Motives behind Gypsy anti-Sun News demonstration

Somewhere between "minuscule" and "small" would describe the size of the demonstration held outside Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission offices in Toronto last Tuesday by the Roma community protesting against the Sun News Network. There were about two dozen people in total, including speakers which included "social activist" Bernie Farber and former Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj.

There is no defending the content of Ezra Levant's tirade against the Gypsy community last year. Sun News issued an apology almost immediately after its broadcast and Levant himself apologized in great length and detail last month. 

Hopefully, that would have put the unfortunate episode in the past, but the issue has become less a cause about offense to the Gypsy community than as a spear opponents of Sun News would use to strike at the fledgling conservative news network.

That motive was so transparent that aspects of the protest took on an element of self-parody. Among the complaints by Roma Community Centre Director Gina Csányi-Robah was that Sun News continues to use the "offensive" term Gypsy to describe the Roma people. Making that claim ridiculous, following her speech, the event's Master of Ceremonies announced a performance by two musicians from the group "The Gypsy Lions."

A definitive monograph on the Gypsies by University of British Colombia Sociology Professor Werner Cohn refutes much of what Ms Csányi-Robah, who was born in Canada, alleges. Cohn is extremely sympathetic to the Gypsies, whose culture he studied in great detail and he dispels dangerous slanders against them such as the allegation of Gypsies "stealing children."

But he also points out that the Gypsies are in fact a number of peoples, most of whom self-identify as Gypsies and of whom the Roma (or Rom or Romani) are just one group.

Bernie Farber's interest in the Roma community is curious. He undoubtedly is sincere in advocating for people he considers oppressed. But it is remarkably convenient for him that in agitating against Sun News, he can attack people with whom he has an apparent ax to grind. As Farber pointed out in an interview on CBC Radio's As It Happens, there is a long history and no love lost between him and Ezra Levant.

That interview is fascinating in a number of ways. The biases and abuses of the state-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation have been a frequent Sun TV target that could possibly even be described as an obsession, and Levant's Gypsy faux pas is being seized upon as an opportunity for payback.

In the interview, Farber and As it Happens host Carol Off compete with each other to malign Sun News and Levant, working themselves into a crescendo of bile. Off is famous for her lack of emotional allocution. For those unfamiliar with her vocal style, imagine a lobotomized, female Ben Stein on Ritalin and that will give you an idea of her bland droning.  But on this occasion her disdain for Sun News was so evident that she actually conveyed feeling in her voice.

But that feeling was rife with hypocrisy. As blogger Blogwrath has noted, the CBC has broadcast anti-Gypsy programming that invokes the most hateful stereotypes they face.

At the protest, former Liberal MP Wrzesnewskyj betrayed himself as an intellectual featherweight by comparing Ezra Levant to the unapologetic neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. 

Wrzesnewskyj was one of the most anti-Israel MPs in the House of Commons while he sat there. He co-authored a heavily biased anti-Israel report along with pathologically anti-Israel NDP MP Libby Davies.  On his trip to make that report, he was accompanied by Sea Hitler organizer Ehab Lotayef  and a group of fanatics who routinely support and participate in the "Israeli Apartheid Week" hate-fest that has been condemned by the last two federal Liberal Party leaders, Ignatieff and Rae. Wrzesnewskyj was compelled to resign as Liberal Foreign Affairs Critic in 2006 after he advocated that Canada engage with the terror group Hezbollah.

Ms Csányi-Robah has her own odd history of engaging, on behalf of her community, with nefarious groups. She has aligned the Roma cause with radical fanatics who want an end to Israel as a Jewish state. That association has shamed a number of Canadian Roma who wanted to distance themselves from such hate. That may partially account for why she was unable to garner much support from her own community for her Tuesday protest. 

It might strike some as remarkable that former Canadian Jewish Congress boss Farber would be part of such an event.  But Farber has been remaking himself recently since losing his role as one of  Canada's top "Official Jews." He has been using his twitter account to promote links from anti-Israel hysterics such as blogger Dr. Dawg, and the vehemently anti-Israel website rabble.ca. 

As blogger Sassywire points out, many in the Jewish community have been urging Farber for some time to come to protests against anti-Semites and Islamist hate-mongers seeking Israel's elimination, but he has not notably done so. Ironically the protest he makes a point of attending, he does so alongside people associated with anti-Israel causes to condemn the most pro-Israel media outlet in Canada.

In the end, it doesn't take much examination to get the impression that, like most people opposed to free speech, the protesters against Sun News appear less interested in suppressing hatred than they do in suppressing points of view that differ from theirs. 

