Cynics Unlimited

What a week it’s been for Ezra Levant. The long-time Reform Party activist and publisher of The Western Standard has quickly elevated to near-celebrity status, giving interviews to CTV and talk radio to defend his “brave” decision to publish the controversial Danish cartoons that have caused numerous riots and deaths throughout the Muslim world. Citing the mainstream Canadian media’s refusal to run the cartoons, Levant has positioned his decision as a both a defiant act of free speech and a symbol of courage in resisting attempts by the Muslim world to culturally bully the west.

Alas, Mr Levant’s assertions seem to ring a little hollow. Firstly, the Muslim cartoon controversy has been raging for weeks and there has been no shortage of sources from which this cartoon can be viewed. If cyberspace news junkies failed to do the obvious image search on Google, they could have still viewed the images on numerous websites, including Michelle Malkin’s high-profile web log and the Canadian-based Jack’s News Watch. Furthermore, The Western Standard is breaking no new ground in the traditional news universe by printing these cartoons - they have already been published in a University of Prince Edward Island newspaper, The Jewish Free Press and the office door of philosophy professor Peter March among other places.

As for courage, there isn’t much risk in being a subsequent publisher of a cartoon that has earned no threats of violence to its previous publishers. The Canadian Islamic Congress responded to Levant’s decision by taking the decidedly Canadian route of deferring to the nation’s anti-discrimination ethics:

“We believe the Western Standard actually did transgress many limits. Although the Canadian Islamic Congress and the Canadian Jewish Congress did appeal to the magazine not to republish these offending cartoons they did go ahead and do it”
-Mohamed Elmasry, President of the Canadian Islamic Congress, CTV Interview (February 2006)

Scary words those are. Levant receives harsher treatment from neo-nazis on his own blogsite. The only likely danger as a result of this publication will be to Canadian troops in Afghanistan, as Lt.-Col. Tom Doucette warned recently.

So if the concepts of novelty and courage have been exhausted, what drives Mr. Levant’s sudden interest in promoting already-exercised freedom of speech?

How about some good old-fashioned controversy? There’s nothing like it to boost sales, which is definitely a must when your circulation is stagnating and consists largely of subscribers - hardly a model for financial growth. Moreover, the Western Standard’s politics of praising conservative ideals and attacking central Canada’s Liberal-dominated power structure is now mainstream commentary (not least because the Standard’s more prolific writers have day jobs at much larger publications). Levant himself writes for the Calgary Sun, where he quite liberally pimped his “controversial” decision. Why would people go out of their way to find nearly identical material from a more obscure weekly publication?

Hopefully, The Western Standard has better luck stirring up legitimate controversy by printing racial remarks made by unnamed Conservative politicians about Alberta Premier Ralph Klein’s wife (it is alleged that the sources claimed once Klein was out of office, his Metis wife would be “just another Indian”). Otherwise its publisher could be hereafter dismissed as the David Horowitz of Canadian politics.