Ezra Levant's plummeting Standard

The publisher of the Western Standard has outdone himself this week, with a mud-slinging piece against the Liberal candidate in Mississauga-Erindale, Omar Alghabra. Readers may remember that Alghabra was accused of making inflammatory statements during his nomination meeting. This proved to be false, but Ezra Levant isn't having that: he now levels more accusations against Alghabra, whose chief fault appears to be that he is an immigrant and a Muslim.

Levant's bill of particulars, alas, would never stand up in court. The links provided to back them up reveal nothing other than his dishonesty: in many cases they do not remotely say what he claims they do. Here, then, are his charges, repeated verbatim:

1. Alghabra has condemned CanWest newspapers for labelling groups like Hamas and Hizbollah "terrorist" groups;

2. Alghabra has welcomed al-Jazeera to Canada and railed against any restrictions on it, but condemned the CRTC for allowing the "abusive" Fox News Channel in;

3. In the wake of the Arab riots at Concordia that shut down a speech by former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Alghabra had the temerity to blame Jewish students for silencing campus discussions, and supported an Arab conference on campus whose stated mission was the elimination of Israel;

4. Alghabra has called for the total abolition of Canada's anti-terrorism laws; and

5. Alghabra was stopped at the U.S. border and searched and fingerprinted -- whether that was by reason of demographic profiling, or because he was on a watch list is uncertain. What is certain is that Alghabra turned it into an opportunity to gain media face time, Maher Arar-style, as an anti-American, anti-security mouthpiece.

Let's have a look at the damning "evidence" that Levant adduces:

1) Levant's link doesn't mention either Hisbollah or Hamas. It refers, in fact, to CanWest’s nasty habit some time back of re-writing wire news stories, inserting the word "terrorist" hither and yon to refer to Palestinians, but giving the Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank a pass. You don't have to be Muslim to object to that. Reuters didn’t think much of it.

2) Levant's link indicates that the Canadian Arab Federation did not call for the censoring of Fox News, but rather questioned the double standard that allowed Fox in (an outfit that more recently endorsed the neo-Nazi Stormfront organization) while attaching onerous conditions to the Al Jazeera network, the latter well-known as a rare independent voice in the Arab world, attracting the ire of the Arab establishment.

3) The article in question pointed out instances of Muslim students being put under pressure by various university administrations. Levant doesn't question this, because the facts are public record. As for the conference, Levant's link doesn't actually refer to it that I can see, but rather to an organization that supports the "right of return." The problem is, the right is here being applied to Palestinians instead of Jews. Horrors!

4) I'm against the anti-terrorism laws too. They were a knee-jerk response by the Liberals, in particular Anne McLelland, a "me-too" to the American Patriot Act. Now we're about to get even more intrusive state surveillance, this time of Internet communications. This is something conservatives would normally abhor, but not, I guess, where Muslims are concerned. But Levant would no doubt consider the Canadian Bar Association as "terrorist," as well: they too are mentioned in his link.

5) Alghabra was stopped at the US border and searched and fingerprinted. He made some public noise about this. Levant appears to think that the dusky fellow should have just sucked it up and said nothing. People like him should be grateful to have been allowed to immigrate here. Opening his mouth is clearly suspicious: speaking out is a right reserved, dontcha know, for people, well, like Levant himself and his buddies at the Western Standard. But none of the latter, I venture to suggest, would be subject to racial profiling at the border.

Levant complains that Alghabra is now threatening to sue people for attributing comments to him that he did not actually make. (Maybe he should talk to his colleague Kate McMillan.) That’s a reasonable critique: Alghabra isn’t the first Liberal to throw this kind of weight around, and I for one am getting a little tired of it. If only he had left it there. Instead, he goes on to refer to the Muslim Canadian Congress’ call for a police investigation of the "Canadian Coalition for Democracies" group, the folks who had to apologize publicly to Alghabra for getting it wrong. In a racist dig at Alghabra, who himself has said nothing about police at all, he says: “More good Saudi moves, but sorry, we don't bring police in to settle political arguments in Canada.”

He concludes by inviting a defamation suit against him. Alghabra shouldn’t bother, if it were even to cross his mind. Levant has self-destructed in his sleazy, dishonest piece. Let him lie where he fell.

The slurs of Colby Cosh

I wonder, for example, whether the UCC would have raced so quickly to weigh in if the editors and publishers of the Standard and the JFP had been UCC members in good standing? That seems improbable, doesn't it? In view of the United Church's admitted history of anti-Semitism, I'd like to ask James Sinclair and Bruce Gregersen on behalf of all Canadians whether it's a coincidence that they feel so progressive and so comfortable in judging people with names like Richard Bronstein, Ezra Levant, and Kevin Libin guilty of presumptive "racial hatred" where no evidence exists. Surely the question whether the UCC regards public Jew-bashing as marvelous sport for an idle Friday afternoon is at least as fair as the UCC's own letter is.

The UCC is the bastard grandchild of the faith of my fathers.
--Colby Cosh

The other day the United Church of Canada stated the obvious: publication of the anti-Muslim cartoons in Europe, and now in Canada by Ezra Levant of the Western Standard and the Jewish Free Press, "has little to do with freedom of expression and much to do with incitement to racial and religious hatred....The answer to your question of 'why publish such cartoons' we believe is simply racial hatred."

It would appear that National Post superstar Colby Cosh has taken the brave plunge to become another one of Ezra Levant's defenders, albeit by a side route: the United Church of Canada is, in his hands, a useful foil. Levant's low style is reproduced faithfully here, as the sincerest form of flattery, perhaps.

Let's have a look at the more spectacular claims in the quotations above, and judge Cosh's credibility on the basis of his own words.

To begin with, the conscientious act of contrition by the United Church in 2003, confessing historical complicity with the Christian church as a whole in anti-Semitism, is now being used by Cosh in a grossly sinuous manner to denigrate the United Church of Canada and to accuse it implicitly of continuing anti-semitism. I would dispose of that by urging readers to follow the link that he so helpfully provides. Joe McCarthy would be proud of Cosh's disingenuous juxtaposition. It's in a grand tradition.

