Post-Easter Special: We Are Ruled By Dunces

Liberal hysterics on Al Aqsa, Vladimir Putin's Canadian fanbase, Emanuel Macron: Loathed at Home, Loved in Beijing, and Xi's Man in the Senate Beclowns Himself Again.

All these things in this Real Story Special! Except in reverse order.

It’s been more than a week since my last newsletter, so we’ve got some catching up to do. Lots of unreported stuff to reveal, some very awkward and unreported news-media news and backstory along those lines, all without a paywall.

A Disturbance in the Force, Briefly

Getting this out of the way:

I was laid low by a vicious chest cold (I’m well on the mend) and then power outages at the home place meant the Racist Bogeyman column I filed to the Post and the Citizen was so late it had to be held a day. This past week I was only barely more punctual, as my long-suffering editors will attest. Also I had to factor in a strange tantrum Twitter strongman Elon Musk has thrown at the expense of Substack newsletters, like this here Real Story.

Late last week, out of the blue, Tweets embedded in Substack newsletters led to dead space, then Tweets with links to Substack newsletters went nowhere, then to a Twitter warning notice: “The link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe.” It was apparently a revenge move responding to Substack’s announcement of the imminent launch of Substack Notes, a platform of its own that Musk took to be too much like Twitter.

By Saturday night it appeared Twitter’s Substack suppression had been mostly lifted, but it was scary. About half the traffic to the Real Story newsletter is driven from Twitter, and Musk’s eruption is a reminder that town-square free speech in the liberal democracies is very much at the mercy of Silicon Valley oligarchs and meddlesome governments. For insight on the excesses of Canada’s very own Bill C-11, I strongly recommend paying attention to Michael Geist, who keeps a close eye on these things. Or Margaret Atwood.

So I’m taking a slightly more urgent tone today: You can help secure the Real Story’s future by subscribing if you don’t already or upgrading or gifting a friend if you subscribe to the free version. Just a couple of clicks and everything’s yours, including the archive, here. Probably silly of me to have today’s newsletter in its entirety free to everyone. I do this sometimes. Probably shouldn’t. Bad for business all round. But do take up a paying sub if you don’t already, okay?

This edition of the Real Story newsletter is an Easter Monday Evening Holiday Extended Play Special (!), the sort you’ll want to put your feet up to read, and I’ve got news for you that you won’t find in The News. It will be link-rich, but as always, read on through and come back to the links if you want. It’s easier that way.

Catching you up on Beijing’s Friends in High Canadian Places. . .

I left off here with a newsletter-podcast that included a contribution from an amazing independent journalist, my pal Bob Mackin: No, it’s not white supremacy. No it’s not racism. It allowed me to give space on the Beijing-directed “elite capture” phenomenon in Canada to some really great Canadians - Cheuk Kwan, Mehmet Tohti, Bill Chu, Cherie Wong, Ai-Men Lau, Gloria Fung and Henry Chan - and especially Vancouver’s working class hero, Andy Yan.

That led to last week’s Postmedia column: It's not racist to delve into the subject of Chinese interference in Canadian elections. No matter what the prime minister says or Chinese diplomats say or neo-Stalinist university professors say, it just isn’t. Among other things in that column, I laid into Beijing’s main man in the Senate, the increasingly frantic business-class bigmouth Yuen Pau Woo. It was a bit eggshells-treading because I was filing to the Ottawa Citizen, which had just allowed Woo to bang on with his bullsh*t in an Ottawa Citizen op-ed only the day before.

Beijing has long exploited the tendency of Canada’s effete establishment opinion makers to see almost everything through a “race” lens. We really need to stop this, so here’s a helpful and amusing juxtaposition for you. Something I bet you didn’t know.

First, a graph prepared by research scientist David Rozado showing just how totally off-the-charts the race fixation has become in Canada’s news media ecosystem. Go Team! We’re Number One!

Now we turn to data from the World Values Survey undertaken by U.S. News and World Report, the BAV Group, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Right here. Out of a massive sampling of survey responses from 78 countries around the world, Canada is the least racist country of the 78 countries surveyed after the Netherlands.

