Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once said that he would rather be quickly shot than to be trampled to death by geese. That is exactly the way human rights are lost – not in one fell swoop, but by a slow insidious process of attrition, hardly noticeable at all. The right of freedom of speech in Canada and elsewhere has now come under attack by an aggrieved group that – marvelous irony – is using the state, normally the guardian of the constitutional right of unfettered speech, to suppress free speech. Ira Levant has already felt the tread of geese on his back, and now it is Mark Steyn’s turn. Steyn , the author of “America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it,” is also a prolific, international conservative political commentator who has written for such publications as National Review, The New York Sun and The New Criterion. Last month, according to a story in the Jan 14 edition of the Washington Times , Steyn became the subject of “a CHRC (Canadian Human Rights C...

Defenders of freedom of speech may want to mark January 11, 2008 on their calendars, for it was on that date that Ezra Levant, publisher of the Western Standard magazine, answered a complaint before a quasi-legal Canadian authority, the Alberta Human Rights commission, concerning cartoons he had published that originally appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten . The cartoons represented the prophet Mohammed, some in an unflattering light, and at the time, to put it mildly, they created quite a stir in the Islamic world. Before the Alberta Human Rights Commission, Levant declared that the re-publication of the cartoons in the Western Standard was “the proudest moment of my public life.” He said, “I would do it again today. In fact, I did do it again today. Though the Western Standard, sadly, no longer publishes a print edition, I posted the cartoons this morning on my website .” Not everyone, of course, felt similarly. The original cartoons inspired attacks on the Norwegian and...

Ezra Levant defends his decision to print cartoons before agents of the state. His response to interrogatories by the Alberta Human Rights Commission should be shown in every journalism class in the (as yet) free West: Video 1 , Video 2 , Video 3 The entire interview may be found here . Ezra Levant's site may be found here . A full account of these incidents from a moderate Muslim perspective may be fond here .