He added: “What led to Occupy Wall Street taking off was not just the iconic image of the ballerina and the bull but a number of factors — including on-the-ground activists building an organization through many, many meetings and relationships and hard work in New York and elsewhere. Adbusters didn’t do that. Other people did it.”

Mr. Lasn acknowledges the truth of that, and says he’s not a community organizer and certainly not a graceful politician. “I’ve said some things that have pissed people off,” he says. And it’s not just corporations like Nike, McDonald’s and Philip Morris that have been stung by him. Israel’s policies toward Palestinians are an Adbusters target.

A blog post in February 2011, for example, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Violate International Law,” compared Israel to a drunk friend: “For over half a century, America has been Israel’s bartender and enabler: each year dumping billions of dollars in military aid that is used to oppress Palestinians.”

The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy organization, says the magazine’s provocative statements have occasionally contained anti-Semitic elements.

“While anti-Semitism is not part of their overarching message or mission, Adbusters makes no apologies for spreading Jewish conspiracy theories and promoting offensive analogies to the Holocaust,” said Abraham H. Foxman, the league’s national director. “Some people want to get attention to their cause, but unfortunately Adbusters has found it convenient at times to play into age-old conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the government in an effort to get attention to themselves.”

In one instance, in 2004, Mr. Lasn published a list of 50 people who, he said, were prominent American neoconservatives and influenced American policy in the Iraq war. Half of them appeared to be Jewish, he wrote, and affixed a mark next to those names. He said American Jews tended to vote Democratic and that many were opposed to the Bush administration’s foreign policy and to at least some Israeli policies. But, he said, the “neocons seem to have a special affinity for Israel that influences their political thinking and consequently American foreign policy in the Middle East.”