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Is a rogue element in India's spy agency the latest player in the Punjabi Gangland murder-for-hire racket? The Hogue Inquiry's first report is out (so's the jury). And a nemesis of mine is arrested.

This newsletter will be brief. This past week has been a perfect storm of important developments in stories I’ve been covering for longer than I care to remember. I’ve gone without a lot of sleep.

Ottawa: India is a terror threat. Delhi: Canada is a terror threat.

Both can be right, you know.

About the gangsters the RCMP has picked up in the Hardeep Nijjar murder case, too much of the Canadian coverage has been comically bad. I won’t bang on about that today.

For an entire Real Story archive on this story, here you go: Is India Interfering In Canada's Affairs?, Did Ottawa Sabotage Modi's Peace Talks?, Conspiracy Theories, From Inside The House and The Myths That Sustain Khalistan To This Day

The best and most sensible mainstream treatment of the latest developments is from yesterday’s New York Times: Canadian Arrests Highlight Alleged Gang Role in India’s Intelligence Operations. A better headline would have been Canadian Arrests Highlight Gang Role in Alleged Indian Intelligence Operations, but never mind.

Telling us what we already know, answering questions we didn’t ask

So much to say about the Hogue Inquiry’s first public report. Again so much that has been reported is just not helpful. Weirdness: the ubiquity of headlines to the effect that, yes, there was some interference, but the overall results of the 2019 and 2021 elections were not impacted. Do you know anyone who has suggested that the overall election results were impacted? No, of course you didn’t.

Real Story subscribers will know my first analysis: It’s not interference if it’s solicited, invited and welcomed.

And it’s not “foreign” when it involves the mobilization of Beijing’s vast strong-arming and influence-peddling infrasture that is already well established in Canada, and deeply entrenched in the governing Liberal Party’s fundraising, candidate-selection and activist base.

Jonathan Manthorpe was there on this story even before I was, which is saying something. He was known as the dean of Canadian war reporters when I was still cutting my teeth in Amritsar, in the years before the Air India atrocity. Jonathan’s got an updated edition of his book Claws of the Panda, just out.

For now, when you have a sec, read his latest in The Vancouver Sun, where we both once toiled: Beijing’s campaign of influence and intimidation in Canadian life goes beyond national elections. Do note his reference to “a fifth column to promote Beijing’s political aims on the streets of Canada,” and this: “We don’t need a public inquiry. We have mountains of evidence of the CCP’s campaign to turn Canada into a vassal state. What we need is political will, and that, unforgivably, is absent.”

Full marks to the Globe and Mail’s editorial this weekend, too:

“It’s no second coat of whitewash. The initial report from the public inquiry into foreign interference is necessarily incomplete, vague in some places and inconclusive in others. But already, Justice Marie-Josée Hogue has gone further than the earlier effort by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s hand-picked special rapporteur, David Johnston.

“In light of Justice Hogue’s findings, it’s clear that Mr. Johnston’s report amounted to a coverup, or at the very least an attempt to smother the controversy over China’s meddling in the 2019 and 2021 elections by taking aim, not at the government, but at the media and those who bravely chose to expose Beijing’s efforts by leaking classified information.”

As I was saying in the National Post, more than a year ago. . . David Johnston the right man to whitewash Chinese interference He has spent a half century supporting Beijing’s strategy to draw Canada into its orbit of influence. And this: David Johnston escapes inquiry into his own China dealings. The former governor general is a poster boy for 'elite capture'.

This coming week is going to be unmercifully busy. Starting with: Feds hope to table foreign influence legislation next week.

You can listen to my interview with Jas Johal, here, which touches on both the arrests in the Nijjar case and the Hogue report.

So that Jews can “feel safe” in the company of savage antisemites?

It happened exactly two years to the day after the National Post gave me the whole front page and a lot of space inside for the results of a major investigation into the antisemitic terrorism-advocacy Samidoun network, the international outreach arm of the terrorist-listed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

What happened? Samidoun’s internatonal coordinator Charlotte Kates gave a bloodcurdling speech on the steps of the Vancouver Public Library.

I paid very close attention to what Kates had to say for herself. I wrote about it for the National Post online here: Group banned in Germany gets carte blanche in Canada to glorify Hamas massacre. Samidoun is one of the main groups behind the anti-Israel rallies across the country.

