Weekend Special: The Limits of Tolerance.
What Canadians say. What the Israeli ambassador says. And. . . what? Trudeau "vindicated" in Hardeep Nijjar assassination plot uproars?! Really?
Memoriam.
Wherever we go, we celebrate
The land that makes us refugees,
From fear of priests with empty plates,
From guilt and weeping effigies.
Still, we dance to the music
And we dance.
Shane MacGowan was born on Christmas Day, 1957. He died on Thursday.
We Are All Europeans Now
It’s been more than 20 years since the Dutch politician and gay libertarian Pym Fortyn was assassinated by the eco-activist Volkert Van der Graaf, whose justification was that Fortyn was making scapegoats of Muslim immigrants. It’s been nearly 20 years since the Amsterdam-born Moroccan jihadist Mohammed Bouyeri shot and then slit the throat of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in response to his film featuring the tribulations of Somali-Dutch secularist and feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
There’s been a lot of dirty water under the bridge in the intervening two decades, and in my column in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen this week, Canadians go full European on immigration skepticism, I lead with the November 22 electoral victory of the “Dutch Donald Trump,” Geert Wilders.
Despite how this event has been widely described, this is not a story about Dutch voters taking some dramatic turn to the far right. Similarly, despite the claims of certain Liberals and New Democrats, Canadians’ disaffection with Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and the meteoric rise of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in the polls does not reflect a sudden shift to some Wilders-like state of racist hive-mind in this country.
Like Canadians, the Dutch have simply had it up to their eyeballs with the failures of high society neoliberalism. While Wilders is unambiguously far to the right of the European mainstream - and far to the right of the Canadian conservative mainstream - his party simply managed a more cunning exploitation of public restiveness than any of the other 16 parties with legislative standing in the Netherlands.
Just like Canadians, the Dutch have been sinking ever deeper into the muck of a crippling housing crisis, hastening inflation and the destitution of the working class. The only difference is that in the Netherlands, immigration has become a “left-wing” issue, too, along with anxieties about whether the country can tolerate the cultural upheavals that mass migration is triggering. Even the Green-Left-Labour coalition leader Frans Timmermans says the country is groaning under the weight of asylum seekers.
As difficult as it may be to talk about - the conversation does tend to attract conspiracy theorists and bigots - the diffusion of theocratic-fascist Islamism among Muslim migrants to Europe is very much a serious Dutch concern.
It’s a very real concern in Canada at the moment, too, as my National Post colleague Sabrina Maddeaux points out here: Trudeau Liberals not taking the threat of Islamofascism seriously. Our teammate Tristin Hopper has been all over this lately. From Friday: The pro-terror hate groups organizing almost all of Canada’s 'ceasefire now' rallies: Organizers, some of whom have ties to Gazan terrorist groups, have never even attempted to conceal their support of the Oct. 7 massacres.
Who The Hell Are These People?
Among the rally organizers of particular interest to me: Samidoun, barred from Europe, outlawed in Germany, terror-listed in Israel, federally registered in Canada and headquartered in Vancouver. Samidoun is the key overseas affiliate of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, terror-listed in Canada, the United States and lots of other places.
Strictly speaking, the PFLP is not Islamist. It’s pro-Hamas, but the Marxist bric-a-brac in its sloganeering masks more of an Arab Nazi legacy.
Here’s my April 28, 2022 investigation for the National Post: The Curious Case of Khaled Barakat. For deeper background (and mostly for paid subscribers) with a lot of international intrigue and spy-versus-spy stuff: Canada’s Counter-Terror Clown Show and Canada's Samidoun: The Network.
I’ve been banging on about this stuff for nearly 20 years now, as have my Syrian, Iranian and Afghan friends, so do forgive if I occasionally come off a bit weary with it all.
Since the October 7 Simchat Torah pogrom I’ve had to neglect quite a few the other files in my beat - as in this, from only yesterday, Chinese groups in Montreal threaten to sue RCMP over ’secret police station’ allegations and just today in the New York Times: He Won Election to Canada’s Parliament. Did China Help?
But October 7 changed everything. I’ve weighed in on the grotesque Canadian endorsements of Hamas and its barbaric “resistance” by way of mass rape, child murder and kidnapping, several times now in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen.
As in, from the day after the pogrom: As Israeli innocents are hunted and murdered, certain Canadian ‘progressives’ choose to celebrate: It has become commonplace in pseudo-left circles to justify Hamas bloodlust as merely the understandable response of a subjugated people to oppression and 'apartheid'.
And October 11. Hamas supporters enjoy safe haven and left-wing backing in Canada: A bloodcurdling sociopathology has been incubating under Canadian noses for years.
And here, in the Real Story, for paying subscribers with full access to the archives: 'How could this be happening?' Bloodcurdling oaths of allegiance to Hamas, faculty-lounge conflations of mass murder with "resistance," Jews from Paris to Vancouver afraid for their children. This did not come out of nowhere.
In the Netherlands, the Van Gogh murder changed everything, too. And the Dutch political class more or less just trundled along with the status quo, and now the disgustingly Moscow-friendly Wilders is on top.
He’ll have a hard go of it finding enough coalition partners to form a government. There’s no way the other parties will indulge his indecencies about banning mosques and so on, no matter what coalition comes to pass. But his triumph is a very big deal. It’s a revolt against the ruling consensus that has prevailed in Europe for a generation.
