Earlier this month, the Western Standard was sued in human rights court for publishing the Danish cartoons. It's been ten years since I've graduated from law school, and I've never seen a more frivolous, vexatious, infantile suit than this.
But that's the point -- this complaint is not about beating us in the law. Freedom of speech is still in our constitution; we'll win in the end. It's a nuisance suit, designed to grind us down, cost us money, and serve as a warning to other, more timid media.
The hand-written scrawl and the spelling errors were what first disgusted me with the suit; but the arguments were what really got me. The complainant, Imam Syed Soharwardy, a former professor at an anti-Semitic university in Saudi Arabia, doesn't just argue that we shouldn't have published the cartoons. He argues that we shouldn't be able to defend our right to publish the cartoons. The bulk of his complaint was that we dared to try to justify it.
He argues that advocating a free press should be a thought crime.
Levant has more here. Talk about an abuse of system and process. Sad to say, it seems that our system lends itself so easily to any half-witted twit with an aggravated and delusional sense of rational attempting to push the envelope on the absurd on the taxpayer’s dime. If the Iman was any kind of man he would have two choices. Call Ezra out and arrange to meet him in the back of the building man on man or sue the magazine in civil court on his own dime and call for costs.
The Western Standard is accepting donations for their legal defense fund or I would suggest that you take out a subscription to one of the few magazines that dared to publish the cartoons in Canada.
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