July 2008 Archives

See update, below.

Here is that Maclean's article from 1966, about how the Canadian Jewish Congress sent an "agent" to pitch in to organize the Canadian Nazi Party. Just like Grant Bristow twenty years later, and Richard Warman forty years later, it was a case of the "cure" becoming worse than the disease. The scans are about 30 MB; I've put a 12 MB version here:

John Garrity, the CJC agent who helped out the rag-tag band of wannabes, didn't do as much as Grant Bristow did, in terms of organizing neo-Nazis, and he didn't do as much as Warman did, in terms of spreading anti-Semitic and racist hate. But the fact remains, the Canadian Jewish Congress pitched in, helping to prop up the haters they were publicly fighting against. And -- surprise! -- in a self-serving article, Garrity wrote that his work was extremely important, and that the rag-tag nobodies he helped out were a real menace. The only thing missing was the pitch for readers to donate money to the CJC and the rest of the anti-hate industry.

Let's get serious. Barely 20 years after Nazi Germany was crushed into powder by the Allies, with Canada taking an oversized role in the battle, when the streets of Canada were teeming with war veterans who hated Nazism with every cell of their body, when Nazism had been utterly discredited in the public mind, when there was no possible chance of that ideology finding intellectual purchase in Canada, let alone actual power, the CJC was trumping up the menace -- led by a vain, 24-year-old nobody.

Why?

Because that's the moral hazard of the being in the anti-hate business. If there's not enough hate, you have to change your line of work. Or: as the CJC did in 1966, and as they're doing today through the human rights commissions, they drum up a fake danger, manufacture a menace, help them out even, and then expose the whole thing and posit themselves as the remedy.

I just don't know what's wrong with the Jews sometimes. We have enough real enemies out there -- even in 1966, before the West turned against Israel after the Six Day War ended the Jews' status as the world's underdogs, and with it ended the pity honeymoon that had existed since the Holocaust. Even then, the Jews had enough real enemies, and there were real enough Jewish issues. Today it's far worse, with radical Islamists planning the next Holocaust.

I just don't get it. But Bernie "Burny" Farber and the rest of his industry know a good gig when they see one. They're just running the Garrity-Bristow-Warman game one more time. It makes them heroes in their own mind, and it gets them lots of press. But it's dishonest. And today, with militant Islam on the rise, there are enough real fights to fight without making up fake ones.

UPDATE: A commenter writes to say that he was there in Toronto when Beattie, the 24-year-old leader of the rag-tag Canadian Nazi Party had its rally in Toronto -- with 20 people in tow. The commenter's point was to suggest that I have overstated the CJC's role in assisting the Nazi Party. Maybe -- though any support is bizarre. But what I actually glean from the commenter's report was the opposite message: that Beattie and his "party" could only muster 20 followers in a city of millions. This was a national threat? Of course not. But with a little finessing, it could be built up into a menace that would terrify Jews and Gentiles alike.

Brought to you by the CJC.

I am sympethetic to CSIS these days. They have an enormously challenging job to keep Canada safe from real threats -- such as those being plotted continuously by foreign jihadis and their domestic agents. It is partly to CSIS's credit that the acts of terrorism Canada has endured in recent years have been low-level activities, difficult to detect in advance -- such as the fire-bombing of a Jewish synagogue by a Muslim radical in Edmonton; or the fire-bombing of the Jewish school library by Muslim radicals in Montreal; or the assault on a Jewish teenager by a Muslim radical in Calgary.

Perhaps it's precisely because CSIS is now engaged in a real battle against real threats that it no longer -- as far as we know publicly -- spends government time and money building up neo-Nazi organizations like the Heritage Front.

During the 1980s and 1990s, CSIS -- that is, the taxpayers of Canada -- helped organize and build Canada's leading group of white supremacists. Funding, strategy, organization support -- all of it came from the government.

Their point man was Grant Bristow. He was one of Canada's neo-Nazi leaders, who worked as an agent for CSIS. Without Bristow, Canada's neo-Nazis would have been less-organized, less prominent and more poorly led. Thanks, CSIS.

Now, I understand the need for undercover police work to stop some tough-to-fight crimes. And there might even have been a few cases where the other neo-Nazis that Bristow met were genuine threats of violence. They probably were. But there's an important moral and practical difference between sending in some infiltrator and building up the biggest neo-Nazi group in the country. At what point is the cure worse than the disease?

CSIS and Bristow didn't just track potentially violent criminals. They engaged in political dirty tricks. They attempted to take over the Reform Party when it was in its formative years. The "discovery" -- funny how that leaked out, eh? -- that CSIS's front organization was trying to take over the Reform Party was a political embarrassment for that party, and the unfair legacy of that accusation continues even to this day. That wasn't crime-fighting; that wasn't even the more nebulous "hate-fighting". That was using a government agent and a government front to smear a political opponent that both the Tories and the Liberals of the day hated. No wonder CSIS got the green light. (The fact that Warren Kinsella's "definitive" "history" of Canada's "hate organizations" strategically omitted mention of Bristow, adding him in only to later editions once Bristow was outed, is simply more proof of the partisan infection of Bristow's mission.)

I mention all of this because that key CSIS neo-Nazi organizer, Grant Bristow, had an Op-Ed in yesterday's National Post, defending... the Canadian Human Rights Commission, its patron the Canadian Jewish Congress and even Bernie "Burny" Farber. Besides a modest recitation of how brave he was, and how brave Burny is, Bristow gave his opinion that:

The Canadian Human Rights Commission has been at the forefront of the war against hate in this country for decades. I personally believe it played a key role in eviscerating Canadian hate groups in the 1980s and 1990s.

But that's simply not true. The CHRC didn't have the mandate to go after real criminals. And it certainly didn't shut down the Heritage Front -- that would have meant arresting Bristow, a CSIS agent himself. The Heritage Front unwound party because of its own incompetence, and largely because Bristow abandoned his leadership role there when his cover was blown. The CHRC really had nothing to do with it.

That's an obvious point to anyone who looks at the Canadian Human Rights Act itself. It doesn't deal with real acts of violence -- such as street fights, or death threats. It deals with "hate speech" on telephone lines and the Internet. That wasn't the problem with the Heritage Front -- indeed, it has never been the real "hate" problem in Canada, but a placebo for the human rights industry to noisily and showily deal with, while ignoring real threats.

Bristow knows nothing about the CHRC -- he was never a complainant under its sections; he never worked for it; in fact, the only possible relationship he has with it is as an offender of its thought crimes provision, he himself having generated an enormous amount of "hate", while undercover.

