By Lynne Cohen
Tribune Correspondent
In a ground-breaking court decision for Canada, Federal Court Justice Yves de Montigny ruled last week that London, Ontario’s Tomasz Winnicki can not use the Internet to spread his alleged antisemitic and racist vitriol while awaiting a decision by a tribunal of the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
The commission, itself, in what its lawyer called an “extraordinary” move, argued for the injunction in early August.
Though the judge has not yet released reasons for granting the injunction, it is clear the ruling against Winnicki – the city’s self-proclaimed “biggest hater” – could spell disaster for his defence at the tribunal. With the federal court prohibiting the posting of ‘hate’ material on the Internet while he is before the commission tribunal, it is hard to see how he can argue that his material is fit for Canadians to read. However, there have been no criminal charges against him.
Tribunal hearings are scheduled to continue this month after a 10-week delay, which was granted so Winnicki could hire a lawyer.
“This injunction is a huge a relief,” said Richard Warman, a lawyer, anti-hate activist and the complainant in the case, in an interview with the Jewish Tribune. “I think it really reflects the seriousness of the kind of conduct that Mr. Winnicki is engaged in.”
Among Winnicki’s more colourful Internet remarks: “Jews are not a race or religion, they are a political group”; “Blacks and Jews should be put on reserves, like Indians”; “We hate Jews, the lawyer Jew, the banker Jew”; “niggers are not men, they are sub-human, they are f------ cockroaches”; “not even niggers want to live among niggers”; “watch out Jews, we are coming for
See Hate site, page 3you.” He also says Blacks should be sent to Africa “to rule themselves” and that he hates “Jewish commie murderers.”
Warman said he was not surprised by the federal court ruling.
“No, the material is so vitriolic and so vile on its face that we were always cautiously optimistic that we would have a favourable decision,” he said. “The injunction just confirms this.”
He is waiting for commission hearings to start in six more cases he initiated against antisemitic and hate propaganda web site owners. Warman, the only person in Canada taking a systematic and multi-case approach to eradicating Internet hate, has pledged to launch from 20 to 30 more formal complaints against racist web sites in Canada.
An Ottawa federal public servant, Warman has received death threats and even had Nazis march around where he works, once causing a federal building to go on lock down. For these reasons, he wants to keep secret his current work and home addresses.
Warman believes the unprecedented ruling will have a positive effect on his other cases, and will even impact the behaviour of other racist web site owners. “Some of the sites have actually removed a lot of the worst material already, even just after the complaints are started,” he said. “They want to protect themselves or try to minimize the penalty that they will face.
“The injunction is very positive and it shows that the system can work. It just needs to be a lot more expeditious. Up to now my complaints have taken between one and a half to two years for the commission to finish its investigation and refer the cases on to the tribunal. There is no real reason for taking so long, but I have to admit it has gotten better, probably because commission officials have developed a protocol for doing these types of complaints.”
Warman, who started fighting against hate propaganda 15 years ago when it was mainly spread by telephone, said it is extremely important to shut these web sites down.
“In Canada, we are blessed in that we tend not to have incidents of racist violence and certainly have not experienced genocide,” he said. “The closest we seem to get to organized hate activity is the propaganda and the groups that are behind it. But this type of activity is the first step towards race violence.
“It is hard to believe that because we are so far from genocide. As each (succeeding) generation moves farther away from World War II, people find it harder and harder to relate hate propaganda to pogroms. But why go back to World War II? You just have to look at Rwanda, where you had government controlled radio stations that broadcast hate propaganda. Those radio broadcasts contributed greatly to the genocide in that country.”
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