And what fresh hell awaits us this week?

A round-up on journalism's highs & lows: Pharmacare Frenzy, Airdrops in Gaza, Spies in Winnipeg & some previously paywalled content with a brief post by that star candidate the Conservatives ditched.

We begin with the easiest story because it didn’t happen.

About the Pharmacare Deal. It doesn’t even exist.

It’s a bit cruel, really. Diabetes, for instance, is a genuine scourge, and it can be crippling just to keep expenses under control. After last week’s Pharmacare huzzahs, don’t be hard on yourself if you find yourself wondering what the hell is really going on.

CBC: Ottawa unveils national pharmacare plan that covers diabetes, contraception to start. CBC: Advocacy groups on P.E.I. applaud national pharmacare plan, Global News: Canada’s pharmacare bill has officially been introduced in Parliament. Global News: NDP’s Singh questions provinces mulling pharmacare opt-out.

For the confused, my National Post colleague Chris Selley comes to the rescue: There is no 'pharmacare deal'. Ontario hasn't 'opted in' because there is literally nothing to 'opt into'. This is a fact that even the high-strung pharmacare front man and Trudeau lieutenant Mark Holland inadvertently admitted, in this Canadian Press story from the Montreal Gazette: “It’s important not to criticize something that doesn’t exist.”

The Intifada lobby is angry: Gazans are finally getting some help

Seriously, Global News, you call this journalism? That three-minute broadcast about humanitarian-aid airdrops into Gaza will leave viewers knowing less about the story than they did before they started watching it.

The first third is wholly unfiltered and un-labeled Hamas propaganda. The rest is such brazen video stenography it could be mistaken for a self-flattering video produced by the stupidest elements of the American “From The River to the Sea” crew.

Be careful what you wish for. Thousands were killed and injured during the 1st and 2nd intifadas.

About those airdrops: It’s a Jordanian-led effort backed by the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France, as well as the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Bahrain. Canada is trying to figure out a way to contribute. The point is to get aid directly to the people, circumventing Hamas hoarders, UNRWA’s complicit incompetents and the profiteers that are contributing so generously to the agony and hunger of the Palestinians of Gaza.

Over the weekend, the United States joined the effort, with C-130s dropping more than 38,000 meals along the Gaza coast, providing civilians with direct access to food.

So of course the Israel haters are angry. Hamas wants Gazans to suffer. As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, Gaza warlord Yaya Sinwar has told his confederates in the Hamas politburo that everything was going to plan: “High civilian casualties would add to the worldwide pressure on Israel to stop the war.”

What else would you expect the ‘Free Free Palestine’ shouters to want, except more or less the same? Here’s the party line: The “demeaning” airdrops are all part of a plot, a “systematic and intentional campaign of starvation” orchestrated by Israel, the United States and Europe.” Twist your head around that pretzel logic if you can.

Last month I introduced National Post readers and Real Story subscribers to the Palestinian patriot Ahmed Fouad Alkatib, who’d been mobilizing against formidable odds for months for precisely the kind of largescale airdrop initiative that’s finally underway. Key point there: The Palestinians' western 'friends' are the Palestinians' worst enemies. They’ve sucked the life out of every conversation where measures to lift the weight of agony from the Palestinians of Gaza should be the only item on the agenda.

Since last December, that’s been the only item on Alkhatib’s agenda. It been a hard uphill slog. When I was in Israel last month I’d put the question directly to Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy and to Lt Col Jonathan Conricus, the international spokesman for the Israeli Defence Forces: Why doesn’t Israel get behind large-scale airdrops in Gaza of the kind Alkhatib proposes, the kind the World Food Program carries out with tragic regularity in Africa?

They didn’t really know how to answer. It was evident then that the Israeli government hadn’t given the subject much thought. That’s changed. Israel is behind the initiative.

Here’s Alkhatib now: “Civilians who need the aid are getting it, not Hamas's thugs or organized criminals.” To U.S. President Joe Biden: “Please keep going to flood Gaza with aid, reduce the risk of famine & drive out the black market merchants who'll be forced to give up their schemes if enough supplies saturate the Strip, driving down the prices & making the resale of aid unprofitable.”

