In his blogging about Canada’s hate speech laws, right-wing pundit Levant defamed a young law student as a serial liar, a bigot and a Jew-hater, a judge has found
Matthew Sherwood for National Post
Joseph Brean
November 27, 2014
In his blogging about Canada’s hate speech laws, right-wing personality Ezra Levant defamed a young law student as a serial liar, a bigot and a Jew-hating “illiberal Islamic fascist,” bent on destroying Canada’s tradition of free expression, a judge has found.
For these unfair, false and “extremely serious” written comments, which were motivated by “ill will,” and showed a “reckless disregard for the truth,” Mr. Levant must pay Khurrum Awan $80,000, Judge Wendy Matheson of Ontario Superior Court ruled Thursday.
Mr. Awan is now a lawyer in Saskatchewan, but in 2007 he was the public face of a campaign to protest the representation of Muslims in
Maclean’s magazine. This led to three failed human rights complaints and spurred Canada’s first online culture war over the hate speech section of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
That law has since been repealed by the Harper government and this case was one of the last loose ends in the broader conflict. As a total victory for Mr. Awan, it represents the revenge of the “sock puppet.”
This was the condescending nickname Mr. Levant and others used for him on the theory the law student was being manipulated in his anti-Islamophobia advocacy by Mohamed Elmasry, former head of the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC), who had earlier torpedoed his own credibility with inflammatory comments about the Mideast conflict on a television talk show.
But Mr. Awan did not have as close a relationship with Mr. Elmasry as Mr. Levant repeatedly claimed, nor did he share his controversial views, Judge Matheson found.
As she put it, “Much of what [Mr. Levant] wanted to talk about at trial related more to Dr. Elmasry than to [Mr. Awan].”
She ruled there is “ample evidence before me demonstrating express malice on the part of [Mr. Levant],” especially the fact he “did little or no fact-checking regarding the posts complained of, either before or after their publication.”
“I find that [Mr. Levant’s] dominant motive in these blog posts was ill will, and that his repeated failure to take even basic steps to check his facts showed a reckless disregard for the truth.”
Mr. Levant “ought to have been aware of the serious ramifications of his words on the reputation of this law student. Yet, at trial, he repeatedly tried to minimize his mistakes and his lack of diligence.”
The judge rejected the argument of Iain MacKinnon, Mr. Levant’s lawyer, readers of his blog would not take his comments “at face value” because they would be “well aware of Mr. Levant’s penchant to stir controversy and make outlandish comments.”
She ordered Mr. Levant to remove the posts from his website within 15 days — they have been posted there for years — and pay Mr. Awan $50,000 in general damages plus $30,000 in aggravated damages.
“Mr. Awan is very pleased with the decision and is grateful that at long last he has been vindicated,” said his lawyer, Brian Shiller.
‘I find that [Mr. Levant’s] dominant motive in these blog posts was ill will, and that his repeated failure to take even basic steps to check his facts showed a reckless disregard for the truth’
Responding to the ruling, Mr. Levant called it “very troubling” and said he felt compelled to appeal.
“This is a shocking case of libel chill that should concern any Canadian who is worried about radical Islam, and the right to call out anti-Semitism in the public square,” he said in an email.
“If this ruling is allowed to stand, it will be open season on anyone who campaigns against anti-Semitism. It is a national gag order, which has the effect of silencing and punishing critics of anti-Semitism.”
The roots of Mr. Awan’s case go back to the early days of the vicious debate over Section 13, the hate speech clause of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
That debate began in 2007, when Maclean’s magazine published an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s book, America Alone, entitled “The Future Belongs To Islam.”
Offended by the article, Mr. Awan and three fellow law students complained to the magazine about its depiction of Muslims as a threat to the West and cited several other articles in Maclean’s on the same theme.
‘If this ruling is allowed to stand, it will be open season on anyone who campaigns against anti-Semitism. It is a national gag order’
Initially, they sought space for a rebuttal, but when that failed, they filed a human rights hate speech complaint in Ontario. Others followed federally and in British Columbia, brought by the Canadian Islamic Congress.
Judge Matheson describes the law students as “naive,” and said their meeting with Maclean’s executives represented a “significant failure of communication.”
“Ironically, while their original objective was in furtherance of freedom of expression, their perceived attack on the article and the venerated Maclean’s magazine resulted in their portrayal as attacking that very freedom,” Judge Matheson wrote.
The failure of the hate speech complaint became the primary example for the argument human rights tribunals had run amok as would-be censors. The fiasco was a key motivation for the government’s repeal of Section 13, the federal Internet hate law.
This massive national pivot on hate laws, which leaves criminal prosecution as the only legal response to hate speech, was in response to a blog-based campaign led by Mr. Levant, and marked a flip-flop for the federal Conservatives, who had supported Section 13.
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