The Thugs Among Us We Can't Even See
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. - George Orwell.
I get it. Canada’s surviving newsrooms are half empty, reporters tend to be run ragged and routinely preoccupied with the most frivolous assignments and clickbait and so on. And there are only so many hours in a day.
But you tell me. Seriously.
There’s no paywall in this weekend edition of the Real Story, but only paying customers can propose solutions to the puzzles below. Extra points for connecting the dots between the puzzles. Please be sensible in your comments. Or not. Just don’t be too weird. Thanks.
Puzzle Number One:
They’re the key figures in a terrorist-listed entity in Israel that’s intimately associated with a leading terrorist group that’s listed by both Israel and Canada. These two characters get detained by military police at Amsterdam Airport and expelled from Europe. They’re welcomed back into Canada, where the entity that Israel calls a terrorist group is registered, with Ottawa’s blessing, as a non-profit corporation.
They got kicked out of Europe just five days ago.
Puzzle Number Two:
Heading up yet another federally-registered non-profit corporation is an especially greasy Khomeinist ruffian who routinely and openly colludes with another entity on Canada’s terrorist list. He’s notorious for uttering blood-curdling oaths vowing death to pro-democracy Iranians, and his hobby is badgering and harrassing Jews. When he drives his car into a group of Iranian-Canadian demonstrators, in broad daylight, then flees from police, and then gets charged with weapons offences, the incident is reported as involving . . . just some random guy.
That happened just six days ago.
Puzzle Number Three:
A well-connected and by all accounts a perfectly presentable “progressive” candidate runs for mayor of Ottawa. Throughout the entire just-concluded election campaign it goes unmentioned that the gentleman had been previously outed as a high-ranking associate of an unreconstructed fascist party with its own death squads that’s openly aligned with the Syrian mass murderer Bashar Assad. So far as I can determine, not a single newspaper, television station or radio station even alluded to this for the duration of the campaign. Riddle me that.
An Intermission, Sort of:
I’ll get straight into the details of these three puzzles in just a moment but first there’s another one that may shed some light on the first three. It’s the curiosity I touched on in my column in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen this week. It involves Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. It happened in plain sight, at a press conference in Ottawa on October 7. Loads of media were there. Three weeks have passed, and the puzzle remains unsolved.
It’s actually part of a bigger puzzle:
The main thing the pro-democracy constituency in the Iranian diaspora has been asking Ottawa to do is to list the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps under the Anti-Terrorism Act, just as the Americans do (the IRGC’s overseas terrorism command, the Quds Force, has been listed in Canada since 2012). The Trudeau government refuses, and won’t say why.
The various pretexts and excuses and maybe even plausible justifications put forward by the usual unnamed sources and insiders are all very interesting, but they’re beside the point here. The Trudeau government won’t do it even though three years have passed since the House of Commons adopted a resolution to designate the IRGC in its entirety as a terrorist organization, and Trudeau’s Liberals voted in favour of the resolution.
The Trudeau government won’t do it even though it’s been more than 1,000 days since the IRGC blew Flight PS752 out of the sky killing all 176 people on board, including 85 Canadian citizens and permanent residents (the victims’ families have given up waiting for Ottawa to do something and are taking the regime to the International Criminal Court on their own).
Even after 40 days of a revolutionary upwelling that’s unprecedented among the popular insurrections and mass protests that have broken out in Iran since the Khomeinists took over in 1979 - and even after massive demonstrations across the world and across Canada - the Trudeau government still won’t designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization.
The puzzle of immediate interest is what happened in Ottawa on October 7. Or what didn’t happen. Or what won’t happen anytime soon.
Trudeau announced that his government was “using the most powerful tools we have to crack down on this brutal regime and the individuals responsible for its heinous behaviour.” But that’s not what the Trudeau was doing. Rather than list the IRGC as a terrorist organization under the Anti-Terrorism Act, what Trudeau announced was that the senior ranks of the IRGC would be banned from visiting Canada under provisions of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.
At that very same news conference, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said, in plain language: “The IRGC is a terrorist organization. Today, Canada is formally recognizing that — and acting accordingly.” But Canada did not recognize that, formally or otherwise.
Trudeau said the travel ban would apply to the top 50 percent of the IRGC, or about 10,000 people. But the Council of Foreign Relations estimates the IRGC’s Ground Forces alone number about 100,000 in uniform. Then there’s the IRGC’s navy of about 20,000 people, the IRGC’s aerospace force of about 15,000 people, and so on. So Trudeau’s 10,000 visit-banned IRGC bigshots don’t even come close to 50 percent of the IRGC’s troop strength.