Cosh, however, doesn't stop there. According to him, criticizing Levant and the JFP editors is--wait for it--"Jew-bashing." Certainly he attempts to make his claims ironically, stating that they are the moral equivalent of imputing race-hatred to the cartoon-publishers. But this comes off as rather lame and suspect. Anyone who reads the Western Standard can just feel Levant's visceral hatred for the Muslim Other. He delights in vicious and unfounded attacks, one of which I have blogged about here. The man is clearly an extremist, and frankly not worth defending--unless his defenders have their own axes to grind.

Levant, and the publisher of the Jewish Free Press, don't get a pass from justified criticism because they happen to be Jewish. To suggest such a thing, even to score a cheap debating point, is devious, not to mention stupid. (No one has attempted, at least to date, to slander critics of the Jyllands-Posten's editors as "anti-Danish," for example.) Cosh's broadside is in fact merely the latest instance of the neo-MacCarthyite smear tactic of deploying words like "anti-Semitism" to attempt to discredit and silence critics of Israel, supporters of the Palestinian cause, or even those who merely deplore gratuitous insults spewed at ordinary workaday Muslims.

Sorry, Cosh, it won't wash. You're trying to have your cake and eat it too. You're arguing motive here, admit it. And your slagging of the United Church in the second comment reproduced above simply reveals the penchant of conservatives to use insult when rational argument is unavailable. "Bastard child?" Ah, your mother wears army boots. Nyah.

Today's Globe and Mail jumps on the fashionable denunciation bandwagon today, claiming that there couldn't possibly be a racial motive behind the gleeful and repetitive publication of the blasphemous anti-Muslim cartoons, heavens no, that the Jyllands-Posten had no idea that it would create the reaction it did, and that other papers were only re-publishing them for news interest or to defend freedom of speech. Pull the other one, fellas. The only real question before us is whether the publication and endless re-publication of the cartoons were exemplars of religious hatred or racial hatred, or both.

I would argue, in fact, that it's most likely the last. "The Muslim," as already noted, has been created in the Western popular imagination as the Other, whether a racial Other or a religious Other: the two are in any case conflated. The popular notion of a Muslim combines a taken-for-granted extremist religious fervor with clearly racialist imagery of swarthy Arabs with unmistakeable facial features in caricature, much like the anti-Semitic cartoons that played a role in the rise of Nazism. (Check out "Muslim" on Google images to get a sense of what I mean--fast-forward to the more run-of-the-mill editorial cartoons).

The sketches that caused offence were originally directed against a minority group--in Denmark, in France, you name it--which, like other minorities, is not in much of a position to fight back. They don't have newspapers. They don't have wads of cash to take out advertisements. They are expected, essentially, to suck it up--just another insult that the majority have the "right" to deploy, but by all means call it "free speech" or something equally noble to dress it up and make it respectable. Denmark contains a traditionally homogenous population--the Romans didn't even succeed in invading it--and immigration has not been welcomed by everyone. It is ruled today by a fairly right-wing government, and immigration has been on the political front burner for some time. Ditto France. That, and nothing else, is the context for the establishment media's publication of the scurrilous cartoons.

The Globe and Mail's disingenuousness on this issue is fairly plain. However, it abstains at least from hysterical shrieking about anti-semitism; the editorial must have gone at least into second draft. I expect I must, in view of Cosh's own scurrility, commend the editors for their admirable restraint.

Spreading false news [updated]

A few days ago, the Ottawa Citizen's Leonard Stern wrote a column about human rights commissions and free speech. In the midst of his piece, referring to the current complaints against Maclean's magazine and Ezra Levant, he stated:

That is the problem with human rights commissions. By overreaching, and elevating insults into human rights violations, they discredit legitimate efforts to identify speech that does cause real harm.

Yesterday, Canada's National Newspaper, the Globe & Mail, published an extraordinary self-serving editorial in support of Keith Martin's proposal to remove section 13(1) from the Canadian Human Rights Act. In the course of the argument, the editorialist makes this statement:

[The motion] arrives amid the gross overreaching of human-rights commissions in hearing two high-profile cases involving journalists Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant, both of which are best viewed as nuisance complaints.

Now, what "overreaching" are we talking about, exactly? What exactly have these Humans Rights Commissions done? So far, as their mandate requires, they have taken complaints from citizens against other citizens, and are presently determining whether or not these have the legitimacy to be heard. That (as I suspect the writers know full well) is all that's happened to date.

Having had enough of this "overreaching" meme, I emailed the following letter to the editor to the Globe & Mail yesterday:

Sir:

There is more than enough misinformation about human-rights commissions and free speech flying around at the moment without your adding more of it. You speak of "the gross overreaching of human-rights commissions in hearing two high-profile cases involving journalists Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant." It's nothing of the kind.

Complaints submitted to the bodies in question are being investigated as to their merits. That's a screening process, not a hearing. (For what it's worth, I predict that the complaints in question will be screened out. ) The "gross overreaching," it seems to me, is by the hysterics who want us to believe that freedom of speech is on the line.

Sincerely,

Surprise, surprise, this wasn't published. Nor were any other letters making the same point. I don't buy into the fashionable right-wing paranoia about the "MSM," but it seems pretty clear to me that the media tend to go somewhat further than ethics permit when it comes to defending their interests. Judging from the peddling of blatant falsehoods like the above, I think we can expect the media disinformation campaign against Human Rights Commissions to continue, without inconvenient facts being allowed to get in the way. We can only hope that this tactic is too obvious to permit the manufacture of the consent they are seeking.

UPDATE: (February 8)

Mark Steyn corrects the record. As he points out, two of the three complaints against Maclean's magazine--before the BC Human Rights Commission and the Canadian Human Rights Commission--have been screened in, and will be heard by a Tribunal. My comments stand about the case of Ezra Levant. Hence my comments also stand with respect to the two newspaper accounts I cited, which misleadingly state that Levant's case is being heard. No such decision has been forthcoming from the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal.

But clearly I was misinformed. What I find odd is that Steyn's winning card hasn't been played before, in all of the blogospheric wrangling that has been going on for months. Obviously I haven't been the only one in the outer darkness. But the facts that Steyn states are incontrovertible, and indeed have been known for some time.

Hence, mea maxima culpa. Maclean's, in my view, offered the students reasonable accommodation. Things should never have proceeded so far.

Retraction [updated]

Ezra Levant, the sturdy defender of free speech, has caused the above Notice of Libel to be sent to me for reporting on two recent National Post stories about his recent mandatory conduct advisory ("fireside chat") with the Law Society of Alberta.

I have no intention of putting up a Paypal button and defending this action. Res ipsa loquitur.

