Litigious Levant not giving up

Oh dear, someone's 14:55 into his 15 Minutes. Waaahhhhh!:

"Calgary Muslim leader Syed Soharwardy says he is withdrawing his Alberta Human Rights Commission complaint against former Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant.

The complaint was launched in February 2006, after the Western Standard and the Jewish Free Press reprinted cartoons from a Danish newspaper that many in the Muslim world felt insulted the prophet Muhammad. The cartoons sparked violent protests in a number of countries." [...]

"Mr. Levant said he plans to launch a civil lawsuit against Mr. Soharwardy to recover the tens of thousands of dollars he said he has spent battling the complaint.

"I put in at least 100 hours fighting this guy. He may want to run away from this issue, but I'm not going to. His values are out of sync with Canadian society.""

For the record, I think both of them are out to lunch -- the complaint was frivolous and Levant's response (which included dragging videocams into the Human Rights Commission office to record his performance in front of a bored civil servant) was a lot of overwrought drama. Now that the complaint has been dropped (as expected), it comes as absolutely no surprise that Levant plans to sue -- all in the name of defending free speech, of course. Because nothing says "free speech" like a lawsuit launched against someone for using the system to complain about free speech.

(h/t: BCL)

That's just what happens

when you leave the inmates in charge of the asylum: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

*Ahem* Yes, quite.

On unringing bells

Somebody's quickly finding out that "free speech" doesn't mean the freedom to spew potentially-libelous bullshit.

Last summer I took the unusual (at least among my progressive peers) stance of defending FD when they got a complaint from the CHRC. I still believe that the last thing any of us should want to see is websites being shut down for being "offensive" -- "offensive" being a pretty subjective term -- and that's where this kind of thing goes. But I was a little shocked at the level of idiocy FD and its constituency displayed in response to the complaint. 90-page threads hurling insults and making veiled threats at the complainant are usually a bad idea -- there's freedom of speech and there's freedom of stupidity.

When the complaint was dropped, FD and friends were therefore so emboldened that when someone more tenacious came along, they saw no reason to respond any differently. Stupidity then escalated from the merely offensive to what might turn out to be outright libel. Yay team. Thick as they are, today it seems to be finally dawning on them just what they've wrought. Threads are disappearing, flustered and justifiably fearful apologies are being made, but...

... you can't unring a bell -- can you say "google cache"? "screenshots"? This one's done like dinner. And knowing how litigious this Richard Warman guy is even when he's merely "offended", I shudder to think of his response at being (possibly) libeled.

I wonder if it's starting to occur to these "free speech defenders" how much damage they actually do to the cause of free expression... Naahhh. What was I thinking to even consider such a thing!?