Bristow's Op-Ed -- besides being a self-serving piece of revisionist history (revisionism being something that the Heritage Front was always good at) -- conflates real crimes, crimes of violence, with "thought crimes" that the CHRC seeks to police. Whatever grains of truth lie at the bottom of Bristow's autohagiography apply to matters for real police to solve. The CHRC has no role in stopping violence. Bristow can marshall whatever "authority" he has towards discussions about policework, but his experiences in thought crimes policing are nil. If Bristow has any credibility, it's in regard to street crime, of which he has plenty of experience, not thought crimes.

But Bristow popping his head up now -- in a clearly ghost-written Op-Ed -- serves to remind us of some of the lessons of that awful CSIS experiment in neo-Nazism. Even with CSIS's police oversight, in the form of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, Bristow got out of control, and the Heritage Front started to engage in political adventures. Imagine how much worse it is at the CHRC, which has no oversight committee.

No need to imagine, actually -- you can see how contorted the CHRC has become, how self-righteous, how it violates its own laws constantly, how it has become a political weapon. Like CSIS creating Canada's biggest neo-Nazi group -- creating it, instead of fighting it! -- the CHRC has become Canada's largest disseminator of hate speech itself -- creating it, instead of fighting it. Richard Warman himself has admitted, under oath, to posting hundreds of messages on neo-Nazi websites, and other CHRC staff have also admitted to joining those neo-Nazi groups, under codenames like "Jadewarr". That's one of the reasons why the B'nai Brith renounced HRCs today -- the cure has become worse than the disease.

CSIS created Canada's biggest neo-Nazi group. The CHRC has generated more neo-Nazi hate than any other entity in Canada. You can even see examples of one "covert" neo-Nazi talking to another, each "investigating" the other. Anytime I see a conveniently-timed outburst from some racist group, especially if it's online, I immediately think of Bristow and Warman and the rest of them. (Example: the white pride "rally" of two dozen misfits in Calgary on the eve of the spectacularly embarrassing March 25th human rights tribunal hearing in Ottawa. Frankly, even Fred Phelps' looming visit to Red Deer smacks of an act of an agent provocateur.)

And Burny? He's at the heart of it. Because he need hate groups to be big and strong, if his anti-hate obsession is going to remain valid and important. (Correction: He needs impotent "hate groups", like the Heritage Front to be big and strong. There really are big and strong hate groups out there, like the Canadian Islamic Congress, but they're a little bit too big and strong for Burny to, well, do anything. When was the last time the CJC filed a "hate speech" complaint against a Jew-hating Muslim?)

There is a grotesque symbiosis between the Canadian Jewish Congress and the hate groups; they need each other, actually. The hate groups need a Jewish demon, who lives down to their worst stereotypes and prejudices. The CJC needs Nazi caricatures, to play on old wounds about the Holocaust -- not troublesome threats of a Muslim jihad.

I have copies of an old Maclean's magazine article from the 1960s in which the Grant Bristow of that day was hired by the Canadian Jewish Congress to help build the Canadian Nazi Party. Jewish money was actually used by the CJC to start a Nazi party. I'll get those scans in a useable form and try to upload them shortly. It's 40 years later, and Burny is still doing the same thing -- except that CSIS is paying the freight today.

I believe that going undercover to fight real criminals is sometimes appropriate -- subject to proper internal controls, to make sure the cure isn't worse than the disease. Those checks and balances weren't strong in Bristow's case, which is why he was able to smear the Reform Party politically. And the fact that CSIS actually built up the biggest neo-Nazi group in the country is another ethical problem. But at least SIRC, CSIS's Internal Affairs oversight committee, realized that (here's their report).

The CHRC doesn't have an internal affairs department, and as I've written before, it doesn't even have a code of ethics. That's the problem -- or one of them at least. The fact that a long-time neo-Nazi organizer like Bristow speaks out in the CHRC's defence isn't persuasive. Rather, it only points out the problems with government provocateurs like the CHRC. 

This is definitely a two-siren blog post.

The B'nai Brith, historically one of the most partisan supporters of Canada's human rights commissions, has made a dramatic break from the human rights industry, "urgently" calling for a "major overhaul" of Canada's human rights commissions. You can read the full text of their press release on the subject here.

The B'nai Brith is Canada's oldest and largest Jewish service club, dating back to 1875.

Frank Dimant, the Executive Vice-President of BB, said "we have to ensure that commissions do not become abusers of the very human rights they are charged with protecting" -- a clear shot at the HRCs' continuous violation of freedom of speech and freedom of religion, as well as their well-documented procedural abuses and corruption. The Canadian Human Rights Commission, for example, is now under four different investigations, including by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

David Matas, BB's senior legal counsel, was also quoted in their press release, pointing to several illegal and abusive traits of HRCs, including that the same complaints can be filed with multiple HRCs, as was done by the anti-Semitic Canadian Islamic Congress in their complaints against Maclean's magazine and Mark Steyn. According to Matas, "Commissions cannot become avenues of harassment in which complaints are simultaneously made in several jurisdictions. The remedy is to introduce rules that will allow for one jurisdiction only."

Matas also suggested deep re-education for the HRCs' corrupt censors, accusing them of ignorance and anachronism. “The remedy for ignorance is education and training. Investigators must be required to undertake compulsory in-house courses that meet these needs. They must always be able to distinguish between hate and protected political speech," he added. That's a pretty clear shot at political censors like Richard Warman and Dean Steacy, the latter of whom actually testified that free speech is not a Canadian value -- despite its entrenchment as a "fundamental freedom" in our Charter of Rights, our Bill of Rights, and our inherited unwritten U.K. constitutional corpus. 

Finally, Matas called for costs to be awarded against clear nuisance litigants, like the CIC and the Jew-bashing imam Syed Soharwardy, who simply walked away from his Alberta HRC complaint about the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, after saddling taxpayers with $500,000 in costs, and me with nearly $100,000 in costs (another, identical complaint, continues against me.)

Matas said: “Costs must be levied against those whose clear aim is to abuse the system by launching attacks designed to harass bona fide respondents. This would be a deterrent against those who deliberately seek to hijack and corrupt the human rights system in pursuit of their own ideological bent.”

Again, you can see the entire release here.

This is enormous, because it ends the false unanimity amongst Canada's "Official Jews" in support of HRCs. As I've written here, most real Jews are not for censorship; it's just the personal obsession of a few "Professional Jews", like Bernie "Burny" Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress, and Leo Adler of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

It's not surprising to me that B'nai Brith was the first to bolt the troika of Jewish groups that has turned a blind eye to the HRCs' corruption. As I wrote several months ago, as the HRCs continue to beclown themselves in the public square, those who are allied with them will start to incur political damage, especially with this Conservative government. (The CJC, with its impeccable Liberal connections, doesn't much care.) But I don't think the B'nai Brith's about-face was done to please the government; I think it was done in response to the B'nai Brith's own constituency: grassroots, severely normal, Canadian Jews.