Accordingly:

1) I retract my claim that a complaint against Ezra Levant was "upheld" by the Law Society of Alberta.

2) On the basis of his attendance at said "fireside chat," the formal complaint was not upheld, and the matter is closed.

3) The post to which my own post originally linked has been changed to reflect the above.

4) Comments that have repeated the claim that the complaint was "upheld" have been expunged.

5) I apologize, profusely, for being unaware of the difference between a finding that Ezra Levant had breached various elements of the code of conduct for lawyers--as reported in the National Post--and the formal upholding of a complaint.

I really should go to law school.

PS: Ezra, you're not my friend anymore.

UPDATE: (February 12) Ezra is now escalating his demands:

Implicit in the notion of retraction, which was requested, is that you do not republish or continue to publish the defamation. Your actions in merely striking through portions of the defamation and leaving it readable, rather than removing it, suggest an intention to continue defaming Mr. Levant, which gives rise to additional issues.

Accordingly:

1) If you do not remove the original post, in its entirety; and

2) Remove all third party comments from your blog that refer to Mr. Levant and the Law Society issue starting from February 6, 2010 up to the present;and confirm that you have done so, by the end of business today, my instructions are to file an Action and proceed against you.

Please also be aware that you will be held responsible for defamatory comments published on your blog on this issue that are authored by others.

I trust you will govern yourself accordingly.[emphases added]

In response, since his lawyer asked so pleasantly, I have removed the struck-through words in my original post, while trying to keep the thing readable. But to demand that I remove NON-defamatory material, and NON-defamatory comments from readers that refer to a matter that has now been the subject of two National Post articles?

Won't happen. Bullies need to be stood up to. Bring it on.

Facts of the case: the Steyn hearing [updated]

Readers will forgive me for this, but the falsehoods about the Mark Steyn proceedings before the BC Human Rights Tribunal continue apace, and it's high time to set a few matters straight before moving on to real news.

The latest offender in this regard is Ottawa Citizen columnist and bloviator David Warren, who can't get even the most elementary facts right as he blathers on about "obscene" Human Rights Commissions (sic), operating under the power of Section 13 of "our Human Rights Act" (sic). "The commissars running the tribunals need have no legal training, exhibit none, and owe their appointments to networking among leftwing activists," he says, with a straight face. "A respondent who comes before Canada's "human rights" tribunals has none of the defences formerly guaranteed in common law," he claims. At this point an image of him comes unbidden to my mind, David Warren with a sweet, innocent look--and his fingers crossed behind his back.

But here I must, albeit unwillingly, give Warren the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he's not being deliberately deceptive, but merely careless with the truth. Perhaps he's just not a very good journo. Perhaps the same blithering ignorance that leads him to reject the theory of evolution is at work here. Perhaps he is propelled by venom rather than intelligence--his endless spewing about "commissars," "neo-Maoist tribunals" and the like, might reasonably lead one to that conclusion.

However, for the record:

1) Mark Steyn is not a respondent under Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. A complaint against him Maclean's is being investigated under Section 7(1) of the BC Human Rights Code.**

2) He Maclean's is before a Tribunal, not a "commission." This is not mere semantics. In most jurisdictions, the Commission and its tribunals that actually hear complaints are at arms-length. The Commission establishes policies and procedures, and investigates complaints at an early stage of the process. It also appoints tribunal members. (A claim by Bell Canada that this could compromise a tribunal's impartiality was dismissed by the Supreme Court in 2003.) In BC, however, there is no "commission" per se, but only a Tribunal, whose members are appointed by provincial order-in-council . Complaints go directly to the Tribunal, and are heard by a panel of Tribunal members.

3) Appointees to the BCHRT are experts in human rights law, contrary to Warren's ridiculous assertion. All but one of the Tribunal members hold degrees in law. (The one who doesn't, Barbara Junker, has several years of experience on administrative tribunals; she is not connected to the Steyn hearing.) They are appointed after a merit based selection process (Section 30, BC Human Rights Code). The three panel members holding the current hearing all have law degrees: more about them below.

4) Two of the three panelists in the Steyn hearing were appointed by the Campbell government. So much for "networking among leftwing activists."

5) Rules of procedure and evidence are very much in place. I cannot bring myself to believe that comments to the contrary by the speech-warrior clan are made in all innocence. The Tribunal hearings fall under the BC Administrative Tribunals Act. The BC Human Rights Code contains no privative clause, so that the decisions of the BCHRT are broadly reviewable by a regular court.

Under Section 32 of the BCHRC, Section 59 of the ATA applies. Here it is:

Standard of review if tribunal's enabling Act has no privative clause

59 (1) In a judicial review proceeding, the standard of review to be applied to a decision of the tribunal is correctness for all questions except those respecting the exercise of discretion, findings of fact and the application of the common law rules of natural justice and procedural fairness.

(2) A court must not set aside a finding of fact by the tribunal unless there is no evidence to support it or if, in light of all the evidence, the finding is otherwise unreasonable.

(3) A court must not set aside a discretionary decision of the tribunal unless it is patently unreasonable.

(4) For the purposes of subsection (3), a discretionary decision is patently unreasonable if the discretion

(a) is exercised arbitrarily or in bad faith,

(b) is exercised for an improper purpose,

(c) is based entirely or predominantly on irrelevant factors, or

(d) fails to take statutory requirements into account.

(5) Questions about the application of common law rules of natural justice and procedural fairness must be decided having regard to whether, in all of the circumstances, the tribunal acted fairly.

And here is the complete list of such reviews from 1997 to the present.

Now, let's have a look at the three panel members hearing the Steyn case.

The Chair of the BCHRT, Heather MacNaughton, became Chair on August 1, 2000. Her two co-panelists are Tonie Beharrell and Kurt Neuenfeldt (both, as noted, appointed under the Campbell government).

And here is the usual Free Dominion crock of rubbish about all three, authored by none other than my friend Ezra Levant. He's at his frothing best about rulings the panelists have made in the past. NB: please follow the links, provided there, and reproduced below. Read the decisions. As in the infamous "hand washing" case,* the rulings that have excited Ezra's ire are very different from the cursory pearl-clutching description of them that he provides over at FD.

