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George Jonas, who has died aged 80, was a journalist, novelist and poet who fled the brutal Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian revolution for a new life in the West, where he became one of Canada’s best loved and most controversial opinion makers on issues from criminal law, war and politics to Islamism and multiculturalism.

The cause was not specified; he had been ill for the past several years with Parkinsonism.

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[np_storybar title=”A compendium of Jonas’ columns for the Post

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Jonas was an avid motorcyclist and pilot, who flew, as did the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, to release his mind from the “tyranny of petty things.”

And though he grappled in print with the most fearsome ideologies of modern history, having been born into the mid-century European tension between fascism and communism, he was at heart a newsman, reacting to fast-breaking facts on the ground, and viewing them through the crystalline lens of his pithy wit.