Tuesday, March 04, 2014

Ezra Levant and the Fine Art of Astroturfing....

.... allegedly.

We've written posts about Ezra Levant sporadically throughout the history of this blog, most recently concerning his racist stereotyping of the Roma people for which he eventually apologized (though only because Sun News was trying to get mandatory carriage at the time). He has championed bigots such as Geert Wilders and Anne Coulter. He has tried to help former Heritage Front leader Marc Lemire whitewash his past on his program not once but twice. He has engaged in character assassination of people he has decided he doesn't like for whatever reason.

Really, what we've written about Levant on the blog really doesn't begin to cover what a nasty piece of work the man is.

Oh, and he gets sued. Quite a lot actually. And many of those suits are successful.

We were reminded on the most recent lawsuit against Ezra Levant when we visited BCL's blog yesterday. In this case, Levant is accused of libelling a then law student (Khurrum Awan) who, along with three law students (all Muslim men), filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission in both Ontario regarding an article in "Maclean's" regarding an article they believed was Islamophobic. The Commission in decided that the article did not constitute hate speech and thus the case went no further. However, Levant himself jumped into the fray calling Awan a "liar" and an "anti-Semite."

One can imagine given the number of defamation suits against Levant that it must be getting pretty expensive. But Levant, who does have a following of like-minded individuals, can be thankful that there has been a groundswell of grassroots support for him:


"Stand With Ezra" claims the following:


Well that's lovely. It's important to have friends and allies who will support your cause, especially when they are willing to set up a slick looking website to solicit contributions to fight the good fight.

That being said, we became curious about just how "grassroots" his support is, at least with regard to the website.

So we decided to do a WHOIS search.


Admittedly, there isn't much here that tells us much of anything, but knowing that there might very well be a number of domain names purchased by the creator of the website, we continued digging. Sure enough, we learned that www.standwithezra.com will redirect to www.standwithezra.ca. And when we checked the .com site through WHOIS, we found that both sites were created on 2013/10/10 and expired on 2014/10/10.

But that's not the most interesting thing we found:


For those who have trouble reading this, we offer these screen shots:

 
 

We suppose it might be a coincidence that the two websites were created on the same day and that the .com redirects to the .ca website. And we suppose it could be possible that the .ca site is, indeed, a grassroots effort to help Levant in his legal efforts.

But it sort of a stretch of one's credulity, don't you think?

The kicker? The address Levant provides is that of his father's residence in Calgary.

But to those who support Levant please don't be worried. Unlike Ezra who seems to have no compunction about doing so to his political adversaries, we won't provide his parent's home address.

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