I’m not even going to get into the way so many news organizations covered the horror last Friday with that Israeli aid convoy that was mobbed on the Gaza Coastal Road. I’ll leave that to Robert Walker from Honest Reporting Canada: Gaza Stampede Gives Hamas Opportunity to Spread Lies; Canadian Media Takes the Bait.

Meanwhile, the so-called “Pro-Palestinian” crowd continues to win friends and influence people, I see. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was supposed to host Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at the Art Gallery of Ontario Saturday night. The menace of the protestes caused police to put the event in lockdown. Trudeau and Meloni weren’t able to get in.

Here’s Tony LaMantia, president of the non-profit Waterloo Economic Development Corporation: “Protesters tried to keep me from entering. I was assaulted. Kept my cool - not bad for a Sicilian. Was able to help get 12 or so guests in by keeping the entrance door open myself until police did their job and created a buffer. Brother, it's an angry, crazy world.”

Raise your glass to journalists who do their damn jobs.

I’ve got to hand it to the Globe and Mail’s’s Steven Chase and Bob Fife. Seriously. This is something of a personal obligation.

Beijing’s deeply embedded network of spies, strongarm men, campaign financiers, corporate compradors and friends in high Canadian places and has occupied more of my working time than any other story over the past decade or so.

When Fife and Chase are on that file, I don’t have to be. And holy cow, they have been on it. When you’re done here, you should have a look at these gems:

Details withheld on fired scientists to save health agency embarrassment, MPs say. Remember all those questions about the infliltration of the top-security Winnipeg infections-diseases lab that Trudeau dismissed as “racist”? Turns out the answers were kept secret not because of national security, but because they made the government look so bad.

Compromised, even: Scientists were fired for providing confidential information to China,

The more things change, the more Canada carries on doing business with Beijing: Canada stops sharing dangerous pathogens, but some research collaboration continues between top Canadian virus lab and China.

The more things change. . .

Here’s Dominic Barton, a major inspiration behind Trudeau’s open-borders disaster, the svenagali in Trudeau’s bid for the Liberal leadership in 2013, chair of Trudeau’s post-election Council on Economic Growth and our ambassador to China for the duration of Canada’s humiliation in the Kovrig-Spavor abduction fiasco, from just three weeks ago: China offers ‘new way of thinking,’ former Canadian ambassador tells business audience.

Foreign interference? What foreign interference? Whatever might you mean? B.C. Senator Yuen Pau Woo challenges reports suggesting China targeted MPs. Even the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation says it can’t rule out the possibility that something dodgy was involved in all the money the Trudeau Foundation was getting from those sketchy Chinese billionaires.

And now. . .

What follows is some necessary background that was on the far side of the February 24 Real Story paywall, and after that, a brief guest post by my friend Kaveh Shahrooz. This is important, if only because the result of this unreported debacle could mean the re-election of Majid Jowhari, who has proposed that the Trudeau’s supine, obsequious accomodations on Beijing’s behalf should serve as the “model” for Canada’s relationship with the Khomeinist head of the Hamas-Hezbollah snake in Tehran.

About Kaveh Shahrooz, the Conservatives, and the Persian diaspora.

In explaining what the hell had just happened, and why the Richmond Hill Conservative nomination recruitment cutoff date wasn’t left until at least after Nowruz, the “issue” Kaveh says the Conservatives don’t understand is this:

Tehran runs a grey-zone and hybrid-warfare strategy targeting the NATO countries. Much like Beijing’s approach, “elite capture,” disinformation and mischief-making in the Iranian diaspora feature prominently in Tehran’s tactical toolbox.

Everything Tehran does is in service of its own filthy-rich elites, and those elites are wholly beholden to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is the military-industrial complex that controls Iran’s crony-capitalist economy. The IRGC also runs a multi-front alliance with Moscow and Beijing to strengthen a galaxy of proxy armed fronts throughout the Greater Middle East, including the terrorist groups Hezbollah, the de facto Houthi government of Yemen, and Hamas.

