Earlier this week, Z Word’s opinion section linked to a blistering piece by Terry Glavin in the Vancouver Sun concerning the decision of that city’s Public Library to extend an invitation to an antisemitic conspiracy theorist, Greg Felton, as its contribution to “Freedom to Read” week.

Now, courtesy of Fat Man on a Keyboard, we are able to report on subsequent developments. Yesterday, the Vancouver Sun published a letter from Paul Whitney, City Librarian, defending the decision in somewhat clipped tones. His key argument revolves around intellectual freedom - and those of us who have been involved in fighting, for example, academic boycott campaigns, know all too well that this is one freedom which you cannot be too cavalier with.

But read Glavin’s response: it’s devastating. He argues that it’s not really Felton’s intellectual freedom that’s at stake, but our own. He puts it like this:

…[T]he library, under the guise of free speech, no less, has afforded legitimacy, and even a sanction of decency, to what is actually a grotesque infringement of free speech. It is a demand that we either dignify people like Felton by debating with them, or shut up.

It works like this.

Nowadays, perhaps especially among the urban intellectual caste, you cannot raise your voice against even the most foul antisemite, if that same antisemite uses words such as “Israel” or “Zionist” in the same breath as his other veiled utterances of Jew-hatred. You will be told that you are equating legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

You will be told, ‘This is part of a legitimate debate.’ But if you say, no it isn’t, you will be told, ‘This is just how the Jews suppress free speech to silence criticism of Israel.’ If you say, ‘That sounds like one of those old antisemitic canards; show me some evidence that it is true,’ you will be called a Zionist, which is one of the worst things you can call someone these days. If you talk back, you will hear someone calling you a Zionazi. You will soon hear people telling you to shut up.

In order for the kind of polemics and legends Felton disseminates to find a privileged place in Whitney’s “open and public exchange of contradictory views”, one must acquiesce to the demand that a veiled and nuanced Judeophobia has a proper place in “legitimate debate,” and we must submit to that very specific and particular sort of demand to shut up. This is not the way lies are made. It is the way they flourish, and spread, and debase the very purpose, function and possibility of “free speech” in an open and democratic society.

And that is precisely and exactly what is going on here.

I also appreciated Glavin’s description of Felton’s publishers as a “crank…house that’s situated somewhere in the bleak Arizona desert.” That would be Dandelion Books, known for - among other things - publishing the works of blood-libel advocate and Borat lookalike, “Israel Shamir.”