A colourful Muslim hot-dog vendor in Halifax is in hot water after publishing a series of Tweets yesterday wherein he joked about the Holocaust. Jerry Reddick, known as “The Dawgfather” (no relation), who is as they say “known to police,” claims that he just wanted to make a point—the same one, in cruder form, that has been made at Dawg’s and elsewhere, namely that the #JeSuisCharlie outcry was not all about free speech after all.

It’s highly unlikely that anti-Semitic cartoons would be defiantly reproduced hither and yon were, say, far-Right caricaturists to be murdered by members of the Jewish Defence League. Perhaps a less emotive example of an apparent double standard would be the republication of hard-core porn images after Larry Flynt was shot. It didn’t happen in pre-Internet 1978; and it wouldn’t happen now, either.

Reddick chose Twitter as his medium, saying that his Tweets were intended to be satirical. But a complaint was duly made and a police officer paid a visit to Reddick. Apparently he was invited in, and the conversation grew heated. The officer thereupon ticketed Reddick for “disturbing the peace”—in his own home. (This isn’t the first time that the Halifax cops have come calling, or, for that matter, issued bogus tickets.) I gather there is an on-going police investigation to determine if Reddick has breached the Criminal Code provisions dealing with hate speech.

Meanwhile, one Jon Goldberg, Executive Director of the Atlantic Jewish Council, has called for the revocation of Reddick’s vendor’s licence.

I suggest that Reddick has proven his point rather well. What do readers think?