November 2009 Archives

I've railed a lot against Canada's Official Jews -- the Jews who are Jews for a living, the Jews who claim to speak for all Jews. Bernie "Burny" Farber at the Canadian Jewish Congress is the worst, with his fetish for censorship. The B'nai Brith and Simon Wiesenthal Center are close behind.

But tonight I have to salute my home town Official Jews for being dumber than a bag of hammers.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a vandalism spree, where swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti were spraypainted on Jewish property around Calgary. In response, the Official Jews held a rally called "Calgary says No to hate". I'm not sure if hate was the real problem, or if it was the vandalism, trespass and other criminal acts. The Jewish community was stunned when the Calgary Police Service originally denied that the swastikas were evidence of a "hate crime", suggesting that it was no different than any other graffiti. Is it any less odd that the Official Jews would drop the word crime, and suggest the problem was merely the emotional state of the criminals?

But look at the list of co-sponsors for the Official Jews' rally: included amongst them are the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, the Islamic Association of Canadian Women and the Muslim Council of Calgary.

Who are they?

Well, the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada and the Islamic Association of Canadian Women are front organizations for the same man: a virulent anti-Semite named Syed Soharwardy. I know Soharwardy because he's the Jew-hater who hauled me before the Alberta Human Rights Commission for my high crime of publishing the Danish cartoons. You can read a bit about Soharwardy's disreputable conduct here and here. Soharwardy isn't just a Jew-hater, he's a woman-hater, too. When three women at his mosque started asking troublesome questions about his financial shenanigans, one of them wound up in the hospital, and another had her house torched. Here's a picture in the Pakistan Post of Robina Butt who, according to police, was assaulted by someone shouting warnings to her about her pesky questions to Soharwardy. This is what happens to Soharwardy's enemies within his own mosque:

Soharwardy's website is an ugly caricature of the man himself. Check out this page, where he regurgitates an anti-Semitic calumny against the Jewish Talmud. It's nothing less than a blood libel, and it's proudly on Soharwardy's website.

Or take this gem of a page, trivializing the Jewish Holocaust and accusing the Jews of perpetrating a Holocaust of their own against the Palestinians. And then there's this page, dutifully reprinting an article written by a senior member of the terrorist group The Muslim Brotherhood (it appears on yet another one of Soharwardy's front group's websites).

This is the man who the Official Jews of Calgary allowed to co-sponsor their rally against "hate" not once, but twice through his fictitious fronts.

Who else is on their list of cosponsors? The anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah organization called the Muslim Council of Calgary, which has received funding from Saudi Arabia.

The Muslim Council of Calgary was the group behind the near-riot a few years ago in downtown Calgary, when hundreds of Muslims chanting "death to the Jews" tried to break into the offices of the federal government in Calgary. You can read the Calgary Herald news report about that violence here.

Just take a moment and surf through the news releases on the Muslim Council of Calgary's website: between calling Israel a war criminal, defending Saddam Hussein, disparaging Canada's security forces and praising Jew-haters like the Canadian Islamic Congress's Mohamed Elmasry, there's not a lot of room left for religion. They're simply doing their job as Saudi Arabia's battering ram in Calgary, battering away at the Jews.

The Muslim Council of Calgary and Syed Soharwardy teamed up earlier this year for a pro-terrorist rally in the heart of the Jewish community. Here is some of my coverage of it at the time; here's a picture of them flying the flag of the terrorist group, Hezbollah -- a group deemed a criminal organization in Canada.

You'll notice that, in addition to the terrorist flag, there is a swastika.

I've lived in Calgary Southwest for most of my life, and my parents and grandparents live there, too. None of us has ever seen swastikas in the neighbourhood until the Soharwardy/MCC protests. They didn't just wave swastika signs, the left anti-Semitic graffiti on a wall, too:

 

 

To this day you can still see where that graffiti has been painted over.

Week after week the anti-Semites from the MCC and Soharwardy's group came back to the mall in the center of the Jewish neighbourhood. At first, they only waved the terrorist flag furtively. When they saw, though, that the police did nothing to stop them -- but rather accosted any pro-Israel counter-protesters -- the anti-Semites got bolder and bolder, to the point where they parked their cars in the Jewish Centre across the street -- on their way to a Jew-bashing rally! -- and spat on a rabbi passing by.

It was only when the owners of the mall got a restraining order against Soharwardy, the MCC and the other protesters, did the weekly festival of Jew-hatred retreat back into their holes -- oh, except the graffiti.

These are the people the Official Jews invited to be the "co-sponsors" of their rally against hate.

I happened to be in Ottawa on November 26, the date of the anti-hate rally. So I don't know if the Official Jews actually invited Soharwardy -- the Jew hater; the Talmud-smearer; the Holocaust trivializer; the terrorist-quoter -- to give a few words at the rally. I don't know if the Muslim Council of Calgary brought their Hezbollah flags with them, or defended Saddam Hussein.

But, as coincidence would have it, I bumped into a Member of Parliament who told me that he had heard one of Calgary's Official Jews, Adam Singer, on the radio saying that it was like Calgary was back in the 1950s again with all the anti-Semitism in the streets.

Come again? The 1950s? You mean when one out of two men on the street in Calgary were war veterans who had just come back from vanquishing Hitler -- not to mention the plenty more who didn't come back? There was the odd anti-Semite in Alberta before the war; Premier Ernest Manning had pretty well rooted them out of public life in the 1940s, and the shock of the Second World War silenced most of the rest of them, moreso in Alberta than, say, in Ontario. Alberta in the 1950s was a golden age for Jews, in business, religious life and public life. A perfect example of this was Harry Veiner, the Jewish mayor of Medicine Hat from 1952 to 1974. Those anti-Semitic Albertans of the 1950s!

Maybe it's Adam Singer and the Official Jews who need to have a little anti-hate workshop for themselves -- they've got to stop hating the province they live in, and hating their neighbours, and accusing them of being closet anti-Semites.

My MP friend marvelled at the alternative reality that Singer and his ilk would have to inhabit to claim that the kind of anti-Semitism evidenced here:

is the work of Nazis, or old-style anti-Semitism.

"Stop Israel's Genocide on Gaza" -- ah, yes, that's what every Jewish shopkeeper in Alberta was faced with in the 1950s!

There had never been anti-Semitism in the Jewish neighbourhood of southwest Calgary until Soharwardy, the MCC and their ilk invaded with their terrorist flags and their Jew-bashing chants. They came, they harrassed the Jews, and they left their vandalism. And Adam Singer and his clueless klatch invited them to share the podium with him at a rally against "hate".