Okay, whatever. Just who are these 10,000 IRGC dudebros who can no longer come to Canada? Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino doesn’t know, and he says he doesn’t know when he will know. "Certainly not years or months. I think we're looking at weeks," he told the CBC’s Rosemary Barton.
You should be forgiven if you find you cannot say whether the Trudeau government has any idea what it’s doing in matters of foreign policy or immigration or citizenship or national security. You might think that the federal government is - not to be mean about it - clueless.
Clues to Puzzle Number One.
In this puzzle, the key figures in that federally-registered, Vancouver-headquartered non-proft that Israel lists as a terrorist organization are Khaled Barakat and Charlotte Kates. That’s who got kicked out of Europe on Monday. The entity the husband-and-wife team leads out of an address in East Vancouver is the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. It was listed as a terrorist entity by Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz on February 28 last year. Three days later, on March 3, 2021, the federal government formally registered Samidoun under the Canada Not-for-Profit Corporations Act.
Israel’s Mossad, Shinbet and the National Bureau for Counter-Terror Financing say Samidoun is a fundraising, overseas-organizing and propaganda function of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP is listed by Israel, Canada and just about every other liberal democracy in the world as a terrorist organization.
The Israelis say Barakat himself is not only central to Samidoun’s operations but that he’s a key figure in the PFLP leadership and he’s been involved in establishing cells of militants and “motivating terrorist activity in Judea & Samaria [the West Bank] and abroad.”
I undertook a fairly exhausting investigation into all this for the National Post, here. I made quite a few enemies for myself. Subscribers may recall the backstory I wrote for this newsletter here: Canada’s counterterror clownshow. I also meandered through quite a bit of cloak-and-dagger, spy-versus-spy stuff here.
Anyhow, on Monday morning Barakat and Kates were detained by immigration officers with the Dutch military police at Amsterdam Schiphol airport. Shortly thereafter they were deported back to Canada. According to Samidoun, Barakat and Kates are now banned from all 26 countries in Europe’s Shengen Agreement border-control arrangements, because Germany deported them and banned them from re-entry back in 2019.
There’s been nothing about this that I’ve seen in any “mainstream”’ news media.
Barakat and Kates had travelled to Europe to attend a week-long jamboree of anti-Israel speeches and meetings and marches. Barkat, who styles himself as a co-founder of the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, was scheduled to give a talk on the thoughts of Fathi Shiqaqi, founder of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the bloodthirsty Iranian proxy in Gaza that ranks second only to Hamas in its penchant for suicide bombings and rocket attacks.
On Thursday I heard from Shimon Koffler Fogel, the president and CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. “It is deeply concerning that despite its overt ties to terror, Samidoun continues to be able to operate freely as a not-for-profit in Canada. That Barakat was slated to promote the founder of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Canadian-listed terrorist entity, at an event featuring PFLP posters, combined with countless other instances of glorifying terrorists and inciting to violence, should be more than enough to warrant action.
“We reiterate our calls to Public Safety to investigate and list Samidoun as a terrorist entity.”
Clues to Puzzle Number Two.
Speaking of dodgy not-for-profit corporations registered with Corporations Canada, the Canadian Defenders for Human Rights (CD4HR) is quite the piece of work. Here’s a Tweet from CD4HR asserting that Al Qaida’s 9/11 terror operation “most likely was an inside job by the US regime & #Zionist Allies to JUSTIFY all invasions & plundering of resources” in the Middle East. Here’s a CD4HR petition calling for Ottawa to remove the IRGC’s Quds Force and Hezbollah from Canada’s terrorist listings.
It was CD4HR co-manager Firas Al Najim who was driving the white Kia SUV at what police say was a “high rate of speed” towards pro-democracy Iranian expatriates last Sunday outside the Imam Mahdi Islamic Centre in Thornhill, Ontario. Al Najim was flagged down by police but he roared off. He was arrested shortly afterwards and spent the night in the local lock-up. He faces charges of flight from police, dangerous driving and possession of dangerous weapons (an airsoft gun, a baton and bear spray).
If you wanted anything resembling a complete story about what happened in Thornhill last Sunday you wouldn’t find it in the Canadian news media. You’d have to turn all the way to the Jerusalem Post.
The Post noted Al Najim’s routine appearances as a “human rights activist” on the Iranian regime’s propaganda platform Press TV, one of the regime entities recently sanctioned by Ottawa over human rights violations. The Jerusalem Post headline: Harasser of Holocaust survivor nearly car rams Iran protesters in Toronto.
