We had decided to continue our examination of Marc Lemire's links to the Heritage Front not long after we viewed his August interview on Ezra Levant's "Sun News" program (we didn't see the show itself when it originally aired, but watched it online later). When interviewed by Levant, Lemire made the following statement, repeated almost verbatim on the follow-up interview that took place this past December, regarding his involvement in the Heritage Front:
Back in 2009 when we began our examination of Marc Lemire's involvement with Ernst Zundel, organized racism and the Heritage Front, an incident occurred on Free Dominion. During a discussion about Marc Lemire, Harry Abrams posted an article written by the Heritage Front and posted to Stormfront by Lemire in 2002. The article itself was from the June 2002 edition of, "UpFront":
The controversy arose in that Mr. Abrams added, "By Marc Lemire" to the information he posted on Free Dominion. As a result, he was accused of, "document tampering" and banned from further posting. This incident has been used by our detractors on Free Dominion as proof of an orchestrated campaign to defame Marc Lemire by creating evidence against him. Lemire even got into the act himself as he posted about these nefarious efforts on his own blog.
We don't doubt for a single moment that Mr. Abrams' intentions were innocent and simply intended to indicate Lemire's connection to the article, something that Mark Fournier doesn't deny:
1. Why would someone who claims no connection to the Heritage Front, other than a brief flirtation with the group in his teen years, be posting Heritage Front articles on a well known hate web forum (fyi, if you look for the Heritage Front website now at www.heritagefront.com, you will instead be redirected to Stormfront)?
2. Why, if Lemire had no connection to the Heritage Front, would he include an email address which encouraged people to contact Freedom-Site (Lemire's website) for information about the Heritage Front?
In fact, Lemire posted a number of Heritage Front articles, or links to those articles, on Stormfront, including but not limited to the following:
Posting these articles doesn't mean that Lemire authored them, however it is curious that he would post them to Stormfront if he wasn't in some way involved with the Heritage Front.
Getting back to the "controversy" there is something else of interest. In another post on Stormfront, Lemire refers to Heritage Front campaign in Hamilton:
Interestingly, this flyering campaign (note the url's) is also covered in the June 2002 edition of "UpFront" which was the source of the Free Dominion controversy:
A close up of the individual holding the flyer indicates that it is none other than Lemire himself, so while he might not have authored the article, "A Decade of Defiance," he's still very much present in the Heritage Front's journal.
We would see this image two more times on the Heritage Front website. First we direct our readers to this link in which the Hamilton campaign is discussed in some detail and includes a quote by Lemire:
The other time you'll see the photo being used is when you click on the, "Join the Heritage Front" link:
The photo of Lemire above would have been taken in February 2001, meaning that Lemire was about 25 years old at the time. The Heritage Front website was last updated in 2005 after Wolfgang Droege's death. Up to the point where anyone looking for the Heritage Front website were directed to Stormfront in 2008 (Lemire was then 32 or 33 years old), Lemire's photo with the caption, "Your membership helps us fight on!" could be found by those interested in joining the Heritage Front.
(NOTE: As a bit of an aside, Lemire was bragging about his connection to the Heritage Front in the late 1990s such as on his own personal website [here and here] as well when he was around 24 in 1999; mention is also made of how successful the Heritage Front component of Lemire's Freedom-Site has been in the September 1997 edition of, "HF Report" when Marc was about 22)
Now all of this is very interesting, but we can hear our detractors again cry out, "but none of this shows Lemire writing anything overtly as a member of the Heritage Front so it still means nothing to us."
Fine. On to the point.
You want something written by Lemire? How about the September edition of "UpFront"?
Not good enough? My my, but you are a picky lot.
Okay, how about, "Letter from Heritage Front to support the German-Canadian Congress against Immigration Minister Elinor Caplan's recommendation to strip Oberlander of his citizenship" that was written by Marc Lemire?
We would note that Lemire was 26 or 27 when the above letter was faxed to the German-Canadian Congress in support of Nazi war criminal Helmut Oberlander.
Finally, and not to put too fine a point on it, we have the February 2001 article on the Heritage Front website that deals with a Heritage Front flyering campaign at the University of Waterloo:
There was an article in the University of Waterloo's newspaper "Imprint", and in response a letter from the Heritage Front's Marc Lemire was published.
And here is that response below:
We also did a bit of a search of the University of Waterloo student newspaper website via the Internet Archives and found Lemire's letter here, as well as a story suggesting that Mr. Lemire may have, ehem... "borrowed" the source code for Freedom-Site.
So there you go. Now the folks on Free Dominion can no longer say there is nothing in writing that connects Lemire to the Heritage Front.
You're welcome.
Uh, the Heritage Front uh, was active back in, uh, the the 90s and I was a young kid at the time. I had some, uh, interest in some of the things that they were doing in particularly thing like uh opposition to employment equity, things like reducing immigration. So I uh, listened to some of what they were about, and uh, I went away from it. I mean I was involved with them peripherally in my teenage years.Our previous articles (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here... phew!) on the subject have all called into question Lemire's claim that he was only, "peripherally" involved with the Heritage Front in his teen years but instead support the conclusion that he was in a leadership position as early as the late 1990s and was the functional head of the the group by 2001. In a sense then this article is overkill, but there is one issue left that we do want to address, that being the belief by our detractors that there was nothing written by Lemire himself that links him to the Heritage Front.
