The National Post previews Tuesday's hearing

Today's National Post has a huge news report by Joseph Brean, previewing Tuesday's human rights tribunal hearing in Ottawa. It's the most in-depth report on the subject I've seen so far outside of the blogosphere. But then, the only elements of the mainstream media to touch this story -- other than Joan Bryden's factually inaccurate "report" -- have been opinion editorials. Almost every newspaper in the country has weighed in with their views on the subject (and all of them have criticized the human rights commissions) but almost none of them have deployed actual reporting resources to the matter. The National Post has now set a high standard in that regard, and I assume Brean will be there on Tuesday to follow up the story.

Here are some excerpts from Brean's piece:

In the hands of adjudicators with limited legal training, poor investigatory resources and naively good intentions, critics charge that the power of section 13.1 is being abused for nuisance cases that would be rightly tossed out of a real court.

As evidence, they point to the two prominent conservative journalists who have recently been charged with the same violation: Ezra Levant of the defunct Western Standard and

Mark Steyn of Maclean's. And they point to Mr. Lemire's accuser, former human rights commission employee Richard Warman, who is also the complainant in more than a dozen other section 13.1 cases -- more by far than any other complainant ever -- and wonder how one man could be so widely aggrieved. They also note his 100% success rate.

The article also contains some of Keith Martin's toughest comments on the CHRC yet:

Liberal MP Keith Martin, who has put forth a motion to scrap section 13.1, says it seems unfair that "someone could be using the power of the state for their own private initiative. I don't want to use the word pogrom, it would be too strong. One person's private crusade."

Mr. Martin describes the legal test of "likely to expose" as "a hole you could drive a Mack truck through," and said it is being applied by "rogue commissions where a small number of people [are] determining what Canadians can and can't say."

And here's a quote from Alan Borovoy of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association:

"Although it's true that they have nailed some genuine hatemongers with it, it has nevertheless been used or threatened to be used against a wide variety of constituencies who don't bear the slightest resemblance to the kind of hatemongers that were originally envisioned: anti-American protesters, French-Canadian nationalists, a film sympathetic to South Africa's Nelson Mandela, a pro-Zionist book, a Jewish community leader, Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, and even a couple years ago, a pro-Israeli speaker was briefed about the anti-hate law by a police detective before he went in to make a speech," he said.

In none of these cases was there a lasting conviction or property seizure. "But only lawyers could be consoled by that," he said.

I've got a few comments in the article, too:

Others call the 13.1 offence simply a "pre-crime," a concept from the sci-fi movie Minority Report. They say it is an excuse to punish people for something that has not actually happened yet, but which is simply "likely," or even just theoretically possible.

"How can you even defend against what might or might not happen in the future? Of course I'm guilty because it [exposing people to contempt] might happen," said Ezra Levant, who is the subject of a complaint in Alberta by a Muslim organization for publishing the Danish Muhammad cartoons.

"If Canada had a 100% conviction rate for murders, you don't think that the civil libertarians would be saying, 'What the hell? No one ever wins?' " Mr. Levant said. "But of course it must be a 100% conviction rate because it's a pre-crime, it's a thought crime, and truth is not a defence."

The most, uh, creative comment in the report comes from Darren Lund. (Lund is an anti-American, anti-Christian bigot who runs his own Internet hate site, to use the parlance of the HRCs, dedicated to undermining the Christian charity Samaritan's Purse. Like his fellow anti-Christian bigots, Mohamed Elmasry and Syed Soharwardy, Lund has used the human rights commissions as his own censor. He's the plaintiff behind the abominable Boissoin case, which (at paragraph 357) ruled that Lund's right not to be offended by a newspaper article trumps the freedom of speech and freedom of religion of a Christian pastor.)

Lund told the Post:

"With more resources they could do a better job of weeding out the nuisance cases and of investigating."