It's not the Muslim radicals waving the terrorist flags that Singer is worried about; it's not the radical preacher whose female critics get sent to the hospital after criticising him. No, he's worried about a resurgence -- drop the "re", for there was never any "surgence" in Alberta -- of old-style Nazism.

What a fool. It's wilfully blind buffoons like Singer who gave Fort Hood their Nidal Hasan, by turning a blind eye towards the obvious threats, prefering instead politically correct platitudes.

I used to believe that Jews were smart. I'm sorry, but I just don't believe that anymore.

Here's an Op-Ed I wrote that appeared today in the online and print editions of the National Post. It originally ran in Canadian Lawyer.

Canada’s trade with China has never been bigger, and it’s never grown faster. According to the latest statistics, we now exchange $53-billion in goods and services with them each year, making China our second-largest trading partner after the United States.

If an oil pipeline were ever built from Alberta to the west coast, you could tack on an extra $10- or $20-billion a year to those numbers — and scare any protectionist instincts out of a U.S. Congress that takes Canada for granted.

Such a pipeline isn’t likely. But what is already happening is that energy-hungry China is buying Canadian resource producers directly. This fall, PetroChina Co. Ltd. — the world’s largest company according to its stock-market valuation — spent $1.9 billion to buy a 60% stake in an oilsands company. Expect more of that as China moves its massive wealth out of U.S. dollars and into strategic assets.

All of which makes Jean Chrétien’s October speech in Paris bizarre. Chrétien denounced Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s foreign policy, saying Canada has “lost a lot of ground in China” and “I think it is not good.”

It is generally regarded as unseemly for a former head of government to criticize a successor. Even Dwight Eisenhower publicly stood by John Kennedy after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, communicating his withering criticisms in private. Chrétien, too, has generally remained mum on Canadian politics. But not on this issue. It’s not the first time he’s publicly attacked Harper’s China policy, and this time he did so in a foreign country.

And he gave details; he claims he was once told by a Chinese leader that Canada was their “best friend” (the implication being that’s no longer the case). And he boasted that in the first three years he was prime minister, he met with the Chinese president “eight or nine times.”

Some of Chrétien’s observations are true. It’s unlikely that, in an intimate moment, the Chinese dictator would whisper to Harper that he is their best friend. And Harper is unlikely to make a quarterly pilgrimage to Beijing. On the other hand, Chrétien didn’t visit Alberta that frequently either, so it’s a saw-off.

But are the personal expressions of affection that Chrétien received, and his ability to get meetings with Chinese bosses, truly measures of Canada’s national interest? Or are they merely the measure of Chrétien’s own desire for affirmation from the world’s most brutal regime — the little guy from Shawinigan trying to prove he’s not small-time anymore?

Chrétien pointed out that China has blazed ahead with African relations, something that Canada would do well to emulate. That’s half true; China is on the march in Africa, especially in Sudan. Chinese engineers built and maintain the oilfields there, and China buys more than half of Sudan’s oil exports. And China has become Sudan’s most important arms dealer, too, helping it perpetrate its genocide in Darfur more efficiently. And when the subject of sanctions comes up at the United Nations, China is there with its veto to protect its African protégé.

What is the source of Chrétien’s sinophilia? Since when did liberals concede the cause of international human rights to conservatives?

Let us grant, out of politeness, that Chrétien’s foreign policy as prime minister was not influenced by the fact that his son-in-law is André Desmarais, president of Power Corp. of Canada, a multi-billion dollar company with massive real estate, railway, and power projects in China. But in countries with a more robust press than Canada, it would have been a scandal that Chrétien travelled to China to lobby for Power Corp. less than two months after stepping down as PM.

Since then, Chrétien has made a lot of money off his best friends in Beijing. Just this summer, Ivanhoe Energy Inc. appointed Chrétien as its senior adviser on China. So did SouthGobi Energy Resources Ltd. And he recently signed on with a company looking to build a casino in an allied communist state, Vietnam.
It is illegal for a former PM to lobby the Canadian government within five years of holding office. But it’s not illegal for a former PM to lobby the Chinese government within five weeks of holding office.

It is unseemly, however, that the former prime minister who was so silent on China’s human rights abuses moved so quickly into working with those same abusers. The China-Tibet railway is perhaps the most ethically challenged public works project in the world. Is it not embarrassing to Canadians that it was built by Power Corp., fronted by Chrétien?

Oh, let Chrétien and his family make their money. But next time he gives a speech condemning Canada for our new approach to China, make sure you ask if he’s speaking as a former PM, or as a current lobbyist — or if he even knows the difference. 

 

I saw a headline pop up on my BlackBerry tonight: "Jewish leaders ask Harper to trash Tory flyer".

Naturally, when I saw "Jewish leaders" and an attempt to publicly embarrass Stephen Harper, arguably the most pro-Jewish and pro-Israel head of government in the world, I thought that the Jewish leaders involved would be Bernie "Burny" Farber and the pro-Liberal Canadian Jewish Congress.

So when I read the item I was surprised, and even a little pleased, that the list of "Jewish leaders" denouncing Harper does not include Burny, or for that matter the leaders of B'nai Brith or the Canada-Israel Committee or the Simon Wiesenthal Center or any organization of synagogues or really anyone who leads anything, other than various branches of the Liberal Party.

There's not a lot of leaders on the list of "Jewish leaders". For that matter, many of the names aren't Jewish, either. I guess it's like the Holy Roman Empire -- not really holy, not really Roman, and not much of an empire.

It's not a list of Jewish leaders. It's a list of the last 100 Jews left in the Liberal Party.

Many of the names have just too much of their lives and reputations invested in the Liberals to leave now, even though the party has turned its back on Jews and Israel. In this category I'd put old party hacks like Elinor Caplan and Karen Mock; if they're leaders, who exactly are their followers? I suppose signing a meaningless petition is the least they could do in return for their party's patronage. And then there are those for whom their true ethnic and religious identity is being Liberal. Being religiously Jewish or politically pro-Israel comes second for this category of signatories -- they'd be Liberal even if the Liberals went truly insane and, say, Michael Ignatieff had his way and militarily forced Israel to capitulate to terrorists.

You can see the list of names here.

The first thing you'll notice is, well, how short the list is, and even that is plumped up by having lots of husbands and wives both signing, and the odd kid. Compare that to a very similar letter issued by the Liberal Party in 2006, when they were facing their first serious defections of Jews to the Conservatives. Here's that 2006 letter -- without counting name by name, it looks like the new list of Jewish hold-outs in the Liberal Party is about half as long. Last one out, please turn off the lights.

