Can We Stop Normalizing Antisemitism Now?
It may be ineradicable, but can we at least not subsidize it? And if it's not antisemitism we're dealing with, then what are we supposed to call it?
My editors at the National Post asked me to write a column based on the research and disclosures in last Sunday’s Real Story Special, More Money For Maroufians, which included details about hitherto unreported federal cash acquired by the notorious Laith Marouf, and also background on roughly $225,000 in federal funds spent on a platform that distributes programming from what NATO has identified as a Kremlin propaganda operation.
So I wrote something. It ran in the Post Wednesday online, Trudeau Liberals Can’t Stop Attracting Anti-Semites, and the piece contains some additional revelations about terrorist-fanciers and Holocaust deniers at that shindig on Parliament Hill last week and other things that came my way after last Sunday’s newsletter.
There’s so much to this whole scandal that I haven’t had time or space to report, like a strange cloak-and-dagger standoff at the Canada Revenue Agency over national-security confidences arising from a case involving an organization that has been blessed with about $3 million in federal “anti-hate” money, for example.
That’s going to have to go below the paywall, I’m afraid, along with a genuinely funny story I’ve been meaning to tell about a false-alarm panic set off a few days ago by an alleged threat to burn down a building in Ottawa. There was no threat, and besides I was nowhere near the joint, I swear.
Anyway, there’s a lot unfolding pretty well as I write this that’ll be up in front here for everyone. For instance: There’s been yet another exceedingly creepy event on Parliament Hill.
In attendance was the New Democratic Party’s foreign affairs critic, Heather McPherson. I vote we cut McPherson some slack here. She’s issued a genuine apology, not one of those “sorry what we did caused you to be disgusted” apologies, or the “Gee we didn’t know who’d show up” at the Canada-Palestine Parliamentary Friendship Group jamboree, of the kind we heard from the Friendship Group chair, the Liberal MP Salma Zahid.
Also for instance, I’ll have some background on the character in the harshest glare of Thursday’s limelight, Fareed Khan, the public relations and lobbying founder of the unpersuasively-named Canadians United Against Hate. As it happens, Khan is well known to me. We have what you might call a history.
A Brief Intermission, With Newsreel.
My regular column this week was on the Canada-China COP-15 rodeo underway in Montreal, Beijing, Biodiversity and the 'Cooperation' Trap, which gave me a chance to point out a strange Disco Era relic that’s been flying under everybody’s radar for the past 30 years. It’s an Ottawa-Beijing deal that’s seriously compromised by Beijing’s reputation for both “elite capture” and “greenwashing” operations.
Even when it was set up in 1993, the China Council for International Cooperation on the Environment and Development was a kind of holdover from a decade earlier, when Pierre Trudeau jimmied with CIDA grant eligibility requirements on behalf of the trade lobby to redirect foreign-aid funds to China. It helped China establish the ongoing fiction that it’s a “developing country” like Botswana or something. The point was to assist Beijing in laying the foundations of what has rapidly become a globe-encircling state-capitalist plutocracy.
The CCICED head office is in Beijing. The CCICED’s Secretariat Support Office is in Winnipeg. After all these years, after everything that’s happened, Canadian taxpayers are still paying for it.
Here’s me with the Post’s John Ivison and Sabrina Maddeux reviewing the latest historic events that Xi Jinping’s megalomaniacal bellicosity has catapulted onto the front pages. Is global “free trade” dead? Yes. Sorry for looking so scruffy. I’d just rolled in.
I’ll have more on the COP15 Biodiversity gathering in Sunday’s Real Story newsletter, including what I hope will be a pleasant read about those few remaining lost worlds on earth where biological, cultural and linguistic diversity coincide and intersect. A few years ago my fascination with the subject took me around the world and resulted in this book: The Sixth Extinction: Journeys Among the Lost and Left Behind. One place I really regretted not visiting, although I was close by, was East Turkistan, or Xinjiang, homeland of the Uyghurs. Too late now. The place is a giant slave camp.
Back to the main attraction.
It just never ends.
The latest scoop comes again from the Documenting Antisemitism crew (where has the Ottawa Press Gallery gone?) whose work I acknowledged in my Post piece about the Friendship Group jamboree. The DA crew broke the story on Twitter on Thursday.
This was the lede: “Just days after a gathering of multiple antisemites at Parliament Hill, this morning NDP critic for Foreign Affairs [Heather McPherson] organized another ignominious gathering with Fareed Khan for International Human Rights Day.” It’s an 11-Tweet thread, starting here.
Soon after, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs issued a statement. “When marking Human Rights Day 2022, it’s not a lot to ask elected officials to share their stage with groups that embody the universal values that the day is meant to promote — and not with ones that promote hate.”
CIJA was referring to Khan’s Canadians United Against Hate group and to Canada’s anti-Israel lobby, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East. CJPME is another beneficiary of federal grant money, incidentally, roughly $7,000 from Employment and Social Development Canada since 2018.
Other groups at Thursday’s press conference were the otherwise reputable Justice for All Canada group ($9,500 from Heritage Canada this summer) and the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, a solid bunch. Also presenting was John Packer, director of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa. You can watch the press conference here.
The Problem With Fareed Khan
Khan was the animateur of Thursday’s press conference.
The Documenting Antisemitism group’s Twitter dossier on Khan details that he has declared himself “100 percent in agreement” with the proposition that “Zionism is exactly the same as Nazism” and a “construct of the psychopathic mind.” Zionists are “out to destroy Judaism, Islam and Christianity,” Khan has claimed, “replacing these religions, and global political structure, with the Zionist New World Order.”
Quiz Break.
Who calls Israel “white Jewish supremacy in practice,” Fareed Khan or the drooling antisemite Laith Marouf? Trick question. They both do. No peeking: Who said this, Fareed Khan or the infamous Trumpist Judeophobe Kanye West? “Somehow, our country has been taken over by about 300 Zionists.” Your answer here.
We now resume our scheduled broadcast.
Let’s please drop the pretense that an obscenity is not antisemitic if it’s “anti-Zionist,” shall we? Israel has “used western guilt over the Holocaust to literally get away with murder,” Khan says. He’s like a human antisemitic outburst algorithm. His rap sheet goes on and on.
Back in February, 2021, after dealing with Khan for years in my capacity as a journalist and his as an advocate for the Rohingyas in Canada, I hung up on him. I refused to answer his emails. There were reasons I’ll get into on the far side of the paywall, where I’ll also be going over the other touchy stuff I mentioned up top, and also Liberal MP Anthony Housefather’s hopes about how Ottawa might get itself sorted. And also that funny story I’ve been dying to tell, which I hope might introduce a bit of levity into an otherwise depressing state of affairs.