FLASHBACK: Ezra Levant defends the importance of free speech in 2008 speech
“I regret that the champions of the separation of church and state, the champions of secular pluralism, who traditionally have been on the left and have traditionally fought against squelchers on the right have been silent,” Ezra Levant said in a 2008 speech.
“We need offensive speech,” explained Ezra Levant. “We need it on the spectrum of ideas, and anyone who believes that there should be a spectrum of ideas should be appalled when anyone on that spectrum is gagged.”
This powerful message in defence of free speech was delivered by Ezra Levant seven years before Rebel News was even founded, while he was still the publisher of Western Standard magazine.
In a 2008 speech at IdeaCity, the Rebel News CEO addressed why he was starting to view himself as less of a conservative and more of a liberal, in the classical sense.
“If you look at the root of the word liberal it comes from the Latin word for freedom,” Levant said during the 2008 speech. “And if you look at the things I've been wrestling with over the last two years, it's actually causes that the left used to champion so loudly.”
On certain issues, like swearing on television, pornography or other obscene content, civil liberties groups will take action.
“But on political liberty, I regret that the champions of the separation of church and state, the champions of secular pluralism, who traditionally have been on the left and have traditionally fought against squelchers on the right have been silent.”
At the time, the world was only a few years removed from controversy over a Danish magazine publishing images of the Prophet Muhammad. The backlash was immense, and the Western Standard was the only outlet in Canada to share the images.
The Alberta Human Rights Commission then took aim at Levant.
“What if we started to censor ourselves?” he warned during the IdeaCity speech. “I put it to you that when most of the Western media self-censored those cartoons, which were as innocuous as anything you'd see in the Toronto Star on a regular basis, was a greater destruction of our Western way of life than 9/11.”
“When the attack came not through jet planes into office towers, but into the minds of a thousand North American editors and producers who said, you know what, there's a bit of a risk here,” he added.
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