The lawyer for the then 18 year old Islamist/book clerk who stood by smirking as people known to her (including one who had been previously ejected from the store after a demonstration regarding Irshad Manji’s book) shouted me down with racial epithets has warned me of the futility of my lawsuit when it is “my” word against that of his client.    I thanked him for reminding me that indeed his client’s word would be compared to the word of some reputable Professors in the audience and myself, a lawyer/author - who has a record of writing for a multicultural magazine edited by a fine Egyptian Muslim lady, and who was lawyer for, and a close personal friend of, a leading Muslim family in Waterloo (who would actually say their evening prayers in my office if they were at my office if the time for prayers was due), and who had an unblemished reputation during 25 years as a lawyer, a developer of affordable housing for the working poor, and an award winner from the municipality.

 

I realize what a world we are living in, that when I am called a “racist” by Chapters, on the basis of an allegation by his client that I supposedly said that “all Middle Easterners are terrorists (which would be a silly statement not a racist one because Middle Easterners include white and black Jews, Coptic Christians, Arab Christians, Bahais, etc.) and when I then sue the maker of this statement, I am warned that this substantiates that my behaviour is racist.  As the lawyer wrote to me,

 

 

“If her version of facts is accepted by the trial judge, as it may well be unless you have some persuasive evidence from witnesses other than yourself to the contrary, it could sound like cultural stereotyping on your part – “racism” by another name – to try to connect her with this event.”

 

  

 

In other words, I am now a “racist” if I sue the one Chapters employee who was the only Chapters’ employee there for most of the event, and who made the allegation against me that caused her employer to label me publicly a “racist”.   Notwithstanding we have a bizarre rambling statement given by her to Chapters, (stressing what she thinks I think of her because she wears a hijav) I am warned that I am a racist to even try to connect her to the event. There is very little that I can do, or not do, at this point to escape the opprobrium and consequences of an 18 year old making up things against me.   It was all so easy for her.   

 

I am doing what I need to do, at great personal stress and inconvenience, to protect our children from a nightmare world, and to protect the rights of legitimate authors.

 

One irony is that the novel is about a professor who gets in trouble for using some rather loose wording in a lecture.    One would think this irony would be apparent and remarked on.

 

The lawyer for Chapters mainly just threatens that they are going to have the suit dismissed at the beginning of the trial, based on their allegation of the inadequacy of the pre-trial disclosure of the publisher’s accounting records to substantiate that the publisher might have lost some money on account of Chapters “banning” the book, returning over 300 copies a week after I demanded they withdraw their allegation that I am a racist, and even removing the book from their web sales.  

 

This world keeps getting more bizarre.  I am deemed a racist for suing those who make up allegations against me for purpose of banning my book.  The mere fact that I assert my rights proves my racism.  As a son of a survivor of Auschwitz whose parents’ and sister’s mere Jewishness proved their crimes against the Third Reich and justified their death in the gas chambers, this line of thinking….i.e. that a Jew who merely asserts his right to be free of hatred, intimidation and censorship is by that fact alone guilty of racism …is extremely scary.   God help us.