Jan 20, 2005 - National Post
By: Stewart Bell
No charges for 'hate-filled attack' on Jews: Blamed for world wars
Crown says no evidence Muslim newspaper intended to incite hatred
The RCMP Hate Crimes Unit in Surrey, B.C., confirmed yesterday that its year-long probe of The Miracle newspaper had ended and that the Crown would not be pressing charges.
"This case involved a thorough and exemplary investigation by the B.C. hate crimes team into an article published in The Miracle," said Stan Lowe, spokesman for the B.C. Criminal Justice Branch.
"And after an equally thorough review of all the available evidence, and the law in regard to hate crimes by our senior lawyers in the criminal justice branch, the case did not meet our charging standards. Therefore charges will not be laid in this case."
He added that the law requires the Crown to prove there was an intention, or mens rea, to incite hatred.
"I don't think the subject matter itself there is any debate, the subject matter is hate literature. The issue is at the end of the day, the mens rea element."
The newspaper's editor, Pakistan-born Nusrat Hussain, said the RCMP had informed him of the decision, and he would be announcing it to his readers in a front-page editorial in tomorrow's edition.
"At the outset, I would like to thank Almighty Allah for establishing us innocent contrary to the false allegations of spreading hate," he writes in the column, which concludes with a poem praising Canada.
The controversy began in December, 2003, when Mr. Hussain's small newspaper published an article written by an Idaho Holocaust denier that blamed Jews for organized crime, "race-mixing," militant feminism, "forcing us to allow homosexuals to lead Boy Scout troops" and a long list of other items.
"It isn't Arabs lying about and guilt-tripping us with 'the Holocaust' -- it is Jews," the article read.
"It wasn't Arabs who caused the Great Depression -- it was Jews. It wasn't Arabs who started WWI -- it was Jews. It wasn't Arabs who started WWII -- it was Jews."
The Canadian Jewish Congress gave copies of the "virulently anti-Semitic article" to police hate crimes authorities last January and asked for an investigation.
Yesterday, Mark Weintraub, the congress's Pacific Region Chair, said the RCMP had notified him that while the article was clearly hate propaganda, it would be too difficult to secure a conviction.
"The Miracle newspaper article was a hate-filled attack on the Jewish community, penned by a notorious American anti-Semite. Its publication was unequivocally denounced by the mainstream Muslim community; even the publisher responsible for the publication subsequently expressed remorse," he said.
But Mr. Weintraub added that he "fully appreciates that where material is published which is anti-Semitic, racist and hate filled, investigation of the manner of dissemination of such material may lead Crown counsel to conclude that the strict requirements of the incitement provisions have not been met and that criminal prosecution is therefore not appropriate."
The congress will continue its "zero tolerance" approach to hate and "will continue to be vigilant in confronting such acts and in reporting suspected hate crimes whenever they occur so that the criminal justice system may take its rightful course," he said.Mr. Hussain said in an interview yesterday he did not agree with the article and regretted printing it in his newspaper, which has a circulation of several thousand copies and is based in Delta, B.C.
"I still feel that the article was offensive. I shouldn't have published it," he said. "I shouldn't have, that was a bad choice but at the same time I always believed that if somebody is saying something wrong, let it come out and let us deal with the person."
He said since the issue erupted, the B.C. government and Liberal politicians pulled their advertising. The B.C. Muslim Association also stopped distributing it at mosques, Mr. Hussain said.
The troubles forced the newspaper to scale back from weekly distribution to twice a month.
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