I’ll let Ezra Levant talk about the “lowlight” of his talk this afternoon:
Read More...I had just finished answering a question by referring to a recent meeting of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and how that group’s supporters are not in favour of censorship, when Leo Adler himself, the boss of Canada’s SWC, came to the microphone.
Not surprisingly, Adler didn’t really have a question. That’s fine; but it just wasn’t the right forum for a debate. I had just given a 45-minute rip-snortin’ assault on human rights commissions, and telling Jews not to use Nazi-like tactics of book-burnings against our enemies, but to take the approach recommended by most of Canada’s gay lobby, namely to oppose censorship, even of offensive anti-gay comments. You just can’t rebut that in a 30-second comment.
Adler went on for a few minutes, and I interjected a bit here and there. I think that some in the crowd were sympathetic to him, merely because I had used his organization as an example of what not to do for much of my speech. But taking over the Q & A session just wasn’t the right forum.
I told him I’d debate him in a proper debate anytime, anywhere — and I meant it.
Adler made my point for me, writ large: he noted that when the SWC started fighting against Internet hate, there was just one anti-Semitic website, and that now there are 8,000 of them. I think Adler was trying to prove just how big of a problem that is (though, in a world with a billion web pages, I’m not particularly alarmed). But I pointed out it did the opposite: if, despite destroying our fundamental freedom of speech, and building a jurisprudence of censorship that anti-Semites like Mohamed Elmasry are now using against Jews, Adler and company haven’t been able to stop the proliferation of anti-Semitism on the Internet, wasn’t that proof of his own failure?
