Richard Warman turns against the Jews

It was three years ago that I first paid any serious attention to Richard Warman. I had come across a website that claimed that Warman was personally responsible for more than half of all section 13 censorship complaints to the Canadian Human Rights Commission -- and all but two such prosecutions before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.

One man.

I will tell you that I was exceedingly skeptical when I first read that. It seemed like a conspiracy theory. After all, Warman had been a CHRC staffer when he started filing all of those complaints. And even when he left the CHRC, he still had the run of the office, stopping in to the CHRC's secure facility, telling his colleagues how to investigate his complaints, even accessing their computers.

Seriously: that kind of corruption just didn't sound credible.

I meticulously checked the CHRT's website, and started to read thousands of pages of CHRT transcripts, and found that it was indeed true. I also discovered that Warman had been awarded tens of thousands of dollars -- tax free -- for making those complaints. And, most shockingly, I found that Warman, while working for the CHRC, allegedly combating "hate", actually joined neo-Nazi organizations like Stormfront and Vanguard, and began publishing hundreds and hundreds of bigoted statements online. Some are so shocking I remember them to this day, such as his declaration that gays are a "cancer" on society; that white police should be loyal to "their race" and that Canada should have an apartheid city called "Whiteville". He also vomited on the Jews whenever he could, disparaging the Jewish students club called Hillel, and writing that Jewish politicians were "scum".

In other words, what I had written off as a nutty conspiracy theory was the awful truth -- about Richard Warman, and about the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

I also discovered that Warman is the most thin-skinned man in Canada. Because in addition to filing the vast majority of all of the section 13 censorship cases heard by the CHRT, Warman has sued or threatened to sue no fewer than 60 different Canadians -- often just for calling him a censor.

Amongst those he sued or threatened to sue are a minor child; a charity; and at least two public libraries. 

Needless to say, it wasn't very long before Warman sued me for writing the truth about him. (Those suits are ongoing.)

But something has changed along the way. Over the past three years, Warman has shifted his focus. Until I started to write about him in early 2008, he usually sued white supremacists and neo-Nazis. I acknowledge that many of the people Warman accused of being white supremacists actually aren't -- that's just part of Warman's demonization of his political enemies. But some of them truly were racists.

I think that's why the Canadian Jewish Congress, and Bernie "Burny" Farber in particular, loved Warman so much. His penchant for censoring people, his boastful abuse of process and countless nuisance suits were very un-Jewish. But Farber and the CJC didn't mind, as long as Warman was going after anti-Semites.

But Warman's strategy of nuisance suits (he actually has a name for his conduct: "maximum disruption") has metastasized. He doesn't sue anti-Semites anymore. He sues Jews, and non-Jewish supporters of the Jews.

Since February of 2008, Warman has sued me, Kate McMillan of SmallDeadAnimals.com, Kathy Shaidle of FiveFeetofFury.com, FreeDominion.com, Walker Morrow, Michael Veck, Jonathan Kay and the National Post -- all for criticizing his campaign of censorship and his prolific online bigotry.

Let's go through Warman's new enemies list:

Ezra Levant: I'm a Jew, and a former board member of the Canada-Israel Committee. As a journalist, I often write sympathetically about Israel and critically of radical Islam.

Kate McMillan: Kate is a Gentile pro-Israel blogger who has been to Israel.

Kathy Shaidle: Kathy is also a Gentile pro-Israel blogger who has been to Israel too. She also participates in grassroots pro-Israel events in Toronto, including those where many Jews would feel afraid to attend because of abusive radical Muslim or labour union bullying.

Free Dominion's Connie and Mark Fournier: Connie and Mark run a broad Internet chat site, with a very wide range of opinions. But the dominant foreign affairs theme of their site is support for the war on terror, and support for Israel. Connie and Mark themselves are pro-Israel Gentiles.

Walker Morrow: Walker is a high school student from B.C. He is also a pro-Israel Gentile blogger.