What the Conservatives don’t seem to understand is how successful Tehran has been in manipulating the anti-Khomeinist diaspora against itself by exploiting the usual curse of factionalism that besets pretty much all movements of exiled democrats.

The expatriate Persians may be especially afflicted by this ailment.

Unity in Disunity

As the uprising was well underway following the September, 2022 death of Mahsa Amini in in the custody of Iran’s hated morality police, there were hopeful signs that the fractious Iranian diaspora was getting its act together, after failing to effectively unite behind a succession of Iranian uprisings going back years.

Last March, several key diaspora figures coalesced behind the Mahsa Charter of Solidarity and Alliance for Freedom, which led to the Alliance for Freedom and Democracy in Iran (AFDI). The AFDI united a spectrum from the “left” to the “right” among anti-regime diaspora groups.

The charter’s key signatories included the prominent Iranian-American women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad, the monarchists’ long-deposed “crown prince” Reza Pahlavi and Canada’s Hamed Esmaeilion, the leading voice for the families of the dead from the Ukrainian airliner the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shot down in 2020. The signers’ list also included the 2003 Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, Abdullah Mohtadi from the leftist Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, and several Iranian-born personalities from Europe.

Several of these opposition figures gathered in Toronto last March, shortly after they’d signed the charter. But even by then, the ad-hoc alliance was fraying. One of the first to bolt was Canada’s Esmaeilion, who found himself constantly badgered online and in person by fringe supporters of Pahlavi. Over the following months, key figures began to drop away. The alliance never really recovered.

In an analysis for the Atlantic Council, the historian and author Arash Azizi doesn’t fault Pahlavi. “However, critics say Pahlavi hasn’t done enough to distance himself from many of his chauvinistic supporters who don’t practice the liberal message he preaches,” Aziz wrote. “Some supporters predictably claim this to be a case of some ‘bad apples.’ But the evidence doesn’t support this view.

“This isn’t just about masked protesters and online trolls . . . some of his prominent supporters preach a far-right nationalism that is aggressively exclusionary to those they call the “1979ers,” which seems to include all of Iran’s leftists and republicans.”

Mohammad Reza’s regime was overthrown in the 1979 revolution that ended up saddling Iranians with the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as supreme leader. The Ayatollah’s Islamist theocracy rules by torture and trucheon to this day. Azizi’s conclusion: it’s unlikely that the expatriate Iranian opposition will figure a way out of its “decades-long pattern of political irrelevance” any time soon.

In the days leading up to what you can think of as the Conservative Party’s decision to ditch Kaveh Shahrooz, what the party brass saw on the horizon were the thunderclouds of a massive disinformation and propaganda campaign that was already targeting Sharooz. They also saw nasty squalls of backbiting and rumour-mongering from within the diaspora itself, and from within the Conservative fold.

So maybe the Conservatives just chose to cut their losses, you could say. Maybe it’s just how things are done in politics. After all, the Conservatives are in politics to get elected. Is that cynical?

It certainly didn’t help that some of the calls were coming from inside the house.

When the knives come out

Some of the nastier objections to Kaveh’s candidacy, as you would expect, came by way of social media accounts of dubious provenance. Not without reason, Kaveh says quite a few were conscripted from the Khomeinist regime’s vast army of twitterbots.

Weirdly, some came even from Australia. The Australian crank “National Conservative, Monarchist, Anti-Communist” windbag David Votoupal declared Shahrooz to be unfit to serve as a Canadian MP because Kaveh belongs to “a class of Iranians who prefer Western ‘values’ to Iranian ones, and care nothing for Iranian history, culture and identity.”

The weird turned pro on February 3 with a bizarre public intervention by Ontario Conservative MPP Goldie Ghamari, who posted texts on Twitter that Shahrooz had sent her innocently asking for her advice and counsel about running his campaign (see here and here).

I’d been in correspondence with Ghamari for quite a while by then. She’d asked for advice on how to get opinion pieces published in the National Post. We’d swapped notes on Hamas sympathizers. That sort of thing. But when she went after Kaveh, I told her she’d let a lot of people down and that I was finished with her.