Unlike the CJC, and certainly the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the B'nai Brith actually has active members, and local branches across the country, made up of volunteers. They're like the Jewish Rotary Club -- normal. They're not a hot-house of professional political lobbyists like Burny, who has his own political agenda, and is using the CJC's name and reputation to prosecute his own hobby-horses. Grassroots Jews know that the real threat in 2008 isn't a handful of teenaged kids talking tough about being Nazis in some website fantasy -- really, the political equivalent to an online fantasy role playing video game. The real threat is a wave of radical Islam both internationally and here in Canada -- including the CJC's new ally, the Canadian Islamic Congress. The B'nai Brith understands -- as David Matas makes crystal clear -- that the Canadian Islamic Congress is an illiberal, abusive, human rights-violating enemy of Canada and enemy of the Jews. The CJC? Well, the CJC's newest legal committee member, Warren Kinsella, actually gave help and advice to the Canadian Islamic Congress. I'm guessing that if a B'nai Brith officer tried that, he'd be fired the next day.

I am excited that the B'nai Brith has so publicly broken ranks with the rest of the Professional Jews, and has clearly accused not only the Canadian Islamic Congress of harrassment, but has taken pretty dead aim at the CHRC and its investigators, too.

But, even amidst my enthusiasm, I must still acknowledge some depressing realities:

1. The B'nai Brith remains an intervenor against Mark Lemire in the Warman v. Lemire nuisance suits\ that is clearly as abusive as anything the Canadian Islamic Congress has filed;

2. In that Lemire case, the B'nai Brith's lawyers have conducted themselves in lock-step with the CJC and the CHRC, including supporting the section 13 thought crimes provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

3. The B'nai Brith has stopped short of calling for the abolition of section 13. In other words, they have not taken that final step of realizing that censorship is not a Jewish value, it's not healthy for a liberal democracy, and it has only served to discredit the B'nai Brith -- and make anti-Semitic nobodies into glamourous international celebrities.

Still, this is a huge step -- the first and hardest step. The B'nai Brith has announced today that they no longer drink the human rights industry kool-aid. They're not going to continue turning a blind eye to the corruption and abuse that's rampant in the industry.

I expect two things will happen:

1. The human rights industry will respond with execration, demonizing B'nai Brith and Dimant and -- as Kinsella usually does -- accusing them of being supporters of Holocaust deniers and white supremacists. I know that sounds nuts, but ad hominem attacks are really all the intellectually bankrupt HRC industry has left.

2. I also expect that real Jews, normal Jews, grassroots Jews, Jews who lead normal lives -- as opposed to the Official Jews, the Jews Who are Jews for a Living -- will respond with enthusiasm, and that the B'nai Brith will attract both money and people away from the CJC.

I hope that the B'nai Brith will find its new path so rewarding -- intellectually, morally and politically -- that it will, in time, take the final step and acknowledge that the section 13 "thought crimes" law is unsalvageable, and should be abolished altogether.

Why don't you take a moment and send Frank Dimant, BB's boss, a letter of encouragement. Understand how hard it must have been for him to repudiate decades of collusion with the human rights industry. Wish him well in the weeks ahead, when he'll be abused by his spurned lovers in the HRCs, and the dhimmis in the CJC. And tell him that he speaks for Canadians -- Jewish and Gentile -- and for Canadian (and Jewish) values of true civil rights much more than the corrupt poseurs at the HRCs.

You can e-mail Dimant here.

(UPDATE: I have re-filed and re-served a slightly revised Statement of Defence. It is identical in all substantive regards; the changes are clerical. The old version has been replaced by the new version in the links below.)

Today my Toronto lawyers served my Statement of Defence in response to Richard Warman’s lawsuit against me and six other defendants. You can see my defence here.

Warman’s lawsuit itself is here, and here are the defences of my co-defendants Connie and Mark Fournier, Kate McMillan and Kathy Shaidle and the National Post and Jonathan Kay. I’m the last to file.

My approach is a bit different than the others -- it's a little more fact-packed. Warman's suit is political, and it's part of what he calls his campaign of "maximum disruption". In other words, it's a nuisance suit. It's part of the "lawfare" being waged against me by the human rights industry in response to my criticisms of it. And that, in turn, began when I decided not to surrender to the two radical Muslim complaints against me at the Alberta Human Rights Commission, for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed back in 2006.

In many ways, the lawsuits filed against me by Richard Warman and Giacomo Vigna, and the one threatened by Warren Kinsella, are distractions from the main fight: radical Islam, and its use of our Western legal tools to censor criticism of Islamic fascism. Those three antagonists certainly don't seem, at first blush, to have anything to do with my publication of the Danish cartoons 900 days ago.

But in another sense, their nuisance suits -- and the Canadian human rights industry from which they emanate -- are the necessary domestic partners in the foreign jihad against Canada. They're what Lenin called the "useful idiots of the West". Warman, Vigna and Kinsella probably don't even agree with radical Islam -- though Kinsella has dabbled in it, by giving advice and help to the anti-Semitic Canadian Islamic Congress. But they are defenders of (and in Warman's case, a leading participant in) Canada's abusive, corrupt human rights system that has been so effectively hijacked by radical Islam.

Of course, many others have hijacked Canada's HRCs, too -- radical jihadists are merely the latest and most dangerous. HRCs have been censoring, fining, gagging and even jailing their critics for 30 years. They are no longer a shield protecting our rights, they're a sword to abuse our rights, especially our freedom of speech and thought. 

Read the defence for yourself. Some of the material will be old news to regular readers of this blog; some of it will be new.

My defence refers to many of Warman's bigoted posts that he made as a member of neo-Nazi websites. You can see dozens of those posts here. I also refer to Warman's involvement with the violent ARA. You can see photos of one of the events referred to in my defence here.

There are several ways to fight a defamation claim, and I'm using many of them. Truth, fair comment, etc. are all defences. I've also pointed out that Warman has let hundreds of criticisms similar to mine go unchecked on the Internet and even in mainstream publications like Maclean's, to focus on his prefered targets for "maximum disruption" -- me and other leading conservative bloggers.

But I've also looked at Warman's reputation and said, essentially: you're suing me because I reported that you wrote an anti-Black comment on a website, using a false name? But you've already admitted, under oath, to writing hundreds of anti-Black, anti-Semitic and anti-gay comments on neo-Nazi websites under false names!

I've also pointed out that Warman has issued or threatened literally dozens of defamation lawsuits over the years -- including some since he sued me and my co-defendants. Again, how can you go to court claiming that your reputation was damaged, when you've written -- in your own hand! -- that your reputation has been devastated again and again and again, both before and since, by others?

The answer, of course, is that the lawsuit isn't logical, or serious. It's a nuisance suit. I believe he thought the defendants would each crumble -- the National Post because they already apologized to him, and me and the other bloggers because we're not wealthy. I don't think Warman ever counted on the blogosphere -- and not just the conservative blogosphere, but everyone who cares about freedom of speech -- chipping in to help us with the costs of our defence.  