Ten years ago -- even five years ago -- such a letter would have been signed by the stars of Jewish public life, politics and industry: Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman; at least one of the Aspers; a Tanenbaum perhaps. Not now, and surely not for lack of trying on the part of the Liberal war room. Canada's leading Jews -- Canada's serious Jews -- know that when it comes to Israel, Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are the best thing that ever happened to them. And they also know that Ignatieff's own slanders against Israel (such as his war crimes accusation) are just the beginning of the problem; behind Ignatieff stands the most anti-Israel caucus the Liberals have ever fielded, from Mark Holland to Borys Wrzesnewskyj to Denis Coderre, the last two of whom proudly march with or defend terrorist groups like Hezbollah.

To be fair, the list isn't completely devoid of proud, Zionist Jews. There are a few on the list, like former senators Leo Kolber and Yoine Goldstein, who truly could have been called Jewish leaders in their day. Alas, Goldstein is 75 years old and Kolber is 80; both old enough to have been mandatorily retired from the Senate. The Liberal Party they helped build is long gone. The fact that they are the most prominent names on the list is rather pitiful, a proof in itself that the Liberal Party's heyday for Jews was in the past.

There are a couple of names on the list that deserve some mention. I see Robert Rabinovich on there. He was the Liberal appointee who ran the CBC during its most anti-Israel years -- when it was Al Jazeera's farm team, for self-hating Jews like Avi Lewis. To see Rabinovich lecturing anyone about anti-Semitism is dark comedy.

With that low bar it won't surprise you that Warren Kinsella is listed as one of the "Jewish leaders". Yes, this is the same Kinsella who gave help and advice to the anti-Semitic Canadian Islamic Congress in its human rights complaints against Maclean's magazine. Kinsella was also kicked off a Canadian Jewish Congress Committee for threatening to blacklist the Canada-Israel Committee in Liberal circles. If he's a Jewish leader, I'm a Taliban leader.

This list is a sign of weakness, not strength. I'm surprised it was even released, given its lack of success in recruiting any big names. Severely normal Jews who see the list will say: "uh, who are they?" And political insiders will look at the list and answer, "low-level Liberal functionaries, plus a few retired politicians".

How about the Conservatives? Will they release their own list of Jewish supporters? If they did, it would not fit onto one page. Last weekend the party raised $250,000 in one night in Jewish Montreal. That's quite something, given election finance rules that limit donations to $1,100 or less, and even more stunning that it was in Jewish Montreal. That's about as likely as Michael Ignatieff raising $250,000 in one night from gun-owners in Calgary.

No, it's probably easier for the Conservatives to just list the Jews who don't support the Conservatives these days, and just re-issue the Liberal list.

Ross Rebagliati, pot-head, former Olympic medallist and currently the Liberals' star candidate in Okanagan-Coquihalla, as interviewed by Jonathon Gatehouse in Maclean's magazine:

On his reasons for liking Ignatieff:

Rebagliati: I think Michael Ignatieff has been a great leader...

Maclean's: Why do you think he’s in such difficulty?

Rebagliati: That’s a great question... I don’t feel like I have enough information to make a comment on that...

On the importance of voting:

Rebagliati: ...We’re sending our Canadian soldiers overseas to create a democracy in a foreign land.... And we can’t even bring ourselves to vote here, when we have that right and privilege? To me, that’s unacceptable.

Maclean's: Have you been a regular voter?

Rebagliati: No I haven’t...

On his reasons for liking Trudeau:

Rebagliati: Trudeau... had a cool car and all the girls liked him.

On political lessons he learned in Nagano:

Rebagliati: ...I was put in a Japanese jail for several hours and interrogated, there were potential charges that could have been imposed on me... When I did get my medal back, that famous picture of me holding it up was actually taken on the steps of the Japanese police station—I don’t think people realize that.

On his current, uh, lifestyle

Maclean's: ...you described your job since the Olympics as basically “being Ross.” What does that entail?

Rebagliati: At a certain point, everybody has to face who they are as a person.

Maclean's: How are you making your living these days?

Rebagliati: ...This afternoon, I’m going to be driving a pilot truck for a friend who delivers houseboats... I do what I can, when I can, however I can.

On his plans for the Vancouver-Whistler Olympics:

Rebagliati: I’m going to try to get into as many events as I can, but I don’t have a single ticket.

Macleans: Did you try to get tickets?

Rebagliati: No, I didn’t try

On marijuana: 

Maclean's: Are you in favour of legalization?

Rebagliati: I see myself...standing in the middle of the room, and having a clear view of all the issues, including the legalization of marijuana

Maclean's: ...do you still use marijuana?

Rebagliati: ...When the time comes, I’ll address it. I just don’t think now is the right time.

Maclean's: What’s your campaign theme song going to be?

Rebagliati: I like... Bob Marley

I'd predict that the Liberals under Rebagliati will come in fourth place, but that's what they did last time, so that's not exactly being bold.

This Wednesday night, Nov. 25th, I've been invited to speak at Vancouver's Jewish Book Festival, about my book, Shakedown.

They've titled my talk "Confrontation, Controversy and Censorship" which sounds about right! The event kicks off at 8 p.m. at the Jewish Centre on Oak & 41st Avenue. You can see the details on this page (scroll down to the bottom -- it looks like I'm closing the festival!) You can register on that page, or by calling (604) 257-5111.

I love speaking about freedom of speech at Jewish venues (although, of course, this event is open to anyone). It's important to me that Jews hear an alternative point of view to the pro-censorship tripe served up by the Official Jews. As I've noted before (such as here and here) censorship is the quintessentially un-Jewish idea, and indeed most Jewish public intellectuals in Canada have firmly come out in favour of free speech and against the human rights commissions. It's yet another example of how Canada's Official Jews have taken a public position that is contrary to the wishes of the population they claim to represent.

So congratulations to the Jewish Book Festival for inviting me, despite what must have been some snooty e-mails coming at them from Toronto I hope the event is a hit -- and I hope that, like my speeches at other Jewish forums, it convinces open-minded Jews to stop drinking from the censorship Kool-Aid.

P.S. Let me close with an article I wrote about censorship, anti-Semitism and Vancouver. It appeared in the Calgary Sun back in October, 2004. That was long before I was entangled in human rights commissions, and learned the depth to which they had become hijacked by radical Islam as part of the "soft jihad" against the West in general and Jews in particular. But even then I sensed that there were some kinds of hate speech that the HRCs turned a blind eye too -- the politically correct hate speech by people the HRCs are frankly too afraid to touch, afraid politically and afraid physically, too.

Canada's "hate squads" are very brave when going after basement Nazis who pose a threat to no-one. But they hide under their desks when it comes to real haters who actually incite violence. This is your story, Vancouver:

 

Years ago, Jim Keegstra was charged with and convicted of the crime of spreading hatred. It was a seemingly endless case, working its way up to the Supreme Court.