Her response, among other weird things, was that Kaveh Shahrooz is a supporter of the Mojahedin-e-Kalkh. This is a dangerous libel. . . I also know it to be false, because I know Kaveh.

Ghamari also circulated a Farsi-language diatribe making the same claim that also accused the former Liberal justice minister Irwin Cotler of the same thing. I know that to be false, too, because I’m quite familiar with Cotler. He founded the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, where I’m a senior fellow.

In my brief exchange with Ghamari, this was the giveaway: “Ask him why he rejects the democratically elected Lion and Sun flag that represents the people of Iran. He never holds it. Recently he’s taken some pictures with it to save face. But he never holds it. Ask him why and see what answer he gives you.”

The Shah’s Nostalgic Zealots

If this strikes you as excedingly petty and weird, it’s because Goldie Ghamari is a monarchist, which is to say she’s a supporter of Iran’s “crown prince” Reza Pahlavi, whose father Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was the shah of Iran. And theres nothing wrong with that.

I’ve never had any cause to quarrel with Iranian monarchists. I’ve met perfectly nice Iranian monarchists. Most of them seem like good people. You can spot them at rallies by their flag, the Lion and Sun flag from the old regime. But some, like Ghamari, allow their enthusiasms to degenerate into something approaching a fanaticism that even the “crown prince” Reza Pahlavi has tried to disavow.

There is a core of monarchists who seem to split their time between activism opposing the Khomeinist regime and attacking anti-regime leaders who are not monarchists. Like Masih Alinejad, the courageous, high profile Iranian-American women’s rights activist. And like Kaveh Shahrooz.

In their campaign against Kaveh, quite a few monarchists have rallied around the failed comedian and alt-right “journalist”Daniel Bordman, who was for some reason extremely dyspeptic about Kaveh’s bid for the Conservative ticket in Richmond Hill. Kaveh is a “detestable man,” says Bordman. When Kaveh dropped his bid for the Conservative ticket, Bordman crowed: “I'm proud to have confronted this charlatan.”

Here’s the odd thing. Daniel Bordman is best known for having been successfully sued for defamation and ordered by Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice to pay a whopping $500,000 to former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s campaign chair, Walied Solimon.

It was such a slam-dunk case that in its summary judgment the court said there was no need to consider Soliman’s defence, which described Bordman is a “hatemonger, a racist, and a member of the alt-right community of demagogues, hatemongers, conspiracy theorists, and Islamophobes.”

What is the deal with these people and their obsession with Kaveh Shahooz?

You tell me.

Why did Poilievre want Kaveh Shahrooz to run in Richmond Hill?

This is the easiest question to answer. Poilievre asked Kaveh to run because he would have been spectacularly electable.

Kaveh Sharooz is a recognizable name in the riding, and he came with a lot of big-tent appeal to the riding’s Liberal-leaning voters. He’d even made a run for the Liberal nomination in Richmond Hill just prior to the 2015 election that brought Justin Trudeau’s Liberals to power.

He’d been beaten in a dirty campaign waged by Majid Jowhari.

While Jowhari has been taking pains to cover his tracks lately, he came on the scene as an open enthusiast for re-establishing relations with Tehran and inviting the Komeinist elites’ dirty money into Canada.

Until it became slightly unfashionable to do so, Jowhari was given to praising Trudeau’s obsequious approach to China as the “model” Canada should adopt in its relations with Iran, taking in “economical, environmental, social, cultural, research and innovation” issues. This would allow Ottawa to address “sensitive issues such as human rights, in a non-obtrusive way.”

Kaveh broke with the Liberals for good in 2017. That’s when Stephane Dion - the Liberal foreign minister at the forefont of the push to re-establish the diplomatic ties with Tehran that Conservative Foreign Minister John Baird had broken - refused to endorse a Conservative motion condemning the genocide committed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) against the Yazidi minority in the Sinjar Mountains of Northern Iraq.