I won't write any more now, because there's plenty of reading in the defence itself. What do you think of it?

It wasn't cheap; if you want to help chip in, please do, by clicking on the PayPal button below.

Thanks again. I promise to keep fighting.

P.S. Thanks to all of the volunteer researchers from around the world! 

"This organization is not a registered non-profit organization.  Donations to this organization are not tax deductible for federal income tax purposes."

 

I've just made my 500th blog entry this year. It's been an exciting run; checking out my visitor stats, my biggest single day was June 3 when I live-blogged Mark Steyn's trial, and had 47,000 page loads in 24 hours. I didn't have my stats program in place for the first three days after I uploaded my YouTube videos back in January, and I suspect those were busy days, too.

I forgot to mark the one millionth unique visitor to my site, which happened a couple of months ago. I'm pleased that the site typically gets five to ten thousand unique visitors a day, depending on what I write about -- and who links to me! I find it encouraging that about half of my daily visitors are the "usual suspects" -- according to my stats package, they're return visitors, some of whom have visited my site as many as 300 times.

I think I know why: they want to know how the story is going to end.

Will Canada shuck off its politically correct human rights commissions, and re-embrace our heritage of freedom? Or will we continue to slouch into the soft tyranny of state censorship? I feel optimistic about how things are going in the court of public opinion, but we still haven't seen any meaningful actions from legislators.

What the courts will do is an interesting question -- especially in the wake of a recent liberty-oriented ruling from the Supreme Court of Canada. But that kind of reform is too slow for me.

I decided to pop by my YouTube page to check those stats, too. I haven't uploaded any videos there since January, but the site still has momentum, clocking up to 500 new views a day. YouTube has added a statistics program of its own, which includes demographic information like age, sex and geographical location of my viewers. My typical YouTuber is a 45-year-old male from Canada. That sounds about right.

My blog hasn't just been a way for me to spread my ideas; it's been a great feedback device. According to my comment software, Haloscan, my reader comments have increased from 1,500/month in January to more than 3,000/month in June. I think that's great -- and I try to let as many comments on as I can, though I do delete a few that could cause me unneccesary grief in my various court cases.

Needless to say, without the generous support of my readers, I'd have been roadkill by now. Only through the combination of the blog, YouTube and PayPal have I been able to survive the onslaught of "lawfare" that has been waged against me, first by radical Muslims like Syed Soharwardy and the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities, and then by the permanent human rights commission industry. I imagine that I'd have been crushed by now by their many legal actions had this all happened to me ten or even five years ago. George Orwell wondered if technology would enslave us or liberate us; in my case, it's saved me from would-be tyrants. So far, at least!

This is a good time for me to acknowledge with thanks my volunteer webmaster, who has helped me these past six months with everything from providing the camera which shot those now famous videos, to helping me upload them to YouTube, to setting up my Google Adsense and generally fixing what sometimes goes wrong in a busy blog. Stephen Taylor, the co-founder of the Blogging Tories, has helped me out since January without any compensation -- or even any public thanks. His knowledge and expertise have helped immensely with taking this content and using the social media tools of the Internet to find a huge audience. Stephen's the kind of guy I can contact at 3 a.m., and he's always happy to help. Here’s how to get in touch with Stephen if you have some PR work that needs doing in a smart, Web 2.0 way. I’m sure he'd make a killing if he ever went into the PR business – I just hope he keeps doing his work for "the cause", too!

Luiza Ch. Savage has a large story about Islamic "lawfare" in the new Maclean's magazine, pegged to the meeting of the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus that I attended earlier this month.

She starts with an anecdote from that briefing that is startling, even more now that I read it, as opposed to when I was right there:

Asma Fatima, a petite, bespectacled Pakistani diplomat in Washington, sat at the front of a crowded Capitol Hill hearing room on July 18, carefully considering whether a man seated a few places to her left on the panel should be jailed. The occasion was a panel discussion convened by a group of congressmen to educate their colleagues on the issue of religious freedom, and the man was Canadian Ezra Levant, who in February 2006 republished Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in his now-defunct magazine the Western Standard, which resulted in, among other things, two complaints of “discrimination” before the Alberta human rights commission. One complaint was withdrawn, but the other continues. If it is upheld, Levant could face a large fine, a lifetime order not to talk about “radical Islam” disparagingly, and be forced to issue an apology. If Levant does not comply with these orders, he could be imprisoned for contempt of court.

Fatima tried to find the right words to explain the depth of the emotions at stake. "The cartoon issue really, really hurt Muslims around the world," she told an audience that included congressional staffers as well as officials from the departments of State, Justice, and the media, and various human rights advocates, including a pair of Buddhist monks in bright robes. "There are certain things that should not be said." Ultimately, though, Fatima concluded that a journalist should be, as she put it "off the hook." Her government has not been so generous.

Pakistan and the other nations that have banded together in the Organization of the Islamic Conference have been leading a remarkably successful campaign through the United Nations to enshrine in international law prohibitions against "defamation of religions," particularly Islam. Their aim is to empower governments around the world to punish anyone who commits the "heinous act" of defaming Islam. Critics say it is an attempt to globalize laws against blasphemy that exist in some Muslim countries — and that the movement has already succeeded in suppressing open discussion in international forums of issues such as female genital mutilation, honour killings and gay rights.

...The fact that the resolutions keep passing, and that UN officials now monitor countries' compliance, could help the concept of "defamation of religions" become an international legal norm, said Livingstone, noting that when the International Court of Justice at The Hague decides what rises to the level of an "international customary law," it looks not to unanimity among countries but to "general adherence." "That's why these UN resolutions are so troubling," she said. "They've been passed for 10 years."

The anti-defamation campaign is itself part of a larger agenda to reshape the understanding of human rights being advanced by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a group of more than 50 states promoting Muslim solidarity and co-operation in economic, social, and political affairs. The organization was founded and is largely funded by Saudi Arabia, a monarchy ruled under strict religious laws, where women, religious minorities and gay people are subject to various forms of discrimination and human rights abuses.

...The religious defamation laws urged by the resolutions rely on subjective emotional reactions and are therefore easy to abuse. "We don't want a jurisprudence of hurt feelings," said Wu. Levant calls the anti-defamation campaign a "soft jihad" — an attempt to advance Islamic law around the world, not through violence but through Western legal channels. "If an army came to our shores saying give up equal rights for women and your freedom of speech, we would defend ourselves," Levant told Maclean's after the briefing. "But when lawyers and lobbyists come, we are confused."

I commend the entire article to you. In a country like Canada, which too often glamourizes foreign court rulings, it's particularly dangerous. Our laws are increasingly being written at the U.N. -- and in Riyadh. 

