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[UPDATE II: More from Right Girl - and Dr Roy, who says, "I hope they repeat this event in Toronto." Good idea. Noting the absence of the city's monodaily, Dr Roy adds, "Guess The London Free Press is not interested in freedom." Don't look to the Free Press to save a free press. More from Winston, Wonder Woman plus here, here and here]

[UPDATE I: Behold The Power Of The Jackal! - with some additional thoughts on how that right-wing squish Andrew Potter is cowering in fear of Levant] 

I gather it was SRO for the Ezra Levant-Salim Mansur-Kathy Shaidle freespeechapalooza tonight. Le tout London was there, plus visitors from Toronto, Montreal, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and various other far-flung parts. Alas, the girlyboys from The London Free Press* were apparently too nervous to attend. Despite having been whacking away at the "human rights" commissars for almost a year and a half, Kathy produced some novel lines of attack worth exploring further, including this:

The HRCs are engaged in class warfare. The majority of “hate speech” cases are brought by highly educated, highly privileged white liberals -- against less educated, working class, blue collar “reactionary” whites, who insist on speaking to each other about topics like immigration, using old fashioned, politically incorrect language.

Therefore, the enforcement of Section 13 is an expensive exercise in state sponsored snobbery, in which people’s own hard earned tax dollars are used by their “betters” to scold and shame them. Worse, the process silences people who already feel linguistically, politically and educationally disenfranchised, angry and powerless. We often compare the tribunals to 1984, but to me they’re more like Pygmalion.

As British writer Brendan O’Neill wrote:

"Today’s Top-down ‘anti-racism’ has nothing whatsoever to do with ensuring equality of opportunity for all); rather it is about policing people’s behaviour and etiquette, especially amongst the lower classes. Accusations of ‘racism’ are no longer about indicting someone for their views on ethnic minorities but rather have become a snobbish judgment on their lack of breeding. ‘Racist’ has largely become code for ‘underclass’: uneducated, uncouth, thick, fat, ‘not one of us’.

"Thus, the impact of official ‘anti-racism’ is not to make society more free and equal, but more authoritarian and censorious."

More reports to come from Ezra Levant and others.

*UPDATE: Free Press columnist and freespeecher Rory Leishman was in attendance, and told Ezra it was the largest political gathering ever held in London, Ont outside an election campaign. 

My valiant comrade Ezra Levant and I were on the air in Chicago last night with WGN's legendary Milt Rosenberg, discussing Ezra's book Shakedown, free speech, and the faintheartedness of the multicultural west for a full two hours. Milt was rightly concerned to put our trials in Canada in the broader context, and in tomorrow's Washington Post Jonathan Turley expands on that theme in a piece bluntly titled "The Free World Bars Free Speech":

Ever since 2006, when Muslims worldwide rioted over newspaper cartoons picturing the prophet Muhammad, Western countries, too, have been prosecuting more individuals for criticizing religion. The "Free World," it appears, may be losing faith in free speech.

Among the new blasphemers is legendary French actress Brigitte Bardot, who was convicted last June of "inciting religious hatred" for a letter she wrote in 2006 to then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, saying that Muslims were ruining France. It was her fourth criminal citation for expressing intolerant views of Muslims and homosexuals. Other Western countries, including Canada and Britain, are also cracking down on religious critics.

Professor Turley is no right-wing nut like yours truly. He's the soul of moderation. But he gets the key point: 

History has shown that once governments begin to police speech, they find ever more of it to combat. Countries such as Canada, England and France have prosecuted speakers and journalists for criticizing homosexuals and other groups. It's the ultimate irony: free speech curtailed for the sake of a pluralistic society.

It would be heartening if a few more British, Canadian and European professors felt minded to speak up in defense of a sustained assault on intellectual inquiry. Turley's piece is very much the theme of my new book Lights Out, whose central image is the dimming of liberty in the western world. When my year in Canadian "human rights" hell began, I was asked by many readers if I had a "legal defense fund", and I always replied no, I'm not a charity case, yet - despite the attempts by the Islamists to make it a crime to publish me in Canada. The best way to resist this is by demonstrating to commercial enterprises that they will not lose money by publishing controversial writing on this theme - or that, at any rate, any costs in nuisance lawsuits will be more than made up in profits. So, as I said a year ago, subscribe to Maclean's, who've been very supportive of me (despite the fact I'm by no means a natural fit for the magazine), or buy Lights Out or America Alone, or Ezra's Shakedown, or Kathy Shaidle and Pete Vere's The Tyranny Of Nice. All these books contain important ideas, which is why Mohamed Elmasry and his pals are so concerned to stamp them out and why they're worth giving to friends who are not yet aware of what's going on, especially in Canada, Britain and the Continent.

