A PFLP terror proxy in Ottawa: the backstory.
It's like chapter from a John le Carré novel melded with the script from a Simpsons episode. Except in the real world, where innocent people get killed.
In print yesterday in the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post: Anti-Israel conference in Ottawa set to go, despite connections to banned terror group: The upcoming conference is being organized by Samidoun, an organization openly affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The meet-up this weekend is set for the SAW Centre, an avant-garde gallery and venue space on Nicholas Street. The public wasn’t supposed to know, and it’s not even clear that the exquisitely “progressive” SAW Centre managers knew who was behind the event (I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt, which they don’t deserve, as we shall see).
That story followed this extra I wrote for the National Post on Tuesday: As Israel turns 75, the UN won't be invited to the party. Condemning the Jewish State appears to be a major pursuit for the United Nations General Assembly.
Suitable bookends, if you like, as in the lyrics from a certain song, which I’ll come to.
The Tuesday column chronicled United Nations’ utter uselessness to the cause of peace in the Holy Land, and how the General Assembly, the UN Security Council, the UN Human Rights Council and other various UN agencies with their hands in matter have consistently made cruel jokes of themselves.
. . . In these ways, the UN offers little incentive to Israelis to play along with its various inquiries and tribunals and councils and commissions, so Israelis find friends wherever they can, and the Palestinians are stuck with leaders they don’t elect, and “the conflict” carries on.
That song:
Well, the chances are against it, and the odds are slim That he'll live by the rules that the world makes for him Because there's a noose at his neck and a gun at his back And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac.
This weekend’s event in Ottawa bills itself as “a conference, strategy session and march for collective liberation and anti-colonial struggle, linking Indigenous, Black, Palestinian and workers’ liberation movements as well as global struggles. . .” The endorsers include about 30 fringe “anti-war” and “anti-imperialist” groups.
That song:
He’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace, They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease. Now, they wouldn't hurt a fly, to hurt one they would weep. They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep. He's the neighborhood bully.
Worried about incitement to violence? Who cares. You’re Jews.
That was pretty much the tone taken by SAW Centre curator Jason St-Laurent when I asked him how he’s responding to complaints from the Jewish Federation of Ottawa about his groovy gallery and arts centre handing over its premises to the overseas funding, propaganda and recruitment arm of the blood-soaked Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The “Liberation Conference” is by the account of its own organizers a major North American milestone in the development of Masar Badil, the “Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path,” which is a function of Samidoun, which describes itself as a Palestinian prisoners’ rights network.
The facts of the matter: Samidoun, a terrorist-listed entity in Israel, is intimately tied to the PFLP, a terrorist-listed entity throughout Europe and North America, via its lodestar, the senior PFLP figure Khaled Barakat, who is in turn a co-founder of Masar Badil.
Samidoun and Masar Badil reckon the fatah-led Palestinian Authority is illegitimate. The “alternative revolutionary path” they propose is a Hamas variety, a return to the intefadeh of 1987, which ended years later with about 100 Israeli civilians and 60 Israel Defence Forces personnel dead, more than 1,000 Palestinians killed in encounters with the IDF, and another 822 Palestinians executed as Israeli collaborators.
Another thing about the PFLP and Samidoun: they don’t exactly scruple in drawing distinctions between the IDF and random Jews on the street. The PFLP has always been like that, which should give you an idea about the frustration expressed by the Jewish Federation of Ottawa and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.
Here’s CIJA’s Shimon Fogel: “Enough is enough. Samidoun’s ties to the PFLP terrorist entity are self proclaimed and explicit. The group does not even attempt to hide them. What is unclear is why the government has yet to take action to outlaw the group’s activities in Canada.
“We have long alerted the government to Samidoun’s incitement to hatred against Canada’s Jewish community and affiliation with the PFLP. Emboldened by impunity and inaction, Samidoun is now hosting its first major North American demonstration, here in the capital of our country.”
Last year I covered quite a few stories that required more of me than the usual weekly or twice-weekly backgrounders, explainers & analyses I file to the Post and the Citizen.
The most exhausting of those projects was Year of the Graves: How the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves (more to come on all that in the coming weeks). The most demanding and time-consuming project was an investigation into the revival of the PFLP, which cut its teeth in the early 1970s with a series of spectacular airliner hijackings and acts of savage bloodletting. The centrepiece of that effort was The Curious Case of Khaled Barakat, which appeared in the National Post on this very day, a year ago.
Samidoun and Barakat, and Samidoun’s American “international coordinator” Charlotte Kates (Barakat’s wife), have found it increasingly difficult to organize or raise funds anywhere in Europe or the United States. But, weirdly, Canada has provided them a welcome refuge. On Feb. 28, 2021, Israeli authorities listed Samidoun as a terrorist entity owing to its PFLP connections. Three days later, in Ottawa, the federal agency Corporations Canada registered Samidoun as a non-profit corporation.
Ottawa never discloses anything about its terrorist-listings process, and Ottawa always relies on the Privacy Act in its refusals to discuss individual cases and Samidoun won’t talk to me beyond issuing denunciations and transparently disingenuous denials. So I had to rely on my own devices, diplomatic sources, court records, the findings of the Israeli security agency Shin Bet, intelligence assessments made available to Public Safety Canada and the Prime Ministers’ Office, and the labours of tireless researchers engaged by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and B’nai Brith.
Paying subscribers to the Real Story got a whole lot more than Post readers with spy-versus-spy background and cloak-and-dagger inside stories, for instance Canada’s Samidoun: The Network and Canada’s Counter-terror Clown Show.
The effort caused a bit of a stir. Petitions demanding Samidoun’s addition to the PFLP on Canada’s terrorist list, questions in the Senate, headlines in the Jerusalem Post, that sort of thing. My favorite: a declaration signed by scores of individuals and organizations from around the world alleging a Zionist plot to smear Palestinian activists and their supporters, with me in the middle of it: “All of this recent hysteria can be traced back to the one article written by Terry Glavin,” referring to The Curious Case of Khaled Barakat.
Only a couple of weeks before that the Kremlin had named me among 61 Canadians, “indefinitely prohibited from entering the Russian Federation,” so my response to the charge that I was a Zionist plotter was: Pick a number and get in line, people.
And now for some more backstory on the Ottawa gathering - the venue for Masar Badil’s first major foray into North America, which was supposed to be known only to pre-approved registrants. If you’d like to jump through the paywall, just click here.