SHAKEDOWN by EZRA LEVANT: a Book Review

SHAKEDOWN,
How Our Government Is Undermining Democracy In the Name of Human Rights McClelland & Stewart Ltd

216 pages, $28.99

ISBN: 978-0-7710-4618-6

Ezra Levant’s recently released book, “SHAKEDOWN, How Our Government Is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights” is necessary reading for every Canadian with concerns about the most fundamental human right of all -- Free Speech. It should be required reading in every one of Canada’s secondary schools.

Let’s get one thing out of the way. Levant mentions me by name in the book and lauds my “biting graphics and posters” that serve the cause of free speech. There is no conflict of interest; quite the opposite.

Levant‘s book is a highly readable compendium of the corruption and abuse of fundamental human rights committed by the political appointees to the Human Rights Commissions across Canada. Levant is composed of the holy trinity of being a lawyer, political activist and journalist. Oh, did I mention that he’s a Jew?

Does that matter? Yep. It affords him some minimal protection against the full-force wrath of the Human Rights Commissions because he is a born member of a “protected minority” whereas a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant like myself, is a born-target for an apology-flogging and as an easily-milked compensation cash cow. The HRC’s do not exact justice for individuals, but for groups. Individuals are mere representatives of groups.

Levant’s research reveals that the evil perps of human rights crimes consist almost to a person of white skinned, Christian, heterosexual people. Meanwhile Tamil extremists, Sikh extremists, Islamic extremists, just to name a few, who have been recorded in the public domain espousing hateful things against other groups, notably white-skinned Christian straights, get a free walk.

Another interesting phenomenon of HRCs is the 100% conviction rate. There is not a judicial court in the land with a perfect rate of 100%. Not even the Supreme Court of Canada has issued 100% unanimous findings of law. No other government agency has ever achieved such perfection. You’d have to visit North Korea, or any other totalitarian regime to find such 100% perfection.

We take pride in Canada’s checks and balances of our police and judicial systems, especially search warrants. These are not needed for HRCs. Newfoundland’s HRC has the power to “enter a building, factory, workshop or other premises or place in the province a) to inspect, audit and examine books of account, records and documents; or b) to inspect and view a work, material, machinery, an appliance or article found there. The person occupying or in charge of the (inspected) building, workshop, premises or place shall c) answer all questions concerning those matters put to them; and d) produce for inspection the books of account, record, documents, material, machinery, appliance or article requested.”

The offices of the local newspaper can be entered by any HRC officer to search and obtain all letters that have been written to them over the years, including unpublished ones. The editor and staff would be required, under penalty of contempt, to answer all questions about their personal knowledge of the seized letters. The HRC could go to their homes for material that may have been taken there. No warrant necessary. Unlike the police, there is no independent civilian oversight, nor internal monitoring to admonish an officer who overstepped an ethical boundary.

Unlike other government departments, HRCs have no ethical guidelines in place whatsoever.

This has led to considerable corruption of HRCs. An officer of the Cdn HRC became a member of several neo-Nazi internet groups and under various pseudonyms, posted anti-gay, anti-semitic and racist comments in order to heat up the hate of other homophobes, anti-semites, and racists to make their own hateful remarks. These same HRC officers think nothing of hijacking an innocent citizen’s internet account to make these hateful postings, and to do so while on payroll and the premises of the CHRC. They even hired a disgraced police officer who had been dismissed from her job for just cause -- just the kind of person that fit’s the needs of a Human Rights Commission.

Raja Khouri, former president of the Canadian Arab Federation complained about Canada putting Hezbollah on the terrorist list, then later wrote in the Globe & Mail, that it was “shameful” that Canada put Hamas on the terrorist list. Three months later he was rewarded with an appointment to the Ontario Human Rights Commission where he can pass judgement on the case of an Ontario Jew accused of Islamophobia. Partiality anyone? The OHRC is run by the same Barbara Hall, who, when she was Toronto’s mayor, had banned the Bare Naked Ladies from playing in Nathan Phillips Square because of the sexist name of their rock group.

Levant delineates numerous outrages of these HRCs, which came about, in part, because a complicit and complacent news media failed to do their job as scrutinizer of the state. They were mesmerized by the magic words, “human rights”. It’s secular church.

Ezra Levant, was the only publisher in North America to take the courageous responsibility of publishing the Danish Mohammed cartoons for the very simple reason that they were a major international news story, and his readers deserved the right to see the primary documents of the news story. He became the only publisher in the world forced before a government agency to answer for his publishing “crimes” on this issue. The rest of Canada’s news media saw no problem, nor did they care a wink about the erosion of democracy’s most fundamental right -- free speech. They irresponsibly aided and abetted the implementation of sharia law on blasphemy throughout the Western world.

The news media ignored HRCs because only right-wing nutbars were having their rights trampled, so yawn, ho hum. It was true, of course, that the overwhelming targets of HRCs were marginal basement apartment neo-Nazi wing-nuts with double-digit followings. The HRCs noticed the complacency, and after decades of accumulated media fawning, they became a law unto themselves, bloated with the disease of political correctness and mediocrity, which has also contaminated the editorial offices of news media across the land.

While hundreds of thousands of newcomers arrived in Alberta, its HRC experienced a 15% drop in complaints in a year. Its own stats found that it took 7% longer to resolve a complaint. What would happen to a business that lost 15% of its customers and provided poorer service? It would have to drum up business fast. So Alberta’s HRC published 60,000 easy-to-read booklets encouraging new immigrants studying English as a second language to learn how to file complaints. The illustrated examples in the booklet demonstrated that no matter how trivial or speculative the problem, the newcomer “should always assume the culprit is racism” and that the HRC is there to fix it.

Levant asks, “why new Albertans are being conditioned to expect the worst of their fellow human beings. Do they (HRC) think its good for national morale when taxpayer funded agencies portray Canada as a country full of racists and teach newcomers that bigotry lurks in every coffee shop?”

Rev Boissoin was busted for authoring a letter which was published in the Red Deer Advocate. His letter contained his Christian religious belief that homosexuality is an abomination, as clearly stated in the Bible. After finding Boissoin guilty, the HRC wrote, “In this case, there is no specific individual who can be compensated as there is no direct victim who has come forward.” There was only a theoretical victim, and that was good enough to punish Boissoin with a life sentence of censorship.

Boissoin was ordered to “cease publishing in newspapers, by email, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the Internet, in future, disparaging remarks about gays and homosexuals.” The lifetime ban wasn’t on hateful or discriminatory speech, but on “disparaging remarks.” He could not indulge in the same kind of disparaging remarks that gays are free to make about themselves in their own publications.

If anyone knows the tyranny of state censorship, it is the gay community. Egale, Canada’s largest gay advocacy lobby, stood in favour of Boissoin’s free speech, and told the Alberta HRC where they could shove the cash that they extorted from Boissoin. Egale “argued that a government that punishes a Christian for his views is no different and no better than one that punishes gays on the same basis.”

On of Canada’s most renown civil rights activists, Alan Borovoy, general counsel to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, was once an advocate of HRC’s, he has since become repelled by them. His most notable observation is this: “while abusers of civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s came from the right, today, they’re more likely to come from the left.” Borovoy’s book, The New Anti-Liberals, documents that pathetic transformation.

The great poet, John Milton, wrote one of the most important English documents against government censorship, The Areopagitica, 1644, wherein he wrote "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat … Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties ... though all the fields of doctrine were let loose to play on earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”