Once more, with Nazis: Antonia Zerbisias versus Ezra Levant in Fox News North Shoutfest Part II
Is it possible that there are more important questions in the world than who financed the activist group behind a poorly written petition to stop Sun News TV from getting special treatment from the CRTC? Almost certainly. Nevertheless, over the past week, the Internet has convulsed with arguments over Fox News North and the Avaaz.org petition to which Margaret Atwood gave some publicity when she got into a tweet-off with David Akin and Stephen Taylor.
This week, the fight shifts, with Star columnist Antonia Zerbisias and Sun columnist Ezra Levant clawing at each other. The conflict started when Zerbisias recommended a blog post at Rabble.ca responding to Levant’s Sunday column in which he basically connects Avaaz to Nazi collaborators through George Soros. So we can already see this is going to be a classy argument between two genteel debaters.
Levant responded by calling the post’s author an anti-Semite, Zerbisias counselled that Levant should be careful about libelling people, and the whole thing ended up with Zerb blocking a bunch of zealous Levant fans: “@EzraLevant has unleashed his flying monkeys on me now. Oh well. Blockitty block block. Buh-bye.” Now the argument seems to have drawn in people well outside of the original argument, with the likes of Kady O’Malley noting, “My all friends column is a rather unsettling mix of normal conversation and vicious accusations of anti-Semitism and Nazi collaboration” before getting into it with some vociferous Sun TV partisans.
It’s all enough to make a person wish for the olden days of a week ago when the only argument was whether the CRTC should grant Quebecor a special, albeit temporary, favour—something even some skeptics think there’s a reasonable argument for.
Godwin’s Law was written for a reason, people.
• Moral Hollowness at Work [Toronto Sun]
• Ezra Levant vs. reality -- a prelude to Fox News North [Rabble.ca]
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