Anyway. . . After Chinese-Canadian campaigners boxed Senator Woo’s ears for his preposterous assertion that a foreign-influence registry will threaten a reinstatement of the Chinese exclusion laws from a century ago, Woo has gone on to formulating a conspiracy theory: There’s a “CSIS veto” that now governs collaborations between Canadian universities and a certain unnamed hostile foreign power’s universities and institutions.

After years of Beijing’s infiltration, bullying and intellectual-property theft, the Trudeau government recently succumbed to public pressure and now requires that the national interest be taken into account in collaborations with the institutions of hostile police states. Woo finds this quite upsetting. You can watch Woo whinge about what he calls “the drift toward political intervention in international collaborative research” at the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce here if you want. It’s sad, really.

This coming week should be interesting. After months of dodging questions, insinuating “racism,” stalling, blocking a public inquiry into the scandal, appointing the starry-eyed Beijing sycophant David Johnston to run interference for him and orchestrating one of the longest filibusters in years to prevent the prime minister’s chief of staff from appearing before a House committee. . . Justin Trudeau was obliged to allow his chief of staff Katie Telford to appear before the House Procedures and Affairs Committee, and she’ll testify this coming week.

Here’s a thoroughly elegant account of the overall situation by our old friend Brian Lee Crowley in the Wall Street Journal: Justin Trudeau Shrugs At Chinese Election Interference.

Summing up the state of play as succinctly as possible: Beijing’s influence operations in Canada went into hyperdrive in 2015 when Justin Trudeau came to power with a Liberal Party he’d already turned into the political wing of the Canada-China Business Council. It was a Beijing-Ottawa mindmeld, and during the 2019 and 2021 federal elections Beijing’s massive United Front Work Department undertook extraordinary clandestine measures to keep the Trudeau government in power.

Beijing’s proxies have been hard at work at all levels of government, right across Canada, for years. The latest from the Globe’s Nathan Vanderklippe, for instance, derives from a tape recording of the former head of the political-corporate hub known as the Canadian Community Service Association, “the Chinese community’s spiritual home” in Metro Vancouver. The CCSA routinely runs “election assistance teams” at the local, provincial and federal level. On the recording, former CCSA boss Wang Yan is heard to say the CCSA leadership has to pass a “political review” run by Beijing’s Vancouver consulate: “We have to provide things to the Chinese consulate – everything must go through this political review process.”

So there it is, again.

Here’s the main thing you need to know about the manoeuvres the Trudeau government has put into play since those first shocking disclosures last October detailing how Beijing’s Toronto consulate was funding and running an election-interference network to the Liberals’ advantage in 2019 and 2021. It’s all been in service of allowing the Liberal government to get away with refusing to answer three basic questions. What did Justin Trudeau know about what Beijing was up to in 2019 and 2021, when did he know, and what did he do about it?

I’m not holding my breath that Telford’s testimony will shed much light on these matters. I live in hope that I’ll be proved wrong.

Emanuel Macron is a Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkey.

Sorry. Couldn’t resist. But seriously. Just look at this guy:

Here’s the French president in China, outdoing himself as one of Nato’s three most flattery-prone stooges: Himself, Germany’s Olaf Scholz and our own Justin “Little Potato” Trudeau.

Emanuel Macron was greeted in China this past week with all the parades and huzzahs and pageantry suitable to the welcoming of a closely-allied tinpot foreign strongman. Macron lapped it up and basked in the attention, reducing European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen to the humiliating role of a second-fiddle traveling companion.

First elected in 2017 and re-elected in 2022 with only 58.5 percent of the vote in a second-round election with the lowest voter turnout in 53 years, Macron is possessed of a messianic vision of himself, and of France, as the wellsprings of a “profound recreation of European civilization,” with Russia occupying a central place in a reborn European family of nations.

This magnificently stupid idea was reduced to cinder and ash following the full-on war of conquest Vladimir Putin began waging against Ukraine last February. Right up until two weeks before Russia’s invasion Macron was flitting around the European capitals boasting that Vladimir Putin had given him his “personal assurances” that he wouldn’t invade. Months after the invasion Macron was still playing lone-ranger diplomat, insisting that Moscow has “legitimate security interests” to be taken into account. Even in the Kremlin, Macron had become a laughing stock.

