'How could this be happening?'
Bloodcurdling oaths of allegiance to Hamas, faculty-lounge conflations of mass murder with "resistance," Jews from Paris to Vancouver afraid for their children. This did not come out of nowhere.
The Blueprint
The depravity - unless you’ve been hiding in a mountain cabin away from wifi and cellular service since last Saturday, you’ll know exactly what I mean - has bubbled up out of a virulent strain of antisemitism that has been coursing through Canada’s liberal-left bloodstream for years.
It has been there all along in the leadership of public sector unions and federally-subsidized “social justice” networks, in the social sciences and humanities faculties of Canada’s most prestigious universities, and across the entire milieu of avant garde activism. It is by no means unique to Canada, but there are distinct cultural forces and a prevailing “post-national” ethos that have made this country especially susceptible to it.
I don’t mean to reduce the phenomenon to a simple “narrative,” but an important trajectory in the depravity’s normalization can be traced to a foundational conference in Cairo on December 18 and 19, 2002.
That’s where the blueprint was drawn up for the “anti-Zionist” degeneracy we’ve been witnessing since last Saturday’s pogrom in Israel’s southern villages and towns. The 2002 Cairo gathering was the first in a series of annual get-togethers between senior “left-wing” activists from the NATO countries (Canadians notably among them) and Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi and Syrian Baathists, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and an assortment of police-state delegations from the “Global South.”
Building on networks from a decade of “anti-globalization” mass protests, the strategy set out in the Cairo blueprint would go on to mobilize millions of marchers in the streets of Europe and North America, and it would end up wielding extraordinary influence on mainstream politics along the way. At its fulcrum was a determination to single out "Zionist perpetrators of genocidal crimes" on a global scale. In other words, Jews.
That’s what today’s Real Story is about.
A note on this newletter’s delay
To chronicle this stuff is to make enemies. Today’s newsletter was supposed to be out yesterday, but among other things, on Friday I had to deal with correspondence associated with a lawsuit. I will win if it ever gets in front of a judge. I can’t discuss it. Sorry about that, and I’m sorry this newsletter is arriving on shabbat. All I’ll say for now:
By delightful coincidence, my defence was serendipitously strengthened, even if unnecessarily, by this blockbuster, out Friday morning, by my friend Stewart Bell over at Global News.
The documents that Stewart got his hands on clearly demonstrate an intimate relationship between the lavishly-subsidized Muslim Association of Canada and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the fountainhead of Hamas and its jihad. The documents also detail the MAC’s involvement in a “Hamas support network” based in Qatar.
This newsletter’s subscribers and the readers of the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen will be aware of my reporting on the MAC and its Muslim Brotherhood connections. The MAC has consistently and ferociously denied those connections. and has stridently objected to my reporting.
I’ll have to leave it at that for now.
A quick preamble
For newcomers, it might be helpful to have a quick look at Thursday’s Real Story newsletter, In Front Of One’s Nose. It’s a brief introduction to Left-Islamist alliances going back to the 1980s, with particular notice of Germany’s Red Army Faction, the Baader-Meinhof collaboration between posh German radicals and the Palestine Liberation Organization, aided by East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi.
The RAF didn’t formally shut down until 1998. Today’s Real Story will focus on the much broader and more sophisticated 21st-century alliance that was established four years later in Cairo. We’ll get into it as soon as I get a couple of things out of the way. Actually, three things.
First, this work brings grief, takes time and costs money, so:
Second: When done here readers might want to see my contributions to the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen this week As Israeli innocents are hunted and murdered, certain Canadian ‘progressives’ choose to celebrate, and Hamas supporters enjoy safe haven and left-wing backing in Canada. There’s also a trove of links and resources in my newsletter, Everything Has Changed. It's not just about Israel. It's about civilization and its enemies. And its enemies are among us.
Third, and most importantly: Because I’ve spent years documenting the phenomenon of alliances between ostensibly “left wing” institutions and Islamist parties and terror groupings, I thought that after everything that has happened this week I might make some use of myself by reproducing some of the results of that research here and now. So that’s what this weekend’s Real Story is for.
I’ve published some of that work over the years in the mainstream press, but most of what follows derives from a 5,800-word investigation I produced for the Z Word project of the American Jewish Committee, later published by the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel. I devote this newsletter to the memory of my friend and collaborator in that research, David Ouellette, who lost his gallant struggle with cancer on the morning of February 15, 2022.
The Cairo Declaration
It’s almost impossible to find the Cairo Declaration anywhere. It’s always been that way. Its authors and the key figures who set out to implement its nine-point strategy haven’t exactly gone out of their way to preserve its memory. Even at the outset, the Declaration was witheld from full view. Britain’s Socialist Workers Party, a key organization in the Cairo network, was careful to publish only the most anodyne sections of the Declaration in the weeks following its adoption.
Apart from the contents of my own files, the only remaining online version I’ve found comes from the archives of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, a “third camp” Trotskyist group in Britain. Founded by the Irish working-class socialist Sean Matgamna, the AWL has always cleaved to reasonable standpoints on the Israel-Palestine question - rejecting violence and favoring a two-state solution, for instance. This is unique on the hard left.
The declaration identifies the Palestine issue as "integral to the internationalist struggle against neo-liberal globalization," and it set out a brilliantly cunning strategy to put “Zionist aggression” at the centre of a new global campaign. In Canada, the campaign was an enormous success.
The declaration and the pledges the Cairo delegates made to one another came at a pivotal moment for the western “Left.” Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the primary targets of mass left-wing mobilization through the 1990s were the institutions of globalization, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It was a “unipolar” world. Al Qaida’s atrocities on September 11, 2001 had rendered the “Left” incoherent and delirious. The anticipated Anglo-American overthrow of Saddam Hussein was just around the corner.
You have to hand it to the Cairo delegates. Circumstances were ideal for a grand Left-Islamist alliance, and they seized the moment in the form of what was to be called the “anti-war” movement. It was the perfect vehicle. In Britain and Canada, especially, the strategy worked. Canada’s national “anti-war” coalition, the Canadian Peace Alliance, was led and staffed by Cairo conventioneers. The alliance enjoyed several years of favorable prominence in the Canadian news media, which failed to notice who these people were, exactly, and what their agenda was.
The nine-point Left-Islamist consensus:
1. Objection to all American military presence on Arab lands, and the application of pressure on all Arab states to shut down U.S military bases and deny the Americans any air, naval, or land facilities. 2. Engage with popular organizations throughout the Global South to oppose American “hegemony” and neo-liberal globalization. 3. Organize within the international anti-globalization movement to forge links between anti-capitalist forces in the developed world and the Global South. 4. Promote “the unity of democratic forces and popular organizations” around the world to oppose the Anglo-American military effort in Iraq and “the genocidal crimes faced by Palestinians, supporting their right to resistance and struggle for liberation.” 5. Force the issue of Iraq and Palestine onto the anti-globalization agenda, particularly the upcoming Social Forum at Porte Allegre. 6. Conduct public relations propaganda of behalf of Saddam Hussein. The declaration didn’t describe this point that way, of course. The plan was to “invite Arab and international human rights organizations to evaluate humanitarian conditions in Iraq and disseminate their findings worldwide.” 7. “Prepare to send human shields to Iraq.” 8. Organize boycotts of U.S. and Israeli commodities, and agitate for the “right of return for Palestinians.” 9. Elect a steering committee to follow up on the declaration’s implementation.
Putting the blueprint Into effect
A key figure from “Left” in the declaration’s composition and its subsequent multi-year campaignwas John Rees of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which pioneered Left-Islamist collaboration with its formulation of the Respect Coalition.
An alliance between the SWP and the Muslim Association of Britain, the Respect Coalition was led by Cairo convention personality George Galloway, the disgraced British Labour MP who went on to be expelled from the party for counselling British troops in Iraq to disobey their commanding officers. Galloway became a sort of anti-war cult figure in Canada and a colourful “maverick MP” darling of the CBC and the Toronto Star.
Key figures from the Middle East in the founding convention: Nabil Negm, a political adviser to Saddam Hussein, and Saad Qassem Hammoundy, a senior Iraqi Baath Party official and Iraq's ambassador to the Arab League. The founding convention itself was reportedly financed by Egyptian interests heavily invested in Iraq.
We’re Canadians. We’re The Nice Ones
Canada was especially susceptible to the “anti-Zionist” activism in this new global movement, while in the United States most mainline opposition to the Iraq war was uninterested in championing the cause of Hamas or Hezbollah.
Anti-Zionism had nonetheless become a feature of New Left politics on both sides of the 49th parallel after Israel’s victory in the 1967 War. But this was especially the case in Canada, and after the 2006 Second Lebanon War “anti-Zionism” and an overt identification with Israel's enemies were ubiquitous elements of Canadian left-wing politics. Paradoxically, so was a strangely American kind of anti-Americanism.
By the time of the founding Cairo convention, the New Democratic Party, the the universities, a variety of national "activist" organizations and even the labour movement was dominated by a generation that had come of age in the heady days of the 1960s protest movement. Many of the prominent figures on the Canadian Left were American “draft dodgers.”
The deeply rooted social-justice traditions of the Canadian left ended up nearly eclipsed by counterculture politics and a “social justice” activism more familiar to Americans. Class solidarity was being traded in for identity politics and universalism was exchanged for cultural relativism. As the Canadian philosophers Andrew Potter and Joseph Heath put it, counterculture ideas eventually became "the conceptual template" for all leftist politics.
The NDP, which had traditionally opposed Canadian military and foreign-policy alliances with the United States, set out to capture the "anti-war" vote as its own. At the NDP's September, 2006 convention, delegates adopted a position on Afghanistan that could have been lifted straight off a placard from an American demonstration against the war in Iraq: "Support Our Troops. Bring Them Home".
NDP leader Jack Layton roused delegates with these words: "Canadians are not warmongers. Canada does not commit its soldiers to war just because that will get our prime minister in good with an administration of a certain sort in Washington."
As the United States was cast as the Great Satan, Israel found itself dismissed as the Little Satan, and this new “anti-war” movement was unlike its predecessors from the 1960s. The University of Chicago history professor Moishe Postone pointed to one of the big differences: The 21st century’s successor peace movement "did not express any sort of movement for progressive change."
It became commonplace for Canadian leftists to cite Eric Margolis, a Canadian founding editor of Pat Buchanan's far-right American Conservative magazine, as some sort of authority on Afghanistan. The York University political science professor James Laxer, a veteran of debates on the Canadian left, argued that foreign troops should be withdrawn from Afghanistan no matter that the result could well be "a fascistic theocracy."
Uprooted from a solid working-class conception of internationalist solidarity, the Canadian Left ended up serving as the base for an “anti-war” mobilization on behalf some of the most pro-war, antisemitic, homophobic, and tyrannical Islamists on earth.
Details on the far side of the paywall.