Two, Three, Four, Many Solitudes

Probably way more. If we're going to be a "postnational" state, good luck figuring out what 'national security' means. And what would a postnational consensus about 'terrorism' look like?

It’s not like I’m the only one to wonder about the implications of Canada’s multiplying solitudes. I’m certainly not alone in noticing the enfeebling erosion of any semblance of a national consensus among Canadians about this country’s history, and the weird efforts to force a new consensus.

Our own prime minister seems to think or has claimed to think that there’s no point in having such a consensus, because somehow Canadians have emancipated themselves from the bonds of history altogether and we’ve launched ourselves out into the void of a “postnational” state of being that no other nation on earth has achieved.

It’s all very pointy-headed. The less-ambitious purpose of this newsletter is to notice how Canadians are retreating into what you might call 'discourse fortresses’ that bear more than a passing resemblance to the information silos or news bubbles occupied by the audiences of the opposing Fox-CNN reality shows in Americaland. This is bad news.

It’s Crazytown out there. Just ask any reasonably well-informed American about how the pathology of Trumpism was conjured into being. This sort of thing should not be expected to end well in Canada, and it doesn’t matter how different Donald Trump and Trudeau might be. Or might not be, when you think about it.

All thise fine young Canadians always striving, always reaching for openness, respect, compassion, a willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice, yearning, striving. . .

Quite a few of this newsletter’s subscribers were likely glued to this past week’s made-for-television January 6 Committee hearings out of Washington, D.C., the highlight of which was the video of that day’s events derived from the work of Emmy-winning documentarist Nick Quested.

I’m certainly no clairvoyant and I don’t even follow American politics very closely. I may even have a better grasp of Syrian politics than American politics. Even so, several months before the January 6, 2021, event, I was savvy enough to sketch out the doomsday scenario, the prospect of Trump losing but refusing to relinquish power on the pretext of a purportedly illegitimate vote result. It is no longer far-fetched to imagine this happening, I reckoned. As things turned out, it’s no longer far-fetched to describe the events of January 6 as an attempted coup.

You’re welcome. Palm-readings are an extra $50. Which reminds me:

Meanwhile, being always just a bit behind the United States in culture-war convulsions, Canada endured its very own attempted coup earlier this year. Or so the Trudeau government would have us all believe. Do please note, this is something we are expected to believe about something Team Trudeau has gone to extreme lengths to ensure we are not allowed to know.

Speaking of the conflation of belief and knowledge, here’s me with the Post’s John Ivison and Sabrina Maddeux having a video conversation about “the crisis of trust in the truth,” as John describes it. It’s of a piece with the crisis of trust in the news media, about which Sabrina made some very astute observations, specifically an Abacus Data poll of Canadians this week: “Almost half of those interviewed found themselves agreeing with the statement ‘much of the information we receive from news organizations is false.’”

The case in point we were discussing was the roaring bedlam that erupted in response to my Year of the Graves project. Along the same lines as these forays into epistemology, just so you know I’m composing a put-your-feet-up newsletter with a guest writer about the platforming and privileging of well-to-do conspiracy theorists and the mainstreaming of their derangements. Can’t promise, but it should be in your inboxes by Sunday morning. It’ll allow me to shed some further glaring and unwelcome light on how things went so sideways last summer. It will also allow me to make room for a fine writer, one of the smartest guys I know, a founding subscriber to The Real Story and an international expert in conspiracy-mongering. So stay tuned, as they say.

Anyway, about believing and knowing what was going on with the Trucking Excitement, the Trudeau government’s bizarre and increasingly not-believable justifications for invoking the successor to the War Measures Act looks every day more like the Great Truckist Hootenanny of February 2022 was not so much an apprehended insurrection like the October Crisis of 1970, but rather an embarrassing matter of the Ottawa Police not drawing upon the Criminal Code provisions that grant law enforcement authorities the liberty to commandeer tow trucks.

Staying within Canada, and on the subject of forebodings of national meltdown into opposing solitudes, this is how the Swinging 60s’ icon Pierre Trudeau once famously described the motivation behind his exertions as Canada’s prime minister to patriate Canada’s Constitution: “I had a real sense that the country wouldn’t last. It would become a confederation of shopping centres."

This wasn’t an outlandish thing to worry about at the time, owing to the corrosive and ultimately insurrectionary implications, by October, 1970, of what the writer Hugh Maclennan sketched out in his 1945 novel, Two Solitudes.

Canada is still officially a single United Nations member state, even though Quebec’s independentistes have more or less won the sovereignty-assocation arrangement they lost in a 1980 referendum. They flourished, as things turned out, following Trudeau Senior’s patration the Consitution in 1982.

And now, the Canada that Pierre’s Instagram influencer son Justin is refashioning in his own image and likeness is already looking a lot like the loosely affilated federation of shopping-mall oblasts that worried Trudeau père’s imagination. ‘‘There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,’’ Justin happily postulated back in 2015 during a conversation with the New York Times magazine.

‘‘There are shared values,” Trudeau said, listing off the stereotypes you will find in any Michael Moore documentary that touches on how cool Canada is compared to the United States — “openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice.” This was the weird part: “Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state.’’

I really don’t know what to make of this sort of thing, although I have been assured by people who are intimately privy to Trudeau’s thinking that he wasn’t just making a bollocks of John Ralston Saul’s notion of Canada as the world’s first postmodern state. This is what I’d once assumed myself, that Trudeau was merely attempting to ventriloquize John Ralston Saul, and making a hash of it.

