If You Can Remember Dewey's, You Weren't There

From over at My Blahg, Oi! Thump! gets reminded of halycon days of yore.

Actually, what is really interesting is that in an earlier incarnation Ezra Levant worked to punish a newspaper for publishing a cartoon. A cartoon was published in the Gateway in the University of Alberta during the early 90s (I think 93 or 94). The cartoon depicted Jesus being born now, and with an Israeli soldier declaring the need to smash down the manger in which he was born “because the manger was an improperly registered dwelling.” This caused enormous excitement, with one prof. claiming that it was an imitation of the Medieval European cartoons with the “Christ-killer motive.”

snip

The joke is that Levant jumped into this controversy with his hair in a braid, using it as his platform to eliminate evil “left-wing anti-Israel” bias in university publications.

I remember this, actually. My main watering-hole on campus was the late lamented Dewey's Pub & Deli, where unfortunately the regular clientele included Ezra Levant, who at the time was considered something of a golden boy in Alberta conservatism, and was clearly lining himself up for a big-time political career. Of course, he fucked that up in a number of interesting different ways, and on a number of different occasions. Anyhoo, when the Gateway published that cartoon, well, lets just say that the political arguments in Dewey's got ramped up a notch or two. And yeah, ol' Ezra was pretty much leading the "lynch the cartoonist" brigade that time around.