It cost millions of tax dollars, and more than that, was an energetic expression of the government's opposition to racial and religious discord. Libertarians were rightly upset that speech -- no matter how vile -- could be criminalized. But a precedent was set, along with a message.

Fast forward to the present: News out of Vancouver is the imam of the major mosque there, one Younus Kathrada, has been whipping up his congregants each week with anti-Semitic hatred that would make Keegstra sound positively like a Zionist.

Like Keegstra, Kathrada called Jews names -- "we are dealing with a people ... the brothers of the monkeys and the swine ... whose treachery is well known." Calling Jews brothers of monkeys and swine sounds like a schoolyard taunt more than high argument, but his point was clear. And just in case it wasn't, Kathrada made it clearer still: His sermons repeatedly called for the killing of Jews.

Poor old Keegstra. All he ever did was call the Jews power-hungry money-grubbers, and he was convicted of a crime. Kathrada whips up his congregants into a Jew-baiting frenzy -- and tells them to go and actually kill someone -- and he remains free.

There's some evidence that his Muslim acolytes actually followed his instructions, too. Rudwan Khalil Abubaker, who attended Kathrada's mosque, was in a fire-fight with Russian troops in Chechnya earlier this year. At least he took his violence outside of Vancouver.

The question remains: Why was Keegstra's offensive but non-violent anti-Semitism taken to the Supreme Court, but Kathrada's is tolerated with impunity?

Kathrada doesn't just call for the death of Jews. He slams Muslims who dare to believe in peaceful co-existence -- you know, Ottawa's dream of multiculturalism. Kathrada claims such Muslims aren't real Muslims, and no truce with Jews can ever be had.

Kathrada also uses his tax-exempt mosque to trumpet the cause of Hamas, a notorious terrorist group responsible for countless suicide bombings.

Why hasn't Kathrada been charged with a hate crime? Why haven't he and his mosque been charged under Canada's new anti-terrorism laws for promoting and aiding terrorist groups like Hamas? (To date, not a single charge has been laid under this law.)

The answer is obvious. It's easy to pick on a politically incorrect country bumpkin like Jim Keegstra. Some dumb white guy making dumb remarks about Jews -- go get 'em. There's not a well-funded, politically correct Dumb Guy Defence Committee ready to roll for his defence.

But ever since 9/11, liberals throughout the West have decided an anti-Arab backlash would be worse than Arab terrorism itself. So true risks like Kathrada are ignored, in the name of not making a fuss. The liberal thinking is that charging someone like Kathrada would only give a bad name to all Muslims.

Of course, it would do the opposite -- it would point out that not all Muslims are in league with such terror tactics, and that the few who are will be rooted out.

Not charging the handful of Muslims who are haters is like not charging the handful of Italians who are part of the Mafia -- it is a misguided act of political correctness. The majority of Muslims -- we hope -- do not support Kathrada. He should be made an example of, not have excuses made for him. Justice calls for it.

 

The first move by Peter Donolo, Michael Ignatieff's new chief of staff, was to fire just about everyone in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition, other than the leader himself.

Last week I asked the obvious question: did Donolo fire Warren Kinsella, the frat boy in charge of Ignatieff's gaffe-prone war room? Given Kinsella's string of highly publicized failures (here's a particularly embarrassing one), it seemed obvious. A close inspection of Donolo's new organizational chart shows that, indeed, the great restaurant critic and girls' school guidance counselor had been shown the door.

Does anyone see a pattern here? Kinsella has been told "thanks, but no thanks" by many people who have worked with him, from the consulting firm Navigator, to the National Post where he had a column, to the Canadian Jewish Congress where he served on a committee until he threatened to blacklist the Canada-Israel Committee. It's not just him being fired; it's him firing back at his former employers and even former friends, publicly and viciously. To me, nothing tells that unhappy story better than Kinsella's bizarre and brutal attacks on TVO's Steve Paikin -- attacks that, of course, only blew up in Kinsella's own face. What a social misfit.

I guess Peter Donolo was sick of having a "human shrapnel machine" inside the office. It's poetic justice that it was Donolo, Jean Chretien's key man, who finally took care of the Kinsella problem.

When I asked the question on my blog last week, Kinsella -- the most thin-skinned man in Ottawa, judging by the number of defamation threats he issues -- went into his patented damage control mode. Or, as the rest of us call it, lying. He told the Globe and Mail's Jane Taber that he in fact had not been fired; she dutifully reported that he was the last man standing in the OLO.

Today Kinsella himself admitted what will soon become evident: he ain't running the war room anymore. As with all of his involuntary departures, he has some pitiful spin; today it's that that his focus will be "municipal and provincial politics - and punk rock, and hockey rink philosophy, and the law, and bad puns, and clumsy alliterations, and the other stuff I like". Wow, that's weak.

Look, politics is an unstable career; it's not unusual for people to be fired -- even good people. It's just that most folks don't go to such lengths to cover up the fact, or to spin it. I'm guessing that it will be a while before Taber takes anything Kinsella says at face value again.

Donolo's decision to fire Kinsella has been done, so far, without Kinsella smearing Ignatieff as he did before, and as he did continuously when Paul Martin was the leader. I'd call that Donolo's first executive success, though I wouldn't bet on it being permanent -- like a vial of nitroglycerine, Kinsella is quite touchy, and prone to angry explosions.

When Ignatieff hired Kinsella, the Liberals were essentially tied with the Conservatives. On the day Donolo fired Kinsella, the Liberals are 15% behind. I call it the Kinsella Effect; Donolo calls it time to end amateur hour, and bring in some grown-ups.

Though I'm a Conservative booster, I've got to be candid: I predict that with Kinsella gone, Ignatieff will begin to close that 15-point gap.

No, I don't think he is. And, contrary to apoplectic Liberals, that's not the accusation made in these Conservative mail-outs. Here's a detail of one of those mail-outs:

You can see that it is a fact-based comparison chart between the public positions taken by the Conservatives and Liberals. For example, it is simply a fact that Michael Ignatieff called Israel -- and not the terrorist group Hezbollah -- the war criminal during the 2006 conflict.

That bizarre slander against the Jewish state cost Ignatieff the support of Susan Kadis, his Toronto campaign co-chair, who quit his campaign over the remarks. Kadis was later thrown out by voters in Thornhill, in favour of Peter Kent; other Liberal MPs in ridings with significant Jewish populations saw their vote share plummet, too. Take Joe Volpe, in Toronto's Eglinton-Lawrence riding, who saw his 11,000 vote lead in 2006 evaporate to a 2,000 vote lead in 2008 -- a stunningly weak showing for a riding in the thick of the 416 area code.