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs maintains a documentation project on antisemitic and anti-Israel activity in Canada. It includes an eight-page rap sheet on Al Najim. Real fun guy. Here’s Al Najim saying Jewish politicians are more loyal to Israel than to Canada. Al Najim, on the other hand, is quite candid about his loyalties to Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei. And he was quite worked up when he got arrested:
Here’s CD4HR’s other co-manager, Aliyawa Jamal Hasan: “People think that the United States has a god. They’ve got AIPAC. We got CIJA. We got B’nai Brith. We got the Zionist lobbies that have infiltrated every level of government. They have complete control over every statement that is made by our officials. . . They control everything.” Here’s eight pages the Jerusalem Center has put together on CD4HR’s Hasan, including this post on Instagram: “Israeli products are made with Palestinian blood. BDS! [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions].”
Clues to Puzzle Number Three
This puzzle is about that guy who ran for mayor in Ottawa, but the first clue is about another CD4HR official - at least he was, earlier this year - who lost his bid for a city council seat on Monday in another Ontario city, Windsor. Bear with me.
Among the many rancid standpoints the would-be Windsor Ward 3 councillor Helmi Charif is known to have uttered publicly: “The Zionist lobby incited Ukraine to secede from Russia and join Europe” and “Western media is now of course controlled by the Zionists.”
None of this came up in the press during Windsor’s municipal election campaign. Full marks to Honest Reporting Canada: Windsor Municipal Candidate Spews Anti-Israel Venom On Facebook: Where Is The News Media?But wait. Now it’s okay to talk about this out loud, now that the election campaign is over?
Similarly unmentionable for the campaign’s duration: Charif was an unsuccessful candidate for the NDP in the 2011 provincial election and he figured the job was his again in 2014, but when the NDP decided he was a bit too sketchy and chose someone else, Charif led a protest: “NDP! Arabs are people too” read one placard, and on another: “NDP New Discrimination Party.” Here’s a CBC Windsor muncipal candidates’ profile piece from last month, in which none of this was deemed mentionable.
By 2018, Charif had been welcomed into Trudeau’s Liberal Party. Here he is as a director-at-large of the Liberal Party of Canada’s Windsor West riding association. A minor position, you might say, certainly not something as high profile as director of outreach for the Liberal Party of Canada. That was the job occupied by Ottawa mayoral candidate Nour El Kadri, the subject of this last puzzle.
El Kadri held that office before he made a bid for the Liberal candidacy in the newly-created Ottawa riding of Nepean during the 2015 election that won Trudeau his first term as prime minister. He’d been been backed by the former cabinet minister Sheila Copps and former House speaker Peter Milliken, so it looked like the fix was in before I reported certain gaping holes in El Kadri’s curriculum vitae that had been brought to my attention by my comrades in the Syrian refugee community.
It turned out that El Kadri had a rather too-opaque relationship with the Canadian section of a fascist party within Bashar Assad’s ruling coalition that was running death squads at the time back in the old country. The SSNP sports its very own stylized swastika and its members sing an anthem to the tune of Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles. As you might imagine, they’re not fond of the Jews.
The news media’s collective amnesia may have served El Kadri well in the election that concluded on Monday - it may also have helped that he was endorsed by deputy NDP leader Alexandre Boulerice - but he managed only to come in at fourth place. Mark Sutcliffe is the new mayor.
So, there are your puzzles for the weekend. Explain to me how any of this is at all possible in a G7 country run by grown-ups. And for the more astute among my subscribers, here’s a bonus puzzle, a directly-related genuine enigma:
How is that it’s taken several weeks since the international uproar set off by an investigation that revealed Beijing’s overseas strongarm division has set up dozens of underground “police stations” around the world, with at least two of them here in Canada, and it’s only now that the RCMP finally allows, ‘yeah, well, we’re looking into it’?
Seriously. You tell me.
No great mystery here. With a few rare exceptions, the legacy media's lack of curiosity is because they've been told or instinctively know these thugs are bulletproof because they have connections to important people inside government.
It used to be journalists were the public's watchdogs, devoting time and talent to dig into the dark places to maintain government accountability. The government realized they'd never be rid of these troublesome journalists so they co-opted them. They brought them into the inner circles of government as pals rather than press. (Hard to get tough when you want an invitation to the next soiree.) Then the coup de grace to legacy media integrity, government opened the money spigot to keep them on life support. Corporate media is dying because the public no longer trust them.
My financial support goes to outliers, journalists and start-up media with the courage to challenge the status quo and drag the smelly lies into the sunlight.
The Trickle Down Effect: A federal government that governs like a high school student council, complete with corridor melodramas dominating over real governance