Ex-Liberal candidate sues CJC, B’nai Brith

WINNIPEG — Former federal Liberal candidate Lesley Hughes is suing Canadian Jewish Congress and B’nai Brith Canada, charging they ruined her political career by saying that she’s anti-Semitic.

During last fall’s election campaign, Hughes generated national headlines when it was revealed she wrote an article for a community newspaper in 2002 alleging that Israeli, American, German and Russian intelligence agencies all had advance warning of the Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. She further claimed Israeli businesses were forewarned and vacated the building a week before the attack. The article was also posted on her website.

As a result of the revelation, the former CBC radio broadcaster – she co-hosted the CBC Winnipeg morning show for a number of years – was forced to step down as the Liberal candidate for Kildonan-St. Paul and finished her run as an independent in the October election, finishing a distant third.

Now Hughes has filed a lawsuit against Conservative MP Peter Kent,   B’nai Brith executive vice-president Frank Dimant and former Congress co-presidents Rabbi Reuven Bulka and Sylvain Abitbol, as well as Bernie Farber, Congress’ CEO.

Hughes filed the suit June 16 in Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench. She alleges that the defendants “made untrue and defamatory accusations” that she is anti-Semitic. She charges that senior members of B’nai Brith and CJC went to see then-Liberal leader Stéphane Dion on Sept. 25, 2008, with her 2002 article and persuaded Dion to drop her as a candidate on the grounds that she was anti-Semitic and “unfit to hold public office.”

She said that Kent, now the minister of state for foreign affairs (Americas) and the MP for the heavily Jewish Toronto-area riding of Thornhill, charged in a Sept. 26 news release that Hughes believed “extreme anti-Israel /9-11 conspiracy theories” and was “unfit to serve in public office.”

Hughes states that as a result of being branded an anti-Semite, she has been unable to find work as a freelance journalist and broadcaster. Although she acknowledges authorship of the article in question, she says that all the accusations against her were untrue.

B’nai Brith legal counsel Anita Bromberg said her organization hasn’t received any papers pertaining to the lawsuit yet and, therefore, has no comment.

“We have to wait and see what the nature of her complaint is before we can respond to it in any comprehensive way,” Bromberg said.

Farber had a similar response, referring readers to a column he wrote about Hughes and her theories on Oct. 3, 2008, in the National Post.

“Let’s be clear,” he wrote. “CJC has never accused Ms. Hughes of being an anti-Semite. Nor is she the object of a witch hunt or the victim of thought police. She was damned by her own hand because of her unapologetic association with 9/11 Jewish conspiracy theories. If Ms. Hughes was, as she has suggested, simply ‘reporting’ alternate theories to the generally ‘accepted’ version of the events of Sept. 11, she would have done well to clarify that those theories were anti-Semitic in nature because they represented a collective assault on the Jewish people and the essence of the community’s nature.

“The reality is that people sometimes make unfortunate choices to support unsubstantiated theories. When these allegations create harm like this one does, though, those people must be held accountable. In a press conference held on Oct. 2, Ms. Hughes maintained her stubborn and seemingly purposeful wilful blindness on her wrong-headed embrace of this terrible slander. No one who subscribes to these hateful fantasies, and then refuses to recant when challenged, is fit to serve in the national legislature of a proudly pluralistic nation that counts respect for diversity among its core values.”

Neither Hughes nor her lawyer, Norman Cuddy, were available for comment last week.