The story ran in the Post’s print edition on the front page above the fold Wednesday morning. Before noon, the Vancouver Police Department issued this statement: VPD investigates alleged hate crime at Art Gallery protest. Kates had been arrested.

“The speaker praised the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and referred to a number of terrorist organizations as heroes,” the VPD annouced. I’m not claiming it was my reporting that led to Kates’ arrest. Not by a long shot.

Still, I should be satisfied, you might think. Yes and no.

When you’re done here, you can read my piece about Kates’ arrest, from Friday’s paper: Finally, a terrorist sympathizer is arrested.

You can listen to this interview I did with Jill Benett, here.

For deep background and inside story on the Samidoun network: with a lot of international intrigue and spy-versus-spy stuff: Canada’s Counter-Terror Clown Show and Canada's Samidoun: The Network.

I was pretty foggy for the first minute or so on Jill’s show, but I tried to keep my eye on the big question: What charge is the Vancouver Police Department investigating here, exactly? An alleged “hate crime”? What crime is that, exactly.

Here’s the VPD’s Sergeant Steve Addison: “We defend everyone’s right to gather and express their opinions, even when those opinions are unpopular or controversial. We also have a responsibility to ensure public comments don’t promote or incite hatred, encourage violence, or make people feel unsafe.”

In the company of screaming antisemites, Hamasniks, mass-murder fetishists and the windbag auxiliaries of listed Palestinian terrorist organizations, if it ever comes to pass that what I would want to “feel” is “safe,” just shoot me. I would rather want to feel a certain fire in the belly about the necessary work of civic hygiene involved in removing these elements from the public sphere altogether, if not from the face of the earth.

Just a personal opinion there. I’m not Jewish, and Canada’s Jewish advocacy organizations have expressed gratitude to the Vancouver police department. Kates’ arrest and immediate release, and her prohibition from vulgar harangues until she appears in court in October: that’s at least something, I guess. Her arrest came on the first day of Jewish Heritage Month in Canada. How too uplifting.

What’s the charge, officer?

It isn’t against the law to make people “feel unsafe” in Canada, yet. So here’s what’s readily available to Crown counsel and the B.C. Attorney-General:

Section 319 of the Criminal Code provides jail terms of up to two years for anyone who “incites hatred (or otherwise wilfully promotes hatred) against any identifiable group where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace.”

A problem: The people of Israel are not an “identifiable group” in Canadian law. Still, for a close examination of the likely breaches of the peace that can be anticipated by the now-commonplace exhortations of the type Kates shouted into her megaphone from the steps of the Art Gallery, see my first story last week, before Kates’ arrest. Pay attention to what the former RCMP counterterrorism investigator John Mecher had to say there.

Mecher was on the Mounties’ team in the Toronto 18 case, a foiled terror plot in the aftermath of 9-11. “With the Toronto 18, we had a small group of people, some of whom had known each other for a while, and they built their little group and they did it in secret. They didn’t have these massive demonstrations where like-minded people can easily identify one another.”

A more appropriate charge arising from Kates’ remarks: Section 318(1) of the Criminal Code provides for prison terms of up to five years for advocating or promoting genocide. I cited Kates remarks at length. I can’t imagine what pretzel logic would be required to argue that advocating the violent dismemberment of the State of Israel and forcing Israelis to submit to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad is somehow not advocating or promoting genocide.

A problem: Advocacy along those lines has become commonplace in Canada’s activist circles since October 7. It’s become high fashion among the avant-garde. No prosecutions are pending. Awkward.

A more suitable and evidence-rich case against Samidoun and Kates and the Samidoun lodestar Khaled Barakat is available under the Criminal Code’s Section 83.05(1), which provides jail terms of up to five years for knowingly acting on behalf of, at the direction of or in association with a listed terrorist entity. Samidoun is the global outreach wing of the terrorist-listed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

But charges under this Section would be especially awkward. Samidoun is clearly and directly affiliated with the PFLP, which participated in it association is banned in Germany, where Kates and Barakat lived off and on over the years until they were deported and barred from re-entry to Europe a couple of years ago.

Three days after Israeli authorities listed Samidoun specifically on Israel’s own registry of terrorist groups, Samidoun was granted registration under Canada’s Not-for-Profit Corporations Act.