A Tiny Light Against The Darkness.

Jews: 'We want peace.' CTV News: 'The Jews support war.' Canada: 'Modi's A Murderer'. America: 'Says who?' NDP MP: Israeli space lasers are killing poets.

What a time to be alive. First, a boast.

I was hoping that I could be cheery with this edition of the Real Story and I am trying, honestly. To that purpose I will begin by bragging.

Last night my perfect and amazing daughter Zoe was having a grand time of it with her bandmates in Michael Winograd’s klezmer supergroup Honorable Mentshn at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., for the first night of Hanukkah.

It was a sold-out performance but live-streamed for all of us who couldn’t attend in person, and you can sit in on the concert even now, right here.

Yes I’m a lousy photographer, yes that plant needs watering, yes we’re Roman Catholics of both the Mass-going and the phantom-limb type and the vaguely atheist variety. But this is what we do.

I devote this newsletter to my comrade Peter Stein. Now. . .

So many stories, so little time.

The Real Story newsletter was never supposed to be about “the Middle East” or about the undead peste of antisemitism and its vectors who “hide themselves and bide their time, always waiting, as Camus says, for another chance to send their rats up to die again in a free city.”

But holy cow. How to avoid tracking the thundering advance of the plague at the moment? How to encourage one’s Hebrew homies to cheer up? I’ve tried, as in A Dim Hope Amid The Unfathomable Horror of the Israel-Hamas War. But it’s hard work.

Broadly described, my “beat” is foreign policy and the global struggle for human rights, and that struggle has lately taken on the contours of the great global conflict of our age, between tyranny and democracy, between terror and liberalism, with China, Russia, Syria, Venezuela and most pertinently now Iran, on one side, and the rest of us on the other.

As a consequence I tend to report a lot about the capacity of our governments to at least take notice, if not to actually find the spine to join the struggle. Which in Canada, especially, seems to be asking far too much. Our political class likes to have things both ways.

The Simchat Torah pogrom of October 7 changed everything, and it doesn’t require fan-boy work on behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu to be clear about this - I’m not crazy about Bibi and the Israelis I admire and worry about the most aren’t either. But October 7 changed everything, in ways big and barely noticeable.

Many if not most of my Jewish friends are inconsolable and angry and lonely and estranged from the communities they’ve contributed to so brilliantly over the years.

Like I keep saying, October 7 matters. But the stories I ordinarily have my eye on are going nearly unreported by nearly everyone.

The Maduro thugocracy in Caracas, for instance, has just mobilized Venezuela’s armed forces in the dystopian Bolivarian republic’s threat to invade and annex a third of neighbouring Guyana. Following the example of the Venezuelan regime’s ally, Russia, it looks like, in Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Guyana has put its army on high alert. Venezuela competes only with Syria in the world’s production of refugees, so this all bodes ill.

My own point of view will be obvious, if only in being a senior fellow with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. Speaking of which, the Centre’s Mutasim Ali and Yonah Diamond have written this, just published yesterday: The Imminent Risk of Genocide in Darfur: Never Again Cannot Become a Relic of the Past.

And the Centre’s international chair, Irwin Cotler - my own lodestar in these matters - is at the moment the subject of round-the-clock police protection owing to a threat to his life. Irwin was already the target of “anti-Zionist” harassment in Canada, going back years. Now this.

The horrible suffering of the Palestinians of Gaza arising from Israel’s long-overdue determination to crush the Khomeinist regime’s Judeocidal proxy there has provided the convenient pretext for a worldwide eruption of lurid antisemitism of a kind we haven’t witnessed in generations.

It’s been there all along. I’d become a bore pointing it out over the years. It’s just that nowadays, it’s out and proud. All this “pro-Palestine” concern-mongering really is only a pretext. The faculty lounge anti-Zionists were already expressing joy and jubilation in response to the bloodiest pogrom since the Holocaust well before Israel hit back. They were handing out sweets in Toronto while the Hamas butchers were still going about their work.

Peace is war, war is peace, whatever, we’re professionals.

As I reluctantly pointed out way back on October 25, quite a few of my colleagues in the mainstream press, by lazy habit, have been providing cover for the organizers of the current agitations by describing their various street demonstrations as “pro-Palestine” or “pro-Palestinian.” They are no such thing.

The mass-media stupidity that results from going along with Anti-Zionist antisemites in their self-exculpating humanitarian alibi was demonstrated textbook-style the other day by CTV News. Here’s how CTV covered a Parliament Hill peace rally organized by what you could call “the other side,” the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and Ottawa’s Jewish community.