So who knows. It’s all very trippy, and Justin Trudeau takes after his mother more than his dad. He’s certainly difficult to cast in the mode of the chin-stroking intellectual his father was supposed to be. And this edition of the newsletter set out on a less ambitious purpose anyway. It was to notice something that seems to make the case for the Canadian “discourse” encampments I mentioned up top, the emergence of weird solitudes that mimick Americaland’s information silos, or news bubbles, or whatever you’d prefer to call them.

It’s a perfect illustration that raises questions about postnational national security (or is it just postnational security?), and about how seriously we take the threat of terrorism. It shows how Canadians in one news and information silo won’t have the faintest clue about some pretty important matters touching on national security and terrorism that will be quite familiar to reasonably-informed Canadians in another information silo.

My column this week in the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post was about a matter that has caused no end of alarm at the Israeli embassy, at the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, at B’nai Brith Canada, at the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, and among Jews across the country, generally. The story has appeared in no other “mainstream” news network, and I can’t claim that the explanation is a simple case of having scooped everyone.

It follows from The Curious Case of Khaled Barakat, a project I undertook for the National Post in April that took up so much real estate in the Post’s April 28 weekend edition.

The anxiety among Canada’s Jews arises from the fact that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is an organization that has a great amount of Jewish blood on its hands. The PFLP is on the rise again in Palestine and around the world, owing to the strengthening of its links with Bashar Assad’s Syria and Khomeinist Iran, and it appears to have well and truly established itself in Canada.

The story I wrote this past week was about how Ottawa’s Recreation, Cultural and Facilities Services Department was warned well in advance and provided with a surfeit of evidence to this effect: Offering a civic venue to Khaled Barakat and his crew from the organization Samidoun would clearly violate Ottawa’s policy of preventing city-owned property from being used to promote hate.

The city’s legal department cleared the event anyway, despite all the evidence from Canada’s Jewish community to the effect that Barakat’s bunch should have been barred under that policy. In greenlighting the event, city officials warned the organizers that they shouldn’t say mean things, and the organizers said of course, they woudn’t do any such thing. Case closed.

Except it isn’t closed. The evidence supporting the case that Samidoun is a proxy of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is overwhelming, as is the evidence - not least his own words - that Barakat, Samidoun’s most prominent figure, is himself a leading member of the PFLP.

Here’s Barakat, in his own words:

The whole damn story is odd.

The PFLP is not like, say the Palestinian Authority, or Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Party. The PFLP wants nothing of two-state solution or a rapprochement of any kind with Israel. The PFLP wants Israel eliminated, finished, over and done with “by any means necessary,” and does not scruple to distinguish between the Israeli military and Israelis, or between Israelis and Jews.

The PFLP’s financing in its early years was overseen by the uprepentant Swiss Nazi Francois Genoud, who also managed money for Haj Amin el-Husseini, Adolf Hitler’s principal Arab ally. Genoud also covered Adolf Eichmann’s legal bills. Eichmann was the senior Nazi overseer of the Holocaust who was captured by Israeli agents in Argentina and put on trial in Israel in 1960.

So you can see why Jews - or anyone with a shred of decency, come to think of it - might find the PFLP and Samidoun and Barakat to be objectionable and rather worrisome. And yet it was just three days after Israeli authorities listed Samidoun as a terrorist entity on its own merits, on February 28 last year, that Corporations Canada registered Samidoun as a legitimate entity under Canada’s Not-for-Profit Corporations Act.

So you can see why this whole thing is a bit odd.

This newsletter’s subscribers will be familiar by now with all the cloak-and-dagger backstory about Barakat, the PFLP and Samidoun. Especially this newsletter’s paying customers, who’ve already got the inside story related to the project I’d undertaken for National Post that took over so much of the Post’s April 28 weekend edition. (That was a subtle hint that if you want the really deep background on the turf I cover, you should take up a paid subscription if you don’t already).

Now, here’s the thing about the solitudes I was carrying on about up top.

There was a story about my National Post investigation in The Jerusalem Post. B’nai Brith Canada launched a petition calling on Ottawa to deport Barakat. Senator Leo Housakos brought it up in the Senate, and Bryan Passifiume followed up with a story about it all, again in the Post, and got a big fat zero in the way of an explanation from the federal government. And there’s a story about the recent hubbub involving the City of Ottawa greenlighting Barakat and Samidoun in the Jerusalem Post.

The rest of Canada’s mainstream news media? Nothing.

The Ottawa Parks & Rec imbroglio is not a difficult story to put together, and almost all the information I’ve relied on was not obtainable only by me. It’s not that I’m some especially talented investigative journalist (‘oh but you are,’ the crowd roars). Nope, it’s not about that. And I don’t think you can chalk it up entirely to the impoverished state of mainstream reporting capacity in Canada’s news media, although there is that, as I’ve carried on about.

Whatever the cause, it’s about those strange and sometimes hermetically-sealed news bubbles that are replicating themselves in Canada after the style of the hyperdivisions in the American news and entertainment complex.

True enough, in Canada it’s usually a Venn Diagram sort of thing. Often, news that’s on the front page of the Postmedia newspapers like the National Post or the Ottawa Citizen will appear on the front pages of the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail and will be on the headline lists at CBC, CTV and Global News. But increasingly, there seems to be a clear bifurcation going on, as it has been with the whole PFLP, Samidoun and Barakat affair.

I’m going to be digging into whatever data I can find to show the extent that this is happening. It would be great if it just seems like this is going on, and that really it’s not as bad as it looks.

But I suspect that I’m not wrong.

All for now.