Tuesday, March 11, 2008

A Recent History Of The Western Standard

Noted this short piece in the Calgary Herald this morning:

A Muslim leader is praising Calgary police for making progress in their investigation of anti-Islamic postings on a local website last year.

Syed Soharwardy of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada thanked police for identifying two people who posted the remarks on the Western Standard website.

A quick backgrounder. When Ezra Levant abandoned the flaming wreckage of The Western Standard, he left behind one final blog post (which has since been sent down the memory hole). Fans quickly decorated the post with anti-Muslim sentiments. For example:

"...there is no such thing as innocent Muslims. They must all be killed. All of them."

Mr. Soharwardy swiftly organized protests outside of Calgary City Hall, and threatened a complaint via the AHRCC against the Western Standard, which elicited this grovelling apology from Matthew Johnston, the Standard's new Head Honcho. Afterwards, Mr. Johnston vowed to weed out the crazies posting to the WS Shotgun Blog.

What is interesting about the latest development is that, presumably, Mr. Johnston and the gang at WS must have co-operated with the police investigation.

3 comments:

Ti-Guy said...

Afterwards, Mr. Johnston vowed to weed out the crazies posting to the WS Shotgun Blog.

Judging from The Shotgun, the effort seems, at best, half-hearted:

Break out the violin. The problem is Iran not Texas or Canada.

If monkeys weren't in charge of Iran those people would have been able to stay home and have a life without laying guilt trips on us.

This is the way in the wonderful world of Islam.

Posted by: John West | 10-Mar-08 11:19:35 PM

Not my problem. Iranians are savages.

Posted by: philanthropist | 10-Mar-08 11:23:28 PM


I guess weeding out the crazies calling for genocide is as far as they'll go, but whoever's in charge of the Shitgun should be under no illusions that these two commenters wouldn't call for genocide if they could.

I don't consider going after anonymous internet nutcases to be a priority for the police (and neither to the police), unless it's a real issue of cyber-bullying/cyber-stalking (which the police *do* take seriously).

Anonymous said...

So, when some venomous troll submits a comment on your blog which is subsequently deemed by others to be offensive or hatespeak, would you cooperate fully with the authorities?

Anonymous said...

It would have been no problem at all to get a search warrant for WS to turn over the IP and then another to get the ISP to link that with a name. No cooperation required.