It’s not quite what it says on the tin.

There's something deeply disturbing about the milieu and the mindset around Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s avowedly anti-racist, feminist and progressive Liberal government.

A short-lived scandal, but so rich in ironies:

A federally funded firehose of spittle-flecked antisemitism, highbrow anti-Zionism and back-alley racism, out in the open, going back years – and he’s the victim here. Having availed himself of hundreds of thousands of Canadian tax dollars and platforms provided by Khomeinists and spin doctors for Vladimir Putin and Bashar Assad, the Canadian mainstream press finally notices him. He gets outed.

And when that happens, he blames the Zionists.

That’s from an essay of mine just now published in the webzine State of Tel Aviv. Among the persistent questions about L’Affaire Marouf:

How the hell could something like this have happened?

How could someone like Laith Marouf go unnoticed for years as he rakes in hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CRTC, then gets an endorsement from Diversity Minister Ahmed Hussen?

How did he get past the entire federal Anti-Racism Secretariat (such a thing actually exists), and then get invited by the bureaucrats working under Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez to engorge himself with even more grant money so he can hector federal broadcast regulators . . . about racism?

Sometimes, the answer to vexing questions like these can be found right in front of your nose. It’s been there all the time. In this case, it involves a redefinition of racism in such a way that it can be staring you straight in the face, and you’re not allowed to see it.

We’ve been encouraged to think about Marouf as a kind of exotic, introduced species that has been suddenly discovered to everyone’s surprise in an otherwise pristine ecosystem of diversity, inclusion and equity. That’s what’s wrong about the way this story has been told.

Think of it this way. In the ecosystem that supports Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Diversity Minister Ahmed Hussen and Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez as apex predators (herbivorous though they may appear), Marouf’s species - its genus, order, phylum and domain - is endemic.

In the mindset and the ideological milieu that supports this ecosystem, only white people can be racist, “left-wing” extremism is nothing to be concerned about, and antisemitism occurs only in the bierkellers and never in the bistros. My friend Ben Cohen has been onto this for years.

In that same mindset and milieu you will find an abundance of rationalizations for accomodating, trading with, appeasing, and apologizing for the most gruesome police states - Xi Jinping’s China, Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Ali Khamenei’s Iran. After all, who are “we” to impose “our values” on “them”?

And this brings the world to where we’re at, in the Age of Monsters. I’ve been peering into the abyss for more than 15 years now, beginning where you could say it started, in the Russian Far East. Khabarovsk, Irkutsk, Buryatia, places like that. It was the Springtime of the Oligarchs. I wrote about those days a bit here: And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Kyiv to be born?

Defence Drill, Young Soviet Pioneers, Leningrad, 1937.

It was around the time the leaders of the liberal democracies thought it would be clever to admit China into the World Trade Organization. That’s when we put the knife to our own throat. Peering into the abyss has been a habit of mine since then. I’ve been following the monsters on the road through Hong Kong, Syria, Afghanistan and other such places. The National Post published some of my observations from the precipice last week:

The weakening of even the most advanced democracies has come from within and from without, and it’s often unclear which is which and where the line is. Globalization’s interlocked supply chains and the emergence of global digital information and financial networks have exposed democratic states as never before to subversion, election interference, disinformation, “elite capture” and dangerous trade dependencies.

It’s going to be a busy week, and the week begins with a remarkable address to the European Union’s annual ambassadors’ conference this morning from Josep Borrell, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. In Europe, it seems, the penny may be dropping, at long last. Try to imagine Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Jolie saying these things. I know. You can’t:

I think that we Europeans are facing a situation in which we suffer the consequences of a process that has been lasting for years in which we have decoupled the sources of our prosperity from the sources of our security. . .

Our prosperity has been based on cheap energy coming from Russia. Russian gas – cheap and supposedly affordable, secure, and stable. It has been proved not [to be] the case. And the access to the big China market, for exports and imports, for technological transfers, for investments, for having cheap goods. . .

The war in Ukraine has persisted. We did not foresee how effectively Ukraine would resist. First, we did not believe that the war was coming. I have to recognise that here, in Brussels, the Americans were telling us “They will attack, they will attack”, and we were quite reluctant to believe it. . . We did not believe that this was going to happen, and we did not foresee that Ukraine was ready to resist as fiercely and as successfully as they are doing. Certainly, thanks to our military support. Without it, it would have been impossible, but they put some things from their part. . .  

And I am afraid that we are only at the beginning, that the food crisis will only make things worse in many parts of the world where you are deployed. . .

This is a perfect storm. . .

You can read it here. You can watch here.