Back in 2009 when we began our examination of Marc Lemire's involvement with Ernst Zundel, organized racism and the Heritage Front, an incident occurred on Free Dominion. During a discussion about Marc Lemire, Harry Abrams posted an article written by the Heritage Front and posted to Stormfront by Lemire in 2002. The article itself was from the June 2002 edition of, "UpFront":
The controversy arose in that Mr. Abrams added, "By Marc Lemire" to the information he posted on Free Dominion. As a result, he was accused of, "document tampering" and banned from further posting. This incident has been used by our detractors on Free Dominion as proof of an orchestrated campaign to defame Marc Lemire by creating evidence against him. Lemire even got into the act himself as he posted about these nefarious efforts on his own blog.
We don't doubt for a single moment that Mr. Abrams' intentions were innocent and simply intended to indicate Lemire's connection to the article, something that Mark Fournier doesn't deny:
I emailed the link to Marc Lemire and straight out asked him if he had written it. I'll bet you aren't the least bit surprised that he had no problem admitting that he had reposted the article, but he flatly denied he had authored it.But let's for a moment assume the worst of Mr. Abrams and that he was trying to falsify a document. We still have two issues that our detractors have not addressed:
1. Why would someone who claims no connection to the Heritage Front, other than a brief flirtation with the group in his teen years, be posting Heritage Front articles on a well known hate web forum (fyi, if you look for the Heritage Front website now at www.heritagefront.com, you will instead be redirected to Stormfront)?
2. Why, if Lemire had no connection to the Heritage Front, would he include an email address which encouraged people to contact Freedom-Site (Lemire's website) for information about the Heritage Front?
In fact, Lemire posted a number of Heritage Front articles, or links to those articles, on Stormfront, including but not limited to the following:
Posting these articles doesn't mean that Lemire authored them, however it is curious that he would post them to Stormfront if he wasn't in some way involved with the Heritage Front.
Getting back to the "controversy" there is something else of interest. In another post on Stormfront, Lemire refers to Heritage Front campaign in Hamilton:
Interestingly, this flyering campaign (note the url's) is also covered in the June 2002 edition of "UpFront" which was the source of the Free Dominion controversy:
A close up of the individual holding the flyer indicates that it is none other than Lemire himself, so while he might not have authored the article, "A Decade of Defiance," he's still very much present in the Heritage Front's journal.
We would see this image two more times on the Heritage Front website. First we direct our readers to this link in which the Hamilton campaign is discussed in some detail and includes a quote by Lemire:
"The event was very successful and the reception we received from Hamilton residents is very encouraging" says Marc Lemire, one of the event organizers. "Everyone we spoke to was very supportive and one eager resident, who lives down the street from Henderson Hospital, immediately reached into his pocket and gave us a donation on the spot to help continue our work."
The photo of Lemire above would have been taken in February 2001, meaning that Lemire was about 25 years old at the time. The Heritage Front website was last updated in 2005 after Wolfgang Droege's death. Up to the point where anyone looking for the Heritage Front website were directed to Stormfront in 2008 (Lemire was then 32 or 33 years old), Lemire's photo with the caption, "Your membership helps us fight on!" could be found by those interested in joining the Heritage Front.
(NOTE: As a bit of an aside, Lemire was bragging about his connection to the Heritage Front in the late 1990s such as on his own personal website [here and here] as well when he was around 24 in 1999; mention is also made of how successful the Heritage Front component of Lemire's Freedom-Site has been in the September 1997 edition of, "HF Report" when Marc was about 22)
Now all of this is very interesting, but we can hear our detractors again cry out, "but none of this shows Lemire writing anything overtly as a member of the Heritage Front so it still means nothing to us."
Fine. On to the point.
You want something written by Lemire? How about the September edition of "UpFront"?
Not good enough? My my, but you are a picky lot.
Okay, how about, "Letter from Heritage Front to support the German-Canadian Congress against Immigration Minister Elinor Caplan's recommendation to strip Oberlander of his citizenship" that was written by Marc Lemire?
We would note that Lemire was 26 or 27 when the above letter was faxed to the German-Canadian Congress in support of Nazi war criminal Helmut Oberlander.
Finally, and not to put too fine a point on it, we have the February 2001 article on the Heritage Front website that deals with a Heritage Front flyering campaign at the University of Waterloo:
There was an article in the University of Waterloo's newspaper "Imprint", and in response a letter from the Heritage Front's Marc Lemire was published.
And here is that response below:
We also did a bit of a search of the University of Waterloo student newspaper website via the Internet Archives and found Lemire's letter here, as well as a story suggesting that Mr. Lemire may have, ehem... "borrowed" the source code for Freedom-Site.
So there you go. Now the folks on Free Dominion can no longer say there is nothing in writing that connects Lemire to the Heritage Front.
You're welcome.
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