All Posts Tagged With: "Ezra Levant"
Dangerous Harlem Shakes, a ‘sit-in’ & a creep at Western
What students are talking about today (March 6th)
Tunisian Harlem Shake
1. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is investigating Frontier Airlines after a group of students did the Harlem Shake mid-flight. One of them said a flight attendant gave them permission. Meanwhile, in Tunisia, the Islamist education minister has condemned a fairly PG-rated version by students there. You may recall that the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year old Tunisian street vendor, inspired the Arab Spring revolutions. After overthrowing their long-time president, Tunisia now has an Islamist government and the more moderate opposition leader was recently shot dead. Speaking of dangerous Harlem Shakes, the right-wing rabble-rouser Ezra Levant did one on Sun TV’s website. He even managed to get at least three young people to do it with him. The Albatross offers it in GIF form. No word yet on what the Islamists think of Levant’s gyrating, but I bet they don’t like it.
2. A student at Lakehead University is holding a “sit-in” outside the presidents’ office because a full course in Aboriginal Studies has been replaced by a partial course in the new law program. “I’ve lost a bit of weight, and certainly I think all of our grades have suffered a little bit at this point, but y’know, until there’s a resolution of the issue, there’s no question, I’m not leaving,” Sebastian Murdoch-Gibson told CBC News. The law school’s dean is defending the changes. Wouldn’t the dean know best what kind of education law students need?
Continue reading Dangerous Harlem Shakes, a ‘sit-in’ & a creep at Western
Is a journalism degree worth doing?
A Ryerson graduate shares some advice
sskennel/Flickr
I’ll never forget my first week of journalism school.
Fresh out of Queen’s University’s English program, I entered Ryerson University’s Master of Journalism program in the fall of 2010 with a stint as co-editor of the Queen’s Journal and two solid internships—at the Kingston Whig-Standard and Maclean’s—under my belt.
Ryerson’s serious-looking website promised a hands-on, “rigorous and intensive” program. I was only 21, and I figured I’d be competing for lucrative paid internships alongside people with diverse but equal, if not better, experience. It was called a ‘master’s degree’ after all.
It wasn’t meant to be. During my first reporting class, the instructor mentioned in passing the “lede,” basic newsroom shorthand for the first sentence of an article because it (surprise!) leads the story. One of my classmates raised her hand. “Um, what’s a lede?”
Free speech and unequal prejudice
On the Christian law school where gays need not apply
Carleton's Students for Liberty/Facebook
From Teitel Page on Macleans.ca.
Have you heard? Free speech is a thing of the past. And religious liberty is dying fast.
It began last week when Arun Smith, a seventh-year human rights student at Carleton University in Ottawa, tore down a “free speech wall” on campus because it featured socially conservative comments. The action inspired three National Post columns and an Ezra Levant exclusive lamenting the end of freedom of expression as we know it.
Elsewhere, on the religious liberty front, the Canadian Council of Law Deans wrote a letter of protest to Canada’s Federation of Law Societies about Trinity Western University. The Christian liberal arts school in British Columbia wants to open a law school that would require students to sign a Community Covenant Agreement that pledges “Healthy Sexuality.” The agreement has nothing to do with gonorrhea or how to avoid it: what’s to be avoided is love and sex between people of the same gender (which is, I guess, by Trinity Western’s standards, worse than gonorrhea). “Sexual intimacy,” says the covenant, “is reserved for marriage between one man and one woman.” In other words, gays need not apply.
Coulter: the she-devil in her own words
Maclean’s speaks with Ann Coulter
Ezra Levant, who was present at the venue for tonight’s aborted Ann Coulter talk at the University of Ottawa, spotted my quickie weblog entry about the cancelled event and had me chat briefly with the leggy agitator. Coulter tells Maclean’s she never had the chance to move on from a private dinner reception at which she was signing books, meeting local conservatives, and waiting for the all-clear from her bodyguard, who was on the scene at the university. “I was just reviewing my speech. It was a fine little speech, and by the way, I cut it down so we could have an extensive question-and-answer period. I gathered that I was going to have a very exciting crowd tonight.”
The police, Coulter says, “had been warning my bodyguard all day that they were putting up [messages] on Facebook: ‘Bring rocks, bring sticks, you gotta hurt Ann Coulter tonight, don’t let her speak.’ And the cops eventually said, we’ve got a bad feeling, this isn’t gonna happen. And they shut it down.”
Coulter agrees with the suggestion that conservative speakers face greater dangers and nuisances in trying to encounter audiences on university campuses. “I speak at a lot of college campuses and I need a bodyguard… Michael Moore does not; Judy Rebick does not. I think Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could have spoken tonight with less controversy.” She dismisses the possibility, however, that things are ever likely to change. “Unfortunately, conservatives are too polite, so they will never get a taste of their own medicine in that regard, in terms of angry mobs with sticks and rocks.”
She accuses the University of Ottawa’s academic vice-president, Francois Houle, of “inspiring hatred” toward her with his epistolary warning to her that she needed to be conscious of Canada’s criminal prohibitions of hate speech. Indeed, she says she intends, with Levant’s help, to ask police to proceed with exactly the same charges against Houle.
“He described the law to me very carefully—any speech that incites hatred toward someone based on membership in an identifiable group can be criminally prosecuted. Well, before I even set foot in Canada, he had identified me as having criminal proclivities because I belong to an identifiable group: conservatives. Or it could be because I’m a Christian, I’m a Presbyterian. I’m a female conservative. If what Francois Houle did to me is not a hate crime, then nothing is.”
After the event was cancelled by the police, Coulter says she went to her hotel room to relax and had a surreal moment. “I was watching the local news, which was all hockey and Ann Coulter, and some nut came on claiming that he was the organizer behind my speech. [murmurs in background] OK, his name is Craig Chandler. I sent an e-mail to my bodyguard saying Craig Chandler is disinvited from the event in Calgary. He’s on TV claiming to be the organizer and denouncing me!”