That's why the Liberals are spitting bullets over these Tory pamphlets: they know that Volpe can't afford to lose another 9,000 votes, but a few more "war crimes" comments from Ignatieff, and they will.

Ignatieff's war crime comments weren't a slip of the tongue; they were the reiteration of Ignatieff's long-held views about Israel -- views that may have been fashionable in Ignatieff's academic circles in the U.K., but that are shockingly out of touch with Canadian political norms.

Take this insane rant that Ignatieff wrote for London's Guardian in 2002. Funny enough, I came across that article courtesy of Warren Kinsella, who wrote on this website that he "objected to" Ignatieff's comparison of Israel to "the fascism of apartheid". Apparently Kinsella no longer objects to that grotesque comparison, for he's scrubbed his criticism from his blog, and went to work for Ignatieff as a senior aide. But I agree with the old Kinsella: Ignatieff's comparison of apartheid South Africa to democratic, pluralistic Israel, where Arabs sit in the Knesset and even on the Supreme Court, is odious. I wouldn't call it anti-Semitic; but it's just an arms-length away. I guess Kinsella is comfortable with that. Then again, Kinsella is the political operative who gave help and advice to the anti-Semitic Canadian Islamic Congress in their censorship campaign against Maclean's. That's bad enough, but the CIC is a notorious apologist for terrorism. Its president at the time, Mohamed Elmasry, had said that it was legitimate for terrorist to kill any Israeli adult. Elmasry was a delegate to the last Liberal leadership convention, so I guess a lot of people share Kinsella's comfort level with Jew-hatred in his party, though I doubt even Ignatieff would work for Elmasry's bigoted group like Kinsella did.

You really should read Ignatieff's whole essay. It wasn't some off-the-cuff remark made by Ignatieff in a scrum, where he might have mis-heard a question or mis-spoken the answer. This was an essay that he spent hours writing and revising; it can fairly be taken to be the state of the art of his thinking, the wise professor's considered opinion. Here are some nuggets from it:

Ignatiff compares Israel to crusaders and Apartheid:

 

When I looked down at the West Bank, at the settlements like Crusader forts occupying the high ground, at the Israeli security cordon along the Jordan river closing off the Palestinian lands from Jordan, I knew I was not looking down at a state or the beginnings of one, but at a Bantustan, one of those pseudo-states created in the dying years of apartheid to keep the African population under control.

 

Ignatieff says Israel is what destroyed the Palestinian Authority's ability to govern:

 

Now that its troops have pillaged the offices of the Palestinian Authority, confiscated hard-drives, emptied safes, destroyed records, Israel has destroyed the one entity that might be able to control the territory it cannot.

 

Ignatieff says Israel is brutally repressive, like France was in Algeria:

 

Repressing a population bent on national independence destroyed the French Fourth Republic in Algeria, and it will kill Israel.

 

The right of return for Palestinians is an "excellent idea":

 

Absorbing the entire Palestinian population into Israel as equal citizens would be an excellent idea

 

Israel is "angry and embittered" just like terrorists are:

 

Both sides, moreover, are not just angry and embittered...

 

Israel is extremist, and part of a death cult, like the terrorists:

 

Eighteen months of extremism on both sides... a mutually reinforcing death cult.

 

Like the terrorists, Israel isn't capable or willing to make peace:

 

...neither side is capable of making peace, or even sitting in the same room to discuss it.

 

A solution must be "imposed" on Israel:

 

The only way to seize the opportunity is to impose a two-state solution now...

 

U.S. troops must force Israel to comply, and must protect Palestinians from Israel:

 

the US must then commit its own troops, and those of willing allies, not to police a ceasefire, but to enforce the solution that provides security for both populations.

 

What a nut:

 

Imposing a peace of this amplitude on both parties, and committing the troops to back it up, would be the most dramatic exercise of presidential leadership since the Cuban missile crisis. Nothing less dramatic than this will prevent the Middle East from descending into an inferno.

Is Ignatieff an anti-Semite? No, I don't think so. But his opinions of Israel are word-for-word the kind of thing that anti-Semites like the Saudis or the PLO would say. I think that it was Ignatieff just being a fashionable pundit in British academia, where anti-Semitism is rampant. "Just visiting" isn't just a Tory campaign slogan; it's a real problem for someone who has lived his whole adult life in other countries with other political norms, trying to impose himself on Canada. Sorry, we just don't buy into the moral equivalence that Ignatieff contracted overseas. 

You can see why other anti-Israel activists within the Liberal caucus have felt empowered to spew their own venom. Here's Mark Holland's crazy anti-Israel mail-out to his own riding. It's from back in 2006, but Ignatieff continues to give Holland a prominent role in his caucus.

Holland's screaming, front-page headline is:

Harper's pro-Israel cheerleading is dangerous foreign policy shift

and it goes downhill from there, implying that Israel deliberately targeted civilians in its 2006 war against Hezbollah terrorists. Come to think of it, maybe it wasn't Ignatieff influencing Ignatieff, maybe it was the other way around -- maybe Ignatieff saw Holland's buffoonery, and thought a well-placed "war crimes" comment was what Canadians wanted to hear.

I've got to run now, but let me upload one of my favourite comparisons between the Conservatives and the Liberals. If I have time, I'll post some more proof of a systemic anti-Israel bias within the Liberal Party -- a bias so comprehensive that even Ariela Cotler, the wife of Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, publicly quit the party over it.

The Liberal spluttering you hear is the anger of someone being caught, not the anger of someone being falsely accused.

 

 

 

It's been a rough go for Michael Ignatieff lately: he's lagging in the polls; his party came in third in the byelections this week and Denis Coderre has announced his intention to lead the Liberals, even though there isn't a leadership race on now.

So Ignatieff has hit the reset button, hard. He sacked his chief of staff, Ian Davey, and his communications director, Jill Fairbrother. Gone, too, is principal secretary Dan Brock and two other staffers, Alexis Levine and Mark Sakamoto. And tonight, the Toronto Star's Susan Delacourt reports that nine more staff in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition were sacked today alone.

Was one of them Warren Kinsella?

It's a pretty obvious question; Kinsella's war room has misfired repeatedly this year, emphasizing frat-boy antics that crowded out Ignatieff's occasional policy announcements. When even the CBC is mocking Kinsella's tactics, you know things are rough.

Kinsella's tactics were the pushiest thing in Ignatieff's rudderless office, and so they dominated by default. But tactics -- or, more accurately, just the same gimmicky tactic over and over again -- make for bad strategy. Kinsella made no secret of the fact that he lusted for an election this year, repeatedly calling for it on his blog. Does anyone doubt that Ignatieff's comically bellicose utterances this year -- "if you mess with me, I will mess with you until I'm done... don't trifle with me. Don't try this rough stuff with me" and "your time is up!" -- were encouraged, if not written word-for-word by Kinsella, the self-described ass-kicker?

