Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid, And Buy Our Oil

Speaking at a Meet the Author event at Kelowna's University of British Columbia Okanagan campus on February 24, Ezra Levant allowed himself to go off on a fear-mongering rant about the rise of islamofascism in Egypt:

"What we really have to watch out for here is the Moslem Brotherhood. They bumped off Sadat in 1981, then they got rid of Mubarak without firing a single bullet."

This statement completely misrepresents the origins of the January 25 Revolution, its aspirations, and its execution. And it is symptomatic of Levant's distortion of the truth to support his thesis. Here's another perspective on Egypt's revolution from an unexpected source appearing on Fareed Zakaria's GPS:

PW
All these experts here that somehow know what Egyptians think--I don't know what Egyptians think! I didn't see much evidence of people in the streets of Cairo saying "Death to America" or "Allahu'akbar," but what I did see was a lot of young Egyptians with "Facebook" painted on their foreheads.

FZ
[...] The Israelis [...] seem to have deep Mubarak nostalgia.

PW
It's crazy. The Israelis should welcome what's happening in Egypt, if only cynically. Instead of associating themselves with a dead, doomed regime, they should try to find allies in Egypt, and I would assume there are millions of Egyptians who do not want to restart a war with Israel.

That voice of reason belongs to Paul Wolfowitz. Long regarded as one of the architects of the Iraq invasion, his name usually uttered as one third of the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz triumvirate. He spoke of embracing the potential for democracy to emerge in the Middle East as a populist movement rather than at gunpoint, if only as the proper strategic disposition when the tipping point has already been reached.

However, Levant wants you to be afraid, very afraid, of the petro-states. And I freely admit that the OPEC nations have distorted their politics to serve their distorted oil-based economies. If Canada isn't careful, it will surely suffer the same fate.

Some say Canada has already distorted its politics, shifting its political and economic axis from Toronto--Ottawa--Montreal to Calgary--Edmonton--Fort McMurray. Calgary is the location of Stephen Harper's electoral district and home to headquarters for many of Alberta's oil patch companies. The legislature in Alberta's capital, Edmonton, regulates and grants the extraction rights for this multi-billion dollar industry, and just northeast of the city lies an extensive upgrading facility. Ft McMurray lies in the midst of the oil sands' richest deposit along the Athabasca River, and is the hub for the extraction companies operating in the region.

Why does Levant want you to fear the corrupt, misogynist, ethnic nationalist regimes that control access to the bulk of the world's oil supply? Because he wants to ensure the primacy of the oil sands for supplying American oil demand. Canada is now the top oil supplier to the US. But that primacy is threatened by hand-wringing over the environmental impact of extraction. Levant intends to invigorate demand and for the oil sands to keep right on producing, unabated by environmental concerns. He papers over the inefficiency, ecological damage, energy intensiveness, and socioeconomic disruption of the oil sands by calling it Ethical Oil, a phrase now embraced by Canada's fifth Environment Minister in five years, Peter Kent.

Stephen Harper's former Director of Communications, Kory Teneycke, has ensured that Ezra Levant is given a platform for his disinformation on SunTV, a new Quebecor network referred to as FOXNews North by some.