With respect to Neuenfelt, Levant claims that he ruled in a complainant's favour while the respondent was not even made aware of the proceedings. But a look at the actual ruling indicates that repeated efforts were made over a nine-month period of time to ensure that the respondent in the case was indeed aware of the proceedings and had the opportunity to present his side of the story. A registered letter to that effect was delivered, according to Canada Post records. Registered letters and other documents subsequently sent to him were refused. He simply blew the Tribunal off. In his determined absence, he was found to have discriminated against his tenant. (Try playing those games with a regular court: he got off very lightly indeed.)

Tonie Beharrell is in trouble with Ezra because she allegedly ruled that employees of a bus company had the right to be absent for long periods without being disciplined. What Ezra somehow failed to mention was that the drivers in question were people with disabilities, that their absence was non-culpable (related to their disabilties, not to wilful absenteeism), and that they had been placed in an Attendance Management Program without regard to their disabilities or to any possible accommodation. Beharrell ruled that this constituted systemic discrimination. Indeed, it was a textbook example of it.

Finally, the Chair, Heather MacNaughton, is excoriated for ruling that provisions for children with disabilities had to be made throughout the BC public school system. What a monstrous crime against humanity that was, in the looking-glass world inhabited by the likes of Ezra Levant. (His general views about accommodation, it must be said, are not enlightened.)

Briefly, the only conclusion to draw from this odiferous collation of inaccuracies, half-truths and outright falsehoods from the Steyn camp is that the truth doesn't matter. When human rights institutions are the quarry, anything goes. No need to check facts. No need to check sources. No need to render anything like an accurate account. Say whatever you want, no matter how blatantly wrong it is. Smear people. Make stuff up. Some of the mud might stick.

So bravo, David and Ezra, for making so clear the standards that guide journalism on the Right. At this point, I'd be checking outside for myself if you told me the sky was blue.
______________________
*The ruling allegedly allowed the legal right to work in a restaurant kitchen with dirty hands, but it did nothing of the kind: read it, not Ezra Levant's hash of it. A salient paragraph:

It may be that, at the end of the day, Ms. Datt could not have been accommodated at McDonald’s because she simply could not meet its hand-washing policies doing any job or combination of jobs, but based on the evidence before me, I find that McDonald’s failed to take all the necessary steps to make this final determination.

**UPDATE: (June 5) As noted by one commenter, Mark Steyn isn't a respondent at all: Maclean's is, for publishing an excerpt from Steyn's America Alone. Mea culpa--must have been all those cries of "Free Mark Steyn" that led me astray. I'm happy to make this correction. [Added June 7] I seem to have been in good company.

UPDATE: (June 6)

David Warren responds:

This is rich: you call ME a "bloviator." Reread your post.

Then reread my column, but carefully this time. Notice how the first sentence begins: "The writings of ... Mark Steyn." That is at issue before the BC HRT. I did not fall into the pedantic trap in question.

Continue reading, & you will find that I made none of the assertions you contradict. For my remarks were about Canada's Human Rights Commissions at large -- to all of which I am opposed -- not specifically about BC's. I did not have space to go into comparative administrative detail that would have been irrelevant to my argument. I am incidentally quite aware of the HRC/HRT distinctions, as you will find by the way I switch from one term to the other as the column proceeds.

I wrote, "The commissars running the tribunals need have no legal training, exhibit none, and owe their appointments to networking among leftwing activists." This does not say those in question have no legal credentials. The fact that a commissar is appointed under Campbell's government, or under Mike Harris's in Ontario (as I believe Heather MacNaughton once was) hardly means that he or she was appointed by the premier. Their appointments advance through a little bureaucratic world of like-minded people.

Ezra Levant himself has written on the comparative advantages & disadvantages of the BC system. The fact that it agreed to hear a case that had nothing to do with BC speaks to the latter.

We could discuss all day the actual past & record of each of the quasi-judges in turn, & the cases in which you contradict Ezra Levant: for each of the points you raise cries out for rebuttal. I will not do that however. By all means let people read some of these decisions.

Better yet, let them read some transcripts for an idea of how these cases are "tried."

You are quite welcome to post this in its entirety as a response to your post.

Done. Reader comments are welcome.

The ecstasy of Ezra Levant

One might be forgiven for thinking, after reading Ezra Levant's address to the Alberta Human Rights Commission yesterday, that a brave, indomitable individual was facing imminent martyrdom, and would speak truth to power, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the firing squad waiting in the courtyard. "You may start your interrogation," he said, mercifully concluding his opening remarks.

But this wasn't Darkness at Noon. Nor was he Jesus Christ in front of the Grand Inquisitor. He was just Ezra Levant, the former editor of a screechy, extremist publication who thought it would be amusing to affront Canadian Muslims by publishing cartoons that he knew would be profoundly offensive to them.

To his likely considerable disappointment, there were no riots, no beheadings, no fatwas in the wake of his oh-so-courageous exercise of editorial privilege. This is Canada. At the very worst, you might end up before a Human Rights Commission to explain yourself when you pull a stunt like that. And so he did. Now this pretentious little man is out to make the most of it, cheered on by his rabid ideological comrades, and carrying on for all the world like King Charles the First:

I would know by what power I am called hither ... I would know by what authority, I mean lawful; there are many unlawful authorities in the world; thieves and robbers by the high-ways ...I do stand more for the liberty of my people, than any here that come to be my pretended judges ... I do not come here as submitting to the Court.

Karl Marx must have been in the audience. "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

You may start your interrogation, forsooth. Who on earth does Levant think he is? He's no monarch facing the headsman's axe, no idealist facing torture and death. He's just a crummy far-right propagandist in a spot of bother that he himself created.

I sincerely hope that the Commission lets him off. That would be just the comeuppance he deserves.


UPDATE: (January 12)

BigCityLib has videos. Don't waste your popcorn.

UPDATE: (January 13)

Levant has attracted some Muslim support--or has he? Stageleft has done some digging, with surprising--or not-so-surprising--results.

On namecalling

In a fit of evening enthusiasm, Jay Currie has sprung to the defence of his pal Arnie Lemaire, aka Blazing Cat Fur, aka Mr. Kathy Shaidle, after my last post. His increasingly heated repartee in the comment thread here included the accusation that I had libeled BCF by permitting a defamatory phrase to be published--one that he cheerfully reproduced himself, however, making him as vicariously liable as I.

To his credit, Blazing Cat Fur has as yet shown no stirrings of litigiousness, contenting himself with his usual low-level baiting from the safety of his lair. But Currie took it upon himself nevertheless to ride in on his white horse to rescue what he imagined was a pussy in distress.