Who do you think wrote the following criticism of the CBC's coverage of Canada's human rights commissions censoring free speech?

...it does strike me as a significant gap in coverage that, first, the Levant proceedings were not mentioned, at a minimum, by CBC.ca and were not covered by the national radio and television services. Similarly, there was little coverage of the Steyn complaint [on the CBC] before Mr. Murphy’s opinion piece. Whatever one may think of Mr. Murphy’s opinion, the item clearly highlighted the clash between free expression and the society’s perceived need to protect its citizens from harm.

...Whatever one’s opinion, it strikes me that coverage of these two cases would have enhanced our knowledge of the issues in play."

The author of this criticism, to my surprise, is the CBC's ombudsman, Vince Carlin. You can read the full text here.

Carlin wrote this in reply to a complaint by the anti-Semitic Canadian Arab Federation, which had complained about "Islamophobia" at the CBC. Even al Jazeera doesn't believe that -- they use the CBC as their farm team, hiring away such top CBC talent as Avi Lewis and Tony Burman.

Carlin's reply was written at the end of March, more than two months after the HRC story went big on the Internet, and more than a month after it really broke through into the mainstream media. He points out that the CBC's silence on such an interesting and important subject was strange indeed, and that the CBC had plans to remedy it.

They certainly have, in my opinion. CBC Sunday did a large segment on the matter, which aired twice. The National did at least one story on the subject. And Rex Murphy raised the issue on the year-end edition of The National's "At Issue" panel as the most under-reported story of the year. I think they've made up for their slow start.

I should say that CTV has been excellent on the subject, too, particularly Mike Duffy, who has had Mark Steyn (and me) on his show on several occasions, and Robert Fife did some good digging on the Internet hacking story, too.

To my surprise, Global hasn't done a lot on the issue, and I'm not sure why.

It's summer now, so most political journalists are on a break. But when fall comes and the country's political class goes back to work, I'm sure we'll see plenty more news on the subject -- especially if the Alberta Human Rights Commission announces that they're finally going to take me to trial (after nearly 900 days of investigating and interrogating me.)

h/t LH

See update, below.

Parliament is on its extended summer holiday but news comes nonetheless of two government MPs who are opposed to the Canadian Human Rights Commission's abuses and corruption.

The first news is from John Williams, the Conservative Member of Parliament from Edmonton-St. Albert. Williams served with distinction as the chair of the Public Accounts Committee in opposition, on which he still sits as a member. Interestingly, he also chairs the Global Organization of Parliamentarians Against Corruption. You can see their English website here. Williams is a mild-mannered man, self-effacing, and certainly no media hound. But he is deadly serious about uncovering waste and corruption. If I were the CHRC, I would be terrified that I had caught Williams' attention.

Earlier this month, here is what Williams wrote to a constituent:

From: "Williams, John - Riding 2" <WilliJ2@parl.gc.ca>
Date: Tuesday, July 8, 2008 4:23 pm
Subject: FW: Canadian Human Rights Commission
To: [redacted]

Reply to constituency offrice
  
July 8, 2008
  
Sent via email:  [redacted]
Ms. [redacted]
  
Dear Ms. [redacted],
  
Thank you very much for your email and I apologize for the tardiness of my reply.

Like you, I do not have great appreciation of the Canada Human Rights Commission (CHRC) and their tactics.  I have attached a column by Mr. Jonathan Kay which appeared in the National Post which pretty well says it all.

The CHRC have a role to play in our society but there is no doubt that they have gone beyond their mandate.

Thank you again for writing to me.

Yours truly,
  
John G. Williams
Member of Parliament

The article Williams attached to his e-mail was this one, by Jonathan Kay, pointing out the CHRC's abusive tactics.

Rick Casson is the Conservative MP from Lethbridge. He is the chair of the Commons National Defence Committee, and is an associate member of the Justice and Human Rights Committee, amongst others. He sent this memo to constituents who were upset about the CHRC, mentioning the government's motion to convene a Justice Committee investigation into the abuses of the CHRC, and asking constituents to contact the rest of the committee to support that investigation. He writes:

Personally, I am in support of Mr. Dykstra's motion, and I ask that you forward your comments to the members of the Justice Committee, who will be voting on this motion.

Neither Williams nor Casson could be described as "wild-eyed" MPs. Words like "deliberate" and "understated" and "considered" come to mind. The fact that each of them has seen fit to criticize the CHRC, that Williams has favourably reviewed Kay's dramatic Op-Ed, and that Casson is actually directed voters to lobby the Justice Committee, is all the more encouraging.

Reforming -- or even abolishing -- the CHRC is no longer a radical idea when men like Williams and Casson say what they've said this month.

Summer is a slow time in politics. But the CHRC's infamy is well-enough publicized that it's now become conventional wisdom.

UPDATE: I forgot to invite you to send a note of encouragement and support to these two men. You can e-mail John Williams here, and e-mail Rick Casson here. And if your MP hasn't weighed in on this matter yet, you can reach him or her using this directory.

 

Yesterday I wrote about the conviction of a Muslim supremacist named Mustafa Taj, who attacked a 16-year-old Jewish girl in Calgary, violently beating her and her friends, and even throwing one of them onto the train tracks.

Taj was sentenced two days ago in Calgary.

The Canadian Jewish Congress had nothing to say about this real act of violence -- it prefers tackling Internet websites that say rude things, rather than genuine street thugs who actually hurt Jews.

One of my blog's readers sent this note to the CJC's spin doctor:

UPDATE: see news here.

In 1979, John Taylor was the first Canadian convicted of "hate speech" offences under section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Taylor, a kooky Nazi sympathizer, set up a phone answering machine with anti-Semitic messages on it, and handed out pamphlets telling people to call. He was convicted, and when he refused to change his answering machine message, he was sentenced to a year in jail. Taylor -- then in his seventies -- served nine months. Here's the Wikipedia entry on him, which is more or less accurate.

So nine months in the clink for... having a rude answering machine message.

Fast forward to 2006. A Muslim immigrant named Mustafa Taj approached four teenagers at a subway station in Calgary. He demanded of them, "who's Jewish?" When sixteen-year-old Nichola Cordata said "me", Taj said "I'm Muslim and hate Jews" and slapped her face and pulled her hair. Cordata's friends tried to help, and they were beaten, and one was thrown on the train tracks. Taj called Cordata a "Jewish piece of crap".

This week, Taj was sentenced to a year in jail, but he'll get credit for "double time served" because he has been held in remand. So he has just three months left.

I'm not sure if statutory release applies to such a short sentence; if so, he'll get out even earlier as a matter of course. And if regular parole provisions apply (I'm rusty on those), he'll be out on full parole in a month, and on day parole in just a few weeks. (If there are experienced criminal lawyers reading this, please correct me in the comments section.)

So, let's recap.

