Sorry Ezra, but I'm just not buying it

I see that Ezra Levant is bursting at the seams over a book he has just written about the human rights racket in Canada. He would like everybody to buy it, not just because it shows how very smart he is and how stupid other people are (reason enough to write it), but because he is also faced with law suits and needs the money.

Now I appreciate Ezra’s battle for the preservation of free speech in this country and in other circumstances I would be inclined to line up and buy it. But I am not going to do that. I will certainly read it. I will borrow it from the library when it becomes available, or from a colleague or a neighbour, but I won’t fork out my money for it.

Ezra wrote a blog posting mocking the atheist bus ad campaign, calling the atheists behind it “cowards”, dumping on the slogan of the atheists and even going so far as to make fun of the physical appearance of a spokesperson for the campaign.

Lost on Levant was the issue of free speech prompted by this campaign, a subject about which he fancies himself as the leading Canadian expert (if not international expert, since he addressed the U.S. Congress).

The same sort of pencil-necked government bureaucrats that he has been whaling on for the past 18 months turned down the atheists’ ads in the cities of Halifax, Vancouver, Victoria, Kelowna, Ottawa and London, Ontario. The city council of Ottawa has since reversed the decision of its transit authority.

They may be a different set of bureaucrats to the ones in the HRCs, but they march to the same drumbeat. They couldn’t run the ads because they might “offend” somebody.

Indeed, they were aided and abetted in their back room deliberations by utterings of Dr. Charles McVety, Canada’s leading evangelical spokesperson, the Catholic Bishop of Calgary, Fred Henry, and even Ezra’s old Muslim pugilistic pal, Imam Syed Sohawardy, also from Calgary, who all jumped in to tell people how they were offended.

One would have thought when the imam spoke it might have prompted Levant to take a second look and reconsider what he wrote. Nope.

So, I have to assume from this record that Ezra Levant is all for free speech unless it happens to be the views of atheists, for whose rights he doesn’t give a shit.

Sorry Ezra, as an atheist, I have decided I’ll hang onto my 15 bucks and spend it on something more deserving, or on somebody more deserving.

And I hope that other non-religious people who read this will follow suit.