Quesnel, British Columbia, October 31, 2015. Week one of the Arthur Topham trial ended yesterday in this Cariboo country town of 15,000, with fireworks predicted for next week.
This trial makes frequent reference to symbols especially Jewish symbols. Thus, the symbols in the courtroom have caught the eye of the defence team. At the front, above the judge’s dias is the coat of arms of the Queen — a gold crown, a gold lion, a white unicorn. red roses. So far so good. However. on the ceiling dominating everything in this 1967 building are four large wooden Stars of David and from each six hanging lamps that light the court. Of course, the constipated court rules do not allow us to take a picture of this holy of holies even when the court in not in session, the sheriffs told me.
This trial is special. When I attended the preliminary hearing in the spring of 2014, there was no security at the courtroom. Now, one must pass through a metal detector and be wanded. Freedom activist Dave Lindsay confronted the security brigade on Monday and demanded to know what “reasonable and probable grounds” they had to a search him. After some strutting and attitude, he was finally told: “We can do what we want.”
Up until Thursday, cellphones were allowed as long as they were turned off in court. Thursday, however, no cellphones were allowed. “Why”? I asked. “Orders,” I was told. More likely it was the arrival of an “important” personality, Len Rudner, formerly an official with the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, and the Crown’s “expert witness.” Of course, in keeping with the manufactured drama, he was accompanied by police bodyguards. Arthur Topham who has been much vilified in the press never has such cop shadows at his preliminary hearing.
Monday morning, of over 900 people summoned for jury duty about 120 showed up. It took over an hour to select the jury of eight women and four men.
For the prosecution is Jennifer Johnston, a raven haired woman in her 40s who favours black skirts and boots. She has a powerful though not unpleasant voice and has a flair for the dramatic as she prances around the court. She has trouble pronouncing many key words; for instance, referring to Eustace Mullins, author of one of the impugned books on Arthur Topham’s website www.radicalpress.com, as “Eustache” — to rhyme with moustache.
For the defence is Victoria lawyer and former Doug Christie associate Barclay Johnson. A man who enjoys a good cigar, Mr. Johnson is solid and distinguished looking and is an experienced criminal defence lawyer. On the bench from Vancouver is B.C. Supreme Court Judge Butler.
The rest of Monday and the next two days were devoted to the testimony of Mr. (formerly Detective Constable) Terry Wilson of the B.C. “Hate Squad.” From him we learned that the source of Mr. Topham’s ordeal is Ottawa lawyer and champion complaint filer Richard Warman who sent his old friend Wilson — they had worked on Internet “hate|” cases together in Ontario — an e-mail on April 28, 2011 urging charges under Sec. 319 of Canada’s notorious “hate law” against Arthur Topham for postings on his website.
Mr. Wilson pronounced “85-90 per cent of the material on the website anti-Semitic in its rhetoric.” In an agreed definition, the Crown and Mr. Johsnon held that “anti-Semitic” meant opposition to or dislike of Jews but did not mean hatred.
The second complainant was Harry Abrams of B’nai Brith in Victoria. Mr. Wilson indicated that Abrams even pointed out to him that Israel Must Perish by Arthur Topham was a satire of Germany Must Perish a blueprint for the genocide of the German people, authored by Theodore Kaufman, an American Jew, in 1941.
Mr. Wilson’s chief role was to identify books and passages on radicalpress.com that the prosecution found objectionable.
- Germany Must Perish! by Theodore N. Kaufmann
- Israel Must Perish! (erroneously labeled by Wilson and the Crown as a “book” rather than a satirical article)
- The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
- The Biological Jew by Eustace Mullins
- The Jewish Religion: Its Influence Today by Elizabeth Dilling
Binder #2 was the complete text of Douglas Reed’s masterful historic analysis of political Zionism The Controversy of Zion.
The remaining two binders contained numerous posts and editorial comments by Topham. The majority of material being that produced by authors other than the accused.
Mr. Wilson was taken through the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which is a blueprint for establishing Jewish world dominance and world government. Among other things it : “We shall enslave the Gentiles through financial monopolies”; we shall end individual liberty; the masses will be led by lies; we shall take control of the legal and educational systems and control the press.