"In Ottawa, thousands of Jewish Canadians rallied on Parliament Hill in support of the war while inside Parliament, Palestinian Canadians made a plea for help."

The CIJA rally was in fact intended to mount an appeal for the hostages Hamas is holding in Gaza, and to protest the waves of often violent antisemitism sweeping the country.

Warmongering Jews though, right?

Speaking of incompetence at CTV - and I’m giving CTV the benefit of the doubt here, because of their less-than-convincing later explanation of a “technical” problem rather than some staffer trying to be clever - here’s an otherwise anodyne and happy little story about a traditional Hanukkah menorah-lighting in Toronto.

It opens with Allison Hurst in front of a camera, telling the story of the annual event at the Russian Jewish Community Centre, showing a menorah in a little grove of Christmas trees. The visuals for Allison’s report are suddenly replaced with gruesome footage of bloody scenes in Gaza. And now back to Rabbi Zalztman!

Jewish Space Lasers Are Killing Palestinian Poets.

Something like that, anyway.

In a splendidly useful example of how purportedly respectable people can get away with saying any damn thing these days, we bring you the prominent Vancouver New Democratic Party MP Don Davies.

On Twitter/X yesterday, here’s Davies: “Israel is now using sophisticated technology to target and kill leading Gazan academics, authors, historians, poets, artists, journalists, teachers. These are not Hamas leaders. This is cultural genocide. The world must intervene to stop this brutal crime against humanity.”

Where the hell did Davies get this idea?

He explained later, before deleting his Tweet after an avalanche of attention of a sort he wasn’t inviting, that he was relying on this article in the Times of Israel, which reports no such thing. In fact, the piece could be taken to prove the opposite, that the Israeli Defence Forces are going to extreme and seriously advanced-technology lengths to pinpoint targets in order to avoid civilian casualties.

But here’s the thing. When did Don Davies suddenly adopt a deep concern for cultural genocide?

Davies certainly doesn’t give a damn about the Muslim Uyghurs of Beijing-occupied Xinjiang.

My National Post and Ottawa Citizen readers, but particularly my paying subscribers here at The Real Story, will be aware of Davies’ hypocrisy and sneaky unseemliness in that matter.

Anyone who has followed the revelations about the Chinese Communist Party’s friends in high Liberal places (speaking of stories I’ve been on top of for years that I’ve had to set aside lately) will be familiar with the dodgy Toronto MP Han Dong, who features prominently in the CCP’s wealthy Mandarin-bloc network that mobilized to the Liberals’ advantage during the 2019 and 2021 elections.

Just one thing Dong raised eyebrows about was that time he conveniently absented himself from the House of Commons vote to resettle 10,000 Uyghur refugees, and from the Uyghur genocide motion two years earlier: Liberal MP accused of getting help from China skipped House votes condemning Beijing.

But what wasn’t noticed: Dong wasn’t alone. Don Space-Lasers Davies joined him, as did the Liberal MP Shaun Chen and the NDP’s Niki Ashton, in skipping both votes.

Davies, Ashton and New Democrat Leah Gazan also broke ranks with a 2020 Opposition motion calling on the government to follow the lead of Canada’s Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partners to bar Xi Jinping’s “national champion” Huawei Technologies from Canada’s core 5G internet connectivity rollout.

Davies also broke with the NDP when he sided with certain Liberal heavyweights who were badgering Trudeau to intervene on behalf of Huawei princess Meng Wanzhou, to halt extradition proceedings and allow her to return to China without answering the U.S. Attorney-General’s charges of fraud and conspiracy.

There’s a hell of a lot more about Don Davies here, in a Real Story deep dive from May of this year.

See? That’s why a paid subscription here is worth it.

True North, Strong and Fancy Socks

The bitter reality of it is that Canada has been doing its best to earn its international reputation as a global terror-financing and money-laundering shelter for a long, long time. There’s votes in it, and the Trudeau Liberals - sorry to sound partisan about this, but they are the government - have been providing courage and comfort and a safe haven to Israel’s most determined and bloodthirsty enemies for a while now.

Like Samidoun, for instance, which is intimately aligned with the terror-listed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Samidoun is listed as a terror organization in its own right in Israel, it’s banned in Germany, its organizers are barred from Europe, but it’s based in Vancouver where it enjoys Ottawa’s gold seal as a registered not-for-profit corporation. As I never tire of pointing out.

See especially Canada's counterterror clown show, and In front of one’s nose, and Canada’s Samidoun, the network.