A cranky old coot sets up a phone answering machine that says anti-Semitic things. He's a harmless fool. And he serves nine months in jail.

A Muslim serial criminal beats up a Jewish girl and her friends because she's Jewish. He gets a three month sentence, on top of a few months in remand. He'll be out in a month.

If only John Taylor was a "Muslim youth", instead of a cranky Nazi wannabe! Then the Canadian Jewish Congress and the rest of the "human rights" establishment would have ignored him.

I clicked on the CJC's website today, to see what they have to say about this. Cue crickets chirping. [See update here.] I'm sure the CJC's Bernie "Burny" Farber and Warren Kinsella will have something to say when they get back from their romantic lunch with the Canadian Islamic Congress. 

You see, it's hard to take on violent Muslims. It's politically incorrect. It actually takes work -- not just sitting in front of a computer screen. And it's dangerous -- look what happened to Theo van Gogh.

Better to chase after some ageing, impotent Nazis denying the last Holocaust, than the young, violent Muslim radicals planning the next one.

Here's Barbara Kay's excellent Op-Ed from today's National Post, about the soft jihad of lawfare. Lawfare, of course, is the hijacking of Western legal processes by Islamic radicals. It's no accident that the human rights complainants against Maclean's magazine, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, and the Western Standard and me were all filed by foreign-born jihadis.

Lawfare doesn't work without collusion of what Vladimir Lenin called "the useful idiots of the West". In Lenin's day, those were Western "intellectuals" who willingly, even eagerly, engaged in anti-Western propaganda, espionage and sabotage for the Soviet Union, usually without compensation except for their own misguided feelings of moral righteousness. In today's lawfare, the foreign-born jihadis are aided by domestic leftist busybodies, usually in the "human rights" industry.

It's a bizarre combination: secular leftists -- for whom, for example, sexual liberty is their political signature issue -- teaming up with the kind of medieval brutes. Radical Islam would ban abortion, put women in personality-obliterating niqabs, and kill homosexuals -- in other words, they're everything the Left abhors. The radical leftists who inhabit Canada's human rights commissions would never do the bidding of any other religion -- they love to persecute Christians. But when a second-rate imam issues a fatwa, they hop to it, using our tax dollars and government bureaucracies. Just read this crap, filed against me by Pakistani-born imam Syed Soharwardy. If such a semi-literate piece of theocracy were to be filed by any other group, it would be laughed at. In Soharwardy's case, it has been prosecuted for 900 days by 15 Alberta bureaucrats. Soharwardy abandoned his complaint this spring, but his jihadi allies in Edmonton have picked up where he left off with their own complaint.

Here are some excerpts from Kay's article:

...Ayatollah-prescribed fatwas are so pre-9/11. Nowadays, as liberal elites rush prophylactically to ward off charges of tolerating "Islamophobia," the fatwas (in all but name) against damn good books like Mark Steyn's America Alone aren't bruited in mosques; they issue forth from human rights commissioners.

An unintended but all-too-predictable danger inherent in the prosecution of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn (the latter via Maclean's magazine) was the encouraging message it would send to more fevered imaginations. As reported on his blog on Monday morning, Ezra Levant has received an anonymous e-mail death threat: "Ezra, you will be killed by my hands."

Although this is doubtless a hollow menace (real killers rarely serve notice), the sender's wish to sow fear in Levant, and by extension all journalists, is merely a cruder version of the impulse behind the human rights complaints.

...The soft jihad is gradualistic and law-abiding, but no less desirous of Islamic domination of the West than its violent counterpart. Soft jihad strategy exploits liberal discourse and weaknesses in our legal system to induce guilt about a largely mythical "Islamophobia."

The list of complaint-triggering speech offences is long in all Western countries, and ranges from the trivial to the politically existential: A decoration on a lid of ice cream distributed by Burger King offends because it resembles Allah in Arabic script; Fox Entertainment's drama 24 portrays South Americans, Bosnians, Germans and Muslims as terrorists, but only Muslims complain; a Turkish lawyer sues an Italian soccer team because the red cross on their jerseys reminds him of the Crusades.

...One way or another we must stop the fatwa industry in its tracks. Begin with removal of speech-regulation from the HRCs' legal mandate. Build on that with legislation that imposes costs and damages on litigious third parties who seek to chill journalists.

Canada should also pass legislation imitative of the U. S. Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) law, presently active in 24 U. S. states, which disallows harassment of those writing on matters of "public concern," as well as the Libel Terrorism Protection Act, a New York state initiative that will combat libel tourism.

The HRC crisis is not a tempest in a teapot. Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, says: "I don't think it's too strong to say that the [HRC] complaint against Mark Steyn is a totalitarian document."

It is therefore no exaggeration to say that Levant and Steyn are fighting for the defining ideal of Western civilization which, once lost, would spell the beginning of the end of all our other freedoms.

If Pat Condell was a Canadian, I think he'd have more human rights complaints and lawsuits than me. (It sounds like he gets more death threats than I do.) But he'd be twice as devastating to the human rights commissions. He mentions the CHRC about five minutes into the video editorial, below.

I went to Condell's YouTube homepage -- I'm frankly surprised that YouTube hasn't censored him, given their timidity -- and his videos have had literally millions of views collectively.

I don't agree with every word the man says. But that's not the point, of course. The point is that it's bracing to see a man speak so confidently and masterfully about freedom, and Western culture. The fact that millions listen to him is a sign of hope -- we're not all politically correct zombies.

 

h/t SDA and others

See update below.

An employee of the Canadian Human Rights Commission has threatened me with another lawsuit, because I criticized his conduct at the CHRC.

So now the government is suing its political critics. Sorry – are we in Russia or Canada?

The CHRC staffer is Giacomo Vigna, one of the CHRC lawyers who prosecutes section 13 "hate speech" cases. And he’s also a bit of a buffoon. One day last year, he stopped an entire tribunal hearing because he said he wasn’t feeling “serene”.

Nobody could understand what he was talking about, but they stopped the trial anyways, at enormous cost to the taxpayer – the government had to pay for all of the other lawyers' costs for travelling across the country to be there. The tribunal chairman demanded a doctor’s note, which Vigna gave his solemn professional undertaking to provide. It’s been more than a year, and Vigna hasn’t complied with his promise. The CHRC had to drop him from the case and hire a new lawyer at great expense, because the trial couldn’t continue until Vigna kept his promise. How embarrassing.

I learned all of the above from reading a transcript of the trial. You can see the details here, for yourself, starting at page 4867. I’m not quite sure what Vigna's legal argument is. Is he disputing the facts, as captured by the court stenographer?