That got me thinking again about the rough-and-tumble nature of the blogosphere, which, over time, has gradually schooled me into raising my personal bar when it comes to freedom of expression. I posted upon that at length some time ago, and won't repeat myself here. Suffice it to say that when I am offended, I am usually content these days to ignore it or to offend right back. I believe deeply in civility, and generally insist upon it at my place, but being uncivil to the uncivil has sometimes proven a temptation too great to be resisted.

But it is ironic that Jay now apparently wants to lower the bar once again, although this isn't unexpected. The Speech Warriors™ have their obvious agenda, but setting that aside, they pretty much believe that anything goes--until, that is, their own ox is gored. Then there aren't enough fainting-couches to hold the lot of 'em, or enough pearls to clutch.

I have myself been called a "terrorist supporter," a "traitor," a "Nazi," a "shill for Hezbollah," and endless variations of "anti-Semite," in one instance by Jay himself, although he quickly apologized. (I'm not going to provide links unless readers sincerely doubt me on this.) That sort of thing is fairly typical of the conservative style of badinage, in fact, and is arguably far more defamatory than the comment I excised. Maybe they just don't listen to themselves. In any case, I've grown used to it.

If we are all to accept the new standard that Jay seems to be advocating, however, then I would suggest that he's digging a fairly deep hole for himself and for a lot of his buddies. Let's charitably assume, then, that he wasn't being entirely serious.

On the main issue, however--Arnie's political likes and dislikes--Jay seems serious enough. As noted in the earlier post, words that appeared to be Arnie's were in fact Ezra Levant's. This was an Aha! moment for Jay, but for the life of me I can't see why. Quoting someone else's hateful words approvingly is an equally hateful act. Is Canada a "Gentile homeland?" Doesn't that expression have a vague, sour whiff of Blut und Boden about it?

Can't be, is the triumphant response. Why, Ezra Levant is Jewish. (This doesn't seem to work when I quote Norman Finkelstein, for some reason, but never mind.) And that brings me to something I've been wanting to say for some time, with which I'll conclude.

My main objection to Levant, apart from his logorrheic style and his deliberately misleading summaries of human rights cases, is his frenzied attempts to be edgy. There's something almost self-destructive about the way he carries on, and it's gotten him into a heap of trouble over the years, but that doesn't faze him one bit. And part of his shtick is to use terminology that, in the mouths of anyone not Jewish, would be denounced (and rightly so) as anti-Semitic.

Now, the last thing I'd call Ezra is a self-hater. He is, rather, a provocateur who enjoys peeing on other people's carpets. Whatever his beef is with the Canadian Jewish Congress--and it seems to be a longstanding one--he is never content simply to pose his arguments. His screeds are invariably bedecked with gratuitously offensive terms, like "official Jews," or "Jewville." Bernie Farber isn't exactly my best friend either, but the invective that has been flung his way by Ezra is beyond indecent.

If that were confined to some heated discussions within the Jewish community--and such discussions are not unknown there--that would be one thing. But Ezra has attracted a following, who mindlessly lap this stuff up. They now feel quite at liberty to use the same sort of vocabulary, which objectively speaking is classically anti-Semitic, because of the enormous alibi with which Levant provides them.

Does that mean that all of his acolytes are anti-Semites? Obviously not. But by effectively giving licence to use hateful terminology, Levant has contributed to its currency. And who, watching from the shadows, is benefiting from that?

Challenge to my friend Ezra

Ezra Levant claims he is out almost $100,000 defending himself against a couple of related complaints before the Alberta Human Rights Commission. And he further claims that Alberta taxpayers are out $500,000 over the cost of processing these complaints. As of this writing, there are 1,710 Google hits for "Ezra Levant" and "$500,000," and 3,010 for "Ezra Levant" and "$100,000."

His allies are just taking this on faith. But I'm calling BS.

Ezra, since we are friends, I'll allow myself a little informality here:

PPOSTFU.

Assault on a blind man

Whenever I get the bizarre idea that conservatives--or some conservatives, at least--are carbon-based life-forms, endowed with common humanity, their own disgusting antics prove me wrong. Every time.

Their latest sport is making fun of, and viciously attacking, a person for his blindness. The man in question? Dean Steacy, the competent, professional investigator of Internet hate who works for the Canadian Human Rights Commission. He was the star witness at Tuesday's hearing, another chapter of Warman v. Lemire.

Let's see what the mob are saying over at Small Dead Animals, 2007 Best Weblogs Winner:

Boys are warned that if they play with themselves, they will go blind. How did Steacy lose his vision?

Blind?? I thought he was just stupid.

In fairness, other commenters thought this was crossing the line. But let's have a look at Ezra Levant, the King of Konservative Kraziness™ and speech-warrior hero. He does character assassination with much more panache. And blind people, according to him, shouldn't be allowed to be investigators. (No doubt he'd prefer to see them selling pencils on Bank Street.)

I quote:

Which brings us to the matter of Steacy himself. He's blind, and he has an assistant help him function -- no doubt a double-expense that the CHRC regards as a source of pride and a symbol of how the rest of society ought to work. I think it's great that Steacy is still working despite his handicap. But being an investigator, especially where the matters investigated are words and symbols and intricate websites, requires eyesight.

Keeping a lead investigator who is blind isn't just an act of supreme political correctness, it's an act that so obviously risks the integrity of the commission's work. Again, if it helps, imagine if an investigator hunting real crimes, not thought crimes, were blind. It's inconceivable that any defence lawyer wouldn't immediately object to any of the evidence that such an investigator collected, on the grounds that it was flawed; I can't imagine any criminal judge accepting such evidence -- if it related to anything important, it would simply provide "reasonable doubt" to any charge, and yield an acquittal. It's so ridiculous, it wouldn't even fly in a fictional TV show, even the most politically correct of the Law and Order series just wouldn't be able to have a blind investigator without fans jeering "yeah, right".

How so? Steacy has the services of an assistant, up-to-the-minute computer reading software and other aids that permit him to do his job perfectly well. Precisely what in his work or in his testimony would have required eyesight? Ezra doesn't specify, but the answer is--nothing at all.

It also raises the interesting question, posed by Jay Currie, about Steacy's office helper. Why wasn't she examined, too? She was clearly involved with every step; it would be fascinating to compare her testimony to that of her boss, to find discrepancies. In a real court, that would be done, and Steacy's assistant would be excluded from court as he was answering his questions, so as not to skew her answers. But this isn't a real court.

