Provocative Sun Media pundit, Levant, finally got what was coming to him

One of Canada’s most notorious political pundits is finally taking some well-deserved heat for spewing his usual careless rhetoric in the wrong direction. Ezra Levant, a Sun Media columnist and talk show host, was ordered to pay $80,000 in damages to, and expunge defamatory content against Khurrum Awan, a Saskatchewan lawyer, from his website.

In 2006, a group of students at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto became concerned with an article published in Maclean’s magazine that made some extreme claims regarding Muslims in the west, and decided to pursue the issue through appropriate channels. Instead, it became a controversial topic that drew the attention of Levant, an inappropriate source of political furor who sought nothing but publicity at the expense of another’s reputation.

In 2008, while Khurrum Awan was in law school, Levant made a series of rash blog posts labelling Awan as a liar, in apparent retaliation to a human rights motion brought by Awan and fellow students against Maclean’s.

The Maclean’s article that ignited the whole catastrophe was published in October 2006. The article, an excerpt from author Mark Steyn’s book America Alone, painted Muslims as devious opportunists who wish to capitalize on declining western birth rates and an increasing number of Muslim immigrants to the west as an opportunity for societal conquest. The author purports that Islam “has serious global ambitions, and it forms the primal, core identity of most of its adherents,” claiming, albeit loosely, that all Muslims have an underlying agenda for world domination.

According to the Nov. 27, 2014 decision in Ontario court, Awan and his fellow students discovered that not only was this Maclean’s article spreading xenophobic dialogue, but many more were doing the same. There had been been roughly 20 articles published in Maclean’s in the span of three years, each with similar sentiments expressed, without any differing viewpoints on issues surrounding Islam in the west.

Over the course of a few months, Awan and his associates approached Maclean’s, and subsequently the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal (BCHRT), in an attempt to establish some sort of ruling to address the representation of Islam within publications such as Maclean’s. During Awan’s testimony before the BCHRT, Levant began live-blogging a tirade online, the first of many posts was titled “Khurrum Awan is a serial liar.” Later posts go on to declare that Awan was performing a “shakedown” of Maclean’s under the guise of the human rights complaint, and goes so far as to compare the young Awan’s behaviour to former Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat. The list of Levant’s colourful embellishments goes on, amidst a constant stream of “stupid” and “liar,” words used to describe Awan.

Levant, known for his provocative and distorted rhetoric, lambasted Awan like a schoolyard bully picking on a kid who stands up for himself. For Awan, being labeled by a prominent political voice as dishonest isn’t conducive to being a successful lawyer, hence the lawsuit.

Levant is no stranger to lawsuits, and most levelheaded people should see he’s a bigot, but more importantly, he’s a bully. He uses prejudice to produce inflammatory remarks, and preys on the integrity of others to achieve some level of notoriety. For once, it seems the bad guy maybe got what was coming to him, but this episode is far from over. Levant is here to stay. The judgement made by the Ontario court hasn’t made this tumultuous issue go away, if anything, it is more fuel for Levant to keep the fires of twisted discourse burning.

Be careful what you read. As Thomas Sowell once quipped, “If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.”