Courtroom conundrum: When is hatred illegal?
THE PAPER IS ‘STEEPED IN ANTI-SEMITIC LANGUAGE AND IMAGERY,’ NEO-NAZI RHETORIC AND IMAGERY, HOLOCAUST DENIAL, ‘A VENERATION FOR ADOLF HITLER AND NAZISM’ AND THE USUAL NUTTER CONSPIRACIES, SUCH AS THAT 9/11 WAS A JEWISH OPERATION.
If it seems like yesterday that James Sears and LeRoy St. Germaine were making headlines, well, that’s because it was.
Just last month the two were in court on charges of making death threats against the Liberal operative Warren Kinsella and his wife Lisa.
That charge against St. Germaine, the owner and publisher of the disreputable Toronto rag Your Ward News, was dropped; the judge has yet to deliver his verdict in the charge against James, the editor-in-chief.
But if those allegations were somewhat mitigated by the high-maintenance and precious nature of the Kinsellas themselves, St. Germaine and Sears are now in the right place on the right charges. Their trial on two counts each of wilful promotion of hatred against two identifiable groups — Jews and women — began Wednesday in Ontario Court.
Inciting hatred is not a charge that is often pursued in this country (the late Holocaust deniers Ernst Zundel and teacher Jim Keegstra come to mind as examples of two who were charged and convicted), probably because it’s usually difficult to determine where free speech ends and promulgating hatred begins.
It may be rather less tricky in this instance.
Your Ward News is so obviously odious a publication, and so obviously antiSemitic (and misogynist, but that comes later) that it hardly needed the likes of Dr. Derek Penslar, a former University of Toronto scholar who is now the William Lee Frost Professor of Modern Jewish History at Harvard University, to explain it. (Full disclosure: Penslar is a former neighbour of mine, and a completely lovely guy.)
But there he was, testifying for the Crown as an expert in anti-Semitism, its history and its common features.
And he helped, lending a critical historical perspective on some of the antiSemitic tropes and cartoons so beloved by Your Ward News and by Jew-haters the world over.
As prosecutor Robin Flumerfelt put it in his brief opening statement, the pages of the paper (the print edition is given away free and without subscription to 300,000 people in southwestern Ontario) “are literally filled” with ancient libels (that Jews kill children to drink their blood) and descriptions of women as “tri-orificed chattel,” such that “they constitute an overwhelming breach of the Criminal Code.”
The cover of one issue, for instance, features a bunch of the usual suspects (among them former Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, blood dripping from his jaws) gathered around a table that among other things features a bottle of “Chateau Rothschild Essence d’Enfant.”
Another edition cover makes reference to “6 million lampshades,” the six million of course a reference to the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust, the lampshades a reference to a rumour that the wife of a Nazi leader had had a lampshade made of Jewish skin.
And generally the paper — prosecutors gave Penslar 22 editions published in the last three years to analyze — is, as he told Ontario Court Judge Richard Blouin, “steeped in anti-Semitic language and imagery,” neo-Nazi rhetoric and imagery, Holocaust denial, “a veneration for Adolf Hitler and Nazism” and the usual nutter conspiracies, such as that 9/11 was a Jewish operation.
(Penslar’s equivalent, an expert on misogyny, will testify next week.)
And yet Your Ward News is clever too: The paper is so busy, so full of cartoony images and comic-book-like qualities, and a bombardment of mixed messages that it’s clear that St. Germaine’s and Sears’ defence will be, in essence, “What? We were just having fun. We didn’t know all that history!”
As Sears’ lawyer Dean Embry once suggested to Penslar, in cross-examination, “it might be important to have a definition of antiSemitism that goes beyond hatred?”
Penslar agreed, certainly, that “criticism of Israel is not necessarily anti-Semitic.” but he balked at what might be called taking the hatred out of anti-Semitism.
Your Ward News, Penslar said, is a very 21st-century publication — “a riot of colour, lots of little captions” and for those accustomed to comic books, it might seem at face value to be merely repugnant.
But, he said, “it’s drawing on a deep wellspring of antiSemitism … The language can appear parodic or satiric or funny.
“But it’s not.” Interestingly, in the midst of Penslar’s testimony, there was an outburst from a man sitting in the body of the court.
“These two people are ass----s,” he cried, meaning St. Germaine and James. “Get the Mossad (Israeli intelligence) to take them out!”
With that, he was quickly ushered from the room.
He is — of course he is — the fellow who until recently, did the “graphic editing” at Your Ward News, in other words, the man responsible for all those wretched covers.
The term itself, anti-Semitism, was invented about 150 years ago, Penslar said, to make Jew hatred more palatable. Let us hope it doesn’t work.
The trial is expected to go into next week.