A Defense of Free Speech

This is a terrific defense of free speech delivered by Ezra Levant, during his interrogation by a Canadian "human rights commission." Levant was hauled before the commission for publishing the infamous Danish cartoons that caused outrage leading to rioting and killing in parts of the Muslim world. Below is Levant's opening statement to the bureaucrat leading the interrogation.

I also had to post the following exchange in which the interrogator, Ms. Shirlene McGovern, asks him about his intent in publishing the cartoons.



Levant's website has the details of the case for those interested in following the trial and for additional clips. 

Mark Steyn, a journalist and author who is also scheduled for interrogation by the "human rights commission," observes:

Ms McGovern's question reminds me of a passage from Melanie Phillips' book Londonistan:

Minority-rights doctrine has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a 'victim' group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the 'oppressive' majority.

Ms McGovern, a blandly unexceptional bureaucrat, is a classic example of the syndrome. No "vulnerable" Canadian Muslim has been attacked over the cartoons, but the cartoonists had to go into hiding, and a gang of Muslim youths turned up at their children's grade schools, and Muslim rioters around the world threatened death to anyone who published them, and even managed to kill a few folks who had nothing to do with them. Nonetheless, upon receiving a complaint from a Saudi imam trained at an explicitly infidelophobic academy and who's publicly called for the introduction of sharia in Canada, Shirlene McGovern decides that the purely hypothetical backlash to Muslims takes precedence over any actual backlash against anybody else.

UPDATE: Ok, ok. I had to add one more clip. This guy was just on fire.