Macron’s notion of European “strategic autonomy,” apart from its appeal to the French bourgeoisie’s persistent sniggering about les maudits Américains, is a word-for-word replication of Beijing’s idea of how Europe should position itself globally. Here’s China’s foreign minister Qin Gang, in a speech to China’s servile press corps on March 6: “We hope that Europe, with the painful Ukraine crisis in mind, will truly realize strategic autonomy and long-term peace and stability. We will work with Europe to uphold true multilateralism, and keep to mutual respect and win-win cooperation.”

Macron’s embarrassing failures in loose-cannon diplomacy with Moscow has caused France to become increasingly isolated among the European Union’s 26 member states. Macron continues to bring disgrace upon France for his mewling and reluctant assistance to Ukraine’s defence, and now he is a threat to both NATO unity and French democracy.

The exalted role Macron continues to imagine for himself in accommodating Moscow and Beijing is a mirror image of Trudeau’s notion of his own destiny as Beijing’s primary champion and interlocutor among the world’s liberal democracies. It’s also useful to recall that Trudeau’s first foreign affairs minister, Stephane Dion. opposing Magnitsky sanctions on Russia following Moscow’s 2014 invasion of Donbas and annexation of Crimea.

Trudeau’s vision crashed and burned with the December, 2018 abduction of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, but his folly continues to reveal itself in a heightening public awareness of the depth and breadth of Beijing’s sordid and ongoing “elite capture” influences in Liberal political circles.

Macron’s folly extends to his embrace of deepening trade links with China and his insistence that Europe should not be a “vassal” of the United States by, say, insisting on Taiwan’s democratic autonomy. His unrepentant reconfiguration of a Russia-friendly Europe as a necessary third power rests on the absurd equivalence of the United States and China, as though democracy and enduring international allegiances and the United Nations charter should count for nothing.

Macron’s excuse-making for Beijing this week in the matter of Xinjiang and Hong Kong and Taiwan and human rights was a direct rebuke to Ursula von der Leyen, who has insisted that Europe needs to be bolder with the Beijing regime. “How China continues to interact with Putin’s war will be a determining factor for EU-China relations going forward,” Von der Leyen said. Well, not if Macron has anything to do with it. Macron says the opposite.

Only hours after Macron headed back to Paris, Beijing launched a massive naval and airpower exercise around Taiwan, encircling the country in drills that carried on for three full days. The objective was gross intimidation, “sealing off” the island and simulating precision strikes on select targets. The pretext was Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen’s meetings with various lawmakers in the United States.

Meanwhile, in France, millions of protestors continue to bring the functioning of the state to a standstill. Despite the popular interpretation in the Anglosphere, the disturbances aren’t just about French layabouts getting all prissy about the raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64.

The pension reform bill wasn’t debated in the French parliament. It was rammed through by presidential decree. What has enraged the French people - an overwhelming majority supports the protests along with the strikes that have turned Paris into a garbage heap - is Macron’s trampling on democracy and the unfairness of the law, which will disproportionately target low-income manual laborers and women.

France is now in the throes of a democratic crisis. So much for the égalité enshrined in the constitution of the French republic. But it will not be the guillotine that resolves matters this time around. It will be France's Constitutional Council, which will rule on the legitimacy of Macron’s decree on April 14. Then we’ll see what fresh hell ensues.

Putin Has His Own Canadian Apologists and Propagandists

Lots of them. And I’ve got something very touchy to deal with here so pay attention.

A new study titled Enemy of My Enemy is just out, exposing the way polemics, propaganda lines and falsehoods of the kind associated with the fringes of the Green Party, the NDP and Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party are often indistinguishable from one another, permeating a social-media ecosystem of perhaps 200,000 Twitter accounts.

Published by the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Data and Conflict at the University of Regina, the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland and the Toronto-based Digital Public Square organization, the study sheds a disturbing light on the diffusion of pro-Kremlin propaganda in Canadian social-media networks, on both the “left” and the “right” of the political spectrum.

It’s the subject of my most recent National Post and Ottawa Citizen column: The Russian Propagandists Amongst Us. What I didn’t mention was the absurdity of the way the New York Times covered the report’s release. Far-Left Canadians Susceptible to Russian Influence Too.

Phwat!? Ya think? As I point out in my column, among the most prominent pro-Putin apologists in the entire western world are purportedly “progressive” pseudo-journalists, and Canadians are noticeably prominent among them. Aaron Maté, Yves Engler and Eva Bartlett, for instance. They congregate around “news” platforms such as the Greyzone and the Kremlin’s RT News, a deranged digital pamphleteering operation called the Canada Files, and related online operations. In their spare time they routinely run interference for Syrian mass murderer Bashar Assad, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and similarly rancid caudillos and war criminals.