Michael Veck: Michael is a pro-Israel political staffer on Parliament Hill. I'm not sure if he's Jewish; I think he is part-Jewish and is reclaiming his roots.

Jonathan Kay and the National Post: Jonathan Kay is the comment editor of the National Post, the most pro-Israel page in Canadian media. Jonathan himself writes many of the Post's Israel editorials.

Do you see a pattern here?

Warman has gone from collecting scalps of anti-Semites to collecting scalps of Jews and righteous Gentiles.

I hear he has even filed a human rights censorship complaint against the Jewish Defence League, because they aired Geert Wilder's acclaimed film about radical Islam, called Fitna. So that's another Jewish target of Warman's campaign of harassment.

But now Warman has attacked another friend of the Jews, Arnie Lemaire. You may know Arnie better as the blogger Blazing Catfur -- who also happens to be Kathy Shaidle's husband. Like Kathy, Arnie has participated in a pro-Israel mission. But that's the least of it. It's rare that a single day goes by when Arnie isn't doing dramatic, primary research about radical Islam in Canada -- the kind of investigative journalism that the mainstream media should be doing, but doesn't. In fact, many of Arnie's scoops soon become front page stories, when MSM journalists take his work and run with it. Just to name the most recent example, it was Arnie who blew the whistle on Zijad Delic, the radical imam of the anti-Semitic Canadian Islamic Congress, who had been invited by the Department of Defence to give a talk to the government. After Arnie's expose leapt from his blog onto TV, Peter MacKay himself cancelled the event.

That's Arnie.

So it shouldn't surprise you that Richard Warman is now suing Arnie for $500,000. Amongst Arnie's crimes? Linking to the website of Mark Steyn. Seriously. (I should note that Warman hasn't sued Steyn -- he's too afraid to do so. Warman's specialty is suing penniless bloggers or pushover media outlets happy to pay a nuisance settlement. Neither describes Mark Steyn and Maclean's.)

So I am writing this blog entry for two reasons.

The first is to ask you, my dear readers who have been so helpful to me throughout my own battles against censorship, to chip in to help Arnie fend off Warman's predatory lawsuit. Would you please visit his website, and click on his PayPal button? You wouldn't just be helping Arnie. You'd be helping me, too, and everyone else being victimized by Warman. Because we must all stand united against that bullying censor.

That's the first reason: to help Arnie.

The second reason I'm writing is to note how unmoored from reality the Burny and the Canadian Jewish Congress have become.

Perhaps, until 2008, Burny and the CJC could justify their support for a foul-mouthed censor, because he was picking on anti-Semites. Perhaps.

But it's 2010 now, almost 2011. Warman's section 13 complaints have been shut down by the CHRT, which has ruled them unconstitutional -- in part because of Warman's aggressive and abusive conduct.

So now it's just the lawsuits. And all the new ones are against Jews and pro-Jewish Gentiles.

All of them.

You'd think Burny would have got the message last spring, when a ruling by the CHRT itself focused on Warman's anti-Semitic conduct, drawing attention to Warman's slander of Jews as "scum", and calling Warman's activities "disappointing and disturbing".

You just know that Warman would have sued that judge if he could!

If you take Arnie and Kathy and Kate and the Fourniers and Walker and Michael and Jonathan and me out of the game, that's a big chunk of the pro-Israel, pro-Jewish commentariat that Warman wants to silence. And, in Arnie's case, it's shutting down Canada's leading investigative reporter who is actually exposing dangerous developments that threaten the Jewish community. And then there's the complaint against the JDL.

Burny has supported this every step of the way. Shame on him.

It's one thing for Burny to continue to be friends with Warman, a man who calls Jews "scum". That's between Burny and his therapist. But it's quite another for Burny to bring the entire CJC into disrepute by endorsing Warman's lawsuit pogrom.

I hear that Burny is about to be shuffled out of his position at the CJC. We'll see. But if he does lose his position, I wouldn't doubt that his willful blindness to the anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist bullying by his friend Richard Warman was a part of his downfall.