B'nai Brith, one half of what Ezra Levant likes to call the Official Jews, has put out a rather curious press release:

TORONTO, August 7, 2009 – B’nai Brith Canada strongly condemns the Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA) - Carleton University for following in the footsteps of other anti-Israel entities in abusing Canada’s Human Rights Tribunals and Commissions with another frivolous complaint. The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario recently agreed to mediate between the SAIA chapter and Carleton University over events that took place earlier this year, when the University used its good judgment to insist on the removal of an offensive antisemitic poster. The poster, which the SAIA group had put up as advertisement for Israel Apartheid Week, modernized the medieval blood libel accusing the Jews of murdering innocent children.

“The poster that this SAIA chapter put up was an affront and an offense to every person of goodwill,” said Frank Dimant, Executive Vice President of B’nai Brith Canada. “The university was truly justified in using its good judgment to ensure the poster’s removal.

“It is obvious that this maneuver to involve the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario is part of a new strategy being employed by those who wish to create a ‘legal chill.’ This new strategy is being propagated by those groups that cross the line from legitimate criticism of a democratic Israel to promoting propaganda against the Jewish State and, by extension, the Jewish people.

“We have recently seen other cases here in Canada which exemplify this new strategy of intimidation through ‘legal chill’: there was an attempt to muzzle Maclean’s magazine, the Western Standard and Ezra Levant were dragged through tribunal hearings, and B’nai Brith Canada, for a period of five years, had to defend itself against a frivolous charge lodged with the Manitoba Human Rights Commission. In all of these cases, the charges were either withdrawn or the defendants won, but only after an enormous cost in terms of dollars and human resources.

“Serious reform is necessary to ensure the viability of our Human Rights Tribunals and Commissions. Canadians who believe in standing up for human rights should really be concerned that these types of frivolous complaints keep wasting valuable resources that could otherwise be spent fighting genuine human rights violations.”

I suppose I should be grateful that at least some of the Official Jews are jumping on the "reform" bandwagon, albeit 30 years too late. However, as Scaramouche observes:

The way it was supposed to work was that Jews would be able to lodge complaints about “Nazis,” but Jew-haters wouldn’t be to be able to gripe about Jews--in other words, censorship for me, not thee. Not in their wildest dreams did the Official Jews ever imagine that the very system they worked so hard to set up and in which they placed so much stock would end up being used against them by their enemies...

Had the O.J.s resolved to toughen up and back free speech instead of state censorship way back when, these “rights” tribunals wouldn’t be fielding such complaints today. The fact that, despite everything that’s happened, the B’nai Brith still believes the system can be tweaked such that the Islamists’ “frivolous” complaints will be ignored while the Jews’ "valid" complaints will be entertained shows how out absurdly of touch with reality--dare one call it a type of derangement?--Frank Dimant and his posse really are.

Exactly right. Aside from anything else, Mr Dimant's objection to anyone else getting in on their racket tends to validate the whines of Islamists and white "supremacists" alike that the "human rights" commissions are a wholly owned subsidiary of the International Jewish Conspiracy. Students Against Israeli Apartheid is a revolting group and its poster is repellent. But, as a matter of law, it's hard to see why SAIA's complaint is any more "frivolous" than those with which B'nai Brith has been involved. I sat a few feet from the B'nai Brith lawyer at the Marc Lemire hearing in Ottawa, the umpteenth stage in a case that's been dragged out for years. Why is that not "legal chill"?

B'nai Brith weren't the first on the bandwagon, and haven't been as zealous in their pursuit of "frivolities" as the Canadian Jewish Congress and Richard Warman. But they were the plaintiffs on what were only the second and third Section 13 complaints way back in 1989 and 1992, when they went to the CHRC over some no-name "Aryan nations" schlubs and "the Manitoba Knights of the Ku Klux Klan", two groups of "white supremacists" so supremacist they couldn't even afford legal representation. In a real court, impoverished defendants would be provided with a lawyer, but not here. In its rejection of procedural protections, Canada's "human rights" system is, by definition, a form of "legal chill", and B'nai Brith and the CJC have used it to wage "lawfare" against people they perceive as their enemies.

Of course, they weren't their enemies - just a bunch of losers who can't afford the fancypants lawyers B'nai Brith and the CJC fielded at the Lemire hearing. Instead, while the OJs were waging "lawfare" against nobodies, a new, pervasive, virulent Judenhass incubated and metastasized and became eminently respectable throughout North American universities, left-liberal media and virtually the entire European political class.

But Frank Dimant is the go-to guy if you think the real problem Jews face is all three penniless members of "the Manitoba Knights of the Ku Klux Klan".