From a current column by Ezra Levant in the National Post:
Some
900 days after I became the only person in the Western world charged
with the “offence” of republishing the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, the
government has finally acquitted me of illegal “discrimination.”
Taxpayers are out more than $500,000 for an investigation that involved
fifteen bureaucrats at the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The legal
cost to me and the now-defunct Western Standard magazine is $100,000.
The
case would have been thrown out long ago if I had been charged in a
criminal court, instead of a human rights commission. That’s because
accused criminals have the right to a speedy trial. Accused publishers
at human rights commissions do not.
And if I had been a
defendant in a civil court, the judge would now order the losing
parties to pay my legal bills. Instead, the Edmonton Council of Muslim
Communities won’t have to pay me a dime. Neither will Syed Soharwardy,
the Calgary imam who abandoned his identical complaint against me this
spring.
Both managed to hijack a secular government agency
to prosecute their radical Islamic fatwa against me — the first
blasphemy case in Canada in over 80 years. Their complaints were
dismissed, but it is inaccurate to say that they lost: They got the
government to rough me up for nearly three years, at no cost to them.
The process I was put through was a punishment in itself — and a
warning to any other journalists who would defy radical Islam.
The
11-page government report into my activities is a breathtakingly
arrogant document. In it, Pardeep Gundara, a low-level bureaucrat,
assumes the role of editor-in-chief for the entire province of Alberta.
He went through our magazine article and gave his own thoughts on the
cartoons, and pronounced on our magazine’s decision to publish them.
The government’s wannabe journalist makes a spelling error, he gets
facts wrong and he’s obviously not good with deadlines. We’d never have
hired him at our magazine. But the laugh is on us — he’s apparently our
boss, and the boss of all journalists in Alberta.
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There's much more in the column. And be sure to check out his blog, where he says, among other things,
The
two complaints cost Alberta taxpayers in excess of $500,000 and,
according to access to information documents, involved no fewer than 15
government bureaucrats. What a scam – on the part of the complainants,
who were able to wage “lawfare” against an infidel without paying a
cent; and on the part of the HRC, as a make-work project.
Fire. Them. All.
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