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Serial litigant and Stormfront member Richard Warman launched a blizzard of lawsuits today, against The National Post and the backbone of the northern blogosphere - Ezra Levant, Kate McMillan, Kathy Shaidle and Free Dominion. He'd laid low for a few weeks, contenting himself with empty threats against McGill students, but he has now made his move. Ezra Levant lays out the legal challenge very clearly, Glenn Reynolds offers some advice, and Jay Currie adds an important point:

Warman is betting all the marbles here. His credibility and the credibility of the CHRC are now in play. Warman was the CHRC’s creature and, I suspect the evidence will show, the CHRC became his creature as he casually crossed the line between investigator and complainant.

Precisely. It's not possible to take a stand against the Canadian Human Rights Commission without also talking a stand against Richard Warman. He has been the plaintiff on half the Section 13 cases in its entire history and on all the Section 13 cases since 2002. There are 30 million Canadians yet only one of them uses this law, over and over and over again, which tells you how otherwise irrelevant it is to keeping the Queen's peace. Section 13 is, in effect, Warman's Law and the CHRC is Warman's personal inquisition and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal is Warman's very own kangaroo court. Whether or not the motivations were pure and pristine when this racket got started, at some point his pals at the CHRC and the "judges" of the CHRT should have realized that the Warmanization of Section 13 doesn't pass the smell test: Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done, and when you see what's done at the CHRC you understand it's a cosy and self-perpetuating romance between a corrupt bureaucracy and its favoured son.

So taking on the CHRC means taking on Richard Warman. I believe my colleague Charlie Gillis will have a piece on Warman in this week's Maclean's, on sale tomorrow, so the spotlight isn't going to be dimming anytime soon. In the meantime, I hope SteynOnline readers will support Ezra, Kate, Kathy and Mark and Connie at Free Dominion. They are private citizens like Richard Warman. Unlike him, they have not been enriched by tax-free awards of significant five-figure sums for entirely mythical "pain and suffering". So please go on over to the various websites and make a donation, as my pal Michelle Malkin did earlier today. In Kathy's case, you might also consider buying a copy of her book Acoustic Ladyland: it's in a good cause, but you'll get the better end of the bargain because it's a great read. 

As revealed here a few weeks ago, the investigative unit of the Ontario "Human Rights" Commission recommended to the Commissioners that they not proceed against Maclean's for having the temerity to publish an excerpt from my book. The Commissioners have now released their final ruling and have decided not to hear the case. Of course, being apparatchiks of the pseudo-"human rights" establishment, they couldn't leave it at that. So they added the following:

While freedom of expression must be recognized as a cornerstone of a functioning democracy, the Commission strongly condemns the Islamophobic portrayal of Muslims, Arabs, South Asians and indeed any racialized community in the media, such as the Maclean’s article and others like them, as being inconsistent with the values enshrined in our human rights codes. Media has a responsibility to engage in fair and unbiased journalism.

The Commission intends to further consider these issues in the coming months as it embarks on its new mandate.

"A new mandate", eh? That sounds reassuring, doesn't it?

Let’s begin with the bizarre conference call convened by the Canadian Human Rights Commission to respond to the worst four months’ publicity in its entire history:

By way of introduction in an interview this week, Ian Fine, senior general counsel and director-general of dispute resolution at the Canadian Human Rights Commission, wanted to read out loud some of the nastiest material his staff have dealt with, to prove the seriousness of their mission.

"Savage commie Jews hate European beauty and nobility," he said, quoting a prominent violator of Canada's most controversial hate speech law, and disabled people are "parasites," "incognizant primates," "genetic throwbacks" and "lesser beasts that must be culled from the herd."

He quoted another to the effect that "a nigger will try to kill you just for a slice of pizza or a piece of chicken ... By Aryan standards, negroes are dangerous animals" and should be presumed guilty of crimes.