It’s a loud echo of the British dyspepsia that led to Brexit seven years ago, an event that continues to gnaw at the foundations of British civility and self-confidence. Andrew Sullivan has an interesting take this weekend, which also touches on the landslide November 19 Argentine presidential election of the oddball anti-establishment former rock singer Javier Milei. Headline: Uh-Oh. Here We Go Again: Anti-incumbent performative populist rage is now the rule, not the exception.
A couple of things stand out. Britain’s chronically turmoil-wracked Conservatives and Keir Starmer’s post-Corbynite Labor Party supporters, for different reasons, are united in pessimism. Almost 80 percent of the British see their country in “steep decline.” And while opposition to mass immigration was the defining motive of the Brexiteers, net migration to the United Kingdom has risen from 379,000 to 745,000 since 2016.
I can barely bring myself to mention the situation in Ireland at the moment. I was on about that in the Post and the Citizen the other day: Antisemitic Ireland needs to shake off the imbecility. It really hurt to write that, and I explained why in this family history, in last Monday’s newsletter: The Faith Of Our Fathers.
Canada is the Netherlands, except way bigger.
The Netherlands, like Canada, is routinely in the top five of the least racist countries out of the 78 countries assessed in the World Values Survey.
I don’t think it should be at all controversial by now to state that the Trudeau government’s “post-national” experiment in transforming Canada into a confederation of decolonized intersectional identity oblasts has proven a catastrophe.
With immigration rates higher than any time in Canadian history, it’s only in recent weeks that Ottawa is conceding that housing capacity and the health system should be maybe factored into immigration planning. Whatever that might end up meaning.
The second of the Leger polls I mention in my column clearly shows that Canadians rightly see immigration as a major factor in the housing crisis (it’s the worst in the G7) and most of us have had it with the “diversity is strength” pabulum that’s chucked in our faces every time Canada’s dysfunctional immigration predicament comes to public notice.
As things stand, nobody even knows how many people live in Canada anymore or how many people are coming and going every year. Ottawa’s official immigration target is for 465,000 permanent residents this year, rising to 500,000 new permanent residents by 2025, but those numbers don’t take into account the 700,000 or so who arrive every year as special-stream immigrants, low-wage temporary foreign workers or students.
Between January and October last year Ottawa approved 645,000 work permits to temporary residents otherwise not authorized to work - a quadrupling over the same period the previous year.
The official numbers are not to be believed anyway. Statistics Canada says the official count of non-permanent residents in Canada has been off by at least half, and the real number of non-permanent residents in the country is more like 2,198,679 people.
Douglas Todd has done probably more than any other journalist in the country to get at the corruption and deception at the heart of the Trudeau government’s handling of immigration and housing. For instance: Federal Liberals are directly inflating house prices. The Liberal Party isn’t just the political wing of the Canada-China Business Council. It’s the Party of The Landlords.
I take this tone as someone who would very much support radical legislation to end Canada’s notorious wealth-migration and foreign-student scams along with a reduction in immigration rates overall - on the condition that the shift allows a sizeable increase in the number of genuine refugees admitted to the country every year.
Only about 140,000 refugee claims were accepted in Canada last year, apart from the 166,000 Ukrainians who have found their way to Canada to live here at least temporarily, following Russia’s February 2022 invasion.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees counts 29.4 million people under the UNHCR’s mandate around the world, among whom are all the engineers, nurses, technicians and other such workers Canada would ever need to fill this country’s much-hyped “labour shortage.”
Questions I Wish I Could Answer For You.
The Postmedia Leger poll I mentioned in my column showed that 75 per cent of respondents backed the notion that non-citizens should be deported if they publicly express hatred towards a minority group or support a terrorist organization.
Here’s the question: How much of the shocking agitation for Judeocide that has erupted on Canadian university campuses and in the streets of every city in Canada since October 7 can be attributed to foreign students and other non-citizens?
It would be nice to think that temporary residents are the prime source of all the gruesome “Anti-Zionist” outrages and the celebrations of the Hamas atrocities that have shocked the conscience of decent Canadians lately. It would be nice because we could conceivably just deport riffraff of this type, en masse, as the social-democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz has lately pondered for Germany.
Unfortunately, there’s not much evidence that this is the case. These people are mostly “old stock,” I suspect. And the ideology (or post-ideology or post-truth ideational mumbo jumbo or whatever it is) underlying the phenomenon of “left-wing antisemitism” has embedded itself in the Trudeau Liberals’ worldview and its whole-of-government organizational principles.
The good news is that the Liberal-NDP doctrine postulating Canada as a systemically racist colonial settler state - which dangerously frames Jews as "white,” incidentally - isn’t sitting well with Canadians. In the Postmedia Leger poll, slightly fewer than a quarter of the respondents - the same proportion of Liberal voters out there, incidentally - want the federal policy paradigm to persist.
I don’t like the term “woke,” but it’s a good-enough descriptive term for the cultish pseudo-religion we’re dealing with here. The long-imprisoned Soviet-era refusenik and human rights activist Natan Sharansky describes the thing as reminiscent of the totalitarian ideology that crippled Russian culture and intellectual life for decades. “Woke ideology,” says Sharansky, “is genuinely dangerous for Jews, for society, and for the world.”
Not really news, but not good news either: The macabre “woke antisemitism” that has incubated apologetics for Hamas in Canada won’t be easily quarantined and purged by a mere shift in federal policy or an ejection of the Liberals in a federal election.
It’s embedded at varying depths in the milieu of avant garde “social justice” activism in Canada, in the public sector unions, in the “progressive” media of the Boomers, the algorithm-twisted worldview of TikTok-addled Zoomers, the social sciences and humanities faculties of Canada’s most prestigious universities, the professional associations, the school boards, the student unions and so on.