Ezra Levant, the Left and Hate Speech Hypocrisy

As is now well-known, Ezra Levant apologized for his anti-Gypsy rant last Monday, both on-air during his Sun TV show The Source, and in print in Sun News publications.

Though they failed in their efforts to abort it before it debuted, and detesting it as they do, Canada's political left still keeps a keen eye on the Sun News Network and in particular, it's most flamboyant personality, Ezra Levant.

Levant's ability to combine rhetorical dexterity with showmanship has, on practically a weekly basis, forced attention to a variety of issues that have embarrassed Canada's left-leaning political cliques. Those include included the waste and corruption and deception by many of the leaders of the Idle No More movement, which Labor leaders and NDP and Liberal politicians had hoped to exploit as means of embarrassing Stephen Harper and his Conservative government.

Levant also ridiculed, belittled and exposed the hypocrisy of left-wing sacred cows David Suzuki and the Occupy Movement among many others.

So it was with virtual glee that the Toronto Star's editorial board and the likes of far-left media outlets such as rabble.ca and The Vancouver Observer seized on a monologue by Sun TV's Ezra Levant in which he injudiciously and unfairly characterized Gypsies as a people with a primarily criminal culture. Delighted in their outrage, immediately came calls from the left for his prosecution for Hate Crimes.

Levant's motives for apologizing, six months after-the-fact were questioned by both his detractors on the left and supporters on the right. Sun News' application for a CRTC Common Carry license and the possibility that Hate Speech charges would be pursed by Ontario's Attorney General were among the speculative reasons.

But regardless of why, Levant's words were well-crafted, sounded sincere, and explicitly retracted his earlier statements about Gypsies.

Yet desperate to silence Canadian TV's Grand Inquisitor of left-wing hypocrisy and deceit, calls for his criminal prosecution have not abated despite Levant's apology last Monday.

Which in a way, proves many of the points Levant makes when he preaches his gospel of absolute free speech and thunders about the hypocrisy and double standards of a Canadian left who would have others live by rules that they hold themselves above.

In November 2010 the National Post and later other media outlets did extensive coverage on an anti-Semitic thesis produced at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).  The Department of Sociology and Equity Studies produced a number of theses with anti-Semitic themes, the most well-publicized of which was by a Jenny Peto wherein she accused the Jewish community of conducting Holocaust education to further the aims of "Israeli apartheid." She also, in contradiction to any credible empirical evidence, defamed the Jewish community by claiming it was dominated by "racist" ideologies.

The thesis was condemned for its anti-Semitism in the Ontario Legislature by members of both the Progressive Conservative and governing Liberal parties, including then Citizenship Minister Eric Hoskins.

Unlike Levant, who apologized for slurring an entire people, Peto doubled down, making the claim that it was she who was owed an apology after her anti-Semitic, academically inept polemic was brought to light.

Peto was roundly and vociferously condemned by conservative and pro-Israel commentators, and there were calls for an investigation into the teaching practices and deficient standards at the radical, biased, politicized Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. University of British Columbia Professor Emeritus of Sociology Werner Cohn noted that Peto's and another anti-Semitic thesis which shared OISE instructor Sheryl Nestel as a thesis adviser "consist of hate propaganda, possibly in violation of the Criminal Code of Canada," but no one among those so called "right-wing" voices actually called for criminal prosecution or Human Rights Commission proceedings against them.

And what about the left side of the political spectrum? One would expect those people who are so enthusiastic about the use of state apparatuses to penalize Hate Speech would have wanted them used in such a blatant case of Jew-hate.

But this was not so in the case of Peto and OISE. Hate Speech in the service of "progressive" causes, like the destruction of Israel and defaming Canada's Christian conservatives, is not only tolerated but vigorously, if somewhat preposterously defended by the far left.

The same people who are now calling for Ezra Levant's criminal prosecution for a distorted description of Gypsy culture ridiculously decried mere condemnation of Peto's thesis and OISE as "silencing free speech."

For the hypocritical would be-censors on the left, Hate Speech is only Hate Speech when it is uttered by conservatives and those they disdain.

The Toronto Star's Haroon Siddiqui produced a diatribe about Stephen Harper's alleged "inconsistencies on hate laws." There are a number of valid reasons why those laws should not be employed against Levant. But if Siddiqui and his fellow travelers are genuinely concerned about inconsistencies in the application of unjust laws that seek to censor opinion, they would best look to their own hypocrisy first.