Inside the HRCs: Who is Arman Chak?

On March 25th we might get a glimpse at the inner workings of the Canadian Human Rights Commission and learn a little more about the kind of people who work there, like Dean Steacy. But, for the most part, Canada's HRCs operate without meaningful accountability -- or even basic transparency.

Take Alberta's HRC, where I've been prosecuted for two years for the thought crime of publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. Who's running the show there? I don't mean the commissioners themselves, who issue the inconsistent, illiberal and often bigoted rulings of the commission. I mean the staff. Who are they?

How about one Alberta HRC staffer named Arman Chak? He's a lawyer with the Alberta HRC's Edmonton office. In many ways, Chak is an unremarkable man, best known for coming in dead last in the province-wide lawyers' election for the law society.

Arman Chak isn't famous, but his brother Farhan Chak is. Farhan briefly ran for office as a candidate for the Liberal Party of Canada. But then it was revealed that he had padded his resume -- oh, and that he was also a raging Jew-hater, a nutty conspiracy theorist and had once shot up an Edmonton nightclub. Here's the story that broke the news.

I don't believe Arman Chak should be guilty by association with his anti-Semitic, violent brother, or for his relationship with other cheeky Chaks like Naghman Chak. I'm sure it's possible for two brothers to grow up in the same household, one becoming a violent bigot and the other believing deeply in the equality and dignity of all men. It's possible.

Like a good brother, Arman stood by Farhan, despite everything. I'd like to think I'd stand by my brothers, too, even if one of them shot up a nightclub and uttered horribly bigoted things again and again and again. Maybe, like Arman, I'd even give lectures on the dangers of "thug life", though those lectures would be more meaningful coming from Farhan the gunman himself.

Arman didn't just stand by his brother Farhan -- he positively went on the offensive for him. Last year, Arman instructed the Chak family lawyer to threaten defamation suits, on behalf of Farhan, against any journalists or bloggers who had written about Farhan's embarrassing history. That lawyer served hilariously typo-ridden defamation notices all across the blogosphere, and even on the National Post and the Western Standard, of which I was publisher at the time. (I'll have to dig up that defamation notice and post it -- it's almost as funny as Syed Soharwardy's complaint. And, if I've still got it kicking around, I'll post my, uh, "vigorous" reply to it for a few laughs.) I'm pretty sure every recipient of the Chaks' threatening letter ignored it. But my conversations with the Chaks' lawyer left me with the distinct impression that Arman wasn't just doing damage control for Farhan, but for himself, too.

Indeed, besides trying to get websites to remove embarrassing traces of Farhan's misdeeds, the Chaks engaged in a bit of Internet hygiene on their own. Where they could, they deleted their own political comments from websites, including the radical website Pakistan Link.

Take this page, where the brothers Chak each wrote political letters to the editor. As you can see by clicking on the Chaks' links, those pages, and those pages alone, have been removed. 

But the Internet has a funny way of remembering things. Here is the archived page of Farhan Chak's letter. Frankly, compared to his other rants, it's fairly mild -- but I still wouldn't want to run into him at a nightclub if he was drunk.

And here and here are the archives of Arman Chak's two letters. Here are some excerpts from his letter called Friendship with Bangladesh:

If the people of East Pakistan did not wish to be part of the State of Pakistan, they did not have any internationally recognized right to secede from Pakistan.

What did happen was that the creation of Bangladesh, through the explicit and implicit help of India, was a precedent the world wishes to forget...

Dr. Rahman goes on to compare this situation with Kashmir and Palestine. Simply said, Dr. Rahman has missed the legal realities of both these situations. In both, the legal and moral position is that the countries who are on the opposite end of that equation are 'OCCUPIERS'; they have no right to be there by any definition of international law. Dr. Rahman's comparison is simply a display of ignorance. Pakistan was never the 'OCCUPIER' of East Pakistan, it was a part of its whole. Pakistan's actions may or may not have been brutal, but no more than Canada's imposition of the War Measures Act during the FLQ crisis (French-Canadian separatists).

Dr. Rahman's neglect of incorporating the role that India played in the creation of Bangladesh, shows he would like to forget the realities of Pakistan's turbulent relationship with India. Legally, India's actions since the creation of Pakistan have been against international law. India has interfered in the flow of water, the distribution of land, the distribution of the colonial treasury, political espionage, as well as other acts which clearly show that the intention of India is the denial of sovereignty of Pakistan.

An apology to Bangladesh is an apology of a country for protecting its Sovereignty; this has never been done.

And from the other letter, called No Apologies:

I have recently read an article by Dr. Tariq Rahman in which he has suggested that in order to have better relations with Bangladesh, Pakistan should apologize to Dacca for the tragic 1971 events. I beg to differ with him. Not following the reactionary approach of comparing the wounds inflicted by the two sides, I look at the events in the context of the fundamentals of an Islamic State and its Muslim identity. Regardless of what West Pakistan did to East Pakistan, the latter's alliance with India makes the creation of Bangladesh one of the worst examples of the dis-unification of the Muslim Ummah in contemporary history.

Now, I'm no expert on Pakistan (though, these days, I'm sympathetic to the country.) But Bangladesh has been recognized by pretty much the whole world as a sovereign nation. And even the United Nations, which believes that Israel should no longer occupy the West Bank (it has already left the Gaza Strip), affirms Israel's unquestionable legal right to its pre-1967 borders. Arman Chak's views are radical in the extreme.

I don't think that radical, or even hateful, views should be outlawed -- though I wouldn't want to be someone from the "illegal" state of Bangladesh or from the evil countries of India or Israel, who had a file in Chak's hands at the HRC.

It's not just Arman Chak's extreme hostility to various countries, it's his rationale for that hostility: Chak doesn't believe in the "dis-unification of the Muslim Ummah". Evidently, he believes in the opposite: in the goal of one big Muslim country, where sharia law is the law of the land. Chak, an amateur filmmaker, has even made a movie called Qiyamat -- which happens to be the Muslim equivalent to the Apocalypse. Nice.

Now, if I was a thin-skinned complainer, I'd probably file a human rights complaint against Arman Chak. After all, his comments about Israel, India and Bangladesh meet the test of the thought crimes provisions in the HRC -- they could "expose" people to "hatred and contempt". That's probably one of the reasons he was so eager to delete his spirited letters from the Internet.

But I'm not the type to go whining to the government every time I unearth another bigot.

What I'm more interested in knowing is whether or not Arman Chak, the radical Pakistani nationalist who despises anyone who weakens the Muslim ummah, has handled the files of another radical Pakistani nationalist who despises the weakening of the Muslim ummah. I'm talking about Syed Soharwardy.

Soharwardy isn't just the subject of a human rights complaint at the federal HRC -- he was tagged in Alberta's HRC, too. But just last week, Soharwardy issued a press release on this anti-Christian, anti-Semitic website, gloating at the fact that the complaint against him -- by these women -- was rejected by the HRC out of hand.

Why was the Alberta HRC complaint against Soharwardy rejected where the identical CHRC complaint against him was not? Did Arman Chak, fellow Pakistani radical, run interference for him? What other files has Chak handled? Anything related to Muslims, or his nemeses, Indians?

Or -- hell, just to pull something out of the air -- did Arman Chak touch a file involving the publication of the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, where the complainant was a fellow Pakistani chauvinist, and the respondent an Israel-supporting Jew?

I'll find out soon enough.