Just to keep track, this is the second lawsuit threatened by Vigna. And it's on top of the lawsuit already filed by Richard Warman, the former CHRC employee who remains the heaviest user of the CHRC's section 13 "hate speech" law. Out of 13 Internet cases to have gone to a full hearing, 12 of them have been Warman's. Vigna and Warman were a team at the CHRC, in fact -- Vigna was the CHRC's lawyer prosecuting Warman's complaint against Marc Lemire.

And then there's the defamation threat against me by Warren Kinsella. Kinsella has been the CHRC's lonely defender in the public square. He's friends with Warman -- they even share the same defamation lawyer against me. Kinsella is also part of the "human rights" industry himself, if marginally, having written a loving book about it. And he once gave a keynote speech to the "human rights" industry's luxurious annual convention in Banff. Nice gig.

So that's four defamation suits, all filed or threatened by members of the "human rights" industry. And then there's the two "human rights" complaints themselves (one of which was abandoned, one of which continues against me). And then there are other legal assaults (twelve of them, actually) that have been thrown at me, which I’ll describe another day.

And then there’s the odd death threat.

If that sounds excessive, you're getting the picture. It's a strategy. It's called "lawfare", and it's an attempt to smother me under so many hassles and costs that I abandon my criticism of Canada's HRCs and their abuse of real human rights, like freedom of speech.

They're not even subtle about it. Warman calls his strategy "maximum disruption". He boasts he files legal actions against his enemies just to cause them a hassle. Kinsella calls it “Kicking Ass”. Now you'll understand why I'm putting "human rights" in quotation marks when talking about them.

Instead of rebutting my criticisms, these folks think that if they just throw enough nuisance suits at me I'll pack up and leave.

Not bloody likely.

And not as long as I have the support of the blogosphere to cover my legal fees. I know that support frustrates my antagonists. See, this is the part in their fantasy where I'm supposed to crumple under the weight of their lawsuits, and beg for their forgiveness -- like so many of their previous targets have done. This isn't where I'm supposed to say "not bloody likely.”

Enough preamble. Let me show you Vigna's new legal threat. You can find it here. It was served on one of my lawyers in Toronto.

You will see that it is written entirely in French. My translation of it is here.

Vigna speaks perfect English. My lawyer is unilingually English. The words I wrote that he complained about are in English. The fact that Vigna chose to write his demand to my lawyer in French tells you that he is trying to do a little "maximum disruption" of his own. I don't dispute that Vigna technically has the legal right to file a lawsuit in Ontario in French -- though that will add some cost and hassle to my defence, which is clearly his intended effect.

But he is going much beyond that. He is writing his general correspondence – not his court pleadings, but his day-to-day communications with my lawyers – in French. He's using bilingualism as a weapon. He probably thinks he's pretty tricky. I'd say it proves my point -- he's a little off balance and a lot unprofessional, the very things he's denying in his suits. And it shows a larger sickness in the CHRC: instead of using laws like “human rights” legislation and “bilingualism” as shields to protect people, they’re being used as weapons, to battle people. They’re being abused – especially by activist-bureaucrats.

I’m not going to fisk the whole demand. I think it’s pretty clear that Vigna ought to get himself a lawyer other than himself. He’s not particularly experienced at civil litigation – he’s more used to the shooting-fish-in-a-barrel practice of prosecuting hate speech cases, where a 100% conviction rate suggests that the work isn’t particularly challenging. I’m not sure how he’ll do in a real court – where, unlike section 13 hate speech cases, truth and fair comment are defences. But even if Vigna had experience and expertise in defamation law, it’s clear that he’s -- uh, how can I phrase this – not serene enough to use good judgment in his own case.

I don’t propose to go through all of Vigna’s minutiae. But there are a few points I’d like to address.

Vigna – like so many people in the “human rights” industry – characterizes people who disagree with him as law-breakers. Either you agree with him, or you're an outlaw. In particular, he’s mad about this blog entry I made about the harassment that Vigna’s private investigator subjected my parents to. It takes an extra helping of chutzpah to harass my parents, and then threaten to sue me for complaining about that harassment, and even call my complaint itself harassment.

(I note that his private investigator, one Gaby Saliba, has sworn a false affidavit. Saliba swears that my father told him that I still live at my parents’ house. It’s hilarious in a way; I haven’t lived there since I was a teenager, and my parents kept telling the trespassing Saliba this. Saliba’s perjury makes it a little less funny. But the CHRC isn’t exactly known for its ethics.)

Vigna also complains that his antics – first his antics in the courtroom, and then his ham-fisted antics on my parents’ property – were reported elsewhere on the Internet. He says I’m acting in concert with other websites to intimidate him. Apparently, he thinks there should be some sort of publication ban when he wants to sue people. (I note that Kinsella, too, demanded that I not publicize his legal threats against me. Sorry -- I'm not interested in being threatened in secret.)

I note that one of the websites cited by Vigna is the white supremacist site, VNN. I’m a Jew. I’m not a member of white supremacist Internet communities. I don’t have any dealings with them.

But Vigna can’t say the same, can he? Vigna was one of the CHRC staffers who knew about their secret memberships in neo-Nazi groups. Vigna even knew the passwords and account details for such neo-Nazi memberships, including one called Jadewarr.

You’d think that a man who had access to membership privileges on neo-Nazi websites wouldn’t exactly be bringing that up in court, especially when the suit is about his reputation. I don’t know about you, but whenever I hear about some shocking “news” on Stormfront or VNN that just happens to justify the latest CHRC tyranny, my first thoughts are “the CHRC planted it themselves.” That’s because the secret accounts that Vigna, Warman and others at the CHRC had access to were in fact used to plant hundreds of hateful messages online, and were used to entrap the CHRC’s targets. I’ve never had the access codes to a neo-Nazi website. Vigna has. It’s just creepy that he’d try to tag that on me.

I’m not going to dignify Vigna’s response with any more time. I’m going to put a top defamation lawyer on the case, and tell him to fight Vigna hard.

I'm going to make sure we subpoena all the CHRC's own records that touch on the case. Vigna is Jennifer Lynch's man. Let's get her on the record about his conduct. Let's get their internal files about why Vigna was sacked from the case. And what the whole "serenity" nonsense was really about. Vigna's direct boss, the great Ian Fine, was part of the whole "serenity now" business, too. I've debated against him. Prediction: not a strong witness.

I'm going to fight hard. Not just because it’s so obviously a nuisance suit from Vigna (two, now). Not just because it’s my right as a Canadian to criticize the government, and the on-the-job conduct of government employees like Vigna (and when they harass my parents in retaliation).

But because Vigna is part of a larger pathology: an out-of-control “human rights” industry that feels it can squash criticism, rather than have to answer to it.

Dear reader, I know you’re probably growing tired of helping me out. I’m a little tired of spending my time fighting back against such suits, too. But I know that I can’t back down. I have to fight these fights all the way to the end.