Kaveh’s a well-respected member of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s board of experts and an adviser to the Cyrus Forum For Iran’s Future. He’d led the successful multipartisan campaign establishing Canada as the first UN member state to recognize the Khomeinist regime’s 1988 massacre of thousands of political prisoners as a crime against humanity.

Over the years, Kaveh had become a good friend and supporter of Israel. He’d been a tireless campaigner for Magnitsky Sanctions on Khomeinist officials and for forcing Ottawa to list the IRGC as a terrorist organization.

Despite all this, Kaveh wouldn’t have been a “single-issue” candidate. He wasn’t simply a function of “diaspora politics.” He’d developed enviable credentials as a champion of Iranian democracy and a solid reputation as an international human rights lawyer, but Kaveh was more than ready and able to champion Poilievre’s “common sense” approach to the Richmond Hill riding’s bread-and-butter anxieties.

In the end, the party brass decided Kaveh wasn’t important enough to hold onto, even though Poilievre had gone out of his way to recruit him. The shiv was put between Kaveh’s ribs by Conservative headquarters, specifically by the party’s director of political operations Jeremy Liedtke. Kaveh’s full public statement is here.

I was more than willing to report Liedtke’s side of it. I’d told Conservative HQ that I was a couple of hours from deadline and I needed a response from him. You might think that was asking too much in too little time, but in the ordinary course of business in this racket, it isn’t. In any case, it’s 36 hours later and still, nothing.

The Conservatives do not want to talk about this, at all. And no wonder.

What follows was written by Kahveh Shahrooz:

Two Princes (Or, Jefferson in English, Pinochet in Persian)

If you don't speak Persian but have some passing interest in Iran, you might be confused by some of the angry commentary you've seen in the past few months on Reza Pahlavi, the 63 year-old son of Iran's last monarch. The best way I can describe it is that, since the Woman Life Freedom movement, there have emerged two Reza Pahlavis.

The first is the one that makes nice speeches in several languages about democracy and the people's right to choose their system of government. This Pahlvi is consistent with his rhetoric for decades. I'm not a fan of monarchy, but had been impressed with this Reza Pahlavi the few times I met him in the past few years. From my own tiny perch, I had encouraged a coalition among different opposition groups with this Pahlavi during the 2022 uprising.

But in the last couple of years a much darker version of Pahlavi has emerged. Or, more accurately, a much darker group has arisen around Pahlavi. It's his spouse openly (in Persian) calling for the death of leftists. It's his chief of staff (in Persian) calling any journalist who challenges Pahlavi a "terrorist". It's one of his advisors openly (in Persian) yearning for the hanging of clerics from trees, and threatening those who don't support Pahlavi that they better get onboard or risk facing "the sharp edge" of Pahlavi's "nationalist" movement.

It's the millions, literally millions, of vulgar tweets (mostly in Persian) by Pahlavi's purported supporters directed at anyone that does not bend the knee to him and does not acknowledge the “fact” that Pahlavi is the “only alternative” to the regime. I've received my fair share, but their vitriol is especially directed at Masih Alinejad. That an ambitious woman from a lower-class background who has more media savvy and actual activist accomplishments than their blue-blood prince seems to irk them endlessly.

You will notice that much of the darker stuff happens in Persian. The image presented to the Western world is of a democrat. The threats by the "sharp-edged" gang are in Persian.

To his credit, Pahlavi has said a couple of things about being respectful to others. But the tone from the top, from his own team, has undermined that repeatedly. For his part, it is hard to know what Pahlavi is doing. Whereas he once spoke to a diverse array of Persian-language journalists, he no longer talks to anyone except the most obsequious media. It's difficult to know if he is aware of what is happening around him; his chief of staff is reported to tightly control the information he gets and is said to have an almost Rasputin-like hold on Pahlavi’s wife; but I can't confirm that personally. Or, if he knows and simply doesn't have the management skills to correct things. Or if he knows and actually prefers this Janus-like "two princes” strategy.

For the sake of Iran’s opposition, and Iran, I hope that the first Pahlavi wins out. The first Pahlavi gave hope to those of us that want democracy and may be able to inspire hope again.

The second suggests a much darker future.