"Little Fascist" To Withdraw Complaint Against Ezra Levant?

Via Hot Air, which has good excerpts.

Ezra Levant's blog entry should be read in full. Here's a taste.

Today Syed Soharwardy told the Calgary Herald editorial board that he is withdrawing his human rights complaint against me that he filed two years ago when I published the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. (Seriously, if you haven't done so, you've really got to look at his hand-scrawled complaint here. I know dyslexic ten-year-olds with ADD who are more coherent.)

...

So why would Soharwardy do this -- and why now?

...

Soharwardy wants a hudna because he's losing badly. Not financially: he hasn't spent a penny to further the complaint against me -- that has been done courtesy of Ed Stelmach's government and the taxpayers of Alberta, to the tune of $500,000, I'd guess. Nor has Soharwardy had to spend hundreds of hours battling against me at the commission -- Alberta government employees do that for him. It's because over the past two years -- and the past month in particular -- Soharwardy has become known for what he is: an Islamofascist imam, who's trying to bring Saudi values to Canada. Though I'm being pummelled in a kangaroo court, he's being pummelled in the court of public opinion. He didn't expect it, and he hates it.

He hates that hundreds of bloggers ridicule him. He hates that my video clips, in which I describe his illiberal nature, have been viewed almost 500,000 times. He hates that his own enemies within his mosque have taken advantage of this media coverage to shine a light of scrutiny on the way he runs his mosque - from his financial irregularities, to his abusive treatment of women. These documents here, here, here and here, first published on my blog, have been viewed thousands of times and led to a series of newspaper items in the Calgary Herald and even the Washington Times. Soharwardy is embarrassed -- as well he should be. He is no longer polite company. Now he's known as a censor, a fascist, a sexist. He's un-Canadian. And if the complaint against me goes to a tribunal, he'll go through this again on a larger scale.

But can someone abuse a government process like he has, for two years, and then simply walk away with impunity? I've spent the better part of $100,000 defending against this thug -- but because he's losing face, he thinks he can pretend he never did what he did.

Soharwardy claims that he's seen the light and realized that he was misguided -- that he should never have tried to censor me. Really? Last month he was cheering on commission's interrogation of me; two weeks ago, he was sending me more legal threats. The only epiphany he's had was that in the circus he started, he's coming across as the clown -- an angry, anti-Semitic clown who shouts down women at his own mosque.

Read on. Levant is going to file an abuse of process lawsuit against Soharwardy, and that, unlike Sohardwardy's complaint, really is a recognized legal insult. He may also file against the "human rights" commission.

I guess he committed the third most famous error, after fighting a landwar in Asia and going up against a Sicilian when death is on the line: Taking a Jew to court.*

You'd have thought that this anti-semite would have been forewarned on that one, huh?

Levant really needs to see this through. I imagine that, behind the scenes, the "human rights" commission might just be begging Soharwardy to withdraw, because there is too much peril in convicting Levant on a thought crime -- the commission itself might be in jeopardy were they to take such a disgusting and illiberal step -- and yet they also can't afford to appear toothless.

They want to keep the threat of prosecuting for thought crimes without having to suffer the scrutiny of actually convicting in a very high-profile case, where the "perpetrator" is not some unsympathetic basement-dwelling troglodyte but someone who has much of the public, and all of the righteousness, on his side.

So it's best for the "human rights" commission and the mincing buffoon Soharwardy for this to just go away. At this point, they effectively win by simply shutting down the process, as they retain most if not all off their thought-crime patrolling "mandate."

But that's hardly the best outcome for Levant, for Steyn, for publishers and writers and anyone who cares to express a thought about politics or culture, or for Canada itself.

Have at 'em, Ezra. Make sure the Canadian authorities go on record, one way or another, as to whether freedom of speech and freedom of thought are "peculiarities of American law" or the natural rights of Canadians as well.

Even an adverse ruling serves the cause: These matters need to be clarified, and the people of Canada need to know whether or not they're living in a thought police state.

* If you're Canadian, you're not permitted to read that line. Please report to your local human rights commission re-education center for proper guidance and counseling.

posted by Ace at 03:20 PM

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