Why didn't Barbara Kulaszka, acting for Marc Lemire, just subpoena her, then? Was she simply supposed to show up on her own and demand a chance to speak?

Look, I think it's great that Steacy's still working after going blind -- the fact that he was the CHRC's union boss probably ensured that his lower productivity and need for another assistant wouldn't even be considered.

Leaving aside the fact that the President of a small PSAC Local is hardly a "union boss" except in the febrile imaginations of the über-hysterical Levant and far-right propagandists like Kate McMillan, what's the basis for this allegation of "lower productivity?" That sounds (and is) actionable, and in a perfect world Steacy would go after Levant in civil court. One can dream. One can hope.

I'm sure that, if the CHRC could, it would require all Canadian businesses to go to such lengths and costs. But even the nuttiest anti-discrimination advocate would acknowledge that there are some jobs where vision is necessary. Being a pilot is one of them; being an investigator is another. Unless, of course, accuracy, comprehensiveness and fairness are optional -- which is why the CHRC permits it.

As noted, Levant advances not a shred of evidence to back up his proposition that blind persons cannot be human rights investigators. All he does, in his hateful way, is suggest that such people are a burden on society, and that reasonable accommodation in the CHRC workplace is provided on the basis of a person's union office.

This disgraceful commentary reveals more about Levant's pustular character than anything else. But his words don't really surprise me. Kicking a guy with a white cane is quite in keeping with that repulsive strain of conservatism that makes alliances with neo-Nazis not just possible, but probable.

Yet there are still folks who take this bigot seriously--in fact, they fawn on him. One wonders, indeed, if such people even understand what human decency is, let alone possess any. But at least one doesn't have to wonder in the case of Ezra Levant.

UPDATE: (March 27)

To its credit, Free Dominion isn't having any part of this.

Another call for Warman's execution...

...this time, courtesy of Ezra Levant.

Levant's blog is moderated. Comments do not appear without his approval.

(H/t mordechai15)

UPDATE: (later that same day)

The comment has now been removed. Why did it appear in the first place? Thank goodness for screenshots.

OFF TOPIC: (April 11) I shall take shameless advantage of Warren Kinsella's link from yesterday and a link from Daimnation this morning to acquaint readers with an exhaustive discussion of the technical questions involved in the infamous "Anne Cools" posting. Buckets of Gray has done yeoman work, and techies and laypersons alike should be interested in his series of posts on the matter. Given his evident level of expertise, Buckets might well end up at the libel trial as a witness for the plaintiff.

(H/t Somena Media)

UPPERDATE: (April 12) The prolix Ezra Levant strikes back. But, it must be said, his flabby blows are easily avoided. Obviously rattled, he accuses me of questioning his motives, something I explicitly did not do. I'm not in the mood to be charitable to this windbag, so I will state it plainly: that's a flat-out lie.

And he's playing the Kathy Shaidle game of publicly fussing about my so-called "anonymity," going so far as to suggest (tongue-in-cheek, possibly) that I am Dean Steacy or even Richard Warman. Nope. Anyone wanting to peer past my nom-de-plume who takes the full ten seconds required on Google will be rewarded.

Finally, on a more serious note, I should inform my readers that I made a statement to the police yesterday about the hysterical call for Warman's death by a Levant commenter. It's in their hands now, and the screenshot is evidence. I'm just reporting the news, in time-honoured fashion.

My point, in any event, was not that Warman is in serious danger, but that his assiduous work on behalf of human rights has attracted a lot of hatred. In this case a breach of the Criminal Code had likely been committed by a commenter, whose comment was then approved for publication by Levant. The latter is now pleading laziness. I see no reason not to take him at his word on that, at least.

Discrimination and the market

Stephen Harper's mentor Tom Flanagan, taking time off from slagging the First Nations, has decided to target Canada's human rights commissions.

Shorter Flanagan: "We don't need no legislation, we don't need no thought control." I find myself wondering how a professor at a respectable university can get away with such a farrago of lies and half-truths, but no doubt tenure helps. Or maybe there's something in Calgary's drinking water.

Just check this out, for starters:

Both federal and provincial commissions are suffering blowback from their unsuccessful attempts to muzzle media gadflies Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant.

This has to be the single silliest sentence ever written about Canadian human rights commissions, and that bloviating narcissist Ezra Levant, as I need not remind readers, has set quite the benchmark in this respect. "Unsuccessful attempts to muzzle?" Muzzling might have been the aim of the complainants, but (I hope I'm not misremembering) didn't the various commissions and tribunals throw out the complaints? Every last cotton-picking one of them? And Mark Steyn, bless his cold-spirited Islamophobic heart, wasn't a respondent in any of them.

But Flanagan is merely warming to his task, which is to propose the Ausrottung of all human rights commissions, letting the market alone decide the discrimination question. "[I]ssues of prejudice and discrimination are far too complex," intones the Professor, "to be resolved by human-rights sloganeering."

Ah, yes, the market, that panacea for all human ills. It's expensive to discriminate, says the Professor. Non-discriminating employers get to choose from a larger labour pool; restaurants that discriminate make less money; racist landlords end up with empty apartments. So much for anti-Semitic "gentlemen's agreements" and restricted hotels, "No Irish Need Apply," "No Coloureds," and all of those other apparent figments of our historical imagination. Discrimination in the private sector, he says, is "self-liquidating," something that will come as news to the many successful complainants before any of our human rights tribunals, and I'm not talking about the "hate speech" provisions, either.

Yes, there was indeed discrimination in the past, the Professor concedes, and he offers us quite a selective list of examples, all instances of abuses by Big Gummint using "the coercive monopoly of the state." Hence (don't look down--we're taking quite a leap here) the government setting up institutions to counter discrimination in the private sector, he says, is a case of the fox guarding the henhouse. Only the public sector, he says, should be regulated in this way--assuming that anything is left of it if he and his prime ministerial protégé have their way.

Expensive to discriminate? To give just one obvious counter-example, abolishing the commission-enforced "duty to accommodate," which levels the employment playing field for those with disabilities, would be out the window and down the street as soon as the ink on the repeal legislation was dry. It can cost money to accommodate, even if not so much as many believe. If employers didn't have to accommodate, most of them wouldn't. And, since Ezra Levant was mentioned, let me note that his own attitudes in this respect, and those of his wretched hangers-on, adumbrate the fate of the disabled under Flanagan's cure-all free enterprise regime.

