Assange in the Crosshairs

It's not every day you see newspaper columnists openly calling for someone's murder.

Writing in the National Post, Jeet Heer expresses disgust at the “armchair assassins and laptop killers,” including former Stephen Harper aide Tom Flanagan and sometime contributor to The Mark Ezra Levant, who suggested this week that it might be a good idea to put a hit out on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Heer says such talk is pretty rich for people who spend most of their time behind a desk, and speculates that their bloodlust is attributable to the fact that “there is a huge over-abundance of right-wing voices in the media, so every conservative columnist has to distinguish herself or himself somehow.” He also says that viewpoints like this are evidence that “the right has gone into intellectual and moral decline since the 1950s” when pundits calling for the execution of communists were reviled, instead of rewarded by large followings.

In the Post today, Levant defends his assertion that Assange is engaged not in journalism but in espionage against the U.S., and that the potential harm of what he releases outweighs his right to free speech. The puzzling part comes when Levant states that while hacking could be construed as a kind of expression “the same could be said for … writing a death threat on a piece of paper. No-one would reasonably characterize [that as] free speech.” One has to wonder then what Levant makes of his own column from Tuesday, which began “Why isn’t Julian Assange dead yet?” and went on to suggest that Barack Obama could engineer his assassination. Stunning logic at work here.

The hypocrisy of journalists calling for Assange’s murder is even more apparent when one considers that the only reason we know about WikiLeaks is because the site releases its information directly to the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and the Guardian. Since those papers published the latest document dump, news outlets all over the world have reprinted their so-called “secrets” on a daily basis. So if Levant et al. think that Assange should be extrajudicially killed, what punishment should be meted out to the columnists currently making a living by repeating the dangerous information he’s unleashed on the world?