Defiling the memory of dead Canadians
Today was supposed to be Canada's National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Terrorism. But nowadays, mass murderers and their devotees are celebrated as heroes.
Barely noticed at all by the Press Gallery in Ottawa, on Tuesday, MPs stood in the House of Commons for a moment’s silence to mark the anniversary of the gangland-style killing of Khalistani godfather Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Global News featured a one-sentence report, with a clip, here.
Nijjar was gunned down outside the Guru Nanak Temple in Surrey, B.C., on June 18, 2023. For a full day’s worth of background reading on all that, see Politics and the Punjabi Gangland Wars. While our Parliament’s strangely solemn observance of that particular anniversary went almost wholly unnoticed in Canada, it was a big story, for the right reasons, in India.
See: After Canadian Parliament pays tribute to Hardeep Singh Nijjar, Union minister Jaishankar recalls Kanishka bombing, or From no-fly list to parliamentary tribute: Nijjar Paradox in Canada, or 'We oppose any move ...': India on Canadian Parliament observing ‘one minute silence’ for Nijjar, and so on.
In this edition of the Real Story from last September, under the subheading Propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, and lies, and more recently in this Real Story edition under the subheadings Assassins Without Borders and Hardeep Singh Nijjar, Dead Man Walking, you will learn things about Nijjar that quite incoveniently overturn the image of the Guru Nanak Temple president as the peaceful “Sikh activist” we keep hearing about.
The variously unsavory and sordid aspects of Nijjar’s cirriculum vitae had gone almost entirely unreported elsewhere in this country until the publication this weekend of an extensive, months-long investigation by Nancy Macdonald and Greg Mercer, in the Globe and Mail: The Nijjar Enigma.
It’s gold-standard investigative journalism, and I want to praise the Macdonald-Mercer effort because unfortunately I’m going to have to return to the subject of the news media’s general inattentiveness to the facts and real-world context of this story, on the far side of the paywall, below.
It should give Canadians pause to consider that this week, of all weeks, the House of Commons devoted a minute’s silence to a man wanted on several terrorism charges in India who was on Canada’s no-fly list, whose Canadian bank acounts had been frozen for years, who finagled his way into this country by deceit and subterfuge and immediately set about the work of glorifying the terrorists responsible for the worst mass murder of Canadians in history.
Among other things, during his tenure as president of Surrey’s Guru Nanak Temple Nijjar oversaw the gurudwara’s transformation into a shrine to Talwinder Singh Parmar, the terrorist ringleader who organized the Air India atrocity of June 23, 1985.
Prior to 9-11, it was the bloodiest act of terrorism in aviation history. Of the 329 passengers aboard the Kanishka that day, 268 were Canadians. It’s why today is supposed to be Canada's National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Terrorism.
They were our people, and I confess I have personal reasons why I sometimes tend towards rage and sadness every June 23. The most succinct public explanation I’ve offered is here, in the National Post. By way of further explanation, which you can go right ahead and call a “bias,” is here, in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4: The Myths That Sustain Khalistan To This Day.
This newsletter was supposed to be a follow-up to last Tuesday’s 'Consequences for years to come', about the usually overlooked and unreported ascendancy of Beijing's powerful friends in high Canadian places, and about whether the NSICOP report will make a speck of difference. On that front, here’s my National Post piece from this past week, a user’s guide to governing Liberals various collusions and collaborations with Beijing’s agents, proxies and influence-peddlers in Canada.
I’ll be returning to that story soon enough, but today is June 23, and I’ve also got yet another Post deadline I’m up against in the wee hours of tomorrow morning, so do please bear with me.
One final link to what you’ll find in India’s respectable press today that should give you an idea of what’s behind the low opinion that prevails in India about Canada’s national-security and anti-terrorism capabilities: Canada knew Air India Kanishka was a potential target. Why didn't it act?
The undead Khalistani conspiracy theories
And what will today’s Air India commemorations look like? I wrote this in the early hours so I haven’t got anything to report, but Nijjar’s Sikhs for Justice outfit was intending to stage macabre disruptions of the Air India anniversary events in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa.
The SFJ obscenities derive from the lunatic proposition that it wasn’t Parmar’s Babbar Khalsa organization that carried out the Air India atrocity, but rather the Indian government itself, in a ploy to make Khalistanis look bad. See: Canada's worst terrorist atrocity and the awful conspiracy theory that won't die. You can thank NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh for keeping that lie in circulation, by the way.
Here’s the SFJ’s Gurpatwant Singh Pannun’s broadcast in a Khalistan demonstration in Vancouver this week, with a warning about traveling on Air India flights today: “Nobody should commute because your life could be in danger.” Pannun, wanted on several terrorism charges in India, issued the same warning last November. Pannun denied he was threatening anyone, saying he was just “informing and educating” people.
Parades celebrating Khalistani terrorism are becoming annual events in Canada, and Canadians journalists keep circulating lunatic “theories” and giving free rides to Khalistanis with the most lurid terrorist credentials, without even letting Canadians in on who it is they’re interviewing.
Sorry, casual drop-ins and free subscribers, but here’s where you’ve come to a paywall.