that’s what it wants, I’ll fight it every step of the way, because I need an open marketplace of ideas.
And that’s what the spirit of freedom calls for–the freedom I, as a Canadian, cherish and want for myself. That freedom allows us to add our own input into the debate, and if we do, and are smart enough at it, these two media darlings, bastions of liberty, will sink. But if Canada tries to drown them in a pool of Kafka-esque bureaucracy, they’ll just bob, like turds, to the top.