Happily, a lot of folks seem to agree. In The National Post this morning, George Jonas writes:

The publisher can't keep up with demand for Ezra Levant's book Shakedown, which appeared last week with a foreword by Mark Steyn. The slim volume is like an open whaling boat in which Levant sets out to harpoon Canada's Leviathan of a 'human rights' industry.

The great Jonas identifies an important philosophical difference between Ezra, on the one hand, and George and me, on the other. Ezra regards the HRCs as a "beautiful idea" gone bad, whereas some of us think they were a crummy idea from the get-go. But that's an argument for another day: It's appalling that in some of the oldest free societies on earth we're now fighting to reclaim fundamental liberties against an Islamo-PC alliance. But we are, and to do that it helps to have as many allies as possible, including the likes of Professor Turley.

Meanwhile, The National Post also contains a review of Shakedown by Patrick Keeney. And in The Toronto Sun Salim Mansur makes a sharp point:

Imagine if human rights commission-type commissars had prevailed at the beginning of the Renaissance and Reformation. The modern world would have been aborted at its conception. 

Oh, and by the way:

Did you hear about the Catholic, the Jew and the Muslim who walked into a theatre in London, Ontario? It's a stellar bill - Kathy Shaidle, Ezra Levant and Salim Mansur, three staunch friends of real human rights taking on Canada's pseudo-"human rights" racket - live this Monday evening. If you're in the neighborhood, make sure you're there. (If you're in the US, London, Ont is a convenient ten-minute drive from Buffalo and five minutes from Detroit. Your mileage may vary but it'll still be worth the trip.)  

Speaking of those prepared to stand up and be countered, one man who's nailing his colors to the mast is Randy Hillier, the Ontario MPP I had the pleasure of meeting at Queen's Park the other day. As part of his leadership campaign, he's pledged to abolish the Ontario "Human Rights" Commission and Tribunal. Mr Hillier is fighting for real human rights, as opposed to micro-management by Commissar Hall and the other social engineers.

In another front of Canada's war on freedom, Connie and Mark Fournier, proprietors of Free Dominion, are appealing the order of this remarkably heavy-handed judge, Stanley Kershman of the Ontario Superior Court, to hand over the personal information of eight of their anonymous posters at the behest of - drumroll, please! - Richard Warman. 

Oh, sorry. The drummer got bored and left seven Warman "human rights" cases ago. 

There are many things to dislike about the Superior Court's logic, but let's stick with the most obvious:

Last week, Justice Stanley Kershman ruled that the case dealt with an "anti-hate speech advocate" and a website deemed "controversial." 

In fact, if Justice Kershman were concerned with legal precision, Stormfront member Richard Warman would be accurately described not as an "anti-hate speech advocate" but as Canada's most famous neo-Nazi website poster. After all, we only have Warmfront's word for it that he's "anti" hate speech, whereas the paper trail confirms that he writes quite a lot of it. Perhaps a judge should judge him by his actions rather than his justification for them - especially when the Canadian "Human Rights" Tribunal has ruled that Warmfront's explanation is "very weak" and his reasons for his voluminous hate speech postings not "acceptable".

In that sense, isn't it Richard Warman, the hate-site poster who claims to be anti-hate, who's been deemed "controversial"? After all, unlike Free Dominion, his Stormfront and Vanguard postings have been the subject of judicial rebuke.

And isn't there something preposterous about a man who makes his living (ie, repeated, significant five-figure tax-free sums) from anonymous website-commenting of explicit hatefulness complaining about anonymous website comments in the first place?  

For a Superior Court judge, Stanley Kershman doesn't seem quite up to speed.

As for the broader philosophical question, in the long run I'm in favor of less anonymity. One reason why I admire Ezra, Kathy and Kate is their willingness to take the heat under their own names. Throughout the last year, I encountered far too many Canadian politicians who said, "Oh, of course, I'm behind you 100 per cent, but please don't mention my name." I've also encountered, discreetly, a bunch of Hollywood bigshots who say, "I loved America Alone. Er, but please don't mention it to anyone." So I can understand why a guy in Sarnia or Laval would be reluctant to put his full legal name to a controversial position like, oh, suggesting a Khaled Mouammar ought not to have a say in selecting immigrants to Canada.

But at some point Canadians - and Britons, Americans, Australians, Europeans - are going to have to stand up under their own names, or they will lose their freedoms to an administrative tyranny that, in a technological age, has both the means and the urge - as Justice Kershman has demonstrated - to hunt down even the most piffling anonymities.

Live free or die!