Of course, it's actually cheap, not expensive, to discriminate. Whites-only landlords never had any difficulty finding tenants. Restaurateurs, movie-house proprietors and the construction trades thrived in the past despite explicitly racist practices. Whites-only nightclubs in Calgary are doing very nicely right now. Private enterprise didn't liquidate those practices--the government did, pushed by activists on the ground. And it clearly has more work to do.

But now there's pushback--indeed, there always has been, but in the midst of a deep recession it's becoming mainstream once again. No, you won't find people like Tom Flanagan openly defending crude discrimination per se, setting aside his assimilationist approach to Native Canadians. But, like the Speech Warriors™ going to bat for Nazis and homophobes, he's quite happy to enable it--all the while making the absurdly false claim that the unfettered market will eliminate it. Nope, Tom. Never has. Never will.

On free speech

Political discussions inevitably become polarized, and the current Ezra Levant imbroglio is no exception. One side maintains that he is a citizen being punished by the state apparat for publishing some cartoons. The other insists that he is a a citizen who should be punished for publishing some cartoons.

Hold on a minute. Not so fast.

I don't see many people, in fact, other than the hot-tempered complainant in this case, arguing that Levant is on the wrong side of the law here. Most of those on the Left side of the political spectrum do not hold that opinion. An old antagonist did point out that, two years back, I suggested that Levant be investigated for hate speech. Even ol' dawgs get carried away on occasion. At the time, I was more interested in the selective approach to free speech adopted by many (but by no means all) conservatives. I was also offended by what I still consider to have been a mean-spirited and provocative act. Levant knows very well that Muslims, common-or-garden, nine-to-five, law-abiding Muslims, consider any visual representation of the Prophet to be blasphemous, let alone disrespectful ones. But that doesn't mean the law has a role here.

I've been reflecting on the evolution in my own thinking that has brought me to this point. First, let me explain what that point is. I am in favour of Human Rights Commissions, barring anything better, but in the long term I see them as a weak substitute for genuine social transformation--a kind of institutional safety valve, the intent being to contain popular dissatisfaction, rather than to resolve the underlying problems of unequal status and power that define our society at the core. I am not opposed to laws against hate speech, either in the Criminal Code or in human rights legislation. The bar is set sufficiently high, in my opinion, to winnow out unfounded complaints by the merely offended.

This is why the complaint against Levant will not proceed to a hearing. The system is working. The much-reviled Shirlene McGovern, an Alberta Human Rights Commission investigator, is in fact a filter. She's been doing her job, and getting the usual mindless slagging from conservatives, who have called her just about every nasty name in the book, not realizing that she will likely prove to be an ally.

The issue is just as much one of practicality as of principle. Exposing people to hatred, as the legal language runs, is one thing. But simply being offensive is quite another. No legal system can possibly deal with mere offence: if it were to try, the collateral damage would be incalculable.

Yours truly once supported university speech codes. The infamous "water buffalo" case concerned me, but any positive initiative will have craziness at the margins, and the latter should not necessarily be used to condemn the initiative itself. Then the moderators at Progressive Bloggers (I'm one) decided to develop a Code of Conduct for the blogroll. I thought it would be a simple matter. (Even at my age, I am still capable of startling naivete sometimes.)

During the ensuing discussions and drafts, it became obvious to most if not all of us that this project was taking on enormous proportions. The language seemed to feed on itself. The rules became more and more complex, trying to cover every conceivable aspect of behaviour unbecoming a progressive. Then we tried re-simplification. That didn't work either. We couldn't even agree on what a "progressive" was. A lot of discussion has vanished into the ether by now, but I can recall the animated discussions becoming downright rancorous. And the blogroll members were not remotely impressed by this project. In the end, it was abandoned.

The next step on my journey was the human rights complaint against Maclean's magazine by a group of Muslim law students offended by the publication of an extract from Mark Steyn's "they're breeding like rabbits" book, "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It" (which, despite the title, was not a parody, at least not an intentional one). In his uncontradicted account, the Editor-in-Chief, Kenneth Whyte was open to a solution:

The student lawyers in question came to us five months after the story ran. They asked for an opportunity to respond. We said that we had already run many responses to the article in our letters section, but that we would consider a reasonable request. They wanted a five-page article, written by an author of their choice, to run without any editing by us, except for spelling and grammar. They also wanted to place their response on the cover and to art direct it themselves.

The demands were, in a word, unreasonable. Whyte said no way, and off the students trooped to the nearest Human Rights Commission, where the matter presently rests.
I found myself irritated.

Then came the Levant affair. The antics of this posturing bully falsified the debate. They became, and quite rightly so, a topic of discussion on their own. But what got lost was what was really happening--or not happening. A citizen lodged a complaint against another citizen. The state provides a number of mediating bodies when citizens have problems with each other, including civil courts, various labour arbitration/adjudication tribunals, and so on. In this case it was a Human Rights Commission.

All such bodies have various screens and filters to weed out the founded wheat from the unfounded chaff. What we've been seeing in Alberta is a screening process at work. It wasn't a trial, a star chamber proceeding or an inquisition. It wasn't even a hearing.

On reflection, however (hindsight being 20-20), I think it would have been wise for the AHRC to dismiss the complaint upon receipt, something that they are empowered to do. The publication of the cartoons, as much of an affront as it was, did not put the Muslim community at risk. It didn't expose Muslims to hatred or contempt. It might well have been an expression of hatred or contempt on Levant's part, but that's not the same thing. Certainly, dismissing the complaint after duly investigating it has its strategic appeal, but it has led to the wide circulation of a simply staggering amount of politically-inspired misinformation that has brought the entire process into disrepute.

The complaint will be dismissed, in any case, and so it should be. If it isn't, woe betide us the next time we take a shot at the Intelligent Design yokels, or the Catholic Church's pedophile industry, or the ceaseless whining of privileged white men (provocative phrasing intentional).

The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. There simply has to be room for judgment, debate, testing and opinion without the law getting involved and rules being invoked. That cacophonous mix will often include a large helping of ill-judgment and offensive opinion. That's how it works.

