Canada’s “meanest magazine,” the Western Standard, has not only republished the Muhammad cartoons. It has also quoted the words of a friend of Ralph Klein (the acronym FORK is used for this species of friend) who said that after Ralph retires, his wife will go back to being “just another Indian.”
I know that I am supposed to get upset with Ezra over this. I am supposed to shoot the messenger. I am supposed to say, “Ezra, what if Ralph’s buddy had said, ‘After Ralph retires he goes back to being just another little Jew?’” (I am extremely confident the pariah publisher would have allowed that to run and he would get heat not dissimilar to what he is receiving now.) But instead I am saying, “Why is Ralph Klein invisible on this?”
Remember when Wayne Gretzky was asked about his wife’s connections to the gambling scandal. The first thing he said to an open microphone was, “You’ll have to ask my wife about that.”
Huhhhhhhhhhh? Would Dave Semenko have said that if someone was getting in Wayne’s face?
If it were a member of my family, I would move through that army of smear mongers like corn through a goose. Nobody tries to take down my family puking up little pablum molecules like, “You’ll have to ask her.”
When I saw the quote about Mrs. Klein, I wondered, “Why doesn’t the Alberta premier say something to attack the s.o.b. who thinks of himself as a FORK? Why doesn’t Ralph tell him to FORK off?”
Question to Friends of CBC, the organization that enjoyed airing old tapes of Mulroney kicking the lights out of his critics.
If the public broadcaster had tape of an Alberta Conservative saying the words, “She will become just another Indian,” do you think they would choose to a) burn the tape, b) air the thing just once, or c) run that sucker over and over and over again until every single Canadian is forced to believe that Conservative and racist are the same word?
Question to my aboriginal readers:
If you were aware an aboriginal newspaper publisher had a story about a Tory sticking a fork in Ralph Klein’s eye by making a disparaging comment about aboriginal people, would you expect him to publish it? If he chose not to, might you think of him as an Uncle Tom, as a guy who worried more about offending the white man than serving aboriginal people? If you would condemn an aboriginal for not publishing the story, why would you not praise a white man for doing so? Does it depend on who the white man is? Would you condemn CBC for airing it?
Question for Ezra Levant:
Why didn’t you apply your cartoon “standard” to the Klein story? You have maintained that you had more guts than virtually anyone else by publishing the precise cartoons. You didn’t just write about them. You gave us the real thing. Why didn’t you make it real with the Tory? Why not name him with cartoon-like precision?
Now you’re a lawyer, Ezra, and you knew that while the cartoons would get your mag some needed publicity, you couldn’t be successfully sued over it. But if you decided to publish the name of the man who dissed Colleen Klein, the law would have allowed him to examine you for discovery. He could have made you put up or shut up. And if you lost in court, you might well have been seen for eternity as just another crazy man on the beach staring into the eye of the hurricane.
Question for the messenger shooters:
Are you starting to feel a little like Dick Cheney? You might want to aim higher.
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