Another text under attack that was linked through Mr. Topham’s site was Elizabeth Dilling’s The Jewish Religion: Its Influence Today. Miss Dilling quoted the Talmud, a compilation of the writings of rabbis over the centuries, which contains some hair-raising passages that seem to approve sex with girls as young as three and which assert that such a violated girl’s virginity will grow back. Other passages seem to endorse maternal incest with young boys.
On Thursday, Barclay Johnson began his cross-examination of Mr. Wilson. The court’s mood changed as Jennifer Johnston repeatedly interrupted him and the jury got their exercise by being repeatedly sent out of the room while the lawyers argued procedure before the judge.
Asked why Mr. Topham’s computers had been seized by the police who raided his home in May, 2012, even before he was charged, Mr. Wilson said: “We were concerned to protect his victims from his hateful messages.” Thus, in the “hate squad’s” eyes Mr. Topham was guilty even before being charged or tried.
In a further act of mischief against Mr. Topham, on May 31, 2012 Mr. Wilson sent a letter to Mr. Topham’s U.S. Internet Service Provider (ISP) advising that Mr. Topham had been charged for wilfully promoting hatred against a privileged group — no such censorship law exists in the U.S. — and that the website might contravene the ISP’s usage policies.
Mr. Johnson tried to get Mr. Wilson to admit that his goal had been to get the ISP to shut Mr. Topham down, as they subsequently did. Mr. Wilson played coy and said it was up to the ISP to decide what to do. Sending the letter “was the right thing to do,” Mr. Wilson insisted.
Mr. Topham had run some satirical cartoons about the B.C. hate squad and Terry Wilson. “Is it police policy to write such a letter? ” Barclay Johnson demanded. “I put it to you, you wrote the letter for personal reasons. You were angry at the things Mr. Topham put on his website?”
“No, sir,” Mr. Wilson answered.
During the Warman v Marc Lemire tribunal hearings it was learned that operatives of the Canadian Human Rights Commission wrote hundreds of U.S. ISPs to try to get them to close down Canadian and even some American websites, some of which were not even the subject of Sec. 13 complaints.
Near the end of the cross-examination, Mr. Johnson got Mr. Wilson to admit that he was not an expert on so-called “hate propaganda” or on its likely effects. “No, I am not.”
He agreed that “anti-Semitism was not necessarily hate” and admitted that he did not have a copy of the Talmud and had not checked out the accuracy of Elizabeth Dilling’s many quotations of blood curdling passages of the Talmud.
On Friday, the Crown introduced its expert witness, Len Rudner, 62, an Orthodox Jew who had worked from 2000 to 2011 in various roles for the Canadian Jewish Congress and, until this August, as Director of Community Relations for the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. He admitted that he was not a Talmud scholar. He also admitted that he had not read all of Douglas Reed’s The Controversy of Zion, one of the books that he is critiquing.
He is being paid $95 an hour for preparation and his testimony and, of course, an all-expense trip to Quesnel, B.C. He noted that Schindler’s List was, in fact, a work of fiction,
Crown lawyer Jennifer Johnston asked: “CIJA is a lobby for the state of Israel?”
Rudner agreed: “We advocate to the Canadian government for a positive position” on the State of Israel.
Mr. Rudner also revealed that, while at the CJC, he had helped prepare four complaints to the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
He explained that Jews can identify as such on the basis of religion or ancestry and that some do not believe in God. “Zionism is the yearning of the Jewish people to return to the land of Israel.”
Is Len Rudner a holocaust skeptic? He told the court: “The six million figure might be slightly high. The death count may be between 5.3-million and 6-million.” In such repressive regimes as Angela Merkel’s Germany such potential backsliding could land a skeptic in prison.
Mr. Rudner claimed that the term “World Jewry” was anti-Semitic and did not exist. “The term Jewry dehumanizes us and treats us as an anthill,” he insisted.
As to the horrific passages from the Talmud, Mr. Rudner insisted that Jews oppose adultery and child abuse and that the comments Miss Dilling quoted were speculation among rabbis over many centuries.
Although vital free speech issues are at stake here and there is a battle over many of history’s repeated accusations against Jews, the national media has studiously shunned Quesnel. Even the local paper which gave the trial a little publicity in its October 28 issue, managed to have its editor in court for less than half an hour this week.
Those with a jaundiced view of the MSM [Mainstream (or Lamestream) Media] will have had little reason to change their views after the first week of this trial.
The trial continues Monday. — Paul Fromm32222222