The operator of a telephone hate line, Canadian Liberty Net, has been sentenced to two months in jail and fined $2,500 (Canadian).
In addition to the sentence meted out to Anthony McAleer, federal Justice Max Teitelbaum fined Canadian Liberty Net itself $5,000. And the judge warned that if McAleer does not pay his personal fine, he will spend another month in jail.
Michael Elterman, spokesman for the Canadian Jewish Congress, Pacific Region, was pleased with the judge’s decision. “We appreciate that the Canadian system works,” he said.
The sentence follows two court orders against the hate line.
In July, Teitelbaum found Canadian Liberty Net to be in contempt of court for continuing to operate, after federal Justice Francis Muldoon ordered it shut down in March.
Rather than shut down, McAleer had moved his base of operations from Vancouver to Belling-ham, Wash., and changed its name to Canadian Liberty Net in Exile. He continued to use the Vancouver phone line to refer callers to the Bellingham number.
Judge Teitelbaum ordered McAleer and Canadian Liberty Net to stop disseminating its hate messages while a federal human rights tribunal conducted a hearing into whether the telephone line, which has attacked Jews, blacks and non-white immigrants, was violating the Canadian Human Rights Act.
BOASTED HE IS A RACIST
McAleer is being represented by attorney Douglas Christie, whose clientele includes virtually every Canadian neo-Nazi or alleged Nazi war criminal brought to trial in this country.
As a result of the court’s latest decision, Christie said he will request that the human rights tribunal adjourn because the subject of its investigations is in jail.
Christie expressed his displeasure that McAleer had been jailed before the tribunal had ruled on whether the phone line violated the Human Rights Act.
After last week’s sentencing, McAleer defiantly boasted, “I am a racist. There are differences between the races. And the judge deliberately tried to circumvent that.”
Canadian Liberty Net shares a mailbox with a Vancouver neo-Nazi Skinhead group, ARM Skins.
McAleer initially refused to reveal any of the telephone line’s contributors, but Justice Teitelbaum ordered him to do so, threatening him with another contempt order.
McAleer complied, saying his contributors included Canadian Holocaust revisionist Ernst Zundel; U.S. neo-Nazi leaders Tom and John Metzger; Janice Long, the wife of Terry Long, who heads the Canadian branch of the Church of Jesus Christ Aryan Nations in Alberta; Heritage Front, an Ontario group; and the National Alliance from Virginia.
Justice Teitelbaum, in his sentencing last week, emphasized that his decision was not meant to make “the Canadian Liberty Net or McAleer speechless.”
But Teitelbaum underlined that McAleer had “purposely and deliberately planned a method” of “preaching hatred.”
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.