On the other hand, nothing is absolute, not even freedom of speech and expression. We can all think of counter-examples on which there is virtual consensus: defamation, libel and slander; inciting a riot; child pornography. But these are simply categories: and categories have thick, gray margins. What is libellous? What is incitement? Is Romeo and Juliet child porn?

That's why we have tests, and procedures, and jurisprudence, and argument. That's where societal judgment comes to the fore. Individual cases need to be assessed on their merits. Mere principle will not guide us through the shoals. But the problem with the Levant case, or one of them, anyway, is that it is being discussed mostly in terms of pure principle. The facts of the case have become irrelevant.

In this connection, what I find troubling is the inconsistency of the more ideologically hidebound Levant supporters. The state crushing dissent is how the matter is being portrayed. An innocent citizen having to shell out for a lawyer and give up his time to defend himself. An outrage! Yet, when it comes to the formal court system, all of those repressive mechanisms are firmly in place. If you are sued, you will need to shell out even more for a lawyer, pay a small fortune in legal fees, and be prepared to lose a lot of time in court proceedings. If the plaintiff happens to be wealthy, and/or a lawyer, and you are not, you're basically screwed. Most ordinary folks at the wrong end of a lawsuit swallow their pride and look for a quick way out of the mess.

In North America, activists have been shut down again and again by so-called SLAPP suits, or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. Individuals who say things that the powerful and rich disapprove of can find themselves literally sued into silence. Conrad Black was infamous for using the courts in this fashion. Warren Kinsella, whose lawyerly expertise and well-known aggressiveness makes him a pretty scary antagonist to just plain folks, has thrown a lot of legal paper around as well, or threatened to. And then we have--goodness me--none other than Ezra Levant himself.

The patron saint of free speech is busy suing a tiny community paper and a former employee of his for $100,000 at present because he didn't like what they had to say about his reign at the Western Standard. The column can be read by following the link here,* and the letter may easily be found by Googling "Dust My Broom" and "Merle Terlesky." (I hate having to dick around like this, but I don't want to be sued myself.)

I have raised this matter with some of the more indignant defenders of Levant, busy hagiographing the man, and they have tended to respond, "That's different." (To his considerable credit, Darcey over at Dust My Broom, who first brought this to my attention, has been entirely consistent. Many of his commenters, though, are not of like mind.)

But I don't see how it's different. In each venue, speech is at issue. Some actions succeed, most do not even proceed, for a number of reasons. When it comes to civil suits, respondents tend to choose shutting up and shutting down rather than face the time and expense of defending themselves against the likes of Black and Levant. In the case of Human Rights Commissions, most complaints are screened out or resolved informally.

Few on the Right moan about "the state" when lawsuits are used as a weapon. They seem to be quite well aware in that case that "the state" is merely providing a mechanism that private citizens and corporations can use (or misuse) against others. But when it comes to the quasi-judicial Human Rights Commissions, the story changes: the private citizen submitting an unfounded complaint is no longer the issue, but "the state," allegedly stamping its jackboot on a human face. Court employees are virtually invisible during civil action, but HRC employees, trying to do their job, are placed squarely in the limelight and trashed on a personal level. As inveterate privatizers, it seems, some conservatives don't want "the state" suppressing free speech--that sort of thing, in their estimation, is best left to well-heeled private citizens and companies.

Their current agenda, in any case, is clear: it's not Levant. It's not even freedom of speech. It's nothing less than Human Rights Commissions and human rights legislation that are at stake. The aim for some is just to prevent them from dealing with hate speech; but most of those up in arms at present want to abolish them outright.

In conclusion, is there such a thing as hate speech, and if there is, should it be suppressed? That's really the crux of the current debate. I don't think it's all that difficult, first of all, to find examples of the genuine article. The Boissoin decision provides a good example. Speech that doesn't merely offend, but demonstrably puts vulnerable sections of the community at risk, should be as intolerable in a democratic society as libel, slander or inciting a riot. And if we can agree that such a category of speech exists, then we need assessment mechanisms to weed out bona fide instances of it from other speech that, however unpleasant or hateful in itself, does not pose such risk.

I think it's possible to restrict the category to a very small, well-defined type of utterance, just as the courts have been able to deal with child pornography more easily than with pornography as a whole, and with riot-incitement more easily than, say, with sedition. The bar should certainly be very high, as I believe it already is. We need to encourage citizen participation in public debate: it's a hallmark of a democratic society. Inevitably, stupid and offensive things will find their way into the verbal melee. But, except for rare extreme and dangerous utterances, the law should have no role.

Anyone can go to a Human Rights Commission and scribble a complaint; it's what happens afterwards that's important. I don't think freedom of speech has been put at the slightest risk by the complaint against Levant, regardless of all of the inflamed rhetoric to the contrary. But I shall be prepared to change my tune, and quickly, should this case ever be allowed to go to a hearing.
___________
*In fact, as I discovered after I wrote this, it can be accessed here. Go figure!

Ezra Levant gulls the credulous

Ezra's latest post-- immediately taken up by his ragged horde of admirers and water- carriers-- betrays an amazing capacity for mental legerdemain. In it, he pretty well accuses Richard Warman of lying to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in 2006 by stating he didn't know who "Jadewarr" was.

Actually, that's not quite what Warman said:

MR. FROMM: Can you explain what that is, “Welcome, Jadewarr?

MR. WARMAN: It appears to be a name that was logged in under.

MR. FROMM: By whom?

MR. WARMAN: I’m sorry, I don’t know.

But this is what Levant had to say at his place on April 9:

I didn't pay a lot of attention to the etymology behind "jadewarr" -- the nom de plume that Canadian Human Rights Commission investigators Dean Steacy, Richard Warman and other Stormfront members used when they posted their online bigotry.

Obviously that provides a missing context. And just as obviously, Levant is gaming his supporters yet again.

There's more. Levant states that Warman was present when a "generic version" of an original "Jadewarr" post to the neo-Nazi Stormfront site was printed off, by CHRC employee Dean Steacy. Recall that this is not the original document, shown to him in front of the Tribunal in 2006. So a second leap is made by Levant: that Warman not only was present during the production of the second, "generic," document, but knew who produced the first one.

So which is it, Ezra? Was Dean Steacy the one and only user of the "Jadewarr" pseudonym? Or was it used by a whole lot of people, as you claimed a mere twelve days ago--in which case his "I don't know" was most likely the plain truth?

UPDATE: (April 21) Some of his commenters are onto this.

(Photo: Alison at Creekside)