Well. Are those e-mails "hateful"? Certainly – although not as hateful as many of the e-mails I and other fellows in the opinion trade wake up to each morning. My friend Michelle Malkin might have expected that her columns would generate a certain amount of “hate mail” but not that so much of it would portray her as a slitty-eyed Filipina hooker adept at various manoeuvres involving ping-pong balls. There’s a lot of rough stuff out there. So the question is: What should the state do about it?

You could criminalize it and get the CHRC to investigate it and prosecute it. But to do so is bound to result in arbitrary justice. The word “nigger”, for example, can be found on hundreds of CDs in any Canadian record store. A feminist abortion provider who suggested that disabled people are “genetic throwbacks” would be doing no more than indulging in a particularly brutal reformulation of the rationale behind much pregnancy testing. The price of criminalizing certain speech and certain attitudes is that we cede to the state the sole legitimate power to mediate public (and much private) discourse. And that, to many of us, would lead to a far uglier society than letting a few losers in basements mouth off on the Internet. Marni Soupcoff addresses that question in The National Post.

But you know, Ezra Levant makes a good point. Even to discuss the question is to accord Ian Fine and his CHRC colleagues more respect than they deserve. Who’s to say either of these Internet posts (or e-mails or whatever they’re supposed to be) actually exist? And, if they do, who’s to say they weren’t written by Dean Steacy or Richard Warman posting as “jadewarr”? What is now known is that the level of “hate” on the hate sites targeted by Steacy, Warman, Fine & Co was felt to be insufficient, so that the CHRC staff themselves took out memberships on Stormfront et al and began posting under their various secret identities. Perhaps we might generously regard this as a cry for help, a sign of the immense psychological strain of being a “hate” investigator in a peaceable kingdom with insufficient hate to go round the vast number of bureaucrats living high off the hate hog.

But Ezra’s correct that, by this stage, when Ian Fine produces an Internet post with the n-word, we should say, “Golly, that’s shocking! Presumably, though, it's just another one of Richard Warman’s critical covert operations – like the one where he calls Senator Anne Cools an n-word c-word?” Incidentally, n-word-wise, Mr Warman’s post on Senator Cools is far more vehemently “hateful” than the one Ian Fine chose to quote. But at this point the onus is on the CHRC’s “director of dispute resolution” to prove that these posts are, unlike the “jadewarr” fantasies of Messrs Steacy & Co, genuine “hate messages”.

Which brings us to the next question, posed by Kate McMillan:

With each new revelation about the personalities and practices of Warman, Steacy and Co., I've started asking myself "What are the odds that the abuse and incompetence are unique to the section 13 thought police branch?"

My best guess was "zero".

Quite. The systemic “abuse and incompetence” are not some weird aberration but entirely foreseeable. The genius of the English legal system is the balance it strikes between judge, jury and prosecutor. The “human rights” racket muddies the distinctions between not just those roles but also those of “victim” and “witness” – to the point where former employee Richard Warman has turned the CHRC into his own personal score-settling police force, filled with bizarre personages no longer employable by real police forces. And he’s doing all this in the name of the Crown.

Which leads to the most obvious question, again from Ezra Levant:

Where the hell is the Justice Minister?

Rehmat, the Ontario engineer shrewd enough to see the whole Zionist-Jewish domination angle in the Human Rights Commission cases, has now widened his lens in his own comment section:

As for Pope Benedict XVI (called “Nazi Pope” by 70 Jewish websites surveyed in 2004) - is Jewish agent planted in Vatican...

Magdi Allam is nothing but a cheap Zionist ploy like Mark Steyn. His conversion was made a big show because he wrote a book praising Zionazi state of Israel.

Most Muslim scholars don’t expect a goodwill coming from Vatican, which is a Zionist Occupied entity.

No doubt. It would be too much to expect the Canadian Jewish Congress to take time out of its hectic schedule of pursuing the last four neo-Nazis in Saskatchewan to make a complaint to the CHRC about Mr Rehmat's Judeophobia. But Khurrum Awan and his fellow Sock Puppets and the Canadian Islamic Congress might like to consider filing a Section 13 complaint on the grounds that this kind of "offensive" material risks making Muslims look ridiculous.