Taking time off work to get work done
Dear Canada. Here's an idea. How about we just enforce the law?
Real Story subscribers may recall that I’ve mentioned more than once that in recent years, the biggest stories I’ve covered over the course of my working life in the journalism racket have been bursting from smoldering embers to wildfires. It was one of the reasons I put The Real Story into orbit back in February, 2022.
Things are especially crazy right now, which is why there was no newsletter from me last weekend. I was also absent from the National Post last week. I’m working on a cluster of daunting projects that require meticulous research and fact-checking. I make enemies, let me tell you. So I have to be careful.
Attending to these inquiries will keep my column out of the Post for the rest of the month. Apart from all that work, I expect to be back in Taiwan in three weeks or so, then Montreal in October, then Ottawa. . . but I do intend to the keep the Real Story humming through it all. Stick with me, okay?
In the coming days I’ll be dealing with my vocation’s dilemmas on a personal level and more broadly in a piece tentatively headlined: Where did all the journalism go?
You Can Get Away With It In Canada
First up on our list today: Well, well, well, look who’s partying in Tehran.
It’s Canada’s own Charlotte Kates, the international coordinator of the Samidoun network, the overseas recrutiment and propaganda arm of the terrorist-listed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Samidoun is banned in Germany, terrorist-listed in Israel and barred from entering Europe, but happily headquartered in Vancouver. This is thanks to the Canadian safe haven the Trudeau government granted Samidoun three years ago under the Not-For-Profit Corporations Act, even though Samidoun is functionally and objectively acting in aid of a terrorist-listed entity in Canada, which is against the law.
Deep background: Canada’s Samidoun, the network. Deeper: Canada’s counterterrorism clownshow.
Kates was in Tehran to share a special “human rights award” with quite a few illustrious recipients. Among them:
Ziyad Nakhaleh, the General Secretary of terrorist-listed Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Siraj al-Haq, the former chair of the extremist Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan. Jaime Ermida, the UN representative of Nicaragua’s gangster regime. Gilles Devers, a French lawyer known for filing bogus complaints against Israel at the International Criminal Court. And, oh yes, Asadollah Asadi.
Asadi is the Iranian “diplomat” who was convicted of plotting to bomb a gathering of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e Khalq in Paris, in 2018. Asadi was freed in a wildly controversial exchange for a Belgian hostage last year.
An American who recently acquired Canadian citizenship, Kates was accompanied to the festivities in Tehran by her husband Khaled Barakat, who is described by the Israeli security agency Shin Bet as a member of the PFLP’s politburo. Barakat is also a Canadian citizen now.