But it’s not just Israelis or expatriate Iranians or Ukrainians who want something done about this state of affairs. Paying subscribers will remember what I was on about in my last Weekend Special newsletter here, which covered a lot of ground. The material under the subhead India connected to Canada-related murder plot! provides the backstory to my column in the National Post and Ottawa Citizen this week.

I really like the Post’s headline:

The Post online version is here.

The thing that really gets me going about this latest twist is the absurd talking-point storyline it’s summoned from certain pundits who should know better and from the usual chat-show friends of the Liberal government.

We are expected to believe that in tribute to his melodramatic detonation of Indo-Canadian relations in September, Prime Minister Trudeau has now been “vindicated” by an indictment unsealed by federal prosecutors in New York last week.

The indictment lays out a Keystone Cops murder-for-hire plot hatched in India last spring that doesn’t even come close to justifying Trudeau’s stirring address to the House of Commons to the effect that Indian prime minister Narendra Modi killed a Canadian on Canadian soil.

My assessment of all this is based on my work on this story going back to my days as a freelance boy reporter filing to the Globe and Mail from the Khalistani terror time in Amritsar and New Delhi. A few weeks ago I turned this newsletter into an in-depth series on Canada’s role as a safe haven for Khalistani terrorism, for paying subscribers mostly but not entirely. You can start here: The worst of all possible worlds.

Bottom line from my piece this week, which is pretty much the same as my take from the day Trudeau stood up in the House and accused Modi of murder: Sure, maybe Modi has gone rogue. Maybe 40 years of Canadian law-enforcement incompetence and national-security unseriousness has invited Modi’s bull-necked Bharatiya Janata Party government to take matters into its own rough hands. It’s plausible.

It’s just that the Americans aren’t saying anything of the kind, and last week’s indictment contains no evidence of the sort, and so far the body of historical evidence overwhelmingly favours the proposition of malign Canadian interference in India’s affairs, rather than the other way round.

A Word About Hanukkah (Go Maccabees!)

Setting aside my own family’s peculiar tradition of lighting menorah candles at this time of year - now that’s a strange story for you, and it’s all here in The Faith of Our Fathers - Hanukkah is an event in the Jewish calendar all of us should celebrate in our own ways.

Hanukkah is especially worth celebrating if you side with and count among your comrades the brave insurrectionists of Hong Kong and Syria and Iran, the Ukrainians in their struggle against the bloody Russian emperor Putin, the women and the democrats of Afghanistan who struggle on even now, and their antecedents down through the ages.

The one big reason: Hanukkah is the celebration of the revolutionary victory of the Maccabees over the tyrannical Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV. Without the Maccabees’ liberation of Judaea and their reconsecration of the Temple of Jerusalem, 2200 years ago, we wouldn’t even have Christmas, if you like that sort of thing.

To be clear about where I’m coming from in such matters: The Moral Necessity of Tyrannicide.

Curiously, the original stories of the Maccabean uprising - both written by Jews, one account in Greek and the other in Hebrew - were never formally included in the Jewish biblical canon. There’s all sorts of interesting debates about why this is so, but it looks to me like, more or less, hey, it was only 2200 years ago, so maybe it’s not such a big deal.

Anyway, those two books did make it into the Catholic bible. I’m not sure what the Protestants do here, bless their hearts. The thing is, however we imagine ourselves, Jew or Gentile or Muslim or nothing of the kind, this one big reason to celebrate comes to mind:

It is proper and fitting that during Hanukkah, we suffer a thought for our brothers and sisters languishing in prisons around the world for carrying on in the Maccabean tradition. In prison cell and dungeon vile Our thoughts to them are winging. When friends by shame are undefiled, How can I keep from singing?

I started this newsletter with music and song. So. . .

They buried Shane today.

My hope remains for the victory of light over darkness, that we sing and dance at the miracle of our children, and that at the death of comrades we comfort one another, and sing and dance.

As from Amhrán Mhuínse: And as I go west by Inse Ghainimh, let the flag be on the mast. Oh, do not bury me in Leitir Calaidh, for it’s not where my people are, But bring me west to Muínis, to the place where I will be mourned aloud; The lights will be on the dunes, and I will not be lonely there.

As from The Galway Races: There was half a million people there Of all denominations, The Catholic, the Protestant, the Jew, the Presbyterian. Yet no animosity No matter what persuasion, But failte hospitality, inducing fresh acquaintance.

As in Shane’s funeral today at St Mary of the Rosary Church in the Tipperary town of Nenagh. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam. May his soul be on the right side of G-d. This is absolutely glorious.

Shabbat shalom.