In my column I draw attention to the arrest of a real journalist, the Wall Street Journal’s brave Evan Gershkovich, in Yekaterinburg. While Gershkovich was being locked away in Moscow’s 140-year-old Lefortovo Prison to await kangaroo-court proceedings, Engler’s best pal Dimitri Lascaris was across town giving a presentation to something called the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). It was about how Canada is a lickspittle to Yankee imperialism.

Lascaris is the avowedly eco-socialist and “anti-Zionist” Green Party leadership contender who made a complete ass of himself a couple years ago by signing up and attempting to recruit his chums to join the Iranian-Canadian Congress to bolster the regime-friendly ICC leadership against reform-minded opposition contenders. He’d noticed that there was nothing in the ICC bylaws requiring members to be actually-existing Iranian Canadians.

Lascaris and Engler have lately been running “disruption” operations in and around Montreal, where they show up with placards shouting inanities at cabinet ministers’ public appearances and so on. It’s the only way they can get their stupid slogans into the mainstream press, and too often, mainstream journalists are stupid enough to oblige them.

The weird thing about pseudo-left “progressive” propaganda on Putin’s behalf in Canada is that it gets more favorable traction on the “right” and the far right, and less so on the centre-left. This has been picked up by the Toronto Metropolitan University’s Social Media Lab in the disinformation data they’ve been studying. Pro-Kremlin propaganda is less successful among liberal-left Canadians than among right-leaning Canadians. Go figure that.

Marcus Kolga of DisinfoWatch, a co-author of the Enemy of My Enemy Study, told me that it’s high time we all had a good re-think of the lazy way terms like “left” and “right” are tossed around to describe these phenomena. “Eventually we’re going to need to have some kind of discussion about these new groupings that are emerging,” Marcus told me. “The old labels of left and right, the old political compass, doesn’t really apply to this. It’s a kind of politics that is truly illiberal.”

And now for something exceedingly touchy

David Pugliese is the Ottawa Citizen’s military affairs reporter and a correspondent for the U.S. Defense News weekly. Since hardly anyone covers military news in Canada David tends to be the guy with the goods. He wins awards. Unfortunately, fairly or not, he has acquired a serious credibility problem among propaganda-watchers and Ukrainian-Canadians.

I adopt no standpoint on the subject, except to say that this scoop, in the pro-Zelenskyy (is there any other kind right now?) and indispensable Ukrainian news portal Kyiv Post, strikes me as not entirely fair. But it is newsworthy in and of itself. Headlined Canadian Journalist Branded ‘Undesirable Person’ in Ukraine, I say not entirely fair, although here’s a grain of salt: The Kyiv Post apparently did make several unreturned overtures to Pugliese before running the story.

Another grain of salt: The author of the piece is Jason Jay Smart, a sort-of correspondent-at-large for Kyiv Post. He’s an American and a former Republican Party strategist, although of the eminently respectable John McCain variety.

I will say that Pugliese has made far too much of the “Chrystia Freeland Hid Her Family’s Nazi Past” nonsense - which was straight-up Russian propaganda - and he has banged on a bit too loudly about the formerly dodgy Azov Battalion in Ukraine, which Russian propaganda platforms are forever banging on about in service of Putin’s patently absurd propaganda lie that the Russian invasion is a “De-Nazification” project. But there we are.

If I do say so myself, this is the last word on the Freeland-Nazi uproar. Yet another grain of salt: I wrote it myself: How Russia's attack on Freeland got traction in Canada: Terry Glavin traces Moscow's "Nazi-grandfather" calumny through a maze of cranks, propagandists and Putin fanciers—to Canada's mainstream media.

Speaking of lurid propaganda and people who should know better. . .

Why Must The Trudeau Liberals Traffic in Antisemitic Incitements?

I should have put this at the top of this newsletter. It’s the most outrageous unreported story this edition of the Real Story attends to. Here goes.