Ignatieff's rhetorical overreach certainly follows Kinsella's personal modus operandi: attempts at intimidation that must sound impressive to the one saying them, but cause giggles in most everyone else.

And all of that merely goes to Kinsella's role as a backroom operator. But Kinsella has never been able to simply work in a campaign -- he has a genetic need to boast about it, with some embroidery from time to time. I know of no other campaign strategist who also maintains a blog in which he discusses in public what he is supposed to be doing in private -- and adds in all sorts of other colour commentary, such as his views on how Chinese restaurants serve cat meat or that a woman's place is in the kitchen. It's that tendency for Kinsella to have public melt-downs that led one Liberal colleague to describe Kinsella as a "human shrapnel machine" and even for Ignatieff himself to say "I hope, joking aside, that we maintain basic decency in politics and that there are some things you just don’t do, and that also applies to Mr. Kinsella. Nobody who works for me should be taking cheap shots, and if they take cheap shots, they won’t be working for me for very long."

So, seriously: do you really think that everyone from the chief of staff down to the copy boy has been fired from the OLO, but that Kinsella remains unscathed?

Jay Currie asked Kinsella directly tonight, and was met with insults and a threat. I've never known Kinsella to be modest before, nor restrained, so it's reasonable to assume that Kinsella, too, has been fired -- or at least neutered.

That's the one thing about sacking Kinsella: he has a nasty track-record of smearing people with whom he's parted ways. Whether it's the Toronto Star, the National Post, Navigator Ltd., Steve Paikin, the Canada-Israel Committee, or John Tory, Kinsella has turned on former friends and colleagues with a vicious vengeance if he feels slighted by them. No doubt Davey, Fairbrother and the rest of the newly unemployed OLO staff have hurt feelings, but they will likely keep their grumbling to themselves, if not out of a sense of professionalism, then out of loyalty to the larger party. Kinsella, by contrast, is governed neither by such professionalism nor party loyalty, as shown by his spectacularly public and extended trashing of the Liberal Party as soon as it was led by Paul Martin.

So the question is: will Kinsella turn on Ignatieff, as he has turned on so many others?

It's not hard to imagine; it wasn't long ago that Kinsella was publicly smearing Ignatieff using language that would make a Tory war-roomer blush. Here's just a small excerpt of Kinsella's take on Ignatieff:

I objected to the fact that he mocked Canada during the three decades he was abroad, and that he likened Israeli policy to the fascism of apartheid. I objected to what I perceived to be breathtaking arrogance – calling Canada a "herbivorian boy scout" one day, then jetting up here to run it the next.

That's pretty tough stuff -- and it was written before Ignatieff did anything to him. What could Kinsella do to Ignatieff that's worse than insulting him? Oh, plenty. Given how Kinsella fights with other former allies, one could expect to see quite a few embarrassing internal e-mails splashed on the Internet.

We'll find out Kinsella's status soon enough -- as his reply to Jay shows, Kinsella just hasn't found the right spin yet.

But there is one last reason why firing Kinsella could well be the smartest thing Ignatieff does this year. Nearly a year ago, in a fit of partisan pique, Kinsella slapped me with a $5-million nuisance lawsuit, because I wrote about his involvement with Adscam, and pointed out that Justice Gomery made a legal finding that Kinsella conducted himself in a "highly inappropriate" manner -- a finding that Kinsella never appealled.

Kinsella hated that I mentioned his role in Adscam, and in typical over-the-top, volcano-rage mode, he sued me, surely thinking that I'd be scared. Instead, I laughed, filed a statement of defence, and asked for him to disclose his Adscam documents, as he is required to do under the rules of court.

Not surprisingly, Kinsella has delayed again and again. It's hilarious reading excuse after excuse from his lawyer (when he bothers to reply). Clearly Kinsella never meant for there to actually be a trial about his behaviour in Adscam -- but I can't think of anything that would be more vindicating to me, devastating to Kinsella, and fascinating to the Parliamentary Press Gallery. If I don't get Kinsella's Adscam documents soon, I'm going to have to apply to a court to have him ordered to turn them over. It's just like Ignatieff's election bluffs -- he looked ridiculous when his bluff was called, and he backed down. Kinsella's lawsuit bluff is about to be called, too. It's now a tug of war between Kinsella's pride: does he embarrass himself by dropping the suit against me and paying my costs to date, or does he embarrass himself through a lengthy, meticulous, public inspection of his actions in Adscam?

Either way, do you think Ignatieff wants to be anywhere near that spectacle?

We'll find out soon enough -- I'm guessing by tomorrow morning.

 

See update, below.

 

Last week Don Martin wrote a column about how the Olympic torch route is heavily biased towards Conservative ridings. Only 21 Liberal ridings would get a pitstop, he wrote, compared to 126 Conservative ridings. He had other embarrassing details, like the fact that the opposition-dominated city of Halifax "doesn't rate a downtown pitstop" and "Winnipeg is bypassed in favour of stop-overs in surrounding ridings held by Conservatives".

 

Wow -- following on breathless allegations of bias in how the government is spending infrastructure money, Martin's column hit the sweet spot.

 

Kelly McParland wrote a response pointing out that, geographically speaking, Liberal MPs are bunched together in small urban areas like Toronto and Montreal, whereas Conservative MPs represent more of the larger, rural ridings through which any torch route must naturally go. But McParland's justification was just that: trying to justify Martin's embarrassing facts.

 

Except that Martin's facts were wrong.

 

Take a look for yourself at the Olympic Committee's interactive map of the torch relay route and click around the country, especially in opposition ridings.

 

Click on Halifax. The torch route doesn't skip the city as Martin says it will. In fact, it will go down just about every big road in town, and then it comes back again two days later for another go at things. And in terms of "pit stops" as Martin calls them, there's a big "community celebration" planned for the Grand Parade grounds right downtown, with the torch's arrival being the highlight of the night.

 

Or click on Winnipeg. Again, the torch will visit that city not once but twice. It's not "bypassed" as Martin says it will be. The exact torch route is not yet mapped out on the Olympics website, but it's clear that two days are planned for the largest city in Manitoba, not the zero days implied by Martin.

 

Or look at all-Liberal Newfoundland and Labrador where, later this week, the torch will spend five days.

 

Only a severely bored journalist -- or one desperate for a story idea -- would try to turn something as non-partisan as an Olympic torch run into a political scandal. Martin's column was less about reality and more of a Rorschach test about his own eagerness to pin something on the Conservatives, no matter how gimmicky.

