Levantian Logic

Remember the Calgary bus crash that killed young Kathelynn Occena? Remember how Ezra Levant, in an Op-Ed piece so unhinged that the Calgary Sun pulled it from their website, blamed this accident on the fact that the bus-driver's eyes were covered by her hijab?

Well, charges have been laid today. The bus-driver's name? Louise Rogers! How Islamic is that!

But wait! Ezra's original argument was just filled with nuance! The woman didn't really have to be Muslim, and her head scarf didn't really have to be a hijab, and didn't even have to be impairing her vision, for this unfortunate accident to have been the fault of Muslims:

What matters is that a school bus driver was allowed to operate while wearing a hood.

Clearly, that is an unacceptable risk -- and something that should be banned by common sense.

Ten years ago, to say that head scarves on bus drivers should be prohibited would have been uncontroversial.

But to say so today is to be called Islamophobic -- even if the bus driver in question was not a Muslim.

So there you have it: another poison fruit of multiculturalism and accommodation! You can't even criticize non-Muslim women for wearing scarves anymore!

(By the way, I've read Ezra's latest on the pathetic non-event in Ottawa the other day so you don't have to. The boy sure can rave on. But the shorter version is that, yeah, we lost, and blind people suck.)

h/t to Holly.

Ezra's Next Crusade?

From free speech to trans fats? From upholding the right to bash Muslims to upholding the right to mash taters? Man what a come down that's gotta be.

But wait, where's the inevitable Nazi angle? My God, it's right here!!

Ezra Levant: tough on food Nazis, soft on the regular kind.

Ezra By The Balls

Over at The Western Standard Ezra Levant and his followers are blaming the death of Kathelynn Occena, who was involved last week in a fatal bus crash, on Muslims, believe it or not, and multiculturalism, and the notion of "reasonable accommodation".

Why? Because the bus-driver (pictured left) may have been Muslim, maybe was wearing a hijab, and possibly had her vision impaired by her head gear--whatever the proper characterization of that head-gear might be. But even if she's not Muslim and it isn't a hijab, that poor child died due to Muslims because uppity Muslims have demanded that we let them wear their ridiculous scarfs, and so this woman (non-Muslim though she might be) and her ridiculous scarf were allowed to slip through the cracks, as it were, and she was allowed to drive a school-bus.

Or such is the reasoning of Ezra et al.

So lets go through this one more time.

1) The scarf she is wearing does not look like a hijab (see post below for pictures) as these do not usually get tied in a knot under the neck. Instead it looks like an Eastern European Basbushka or платок.

2) The scarf is clearly not impeding her view in any real fashion, and is certainly not "like blinders", as Ezra would have it (and as a few brave souls at the Western Standard blog have probably risked expulsion by pointing out:

Your pictures prove that Ezra is off his nut again. You can clearly see that her eyes are not blocked at all. Leave it to the neo-nazis ... er neo-cons to make this into an exercise in bigotry.)

On the sides the garment is well back from the eyes, and above well back from the brows. This would impair her vision no more that a toque might.

So what is fogging up Ezra's specs? What could possibly motivate his utterly tasteless intervention in what is already a painful situation for everyone involved, including the families of the bus driver and victims? Well, I don't want to delve too much into personal psychology here, but remember, the print version of The Western Standard has just gone tits up, and no less a prominent personage as David Frum has blamed this failure on the thousands of dollars spent responding:

...to an Alberta Human Rights Commission investigation of its decision to reprint the Danish Muhammad cartoons -- making Canada the only Western country in which the publication of the cartoons was effectively punished by an agency of the state.

So has Ezra, racked by the collapsed of his magazine, developed a hard-on against Muslims or anyone that even looks like one?

Muslims And Christians: Public Education Should Offend 'Em Both

This:

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed.

...is precisely equivalent to this:

Brian Alters, director of the Evolution Education Research Centre at McGill University, says the problem stems from a general de-emphasizing of evolution in our classrooms – from curriculum that barely mentions it, to teachers who avoid a topic they fear will be controversial with students or parents.

"If you know you are going to get a lot of flak, there are ways to dance around it," says Alters, in Toronto recently to speak on the issue.

And I deplore both trends. I have absolutely zero sympathy for the folks in Quebec demanding that women remove their veils to vote; I am also against feeding Christians to Lions, generally speaking, although I like Lions far better and there's always more Christians...

However, accommodation should end at the doors of the Science and History class. These places are where children learn the common ground of our Culture, upon which all of our further arguments and disagreements are tested and settled.

Put them aside and Chaos follows.