“Lucy had had two bullets, one through her brain stem, and one lodged at the top of her spine. There was an operation, there was reason for hope. But alas, our family of seven is now a family of four.” That’s Rabbi Leo Dee talking about his wife Lucy, who died Monday morning following an attack in the West Bank that killed their daughters Rina, 15, and Maia, 20. Twenty bullets from a Kalashnikov rifle. Three dead.

That’s not unreported. Also reported: The 15-year-old Palestinian boy shot dead in an Israeli Defence Forces raid to apprehend a terror suspect in the West Bank outside Jericho, the rockets fired by an Assad-backed Palestinian faction from Syria into the Golan Heights, the barrage of rockets fired from Southern Lebanon into Northern Israel - the worst since 2006 - and more rockets from Gaza, and the Italian tourist killed in a terror attack in Tel Aviv, and the riots, the tear gas, the rubber bullets, and the retaliations.

This is what has been almost entirely unreported.

Those Israeli police attacking peaceful and unarmed worshippers at their Ramadan prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount last Tuesday night? Despite what you’ve read and the shocking videos you may have seen, it never happened. They were not unarmed. They were not worshippers. But it was the distribution and recirculation of those videos that set off the spiral of violence over Passover in the Holy Land.

It’s one thing for Hamas and Islamic Jihad to spread lurid stories about Israeli forces planning to escort sinister Jews intent on slaughtering goats within the Haram al-Sharif - that holy Muslim place within the Temple Mount, the holiest place in Judaism - and then exhorting young toughs to barricade themselves inside Al Aqsa, desecrating the mosque with fireworks and rocks and preventing worshippers from going about their Ramadan devotions, and then broadcasting the baton-swinging result as an attack on the innocently devout.

It’s quite another thing for Prime Minister Trudeau and several of his cabinet ministers and MPs to traffic in the same incitement. But that’s what they did. This should have been reported. It wasn’t. This you should know:

“Israeli police then raided the mosque to break up the group of activists, and sparks were literally flying inside the mosque. Palestinians had stockpiled fireworks. They were setting off fireworks.” Almost entirely unreported: Throughout the day tens of thousands of people prayed and came and went, and it was only later that a bunch of hoodlums commandeered the mosque, refusing to give it back to the worshippers. Israeli attempts at negotiations got nowhere. So they moved in and cleared the place and bashed some hoodlums around. Video footage of the operation depicts some nasty behaviour on the part of the cops. Fair enough.

But here’s Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly: “We strongly condemn the acts of violence against Palestinian worshipers in Al-Aqsa. The sanctity and status quo of holy sites must be respected. On the eve of Passover and during Ramadan, we call for an end of violence immediately.”

Here’s Transport Minister Omar Alghabra: “Israeli forces attacking defenceless Palestinian worshipers is reprehensible. Violence must stop immediately and those responsible for such reckless actions need to be held accountable.”

Here’s International Trade Minister Mary Ng: “Horrific to see the acts of violence and brutality against peaceful Palestinian worshipers in Al-Aqsa mosque by Israeli forces. We strongly condemn these acts of violence and any actions that hinder peace in the region. We call for an end of violence immediately.”

If you have the stomach for it, here’s a clip of Justin Trudeau himself being fervently stupid of wicked about it, you decide, right here.

A couple of things.

Israel is undergoing an astonishing democratic uprising at the moment, and the last thing Israelis need is a sanctimonious lecture from Justin Trudeau. Rather than belabour the issues here, I strongly recommend this deep backgrounder from Yair Rosenberg in the Atlantic, busting some deeply-embedded myths about what’s really going on.

For the vileness of the Trudeau government’s interjections, I strongly recommend a deep background piece I researched for the Real Story last Passover, when Team Trudeau did exactly the same thing. I say vileness, but it may be plain imbecility that explains why they would traffic in the same recurring antisemitic incitement as last year, when the Jews were again about to “storm” Al-Aqsa and the Israeli authorities were again said to have approved a Zionist goat-slaughtering desecration of the the Noble Sanctuary.

None of this was true. It is and was a dirty lie and an incitement that goes back to the days of Haj Amin al Husseini, the Third Reich’s principal Arab ally. The concoction of a Jewish plot to take over Al-Aqsa was a favorite of his. Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, employed the lie so cunningly as to ignite deadly pogroms and massacres from Hebron in the south to Sefat in the north.

So nice work, Team Trudeau. Really nice incitement you championed last week. How too inclusive and diverse and liberal of you.