So Ian Halperin trying to make headlines again. You know, the “Ian Undercover” guy who puts “IUC WORLD EXCLUSIVE” in front of his blog posts, dresses like a douche and is always threatening to sue people for outrageous amounts?

This time, he’s threatening to sue Guy Laliberté for $500,000, because the Cirque du Soleil founder said Halperin was full of shit in his biography.

But what got me about this story isn’t that a man desperate for attention is throwing out another disingenuous idle threat and got some journalist to fall for it, but his mention – in his own defence – that The Gazette called him a “local hero.”

I found this odd, of course, because I thought Halperin hated The Gazette even though he briefly worked there more than 20 years ago. The paper certainly hasn’t been showering praise on him lately, so where does he get this idea that he’s been called a hero?

Well, I looked it up, and sure enough, he’s right. In a “local hero” column published on Dec. 12, 1993, Bill Brownstein described him thus:

The Montreal singer/saxophonist ekes out a living as a busker, usually at the Place des Arts and Beaudry Metro stations from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. daily. In the evenings, Halperin and his Afro-Latin rhythm band, State of Emergency, play for pocket money at city bistros and jazz joints.

There’s brief mention of his journalistic work a decade previous, while at Concordia University’s The Link. But the article calls him a hero because he was organizing a benefit concert for homeless people.

I feel like I need one of those fact-checking meters here, but let’s rate this one “mostly true”. He’s technically correct, but misleading in that the article is 17 years old and has nothing to do with the current controversy.

At a news conference the other day to promote his latest Michael Jackson gossip, “award winning journalist Ian Halperin” lashed out at The Gazette for its review of his book.

He says he has no problem with negative reviews, but decries the “personal attacks” levelled against him by the reviewer. Specifically, that “Halperin has no problem with self-promotion.”

This, combined with its failure to mention the book’s place on the New York Times bestseller list, and its negative treatment of Leonard Cohen (a charge he just kind of made up), was clear evidence that The Gazette is anti-Semitic.

The review is certainly scathing, and puts the book in a really bad light. But is it really a personal attack to suggest that a celebrity gossip muckraker who starts each blog post with “IUC EXCLUSIVE” and wears ridiculous glasses is an attention whore?

I think suggesting there was anti-Semitism involved only proves the reviewer’s point that Halperin is the punchline to a bad joke.