...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

Advantage, Levant: I wish Ezra Levant’s speech at the Ontario Bar Association yesterday could be posted on You Tube. Barring that (sorry), you can get a feel for what it was like—including Ezra’s dramatic encounter with “Official Jew” Leo Adler—by reading Ezra and  Kathy and Denyse (oh, my).  Denyse, who must know shorthand or something, managed to record large portions of the talk, including this, the central point:

I put it to you that over the last ten, twenty, thirty years, by prosecuting our political opponents for merely being political deviants, we have laid down ten, twenty, thirty years of jurisprudence that it is okay to take out your political opponent, absent any proof of damages, absent any crime, absent any acts, you can take out your opponents if you can define them as haters. So is it any surprise that with the great influx of Islam into Canada in the last ten or fifteen years, including radicals like the Jew-hater Mohamed Elmasry ... is it any surprise that he has said, 'I'll take those precedents, I'll use them.'?

The Ezra-Leo fracas was, in a word, delicious. Ezra, clearly, didn’t know that such august members of the Jewstablishment were in attendance, and when Leo appeared at the microphone to ask a question, Ezra didn’t know who he was until he identified himself. I knew who he was, since I was at the desk when he arrived to register (oddly enough, neither Adler nor his boss, Avi Benlolo, were on the list; they had gotten an underling to register for them using her name).  And I recognized him from that town hall I attended a couple of summers back where Adler had assured the audience that even if the worst-case scenario were to pan out and Israel was wiped out by an Iranian nuke, we Jews should take comfort in the knowledge that, as Celine sings about “the heart” in that overwrought Titanic song, the Jews will go on and on (and on). (He didn’t use the Celine song to illustrate his point, but he could have.) That remark left a foul taste in my mouth for weeks—and now that I have dredged it up from the recesses of my memory, the foulness has returned. For, even if the #2 at Canadian Wiesenthal could even bring himself to conceive of things post-Israel—something which I am certainly not prepared to do, thank you very much—why on Earth would he verbalize it in front of such a gathering? Why even go there at all? It was at that moment I realized that Adler and I did not see eye to eye, and were unlikely to do so in the future. That insight was reaffirmed yesterday during his contretemps with Ezra (in which game, set and match went to Levant, even though Adler had the element of surprise on his side).

Update: I just noticed that Leo's Wikipedia entry refers to the Wiesenthal Center's "holohoax studies." Someone at Wiesenthal—perhaps the underling who registered for him?—might want to clean that up.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:42 | link | comments (2)

Comments:

#1  17 June 2008 - 17:45

 

Too bad I missed it, I was traveling back from Montreal yesterday.

Cyclist

Anonymous

#2  17 June 2008 - 18:43

 

Hi, from Denyse:

I don't know shorthand. But I taped Ez's speech and later transcribed portions of it.

I was really surprised to learn that the new sci fi concept of the "pre-crime" has been adopted in Canada.

Your readers really should look at that. Thanks for mentioning it.

cheers, Denyse

Anonymous

Comments: