In Front Of One’s Nose
A shadowy alliance of Islamist antisemites and Canadian "progressives" goes back two decades, to a founding gathering in Cairo. . .
We’ll be going deep tomorrow. For today. . .
Last Saturday was bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. At last count, roughly 1,300 Israelis were slaughtered. Hundreds more horribly wounded, and 150 were taken hostage, including infants, children, women, the elderly and the disabled.
The horror arising from the massacres that gangs of Hamas terrorists carried out in Israel’s southern towns and villages quickly gave way to revulsion. Even before Israeli forces began their bombing runs aimed at Hamas targets in Gaza, the atrocities of last Saturday were being problematized, excused, defended, explained away and celebrated as legitimate acts of anti-colonial “resistance.”
This depravity didn’t come out of nowhere. For years, a virulent strain of antisemitism has been coursing through Canada’s liberal-left bloodstream, in the leadership of public sector unions, federally-subsidized “social justice” networks, the social sciences and humanities faculties of Canada’s most prestigious universities, and the entire milieu of avant garde activism.
That’s what I’m on about this week in the National Post (Hamas supporters enjoy safe haven and left-wing backing in Canada) and the Ottawa Citizen (In Canada, you're allowed to glorify terror and violence):
“To see what is in front of one’s nose,” the British literary giant George Orwell wrote in 1946, “needs a constant struggle.” Averse as Justin Trudeau’s Canada has become to any serious moral inquiry or anything like intellectual struggle, we shouldn’t be surprised that it is only now that a bloodcurdling sociopathology that has been incubating under Canadian noses all along is at last coming to public notice.
Tomorrow’s newsletter will set out in detail where that depravity came from, specifically and objectively, and how it mobilized, under the radar and sometimes out in the open. It was also sometimes deliberately ignored, but mostly it just went unnoticed, right under everybody’s noses.
The story of “left-wing antisemitism” can be traced back to the last century, with its most grotesque eruptions in such phenomena as Germany’s Red Army Factions. Also called the Baader-Meinhof Gang after its founders, activist Andreas Baader and journalist Ulrike Mainhof, the RAF carried out several assassinations, bombings, kidnappings and a plane hijacking.
The RAF was a collaboration between posh German radicals and the Palestine Liberation Organization, aided by the Stasi, East Germany’ secret police. Mostly dormant by the late 1980s, the RAF didn’t formally shut down until 1998.
Four years later, a much broader and more sophisticated 21st-century alliance was established at a founding convention in Cairo. Over the years, the annual Cairo conferences brought together senior left-wing activists - at least 20 from Canada - in annual get-togethers with Iraqi and Syrian Baathists, Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and other terrorist and revolutionary groupings.
How did it so successfully insinuate itself into liberal-left “discourse?
The dominant iteration of leftist activism in the 1990s was the anti-globalization movement. This was all about worldwide mobilizations to stage massive disruptive protests at meetings of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other such institutions. The more notable of these mass events occurred in Florence, Madrid, Washington and “the Battle in Seattle.”
After the Al Qaida atrocities of September 11, 2001, the focus shifted to “anti-war” mobilizations, and the anti-globalization networks provided a solid, worldwide base for what was to come. The 2002 Cairo blueprint set out a hybrid strategy that singled out Palestinian militancy as "integral to the internationalist struggle against neo-liberal globalization."
The greatest propaganda success of the so-called anti-war movement was in its enfeebling conflation of the Anglo-American military project in Iraq with the NATO-led international efforts in Afghanistan. Its commitments in Cairo included boycotts of both Israeli and American goods, and in its crosshairs were "Zionist perpetrators of genocidal crimes," in other words, Jews.
That’s what’s coming in the next Real Story. It’s important to understand the trajectory of the Cairo conventions because it’s the immediate progenitor of the mindset (it barely merits the term “ideology”) behind those gruesome declarations from faculty associations and public sector unions this week and those depravities shouted into megaphones from Montreal to Vancouver and from London to Sydney.
Back to the current moment
My column in print today follows from the backgrounder essay I wrote for the Post on Monday, As Israeli innocents are hunted and murdered, certain Canadian ‘progressives’ choose to celebrate, accompanied by a trove of links and resources in my last newsletter, Everything Has Changed. It's not just about Israel. It's about civilization and its enemies. And its enemies are among us.
Do have a look at those contributions after you’re done reading this Real Story Special. Sorry about all the links and the clutter today but they’ll be useful, I hope, and what’s to come is the result of research going back years. And now for a quick bit of news, and a cautionary note.
“Breaking,” as they say
In both my recent pieces in the Post and the Citizen, on Monday and in print today, I single out the presence in Canada of Samidoun: The Network. Samidoun is a terrorist-listed organization in Israel that you could call the overseas fundraising, recruitment and propaganda arm of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). I’ve been on their case (see all those links from my last newsletter) for quite a while, and they’ve been on my case, too, let me tell you.
Samidoun and the Palestinian Youth Movement are the main organizers and promoters of those “All Out for Palestine” rallies that are turning everybody’s stomachs this week.
The PFLP - which has its own Nazi past, as I’ve set out earlier, as does Hamas - is listed as a terrorist organization in Europe and the UK, in Israel and Canada and the United States. Our friends at the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and other Jewish advocacy organization have been arguing for a long time that Ottawa should never have granted Samidoun federal non-profit corporation status in the first place, and that it should be banned.
The news: In Berlin today German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Samidoun, headquartered in Vancouver, will be outlawed in Germany. "Our law governing associations is a sharp sword,” Scholz said. “And we, as a strong constitutional state, will draw this sword."
A caution: no blunt instruments allowed. Precision strikes only.
After what has happened this past week, I don’t quite know how there can be any coming back from this. No exertions of reconciliation can mend what has been broken. No diversity training, no workshops in anti-racism and no inter-faith seminars can expunge the obscenity of what has happened.
That’s quite the pessimistic tone I struck in my column this week, but I should say I still think the emergence or re-emergence of a “decent left” is possible. It would be a very good thing, in any case.
The question of that possbility was opened up by the ugly turn taken by the mainline “left” in the wake of 9-11. An important liberal-left response was articulated by the Euston Manifesto group, which produced what was arguably “the most serious split within the left since the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956,” according to the UK Guardian.
I was an early signatory of the manifesto, so that’s the grain of salt you should take if I come off like an auld miseryguts. Where I’m coming from:
The ideational package that is widely held to be “left-wing” or “progressive” at the moment is largely a postmodern masquerade play-acting at what were once genuinely progressive political standpoints. Among its guises is a “left wing” anti-Zionism that masks a bloodthirsty and especially sinister strain of antisemitism.
There are damn good people in left-wing activism still, besieged and lonely and backstabbed as they are. But the writing was on the wall by 2006, when the radical “left-wing” super-icon Judith Butler said this: “Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.”
I spent years documenting the political and organizational trajectory that allowed Butler to get away with that, and also led to this week’s displays of depravity, so I figured that after everything that has happened I could make some use of myself by laying out some of the results of those investigations, here in The Real Story.
The point is to shed some light on the horrible predicament both Israelis and Palestinians find themselves in. So that’s what’s coming up next. For now, chin up. Am Yisrael Chai, and my thoughts go out to our chums in the Holy Land (not Ireland, the other one), and before I get back to this I’m going to take a break with a ride on my Triumph Bonneville (the 1977 T140E 750) not the other one (the 2023 T100 900).
You know what to do:
Like many, I have friends and acquaintances that have 'leftist' views. They are good people in their day to day lives. Not specifically ideological. They're idealistic, decadently romantic in their desire for revolutionary change, and often ahistorical in their perspective. In light of the Hamas atrocities against the State of Israel and the Jewish people, I think these same people have been backed into an ideological corner by academics, activists, and political operatives, whereby the cost of saying what is true, and condemning these acts plainly, would extract a high social toll. Most people are cowardly for fear of being ostracized by their social and professional groups, so instead they are as likely to double down, equivocate, and attempt to show their 'progressive' bona fides. To do otherwise, to acknowledge the butchery, the rape, the indiscriminate disregard for life that Hamas and their enablers have shown, would demand they recognize they have aligned themselves with barbarity.
I guess I am asking the question, how do we buttress our social cohesion far away from the brutal reality of events in Israel? This concern pales in comparison to the matters Israel is facing, but defense of our civil society and the values its supposed to uphold needs to be attended to as well. Thank you, Terry, for your work.
Take your breaks when you can. You are doing important work. I pray for your protection.