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Ezra Levant, hailing from the Western city of Calgary and founder of the Western Standard, which now exists only as a online magazine, was on the Michael Coren Show a couple of nights ago to talk about his new book Shake-down. The whole hour-long show is available on Youtube. I highly recommended it since Michael Coren, usually a mild microphone-hogger, gives Levant free rein to present example after example of cases he describes in his book.
Levant gained fame (or infamy) when his print magazine was the only one to publish the Mohammed cartoons, which resulted with him having to appear before the Alberta Human Rights Commission. Levant says this case cost him in the $100,000 range and three years to resolve, and he is a relatively famous Canadian, with all kinds of contacts and associations who helped him. Imagine, he says, the full-time-working, five-figure-earning person with no famous contacts on his Rolodex. In fact, these are just the type of people the Commission "gets".
I'm not sure what other method Levant has to tackle the problem other than to talk about it nationwide, and now to shock the country into realizing the callousness and immorality of the Commission from the accounts in his new book. I think that is his primary strategy so far. But just by the force of his book, his personality and the stories, this strategy might work to get some of the Commission's mandates amended, if not scrapped.
I think it is apt, and maybe providential, that a Westerner is the one to fight so vocally for Western standards. And that a Jew is dismantling what his antecedents set up several decades ago to combat what they believed was potential Nazi-type hate directed at them.
Providential, but also a profound learning lesson. Be careful how you rearrange a country's laws, is what I say, especially if you're "visitors" here. By that I mean, however much Jews try to assimilate as Canadians, they, by their own volition, will always remain Jews. Therefore, their efforts to change things in this country will primarily be for their benefit, and not for the country as a whole. If they go down the route of dismantling or rearranging existing laws and regulations, they have to think hard about the consequences.
Thus, ironically, the Human Rights Commission, established to protect Jews, ended up being harmful to them, and of course to the rest of the country also. It has become a hotbed for Muslim complaints, who are one of the most anti-Semitic groups there are.
