Warren Kinsella threatens me with a lawsuit; implies Mohamed Elmasry not anti-Semitic

Another week, another nuisance lawsuit from someone in the “human rights” industry who would rather sue me than debate me. This time it’s Warren Kinsella, the Liberal lobbyist whose greatest claim to fame was mocking the Christian faith of Stockwell Day on national TV. It’s a badge of honour to be threatened by him.

Kinsella is upset by the following words that I wrote at the end of a lengthy blog post about the Canadian Jewish Congress and its unfortunate penchant for censorship:

Farber's newest recruit to the CJC, Warren Kinsella, has provided political and media advice to the CIC's young bigots-in-training, the "sock puppets". Farber just verbally supports Elmasry. Kinsella -- on the CJC's legal affairs committee -- actually rolls up his sleeve and helps the anti-Semites out a bit.

This is the Canadian Jewish Congress in 2008. How repulsive.

Kinsella is threatening to sue me over those words, and he warns me not to even mention his threatening letter on my blog. Well, you can read that letter here in its entirety.

Frankly, I’m very surprised that Kinsella would threaten to sue over these words – and that his lawyer wouldn’t try to talk him out of it, especially in the wake of the recent Supreme Court case that vastly expanded the defence of “fair comment”.

I wrote that Kinsella “provided political and media advice” to the Canadian Islamic Congress. My source for that? Kinsella’s own website. You can see the page, archived here. He wrote that he met with the CIC’s sock puppets – the young law students fronting for the CIC’s president, Mohamed Elmasry, in their human rights complaint against Maclean's magazine. He wrote that he gave them advice on how to handle Maclean’s. Then he proceeded to argue their case sympathetically, and concluded by publicizing their press release for them, verbatim. That’s what Kinsella does for his clients. And he did it for the CIC.

So if he admitted that he advised and helped the CIC, then what exactly does he take issue with? There’s really only one more contention left in the few words he’s complaining about: my statement that the CIC is anti-Semitic.

Gentle reader, I invite you to explore the anti-Semitic cornucopia of the Canadian Islamic Congress’s website. Or take a moment to read this summary of the CIC that I wrote for the National Post a couple of years ago. This is an organization that cheers on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his threats to destroy Israel. This is an organization that talks about the Jewish conspiracy to control Canada’s media. This is an organization led by a man who went on national TV to declare that any adult in Israel is a legitimate target for a terrorist attack. The CIC is so anti-Semitic that the Prime Minister’s Office refuses to meet with them, as does the Secretary of State for Multiculturalism – and they only blacklist the worst of the worst. Is that the part of my blog that Kinsella is going to dispute?

If so, it will be a fascinating trial indeed. Kinsella is on a Canadian Jewish Congress committee. Will an officer of the CJC really testify that the Canadian Islamic Congress, led by the infamous Jew-hater Elmasry, is not an anti-Semitic organization? Will a CJC officer swear under oath that, in his view, Elmasry is kosher? This I’ve got to see.

That’s going to be half the trial: what I wrote. But the other half of the trial is about something completely different: Kinsella’s own reputation. That’s part of what defamation trials are about – measuring the plaintiff’s reputation, to see if it has been unfairly besmirched. It will be fascinating to see how a court assesses the value of Kinsella’s reputation given that, just to pick one example out of a hat, he was cited more than a dozen times in a judicial inquiry into government corruption for his “highly inappropriate” conduct.

This whole thing is still a little bit strange to me; Kinsella and I used to be friendly enough towards each other, despite his vicious personal attacks on my friends – I thought it was all just part of the game of politics for him, and though he played that game roughly, I thought there was some separation between Kinsella the public figure who loved to “Kick Ass”, to quote the title of one of his books, and a normal man behind the bravado. I even enjoyed the fact that I had a chum on the other side of the political spectrum – when I published the Western Standard magazine, I invited him to write a guest column in it about the 2004 election (quick, free registration required).

But then, last December, I started criticizing the human rights industry, and its corruption – including that of Kinsella’s friend, Richard Warman. That’s when Kinsella went into "War Room" mode (to quote another one of his books), he called me a “fraud” on the National Post’s website and pretty much went over the top. I shrugged off his insults, but Kinsella’s increasingly abusive tone was one of the reasons he had to leave that newspaper.

I offered to debate Kinsella about Canada’s HRCs, especially the section 13 “hate speech” section that he supports. The prestigious Public Policy Forum invited us to have such a debate under their auspices, in Ottawa. I immediately accepted; Kinsella said he would debate anyone but me. I think that says a lot, doesn’t it?

Kinsella threatened me with a lawsuit earlier this year, but never took any steps. This time, he has, by filing his Libel Notice. I'm not sure if he's going to go all the way; we'll find out soon enough. I suspect that it is part of the "maximum disruption" strategy espoused by his friend, Richard Warman. (Look at how the Libel Notice to me is signed -- "Solicitors for Richard Warman". Warman and Kinsella are not only using the same lawyer, they're using the same letters and not remembering to change their names in it!)

Between the human rights complaints against me, and the filed or threatened defamation suits, I'm up to four or five lawsuits now. There's simply no way I could withstand this combined attack from the human rights industry if it weren't for the support of the blogosphere.

I think Kinsella's threatened suit is doomed to fail. My statements are clearly covered by truth and fair comment, and perhaps other defences too. But that's the thing about nuisance suits: they're designed to be a nuisance -- to take my time, and to take my money. I estimate that to fight Kinsella's suit would cost at least $30,000 -- plus the cost of shlepping out to Toronto, where it's being filed.

What do you think of Kinsella's legal threat? If you share my view that it's just the latest manifestation of the "maximum disruption" approach by the human rights industry to its foes; if you think, as I do, that my comments are legitimate and his complaints are outlandish; if you think that his support for the Canadian Islamic Congress is gross, especially considering his position with the Canadian Jewish Congress; and if you're generally upset at the use of SLAPP lawsuits against bona fide criticism of the human rights commissions, then please help me out.

If it weren't for the generous support of the blogosphere, I'd have crumpled under my legal bills already. So if you think I ought to fight back -- and fight back hard -- then please contribute. I promise that, in return, I'll continue fighting this fight as energetically as I can, both in the court of law and the court of public opinion. To me, this is about freedom -- freedom of speech and freedom of thought. And it's also about fighting against the strange collusion between domestic leftists and foreign-based jihadists. It's about fighting back at this leftist/Islamist use of "lawfare" to attack their Western critics. On a smaller scale, it's the same fight that Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Geert Wilders and others are fighting over in Europe. And now the soft jihad has come to North America.

To which I say: not on my watch.

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