 

How did Martin get his facts so wrong? Did he do any research -- even just clicking on the map -- or was he just happy to be spoon-fed the latest anti-Conservative spin from the Liberal war room? There's nothing wrong with getting story tips from partisans, but a newspaperman of Martin's experience owes it to his readership to double-check the facts for himself, not to be wilfully blind to them.

 

Martin was a participant in the Liberal strategy of a gimmick a week -- most of which has fallen apart upon inspection and, judging by last night's byelection results, none of which has had an effect on voters. Martin's story has a blazingly large headline. Too bad the correction, if it ever comes, will be in 8-point font.

 

Update: Don Martin replies, in my comments section. He calls my blog entry a "cheap shot". I'm not quite sure how it's a cheap shot; either his facts were correct or they weren't; either my criticisms are correct or they aren't.

 

If I were an Olympics volunteer who was helping to organize events in Halifax or Winnipeg, I'd probably say that Martin's column was a cheap shot -- and I'd hope that my neighbours came to the torch events despite his claim that they don't exist. Oh well; I wish Martin had the same sense of humour about being caught in an error, as he does when he's the one doing the catching.

Here are my thoughts on the subject, that I wrote ten years ago in an editorial for the National Post (and that was polished up by my editor, the great John O'Sullivan). I suppose the one thing I'd write differently today is to note that China, in fact, is the most murderous regime the world has known. But the Soviet Union is in second, ahead of Hitler's Reich.

I've put the most important paragraph in bold. Here it is:

Evil, unavenged

Ten years ago, the most murderous dictatorship the world has known was brought to its knees without a shot. Forty-four years of Cold War came to an end when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. All through that summer and fall refugees from communism had been flooding through the escape hatch to the West left open by Hungary. Regimes in the Communist satellites had simply faded away one by one in a series of moral revolutions. The doomsday scenario -- an all-out confrontation between the Communist Warsaw Pact and NATO -- never even looked like happening. Communism died like an elderly patient in a geriatric ward -- of opportunistic infections following a massive stroke.

How was this extraordinary collapse brought about? The demoralized, self-doubting America of the 1960s and '70s had been unable to stop a Soviet Union so outwardly sure of itself. As late as the early 1980s the Soviet Union was pursuing an expansionist policy in Afghanistan, southern Africa and central America. It took the political leadership of president Ronald Reagan and and the spiritual example of Pope John Paul II to begin the unravelling of the Russian empire. Mr. Reagan's military and industrial expansion exhausted the weaker Soviet economy as it struggled to match the West weapon for weapon; the Pope's historic visit to Poland rekindled a spiritual fearlessness that official atheism had not been able to extinguish. But the crucial factor was that after years of accommodating leadership, the West was finally led by people who treated communism as an evil but temporary fraud on mankind.

"This wall will fall," Mr. Reagan had prophesied when he visited Berlin in 1987. "It cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom." Two years later, economically stressed, geographically overextended, militarily outmatched and morally rebutted, the Soviet Empire imploded.

Ten years after liberation, however, the truth about Communist oppression is disappearing from public consciousness. Where post-war Germany was de-nazified by the Allies, and where Europeans were deprogramed of Hitler's imprint, no such purification of Eastern Europe has occurred. Most of the architects of the Gulag remain at large, and only tentative steps have been taken to call them to account. By a topical coincidence Egon Krenz, the last Soviet satrap of East Germany, has just been sentenced to prison for his role in killing political dissidents. But Mikhail Gorbachev has called for past atrocities to be ignored: "We should put this all behind us. We should look to the future instead of holding witchhunts."

There is never a case for witchhunts, since witches do not exist. And it may well be that, in the interests of social peace, we do not wish to sentence either former Communist leaders or humble torturers to the long sentences to which we still sentence elderly Nazis. Perhaps the worst punishment we should impose would be to compel the Communist murderers among us to visit the mass graves of their victims, tour the camps where slaves were worked and starved to death, meet their surviving victims and beg their forgiveness. Maybe, however, some custodial sentence should be imposed for what was, after all, mass murder that continued until well into the 1980s. All these are matters to be considered without rancour and in a spirit of seeking truth and justice.

What cannot be permitted is that these crimes against humanity should be thrust down the memory hole because they embarrass former Communist leaders like Mr. Gorbachev and President Boris Yeltsin or the Western politicians who treated Communist collective dictatorships as "normal" or even "progressive" regimes. Our failure to examine the Communist past has fostered a moral climate in which the ideologies that justified dictatorship and terrorism are again presenting themselves for approval. Only the other day the Italian prime minister said he was proud of having been a Communist -- proud, that is, of having given ideological aid and comfort to genocidal regimes that murdered innocent people in the tens of millions. And "post-Communist" parties in Western and Eastern Europe win respectable numbers of votes in elections and even enter governments.

Ten years after the Berlin Wall came down, we still need a Nuremberg trial to achieve justice for the victims of communism. If we do not get one, their murderers will enjoy a retirement -- and the accomplices of their murderers a future -- that they do not deserve.

I had some fun Twittering about the Alberta PC convention this weekend. I used to attend those conventions myself, back when the party was actually somewhat conservative. It can't credibly call itself that anymore: it's Canada's biggest-spending government per capita, with the biggest deficit per capita.

Take their last budget: $36.4 billion. Divided by 3.3 million people, and that's $11,000 per person.

By comparison, Liberal Dalton McGuinty's budget this year has $108.9 billion in spending for 12.7 million Ontarians -- or $8,500 per person. Alberta's "Conservatives" spend 30% more per person than Ontario's "Liberals".

But let's compare it to one of the most disastrous budgets in modern political memory: Bob Rae's 1994-95 NDP budget in Ontario. It was his biggest-spending budget, the one right before he was turfed in favour of Mike Harris.

Back then, Rae spent $56.3 billion for a population of 10.5 million people, or just $5,300 per person. That's 1994 money, which, adjusted for inflation, is $7,100 in today's dollars. Stelmach spends 55% more than Rae did, in per capita, inflation-adjusted dollars.

Ed Stelmach is Canada's biggest socialist. And the only reason he gets away with it is because he's smart enough to have run for the Progressive Conservatives, not Alberta's NDP.

But that deception-based lucky streak looks like it's ending. The PCs' by-election loss earlier this fall, when his "star" candidate came in third in Calgary-Glenmore, a traditional Tory riding, was a sign that Albertans don't much like their socialists, even if they do call themselves "PCs". And then there are the polls -- including the latest one that puts the Wild Rose Alliance neck-and-neck with the PCs across the province, and actually ahead of them in Calgary.

To me, the funniest moment in the PC convention this weekend was when Stelmach gave his view about the biggest problem in Alberta: not the economy; not healthcare or the H1N1 flu; not crime; but... the media.

