MONTREAL — The Canadian Human Rights Commission won’t investigate a complaint against a Montreal imam who allegedly wrote disparagingly, and sometimes with violent intent, about Jews, Christians and other “infidels,” as well as homosexuals, women and democracy in general.

The complaint was lodged in April by Marc Lebuis, publisher of a Quebec-based website Point de Bascule (Tipping Point), which aims to raise awareness of what its creators perceive as the threat to western values posed by radical Islam.

Lebuis claimed Abou Hammaad Sulaiman Dameus Al-Hayit disseminated hate propaganda in his book L’Islam ou l’Intégrisme? A la lumière du Qor’an et de la Sounnah (Islam or Fundamentalism? In light of the Qur’an and the Sunna) in the book’s third edition, which was published in 2006-07 on the Internet.

The commission found that the writings are not likely to expose members of any identifiable group to hatred or contempt, according to the law.

Among the book excerpts Lebuis cited was that Jews “spread corruption and chaos on Earth,” and “unjustly occupy” Palestine for the sole purpose of “filling this land with corruption and transgress the laws of Allah in the name of secularism.”

As well, Lebuis alleges the imam wrote that most Jews “seek only material goods and money. Apart from that, they have nothing.”

Christianity, according to Lebuis’ excerpts, is the reason the West is “full of perversity, corruption and adultery.”

Other excerpts state that all “infidels” are “evil… love perversity and “are our enemies,” and that Muslims are better than others.

Elsewhere, the imam wrote that democracy is contrary to Islam and that Muslims should overthrow “infidel” rulers whenever they are strong enough to do so.

In an Islamic state, Jews and Christians would keep their religion but pay a fee called the jizyah. “The purpose of the jizyah is to humiliate and punish infidels to encourage them to accept Islam,” Lebuis quotes from the book.

Those of other faiths or atheists must accept Islam or “be killed.”

The author also calls for the extermination of homosexuals.

Commission representative Stéphane Brisson wrote to Lebuis in December that “the majority of the references in [the book] are to ‘infidels,’ ‘miscreants’ or ‘western women.’ These are general, broad and diversified categories that do not constitute an ‘identifiable group’ under Section 13 of the [Canadian Human Rights] Act.”

In the instances where groups that are specifically protected against discrimination are identified, such as homosexuals, Christians and Jews, Brisson writes they “do not seem to promote ‘hatred’ or ‘contempt’ according to the criteria set forth in the Taylor case.”

That is a reference to the landmark 1990 Supreme Court of Canada dismissing Western Guard Party leader John Ross Taylor’s appeal of the hate propaganda charge brought against him by the commission. The high court upheld that preventing discrimination against an identifiable group, in this case Jews, was a justifiable limit on the Charter guarantee of free speech.

Lebuis acknowledged that the purpose of his complaint was to “test the objectivity” of the commission.

With this rejection, he concluded: “If you belong to a religious minority, you can with impunity propagate a supremacist ideology that also condones the extermination of other minorities, and of the majority, if this is the doctrine of your religion.

“If you belong to the majority and expose the supremacist, totalitarian and anti-democratic ideology propagated by a minority, you risk being sued.”