 So the remedy to the nuisance suits at the HRCs -- his included -- is... more money and more staff? That's convenient. It's not a particularly original proposal, coming from a life-long government employee himself. But how will more money for the HRCs change their essence, other than to make them a larger menace? They are by nature vehicles for nuisance suits and the statute that governs them, with its vague prohibition against "symbols" that are "likely" to "cause hatred", is the root of the problem. The Alberta Human Rights Commission has now spent more than two years working on the ridiculous cartoon complaints against me. At least four HRC staff have been involved, including at least one lawyer. The fact that they didn't "weed out" the cartoon complaint against me isn't because they didn't have the time or the manpower -- the number of complaints the Alberta HRC received last year actually declined, though their budget didn't. It's because squelching politically incorrect ideas isn't an accident, it's the HRCs very purpose. Every case at the HRC is a nuisance suit -- Lund's being amongst the worst. But back to the National Post:

One of the most interesting comments in the article is from David Matas, of B'nai Brith:

"I don't think that it's a coincidence that we're seeing a number of people complaining and using the human rights commissions claiming that this is an attack against Islam. That's what we're seeing internationally as well," said David Matas, senior legal counsel of B'nai Brith Canada, who returned this week from the meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva.

"To me, looking at Steyn or Levant is looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope, because the problem isn't that Steyn or Levant are being frivolously accused of something, the problem is that there is a wave now of people doing domestically what we have seen internationally, which is to try to use the human rights system to divert it from its true goal," he said.

That's an excellent point -- and exacly the subject of the conference I'll be speaking at in New York. It's about the concerted plan by radical Muslim nations to use the West's legal systems against ourselves, as part of the "soft jihad". The hard jihad isn't working out too well in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, despite what the surrenderist longings of the mainstream media would say. But the soft jihad is a roaring success -- in Western academia, and in Canada's HRCs. That's not just a coincidence. (Why hasn't Lund, a self-styled gay activist, set up a website criticizing the anti-women, anti-gay nature of sharia law, too? Why has he saved his calumnies and his human rights complaints for Christian pastors, but exempted Muslim clerics so reactionary on sexual politics, they make Pastor Boissoin look like Liberace by comparison? Is it fear of violence, like that which killed gay filmmaker Theo van Gogh? Or is it simply that Lund has some personal issues with Christianity that he's working out at taxpayers' expense?)

Matas points out that our human rights commissions are being deliberately used as a Canadian front in the global jihad. I am constantly puzzled by the B'nai Brith. Their chief counsel points out the abuses of the HRC system, and connects the dots to the global Islamist threat. And their own in-house newspaper, The Tribune, published a similar analysis by terrorism expert John Thompson (see page 4). Yet the B'nai Brith continues to be an abuser of these same human rights commissions, and in fact is an intervener, on behalf of Richard Warman and the CHRC, in Tuesday's hearing in Ottawa. A charitable explanation is that the B'nai Brith is slowly coming to terms with the truth about the HRCs, but hasn't fully made up its mind -- unlike the Canadian Jewish Congress, which is ever more obsessed and committed to censorship, no matter the cost to their reputation.

Needless to say, Warman himself declined to be interviewed by Brean. But that didn't stop Brean from doing his own research into the serial complainant:

The lightning rod in all of this is Richard Warman, Canada's most prolific and successful third-party human rights complainant.

Mr. Warman, who worked for the CHRC from 2002 to 2004 and now works for the Department of National Defence, declined to be interviewed, but transcripts of testimony at previous tribunals and records of his public speaking paint a picture of a determined anti-racism activist who pursues people he judges to be hatemongers with a strategy he describes as "maximum disruption."

Besides anonymous lurking in chat-rooms, frequent complaints to the CHRC, behind-the-scenes help with commission investigations and tips to police, this strategy has at least once involved recruiting fellow activists to throw a cream pie at a target, David Icke, a British author whom Mr. Warman considers an anti-Semite.

It was a large and well-researched article, and gave plenty of ink to the HRCs' critics. I can hardly wait to see what Brean writes about the hearing itself in Wednesday's Post.