Seriously. They're the only reason he's not being recognized for the great, maximum leader that his wife tells him he is!

Stelmach's solution to Alberta's problems -- no, not the deficit problem, but the media problem -- is to make more use of social media, like Facebook and Twitter, like Barack Obama did. He really said that. Seriously: Ed Stelmach, an inarticulate, old white guy, who has been in government his entire adult life, thinks Obama got elected because of a campaign tactic. The fact that Obama would be the first black president, that he promised "Hope and Change", that he was running against a tired, two-term incumbent party, against a tired, old, inarticulate Republican Senator, during a time of economic crisis and two wars -- forget about that. Stelmach sees himself as Obama, the fresh new thing who is buddies with Will.i.am. I don't think Stelmach knows who Will.i.am. is, and we know how he treats the lone black man in his caucus. In Stelmach's daydream, young, telegenic Danielle Smith of the Wildrose Party is supposed to be the John McCain character. Right.

Other than Mrs. Stelmach, is there anyone else in the world who sees Ed, presiding over his party's 38th year in power, as a glamourous young agent of hope and change?

One last funny comment. Stelmach noted yesterday that he gets the most honesty at 1 a.m. over drinks with people. I have no doubt that's true. But what does it say about the bunker mentality of his office -- a group of paranoid, blamestorming yes-men?

I wonder if, at one of those 1 a.m., liquor-fueled chats, anyone has the courage to tell Canada's worst premier that the problem isn't with Alberta's reporters, and it can't be solved with a Twitter account or a Facebook page. The problem is with his lack of leadership and judgment -- and his tax-and-spend ideology that would make even the NDP blush.

 

I see that Maher Arar, the huckster who lied his way into $10.5 million of our tax dollars, has had less luck with the U.S. legal system than he had with ours. A U.S. appeals court threw out his nuisance claim against the U.S. government.

Now, that's not quite fair of me, is it? I mean, it's not fair to Canada's legal system because, had Arar actually gone to trial here, his case would have been thrown out, too. Arar's testimony would have been torn to shreds; he would have wilted under cross-examination. He would have been proved the liar that he is.

So, let me retract and apologize: Arar did not have good luck with our legal system. He had good luck with a politicized inquiry that bore his name -- the Arar Inquiry -- but in which he never testified. Of course he didn't: he doesn't want to answer questions.

Arar the hustler -- and his lawyers-of-fortune -- will have to find a new target to shake down. Of course, they won't go after the Syrian government -- the Syrians know too much about him, and what really happened. He's already squeezed what he can out of Canada. Who will keep Arar in the style to which he's become accustomed?

My advice to Arar is to stop with the lawsuits, and focus on the real money: taking huge speaking fees from every university and other left-wing bureaucracy in Canada to tell his fictional account of woe. I bet the UN would give him a gig, and probably some global warming NGO, too.

Just remember not to have a Q&A session afterwards.

Here's a repeat of my blog entry on the subject from January:

 

Maher Arar was declared by the breathless mainstream media to be a saint whose lamb-like innocence was never tainted by association with terrorists.

Word comes from another media darling -- Omar Khadr -- that Arar in fact was at an Al Qaida safe house in Afghanistan on various occasions, contrary to Arar's denials of ever being in that country.

All of which vindicates one of the most important cover stories the Western Standard ever ran, entitled "What really happened to Maher Arar?" You really must read it -- you'll learn things that just haven't been reported elsewhere, ranging from that fact that Arar's purported injuries from "torture" were never examined by an independent doctor; that when he was picked up by Canadian diplomats in Syria, he showed no signs of torture whatsoever -- only signs of not having bathed. Those are just two little tid-bits. Really: read the whole thing. It's a great story, written by Kevin Steel.

Here was my publisher's note, introducing the story:

The real cost of the $10.5-million payout to Maher Arar isn't the money, it's the demoralization of Canada's police and security services, and the wild encouragement given to any accused terrorist to wage legal and political war against Canada. A quick visit to Arar's vanity website shows a half-dozen smiling faces of his lawyers, no doubt eager to make the money and publicity of a dozen more such claims.

How ironic that our western legal system, with its checks and balances designed to protect our liberal freedoms, has become the favourite instrument of illiberal attackers of the West. The Western Standard itself has been a victim of that abuse: In 2006, after we published a story about the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, a radical Calgary imam used Alberta's human rights law to attack us. One year and thousands of dollars in legal fees later, we're still fending off that contortion of our justice system, while the Saudi-trained imam's case is funded by Canadian taxpayers. His concept of "human rights" is alien to our Canadian values, but that doesn't stop him from using a legal shield as a sword against his enemies. Unlike the federal government, we won't cave in to political pressure.

Of course, Canada's media was gaga for Arar; the CBC should get a cut of the payout. Hyper-skeptical when reporting the spin from government or corporate press secretaries, the mainstream media became stenographers for Arar's PR machine. Not just stenographers--cheerleaders, actually. For in Arar they saw a weapon to demonize the police, the military and the war on terror. They painted Arar as an unalloyed victim of racial profiling and police excess, conveniently ignoring facts about his visits with other terrorist suspects, his unusual international travel, and even his purchase of a gun--something that would normally condemn a man in the eyes of the press. Of course they didn't question his tale of torture. And, as Kevin Steel's outstanding story on page 34 demonstrates, neither did the multimillion-dollar Arar Commission. You'd think it might have come up.

What will happen now? The Arars will retire on whatever part of their fortune is left after his lawyers take their cut; Arar's wife, Monia Mazigh, has turned her crusade into a permanent political campaign, even running for office as an NDP candidate. Arar will no doubt do the speaking circuit, telling tales of his suffering--not so much at the hands of his coreligionists in Syria as at the hands of Canada, the country that welcomed his family and secured his freedom. Just don't expect there to be a question-and-answer session after Arar's speeches--he didn't take the stand in the commission, and he's not likely to risk answering some of the prickly questions that we write about here.

Regrettably, the most important facts about Arar likely will remain confidential for security reasons. How frustrating it must be to be an RCMP officer or diplomat, knowing the secret dossier on Arar, but unable to disclose it, either for reasons of security or a political gag order. We don't know those details either--but we know there is enough on the public record to conclude that there is more to Maher Arar than the media darling the mainstream press have manufactured.

I'll be in Toronto this Wednesday, Nov. 4, for a couple of events with my favourite educational charity, the Fraser Institute.

I'm doing a student event first, at 2 p.m. Admission is free. You can see the brochure for more details here.

Later that day, I'll be with my friend Stephen LeDrew for what will surely be a lively debate -- all the moreso considering it will be over drinks! Please join us at The Fifth Grill and Terrace downtown at 6 p.m. More details here.

See you Wednesday!