Some background via The Rebel:
Bad news in the battle for freedom of speech: today, the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear my appeal of the defamation judgment against me, brought some eight years ago by Khurrum Awan.
Awan is the former youth president of the Canadian Islamic Congress. As you know, one of the reasons I lost was that the judge ruled that calling Awan an anti-Semite was defamatory.
But Awan used to be the youth president of an anti-Semitic group — the Canadian Islamic Congress. They even called for the legalization of terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.
But the judge ruled it was defamatory for me to call their former youth president anti-Semitic. Because Awan denied he was, and said he never knew about his organization’s infamous misconduct. The judge ruled I did not prove it was factually true. Even though Awan himself testified at trial that he agreed it’s reasonable for people to call certain statements by the Canadian Islamic Congress anti-Semitic.
Via CBC:
The Supreme Court of Canada will not hear an appeal filed by outspoken political commentator Ezra Levant over a 2014 libel judgment against him.
Levant was found to have libelled Saskatchwan lawyer Khurrum Awan in nine posts to his online blog.
An Ontario trial judge awarded Awan $50,000 in general damages and $30,000 in aggravated damages and ordered the libellous posts taken down.
Ezra Levant, Sun News Network host, ordered to pay $80,000 in libel case
The posts dealt with Awan’s appearance at a British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal hearing in 2008.
The Ontario Court of Appeal upheld the judgment against Levant last year.
‘Motivated by malice’
As usual, the Supreme Court gave no reasons for refusing to hear the appeal.
In the original ruling, Judge Wendy Matheson said the blog posts were “motivated by malice.”
HT: JettieG