Howard Rotberg responds to his verdict: “Next time I shall just punch him in the face”

Good for him.

Increasingly, this is how Canadians should deal with beligerent Muslims. The courts and the HRCs are a joke.

For those of you following the story, Howard Rotberg finally got his day in court — after four years — and the verdict is now in. He calls it a partial victory in this very lawyerly post.

However, he blogged this later as just an ordinary Canadian:

A simple criminal trial for assault, with the defense of provocation, would be a picnic compared to what I have gone through.

The Court chose not to deal with the issue of why Chapters employees, if they heard what was going on prior to the “fucking Jew” statement, should not have had a duty to protect their guest.  Instead the Court just chose to talk about my inappropriate response to being called a “fucking Jew”.   What is an appropriate response?

(…)

Instead of an actual judicial finding of what was said, we got caught up in the Small Claims Court process of allowing written statements to be used as evidence.  Frankly, I thought the written statements of Chapters’ employees were so contradictory of the facts, the chronology of what happened and who said what, the Court would discount them in favour of what we considered was a reatraction by one key employee and oral evidence, of myself and Professor Maoz. Instead the Court talked of “the flavour of my utterence and how I reflected an “us versus them” mentality.

Dammit, it is us versus them.  It is me, a lawyer with a 20 year distinguished record as a lawyer, followed by a career developing affordable rental housing in converted heritage buildings for low income working people, heading up a large warehousing company and writing three books in five years, versus people who shout down lectures, saying the author has no “right” to speak, and is a “fucking Jew”.  Next time I punch him in the face.

Reading the judge’s decision, it seems incredible that he/she read the evidence with an open mind. What a distorted interpretation of what happened.