Why demonize The Rebel?

Re: Rebel Without Applause, Aug. 19. When I served on the National Post’s editorial board, back in the paper’s glory days, we had arguments about what our editorial positions should be. The line often used to carry the day was, “we already have a Globe and Mail”. As in, there already was a newspaper with a politically correct, liberal, vanilla point of view. Wasn’t the Post supposed to be different?

It’s a question someone at the Post should have asked before publishing the extraordinary, 10,000-word attack on me called “Rebel Without Applause”.

Six pages long, including the entire front page. Reporter Richard Warnica worked on it for months, even calling up my schoolyard friends from when I was 14 years old, looking for dirt.

I’ve never seen anything like it. It was something I’d have expected from the CBC, the Globe or The Toronto Star, and reporters at those places gleefully promoted the story. National Post subscribers had a different response, though: every letter to the editor published in reply was disappointed, even baffled.

The reason the article elicited that reaction with Post readers is, “we already have a Globe and Mail”. Since when does the National Post demonize conservatives, using the language and the ideology of the left? And since when does the Post call people who are worried about terrorism and sharia law “Islamophobic”?

The article used the phrase “far-right” 10 times and “extreme” 13 times. “Islamophobia” was in there six times. That’s how the CBC talks about conservatives — not how a conservative newspaper does it.

The main quarrel the Post has with my website, The Rebel, is that we “have become a global platform for an extreme anti-Muslim ideology”, and our criticism of political Islam is a “farright fringe theory.” The Post links me to “the Middle East Forum, a right-wing think was set. And even after I left, I continued as a guest columnist. I’ve written more than 100 columns about Islam for the Post and other Postmedia newspapers, and I continued to do so even after I started The Rebel.

That’s just me; Daniel Pipes, the president of the the necks of the Conservative Party of Canada. He writes, “those who are backing away — including some with ties to the highest reaches of the Conservative Party — will eventually have to answer the question, why now? Why wasn’t everything else the site has ever done — the fear mongering, the focus on Muslims, the footsie with white nationalist themes — enough?”

It’s true, I’ve supported the Conservatives, even volunteering for the party in the 2008 election. But my work for them did not touch on Islam; and in any event, I stopped working with them in 2011. My main expression has been through Postmedia, including more than 600 columns over the years in the Sun newspapers and over 100 op-eds in the National Post itself, the last one less than a year ago. I was part of the Post’s extended family.

The feeling was mutual — half a dozen Postmedia writers regularly appeared on Rebel shows. Our most frequent guest told us he was ordered by his Sun newspaper editor to quit us.