Not just to win them for my own sake, but to send a message to the HRCs that the way they bully their opponents is not acceptable. That message will be sent by the trial judge to Vigna. But I want that message to go to Vigna’s boss, Jennifer Lynch, the Chief Commissioner of the CHRC, too. She presides over a corrupt, ethically-challenged swamp, that is under investigation by the RCMP, the Privacy Commissioner, Parliament, and even an internal review. Lynch smiles for the media, and pretends she’s fine with it all – but the fact is, her own staff and former staff are her attack dogs, suing and harassing her political critics. I blame Lynch as much as I blame Vigna and Warman, for Lynch has created a corrupt corporate culture where abuse of process and vindictive lawsuits against political critics are just a normal day at the office.

My legal fights are about beating Vigna, Kinsella, Warman, etc. But they’re also about standing up to the poetically named Ms. Lynch and her petty tyranny.

If you agree with me, please click on my PayPal button. If you can help me bear my legal costs, as God is my witness I’ll keep fighting these antagonists as hard and as smart as I can.

Thanks for your help.

UPDATE: I've been asked if there is a way to contribute to my legal defence fund by snail mail, instead of by PayPal. There is -- thank you. Please send cheques marked to "May Jensen Shawa & Solomon in Trust", care of Robert Hawkes, at:

May Jensen Shawa Solomon LLP
The Lancaster Building
800, 304 - 8 Avenue SW
Calgary, Alberta T2P 1C2

Thanks again.

"This organization is not a registered non-profit organization.  Donations to this organization are not tax deductible for federal income tax purposes."

 

Kate McMillan of Small Dead Animals and Kathy Shaidle of Five Feet of Fury have filed their defence against Richard Warman's nuisance suit. You can see their defence, drafted by Toronto lawyer Chris Ashby, here.

(Ashby's defamation work has made headlines before. Here's a story about his successful lawsuit against the CBC. Taking on the CBC with its in-house stable of lawyers is a bit of a David and Goliath exercise. I understand that, during that 5 1/2 week trial, it was just Ashby and his client on one side of the court, and six lawyers and CBC managers on the other side. Ashby won $200,000 plus costs for his client.)

But back to the case at hand. Warman's suit can be seen here, and my commentary on it at the time can be seen here.

The National Post and Jonathan Kay filed their defence, which you can see here. My commentary on it is here.

Connie and Mark Fournier of Free Dominion filed their defence here. My commentary on it is here.

I am now the only defendant who has not filed his statement of defence. I expect to do so this week.

Ashby's defence is written in pretty plain English, but allow me to point out some interesting parts.

I liked paragraph 4. Warman had sued not only Kate and Kathy, but their website addresses, too. That makes about as much sense as suing a phone number. A URL is simply a place in cyberspace. It's not a legal entity. It's just plain old weird that Warman was suing those electrons, and Ashby pointed that out.

Paragraphs 7 and 8 are good points: the nature of the blogosphere is that people can rebut and respond immediately, and blogs incorporate those changes in real time. There is a rough and tumble -- even rude -- nature to the Internet, but netiquette (and common sense) suggests that if someone complains with merit, those complaints are often incorporated. It's the whole Web 2.0 thing -- interactive. Warman knows that as well as anyone -- what with his extensive experience as a member of the Stormfront online community. When Warman went online in his various neo-Nazi personas, he interacted with other members of Stormfront, correcting them, insulting them, rebutting them, agreeing with them, plotting with them, dissing Jews and gays with them.

See here, here, here and here. Warman knew his way around the Net. But while he was comfortable chatting on neo-Nazi websites, and chastising people for not being white enough, or Nazi enough, for some reason he didn't deign to write the Internet equivalent to a "letter to the editor" to Kate or Kathy's sites correcting what he thought were their errors. Why's that?  

Paragraphs 11-15 are weird, too. Warman has sued Kathy for things she didn't write. If I'm not mistaken, our friend Jay Currie wrote some of those words, but Warman hasn't sued him. I'm not encouraging anyone to sue Jay, but it's a little bit odd that Warman has sued Kathy for Jay's remarks.

Paragraph 16 is a pretty important point, and it goes to a much larger issue than the substance of Warman's suit. Warman seeks to establish new defamation law, in the realm of the Internet. In his statement of claim, he wants the courts to hold websites legally responsible not only for what they publish, but for what they link to. By that theory, anyone on the Internet is liable for everyone on the Internet. For you are liable for everyone you link to, and they're liable for everyone they link to (and so are you, too), and so on and so on. It sets up a cascading series of infinite liability.

Fortunately, such a punitive approach to defamation and censorship is not Canadian law. Yet.

The heart of Kate and Kathy's defence is paragraphs 17 to 22. That's where they plead that what they wrote was based on true facts, and their fair comments on those facts, as part of a bona fide public debate.

Paragraph 24 is deceptively small. It claims that Warman's poor reputation isn't because of Kathy and Kate, but because of Warman's repeated postings of bigoted material. That's just a sentence in the statement of defence. I expect it will turn into a week at trial.

There's not much for me to add by way of commentary here that I didn't say when the previous four defendants filed their statements of defence. Ashby's style is efficient -- just pleading the key points. He'll be interesting to watch at trial.

I'll wait until it's filed before discussing my approach to my statement of defence. Let's just say I'm going to be a little bit more loquacious about the reputation that the plaintiff claims has been damaged.

See update, below.

I received another report from a free speechnik who attended Guy Earle's comedy benefit last night.

As regular readers will know, Earle is the comedian who has been ordered to stand trial in British Columbia for sparring with two lesbians who heckled him during a show last year. The chair of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, Heather MacNaughton -- who also chaired Mark Steyn's five-day show trial last month -- ruled that Earle and Zesty's (the nightclub he performed in) must stand trial for "discrimination" because their jokes hurt the hecklers' feelings.

Here's the report I received from last night's event, emphasis in the original:

I was at the benefit last night. I’m going to tell you what I thought, but I ask that you keep my identity strictly confidential...

 

I see [Jason Kenney's] attendance is on record: great.

  

I arrived with a donation for Mr. Earle at about 8:00. I was sorry to see there was no line up. The building was totally non-descript and one entered the basement venue via a glass door, covered with brown paper. Various comics were milling around. I had a nice chat with Guy and one other comic: I mentioned both you and Mark Steyn and they both seemed to have very little idea of your importance in all of this. E.g., I said to Guy what an honour it is to be linked to your and Steyn’s blogs where thousands of people have been made aware of his plight. He was polite but not at all excited: I honestly felt, including my discussion with him, that he doesn’t really get it. I explained that, as an observant Christian, I’d been unhappily aware of the HRCs for a couple of decades. I noted that we’re unlikely allies but that it was good that we’re fighting the illegitimate power of the state together. He was very grateful for the support, but I feel, in talking to him, another comic, at length, and watching the show, that these people don’t understand who the enemy is or how deadly serious this issue is.