Ezra Levant’s phone — which buzzes constantly anyhow, believe me — must have been close to melting down yesterday.
After 12 people are slaughtered for publishing cartoons of Mohammed, who else are ya gonna call for comment but a guy who did the same thing in 2006, was prosecuted for doing so, and is still alive to tell the tale?
Not that Ezra (that’s what everybody in Canada calls him, fans and foes alike) ever tires of relating the story.
And why not? It’s pretty amazing.
But yesterday, for tragically obvious reasons, he devoted his show to the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
Unlike some “news” outlets, Sun News let him show some of the cartoons that got people killed.
(That combination of words still feels weird to write, although, sadly, by now it shouldn’t.)
Not just that, though.
Ezra called out the “Media Party” keyboard warriors who were “bravely” tweeting #JeSuisCharlie all day long.
Funny how much time those very same “journalists” have previously spent denouncing Ezra for being a “provocateur” or — the cardinal Canadian sin — a “shameless self-promoter” for taking unpopular stands on troublesome topics.
(I’m thinking of one in particular who has written more than 80 anti-Ezra columns in a national newspaper…)
As Mark Steyn did yesterday, Ezra also bashed the rest of the elite establishment apparatus that has made criticizing Islam a crime, while Muslims in Canada and elsewhere are free to blithely talk about, well, killing those who criticize Islam. (He has them on video.)
Ezra also raises a point that even he, he says, hardly dares to consider:
Is it possible that, after all these centuries — after John Locke and Voltaire and, hell, Larry Flynt — the Left never really believed in “freedom of speech” at all?
That that was just another example of (in my words, not Ezra’s) their seductive, noble-sounding yet ultimately mendacious carnival talker ballyhoo, to trick us into their flashy but empty tent?
That’s a pretty scary possibility.
Because it means that a lot of us conservatives and libertarians have been rigorously defending — to the literal death — a supposed “God-given human right” that was just our enemy’s cynical, phoney, self-serving invention all along.
It’s all way too Wizard of Oz for me to deal with without another coffee.
You’re better off watching Ezra anyway.
For one thing, he’ll also tell why the Charlie Hebdo massacre was actually worse than 9/11:
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