I’ll let Ezra Levant talk about the “lowlight” of his talk this afternoon:
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?
(…)
Adler sat down after a while, and I told him I’d love to debate him. I didn’t have a chance to speak to him directly. But Wendy told me that she overheard Adler talking with a colleague, saying he’d never agree to debate me. “I don’t debate liars,” was what she reported he said.
Leo Adler really embarrassed himself at Ezra’s talk. He unburdened himself of a long, defensive pre-fab speech instead of asking a question. At one point Wendy yelled, “It’s Ezra’s speech, not yours.”
Ezra left out the best part in his post above: trying to be gracious, Ezra thanked Adler for at least bothering to show up and confront him. Adler huffed with palpable hostility:
“Well, it’s a free country!”
At which point half the audience broke out laughing, and Wendy and I called out, “Yeah, right!” and “So why are we here??”
Old guard time servers like Adler and Siddiqui are intimidated by unfettered free speech because their own speech — unlike that of Steyn and Levant, who are talented phrase makers — is riddled with stale dated, tone deaf cliches that actually undermine their own weak arguments: “It’s a free country.” “You’re entitled to your opinion.” “Everyone must obey the law.”
After the talk, one audience member muttered that Adler was a “classic Red diaper baby.” Unlike, say, David Horowitz, however, Adler’s a Red diaper baby who never got toilet trained. To switch metaphors, he’s fighting already-won wars, like some wacky Japanese soldier stuck on a Pacific island after 1945. Except that wacky Japanese soldier was at least fighting for Emperor and country, a forgotten man; Leo Adler obviously wants his Order of Canada at least. His face on a stamp, perhaps…
Adler and the other Establishment figures Levant calls “Professional Jews” are trapped in a past that younger Jews, from what I’m hearing, find boring if not darkly comical. (Over at Jewcy or a similar site, I recently read a column by a Gen Y Jew asking, “So, has everybody gotten their annual ‘The Next Holocaust is Coming!’ fundraising letter from the Blah Blah League? Yawn.”)
I’ve said it before: there are more Nazis on the average Hogan’s Heroes re-run than in all of Canada. If we had to, my friends and I would and could beat them all up over a weekend; even people who can’t stand us, like Warren Kinsella, would join us. I don’t doubt for a single solitary second that WK would be the first one at the designated meeting place, armed with a crowbar, and I’d be thrilled to see him. Just a quick trip to Bass Pro and we’d have everything we’d need.
Better yet, Mossad agents could just sneak into the country and wipe out all the White Pride types.
Don’t laugh: the Leo Adlers of the world can’t have it both ways. If these basement dwelling crypto Nazis really are a serious threat, surely we need to “off” them before they take over Canada!! Where do I sign up?
Because that’s exactly what Adler thinks is about to happen any minute now. He said it today, getting all Hitler’s Willing Executioners on our asses, and no doubt his Center’s fundraising appeals say this too:
that these “thousands” of “hateful” websites indicate Canada’s pending transformation into the Fourth Reich, presumably with suitably Canadian versions of well-known Teutonic trappings, like a Kristallnacht in which the broken glass is dutifully recycled under penalty of death — in the blue bins, people, not the grey ones! — and “Lottery Tickets Will Set You Free” signs over the hockey arenas, Tim Hortons and bingo halls cum concentration camps. (Proudly lacking in German efficiency, Air Canada can be relied upon to lose the Jews’ luggage on the way…)
As I muttered under my breath: the NDP have never won a federal election, but the Nazis are poised to take over?!
Screw you, bub.
What an insult to Canadians.
That without the intrepid, selfless (cough) vigilence of Leo Adler, our centuries old multicultural parliamentary democracy of 30 million mostly law abiding, if not downright timid souls, is just a hateful website away from being ruled by the skinhead gang from Oz.
Sicker still: these Professional Jews are convinced, against all evidence, that Jews face a greater threat from badly tattooed, pasty faced basement losers than from legions of well-financed, highly motivated radical Muslims at home and abroad.
With each passing day that Professional Jews insist on fighting an imaginary enemy, their real enemy gains strength.
And they drive away their true friends — fellow Jews like Levant, and Christians like Steyn, Robert Spencer and, yeah, me — by calling us racists and “liars.”
I could tell by the way he carried himself that Leo Adler sees himself as a sophisticated, well-connected professional on a Very! Important! Mission! Alas, with his weird yet highly lucrative hobby — playing the selfless hero as he battles pretend bad guys in cyberspace — he’s more like a teenaged geek at a LAN party or on a long D&D weekend.
In fact, from his bald head to his obvious passion for burning books — that is, shutting down websites he doesn’t approve of — one could be forgiven for musing that Adler, like many crusaders, has turned into the very thing he claims to hate the most.
