A Canadian court has found a racist telephone line to be in contempt of court for continuing to spread its hate message after being told to shut down.
The hate line, Canadian Liberty Net, which was based in Vancouver, had moved its operations to Bellingham, Wash., and continued from there after being ordered shut down in March.
Justice Max Teitelbaum ruled here last Friday that Canadian Liberty Net violated a court injunction when it continued to operate from the United States.
The line, which shares a mailbox with a Vancouver-based neo-Nazi Skinhead group called ARM Skins, changed its name to Canadian Liberty Net in Exile and moved across the border after the March court order to cease operations pending a full hearing before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.
The automated telephone service featured such speakers as convicted hate propagandist Ernst Zundel and the California-based leader of the White Aryan Nations, Tom Metzger, calling the Holocaust a hoax, saying that there is a “kosher” food tax and that non-whites are importing crime into Canada.
Evidence presented in court last week showed that the message on the Vancouver telephone number referred to the March injunction and suggested that callers phone the Bellingham telephone number.
Additional evidence showed that the same kind of messages that were banned in the original injunction were repeated on the Bellingham line.
Teitelbaum ruled that the breach of the original injunction “warrants a most serious penalty to ensure this type of behavior does not continue.”
‘POTENTIALLY LETHAL’ SILLINESS
According to the Vancouver Province newspaper, a spokesperson for the line, who refused to be identified, said, “In the U.S., they still believe in free speech.”
In Vancouver, Dr. Michael Elterman of the Canadian Jewish Congress said, “It’s a success that we’ve driven them out of this country.”
The operators of Canadian Liberty Net in Vancouver have been ordered to appear in court again.
In the original injunction in March, the judge wrote that the “promotion of racism and white supremacy demonstrates the silliness of ancestor-worship or ancestor-advocacy.”
“That silliness, however, becomes downright injurious and potentially lethal when it turns against other humans on the basis of who their unchosen ancestors were,” said Judge Francis Muldoon, who ordered the first injunction.
“That is the effect of turning against people for what they cannot help, for what they cannot change even if they wished to do so. The rotten corrosiveness of racism disparages and ridicules other people just for drawing breath for living.”
Commenting at the time on the March injunction, the Canadian human rights chief commissioner, Max Yalden, said, “Justice Muldoon has ruled just the way we would have liked. This telephone line has gone beyond the limit of free speech that is acceptable in our society.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
