I’ve Moved!
November 20, 2008
So I’m sure that most people have noticed that the site has been offline for a few days. There’s a reason for that, which I will get to shortly. But first, let me just say this:
In fact, I am blogging at a new site I have just finished setting up: kennethhynek.net. A full explanation for the reasons behind the move can be found here
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That said, this is not the end of Time Immortal. My wife Grace has expressed interest in taking over blogging at this domain, and I am working to make sure that she gets set up here as soon as possible.
Also, my profound apologies for the modification to the site face; the move was not as seamless as I would have hoped, and many of the image files for this theme, and in the gallery, were corrupted during the course of their evacuation from my previous web host’s servers. Until such time as I have repaired them, I’ve put a clean-looking template in place of the previous one.
Update: for the purposes of further traffic shaping, new posts from kennethhynek.net will be excerpted below. Full articles can be read at the new blog.
Ezra Levant’s closing argument at the HRC
January 15, 2008
As the reader may be aware, Ezra Levant has had a run-in with the Alberta Human Rights Commission over the publication of the Muhammed cartoons, which emerged as a controversy from the moment of their first publication back in Denmark in 2005. Ezra Levant’s now-defunct magazine, the Western Standard, published the cartoons in the interests of…you know…actually showing the Reader just exactly what it was that was causing all the rioting and violent invective overseas.
And so we’re clear, here’s the cartoons themselves:
[image:299:c:s=1:l=d]
The publication of these pictures, many of them little more than childish scribbles that are much more pitiable — for the obvious lack of talent behind them — than they are offensive, was legitimate within the rights and freedoms that the UN purportedly grants all people of the world, which the EU supposedly recognizes. One drawing, in particular, is a very accurate commentary on the relationship of European artists and Islam (that would be the picture of the cartoonist drawing a little scribble on his paper whilst fearfully looking over his shoulder). Most of the artists of these Danish cartoons are now in hiding, their fear of ending up like Theo van Gogh very real and very justified.
That’s a huge story, and one would think that the only way to report on it accurately would be to begin by reprinting the cartoons, to provide context for the reader. And this is all the Western Standard did.
For that ‘crime’, a radical, Saudi-trained imam in Calgary — Syed Sohawardy — filed a complaint with the demanding an apology from Levant. (Point of interest: In his complaint, Sohawardy even makes the claim that he is descended directly from Muhammad.)
Of course, these sorts of things take time to happen, and it was only in the last week that Levant had his day before the officer of the AHRC. Ever articulate, and ever in fine form, below is his closing argument.
He says some pretty powerful, and defiant, stuff. It’s hard not to feel proud to be a Canadian standing in solidarity with someone like Levant:
I do not want to be excused from this complaint because I was reasonable, because it was not the government’s authority to tell me whether or not I’m reasonable. If I commit a crime with words, which is possible — fraud, a tort like defamation — then the government has a role. But political and religious debate are not the proper province of human rights commissions. They have exceeded their original mandate, they have strayed far, and they are tampering in illegal ways with fundamental rights. It is my hope that this matter is not dismissed. It is my hope that this complaint is accepted, that it goes to a hearing, and that I happen to appear before the most fascist of the panelists — some thug down in Lethbridge named Lori Andreachuk. I hope I appear in front of her, and I hope she’s having a particularly angry day. I hope she hears every word in this [video], and that I call her a thug. And I hope that she convicts me, and “sentences” me to the apology that this fascist from Saudi Arabia demands of me. Because then I will take this junk out of the human rights commission, and into real courts, where eight hundred years of common law, and the Charter of Rights, and the Bill of Rights will come to my aid, and where we won’t have hearings where reporters are not allowed, and we won’t have hearings where my defence team is limited to one person, and we won’t have hearings before a divorce lawyer like Lori Andreachuk, who knows nothing about constitutional freedoms. I reserve maximum freedom to be maximally offensive, to hurt feelings as I like. I didn’t do that in this case; a few thin-skinned radicals radicals were angry. It was a reasonable publication, but that is not what should exculpate me. My rights as a free man should.
That is, I think, the most important point: his rights as a free man — a Canadian citizen — as outlined and stipulated in the should exculpate him, should set him free from the kangaroo court that is the HRC, is that such a thing as the HRC should not even exist in Canada to begin with. The human rights commissions — at both the federal and provincial levels — are illegal and an affront to the rights of every Canadian citizen, including the right to freedom of expression.
Thus:
