January 2012 Archives

Death and dishonour
Shafia murders the latest sad chapter in war on Muslim women

The jury in Kingston got it right: The evil Shafia family has been sentenced to life in prison, with no chance of parole for 25 years, for killing the girls in their family.

Mohammad Shafia, his polygamous wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, and their demon son Hamed Mohammad Shafia, were motivated by a medieval belief that women are the personal property of men, to be owned by men, and disposed of by men.

Mohammad and his son Hamed decided the three beautiful girls in the family needed to be killed, needed to be drowned like kittens in a barrel. Because they didn't want to live in a cage, which is the norm for women in Islamic fascist states like Saudi Arabia, or the Afghan culture from which the Shafias hail.

Zainab, Sahar and Geeti, just 19, 17 and 13 years old, respectively, were murdered. Rona, one of Mohammad's polygamous wives, was murdered, too.

A quadruple homicide.

Paul Bernardo, Canada's most notorious serial killer, was convicted of three murders.

The Shafias killed four. Of their own family.

Judge Robert Maranger said: "It is difficult to conceive of a more heinous, more despicable, more honourless crime."

Difficult, but not impossible to conceive of it. Because there have been more than a dozen honour killings in Canada in recent years.

And there are literally thousands of them each year, predominantly in countries dominated by medieval, fascist interpretations of Islam.

That's what it is: A war on women. But not a war on all women. These are not Amish girls being drowned in a barrel. These are not Australian girls, or girls from Honduras.

What they have in common, in more than 90% of the cases globally, is their killers are extremist Muslim men. Bullies.

It's the logical extension of women being forced to wear the burka. Surveys from Paris, France, show that more than 70% of women who wear a veil say they do so out of fear — including fear of violence.

Forcing women to cover their face is part of the same toxic culture that says young women in Canada must live like young women in medieval Arabia. And if you subscribe to that culture, that code of living, then you can understand the brutal logic the Shafias carried out: If men own women, and women don't obey men, then men can kill the women.

While the court in Kingston got it right in the end, the Canadian government failed these four murdered women beforehand.

The terrified girls called authorities. They ran away from home. They told teachers about the threats of violence they faced from their father and brother. One even fled to a battered women's shelter. They talked to cops.

But every time, authorities saw they were Muslim, so they backed down. In the name of multiculturalism. In the name of cultural sensitivity.

In the name of tolerance, our tolerant society tolerated the intolerable. Only now that they're dead, have we roused ourselves to give a damn.

Either we believe in the Criminal Code or we don't. Either we believe in non-violence or we don't. Either we believe in the equality of men and women or we don't.

Either we believe that everyone is protected by the law — that no one is above it because they're a Muslim man, and no one is below it because they're a Muslim woman — or we don't.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

Sweetheart deal

In a revealing new book, The Enemy Within, the Sun's Ezra Levant brings Omar Khadr's story back into the public eye. Having completed his U.S. sentence in October 2011, Omar Khadr could return to Canada at any time. He may well be released, thanks to a lenient system that will likely credit him for the time he has served awaiting trial in Guantanamo Bay. With Parliament back in session, Levant brings his razor-sharp perspective to bear on a story that is vital to our notions of citizenship and justice, and to our national security.

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In his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly promised to shut down the U.S. prison for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

After becoming president, he didn't: the heavy responsibilities of a president leading a War on Terror quickly replaced the easy promises of an inexperienced candidate.

But getting rid of Guantanamo's celebrity inmate, Omar Khadr, remained a political priority.

And so, despite conclusive evidence of Khadr's crimes, including video footage of Khadr assembling terrorist bombs, the Obama administration offered Khadr a plea bargain. He would be sentenced to eight years for his terrorist crimes but need serve only a single year in a U.S. prison.

After that, he could be returned to Canada, where he would be eligible for full parole immediately.

That deal was accepted by Khadr on Oct. 13, 2010, but its terms were kept secret from the U.S. jury at Guantanamo Bay that still met to sentence Khadr. They handed him a forty-year sentence.

Forty years, pled down to one year. That's a 97.5% discount.

But the deal wasn't just between Obama's prosecutors and Khadr.

Canada played an essential part in issuing the get-out-of-jail-free card. Without Canada's diplomatic assurances, the promise of a transfer back to Canada, and to freedom, would have been meaningless.

Without Ottawa's nod at allowing a confessed and convicted al Qaeda terrorist back on to Canadian soil, Khadr wouldn't have accepted the plea and Obama's prosecutors wouldn't have offered it. In fact, the deal specifically promised that the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs would give Khadr a "diplomatic note" confirming their support for the plea deal.

So, Canada's Conservative government, which had for years so vigorously fought off court challenges to compel them to bring Khadr back to Canada, battling a full court press of public attacks from Khadr's personal lobby in the media, the legal profession, and opportunist politicians throughout, suddenly gave everything away in a fire sale.

It's one thing for a liberal U.S. Democrat to go soft on crime. But what about Stephen Harper¹s Conservatives, who have made criminal justice, including "truth in sentencing," a centrepiece of their political platform?

Terrorists on the street in Canada are taken seriously. And terrorism in Afghanistan isn't an abstract matter for Canadians either; more than 150 Canadian Forces personnel have died there, the overwhelming majority of them brutally killed by improvised explosive devices exactly like the ones Khadr was filmed assembling. In fact, the very first Canadian casualty in Afghanistan fell victim to an IED planted by a teenager.

Yet Khadr's sweetheart deal was approved by the Canadian Conservative government in a series of secret negotiations. The Canadian public was kept in the dark until the deal was already done. U.S. prosecutors were bushwhacked.

The agreement was signed by Khadr, his two lawyers, and two representatives of the U.S. government, but it was cooked up in a backroom deal among Obama's inner circle, Khadr's lawyers, and a cooperative Canadian government. Khadr's one-year U.S. sentence expired in October 2011, and his transfer to Canada could happen at any time.

Khadr wants that to happen. So does the Obama administration. And so do a lot of Khadr's allies, from the Canadian Bar Association to the CBC. And, of course, no one wants Khadr's public release more than al Qaeda itself, who knows the immense public relations value that comes with having a convicted terrorist set free, triumphant and remorseless.

Khadr has never abandoned his grotesque, murderous interpretation of the Koran and Islam; he has never once renounced his allegiance to al Qaeda; and throughout his detention, his family, a pillar of the al Qaeda community, has continued to propagandize for Islamism and to publicly undermine the Canadian and American war against terror.

His release is an advertisement for al Qaeda, both in revealing the weakness of will it has always accused Westerners of possessing and in recruiting yet more teenagers to its cause by proving that they, like Khadr, will escape harsh punishment should they ever be caught murdering Western soldiers.

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Excerpt from The Enemy Within: Terror, Lies and the Whitewashing of Omar Khadr. Copyright 2012 Ezra Levant. Published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

Whitewashing Omar Khadr
Confessed terrorist will soon walk free in Canada

In a revealing new book, The Enemy Within, the Sun's Ezra Levant brings Omar Khadr's story back into the public eye. Having completed his U.S. sentence in October 2011, Omar Khadr could return to Canada at any time. He may well be released, thanks to a lenient system that will likely credit him for the time he has served awaiting trial in Guantanamo Bay. With Parliament back in session, Levant brings his razor-sharp perspective to bear on a story that is vital to our notions of citizenship and justice, and to our national security.

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So, what can we expect to happen with Omar Khadr when he inevitably returns to Canada?

Unfortunately, it's not hard to guess. When Maher Arar came back to Canada after he was released from a prison in Syria, he was hailed as a hero and celebrity. Every anti-war, anti-Western activist with an axe to grind--which includes a large swath of Canada's mainstream media--turned his homecoming into a triumph. If only they treated our wounded soldiers returning from Afghanistan so warmly.

If Maher Arar became a minor celebrity after his wrangle with the Syrian security system, with a secondary role played by Washington and Ottawa, it's a virtual lock that Omar Khadr--the leading man in a supposed morality play pitting the Bush administration, perennial bugbear of the left, and its Guantanamo "gulag" against a purportedly naive and pitiable "child soldier" from Canada--is set to become nothing less than a superstar.

Unlike Arar, who enjoyed only a fraction of the sympathy and media coverage, Khadr will be coming home to the built-in fan club that he's amassed since his capture. Arlette Zinck, the professor at Edmonton's King's University College who struck up a tender pen pal relationship with Khadr -- "Whenever you are lonesome, remember you have many friends who keep you in their prayers. Each morning at 9 o'clock, I include you in mine," she wrote to him in Guantanamo, referring to Khadr as "my dear student"--has led the charge in turning her campus into a factory for Khadr groupies.

Zinck actually testified in Khadr's defence, calling him a "considerate young man ... thoughtful and generous in spirit" in a sentencing hearing for a murder he himself confessed he took pleasure in reminiscing about (how considerate). In 2008, her school hosted a talk by Dennis Edney, one of Khadr's lawyers, to give a speech about how "a young Muslim man has been branded a terrorist without trial" and the failures of the Canadian government in supporting Khadr's case.

Along with a "consortium of activist groups," Zinck's students organized a rally later that year drawing seven hundred Khadr supporters to cheer for Khadr in downtown Edmonton, and Zinck herself has said she would personally recommend Omar Khadr's application to attend King's University College as a mature student.

But then he probably won't have the time. Or the need. Omar Khadr isn't likely to spend much time in prison once he applies to be released to Canadian custody in late 2011 after serving just one additional year in Gitmo (part of the plea agreement with the Obama administration). Under current Canadian law, Khadr should be able to apply for parole after serving one-third of his sentence --and his nine years in pre-trial custody means he's already done that (even statutory release kicks in after two-thirds of a sentence). A free man,

he'll have a career waiting for him here in Canada as a top speaker on the anti-American lecture circuit. Every pro-Islamist campus club, every unreformed mosque, as well as conferences for the reflexively anti-American New Democratic Party and the Canadian Bar Association, the national lawyers' group that for years churned out reams of press releases calling for Khadr's release and return to Canada, all are sure to hound the freed terrorist to come speak to them, paying him thousands of dollars an hour for the pleasure.

The Canadian Islamic Congress and Canadian Arab Federation have been vocal supporters of Khadr's defence and will surely welcome him with open arms onto their staff: Who better to fundraise among their Israel-hating, America-hating supporters? Perhaps Judy Rebick--the founding publisher of the left-wing webzine rabble.ca,

who hailed Khadr as a new Nelson Mandela--will offer him a regular column to share his views with thousands of readers, and, as a professor of social justice and democracy at Toronto's Ryerson University, maybe she'll make him a featured speaker at her school. That is, when he isn't busy with Professor Zinck's students.

No doubt both will be in a race with hard-left universities like York University in Toronto, the University of Ottawa, and Concordia University in Montreal to be the first to award Omar Khadr an honorary doctorate degree. He could be the first terrorist ever nominated for the Order of Canada. What's less sure is that the nomination will be declined.

Khadr will be courted by on-campus radio stations and left-wing reporters, becoming the go-to guy to comment on radical Islam, terrorism, Afghanistan, the fight against al-Qaida, American security, the evils of Israel, and a hundred other topics where his supposed expertise can be deployed to advance the same distorted world-view that's been used to tilt virtually every Khadr story reported here over the last nine years.

If the CBC isn't already planning a reality show around Omar Khadr and what they'd surely call his "struggles" to adapt back into Canadian society, it's because they're not quite quick enough on the uptake: Just give them a few more months and tax dollars. Khadr's plea deal with the U.S. government may forbid him from personally profiting from telling stories about his crimes or the time he spent in Guantanamo Bay, but even if that portion of his plea deal with Washington were enforceable in Canada, it would be stunningly simple to get around: Either by funnelling the money to someone else--or perhaps even another fellow jihadi--or by ensuring that whenever and wherever he speaks, he refers to it as a more general discussion about the evils of Islamophobia.

Other notorious murderers have to live under strict conditions when they're released: The child-killer Karla Homolka was ordered to keep police constantly apprised of her whereabouts after she was let out of prison. But will Canada's National Parole Board require anything like that for Khadr? And as he's travelling the country for all his speaking tours, media appearances, and awards, how many Canadians will be forced to share an airplane ride with the committed al-Qaida terrorist? There's nothing right now that would stop the avowed jihadi from boarding the same Air Canada flight as you and your family, nor from loitering outside synagogues and Hebrew schools.

What fun it will be for Canadians to have to live with a confessed murdering Islamist walking free among them (you can be sure that any attempts by police or security to keep tabs on Khadr will be met with vigorous civil rights lawsuits by his friends in the Canadian Bar Association, and any landlord who refuses to rent him a flat or employer who refuses him a job is bound to find him-or herself in court facing down a phalanx of pro-Khadr lawyers).

The spectacle of an admitted al-Qaida terrorist with American blood on his hands smiling down at us from podiums and TV screens for years to come is chilling enough. But what's sure to prove even more alarming about all the publicity and support that Omar Khadr is bound to enjoy when he comes home is that there's nothing to stop him from spewing whatever vileness he wants. No one can tell Omar Khadr what to say. He can condemn our American allies --or our own soldiers--before a national audience with all the vitriol of a radical imam and get paid handsomely for it; he can denounce Canada and our soldiers just as easily. And, yes, he's perfectly free to share his vicious hatred for Jews, Christians, and Americans. Omar Khadr will be free to spout as many militant lies as he likes, and, unlike other dangerous Islamists and al-Qaida supporters, he's got a massive and sympathetic national fan base eager to hear him out.

After all, other terrorists released from Guantanamo Bay are frequently compelled to complete at least some kind of nominal de-radicalization process before being released again onto the streets of their home countries. But there's nothing to date requiring Omar Khadr to do any such thing. Even German soldiers, after the Second World War, were required by the Allies to complete "deNazification" programs to rehabilitate their odious views about Jews and other minorities. After years of stewing in the propaganda and hatred of Hitler's suffocating culture of indoctrination, they required some sort of antidote. Khadr, meanwhile, went from growing up with a family of terrorist radicals to palling around with terrorist radicals in the Hindu Kush, to spending his days consorting and studying the Qur'an with terrorist radicals in Guantanamo Bay. Don't expect him to return to Canada as a big supporter of multi-ethnic harmony, democracy, women's rights, and peace.

But enough public outrage could cause Canada's legal system to grudgingly keep Khadr behind bars. If Canadian courts don't give him credit for time served, and if he's treated as an adult, not a young offender, Khadr could serve as much as 21/2 years in jail before being paroled. And the parole board could put conditions on him, such as living in a halfway house and seeking employment. Section 810.01 of the Criminal Code allows a judge to order participation in a treatment program or even the wearing of a monitoring device.

It's theoretically possible--it could happen that Canada's legal establishment will suddenly make a 180-degree change in their view of Khadr, and treat him as a convicted terrorist. Even then, he'll be out on our streets while still in his 20s. But there's only one sure way: Convincing the Conservative government not to let him back into Canada in the first place.

The Khadrs were once upon a time considered among the most reviled, most dangerous people ever to make this country their home. Thanks to years of hard cheerleading on our campuses, in our political movements, and in our newsrooms for the family's most favoured son, Canada will soon become Omar Khadr's country. The rest of us will just be forced to live in it.

Excerpt from The Enemy Within: Terror, Lies and the Whitewashing of Omar Khadr. Copyright 2012 Ezra Levant. Published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

Toe-to-toe with Greenpeace
Comments reveal why group prefers stunts to debate

Greenpeace is pretty good at stunts — it's their trademark.

Sometimes it's jokes, sometimes it's criminal breaking and entering. Like when they broke out of the Calgary Tower and unfurled their propaganda banners in 2010.

Before that, they specialized in vandalizing oilsands mines and refineries near Fort McMurray. It's easy to get media attention if you're willing to break the law, and Greenpeace certainly is.

In gentle countries like Canada, at least.

So far, no Greenpeace stunts have been recorded in the world's largest oil-producing countries, like Iran or Saudi Arabia.

But stunts aside, what if you could sit down with a Greenpeace executive — no photo ops, no gimmicks — and have a conversation? Is there anything underneath the B.S.?

On Friday morning, I tried just that. The Canadian Bar Association sponsored a debate between Mike Hudema, Greenpeace's anti-oilsands executive, and me.

Ninety minutes of talk — no stunts, no crimes. It was illuminating — and depressing.

Hudema trotted out every shopworn cliché, rumour and slander about the oilsands — claiming it's anti-environment and even anti-aboriginal. (That last one is precious: The oilsands are the number one employer of aboriginal people in Canada. Which is good, considering Greenpeace is largely to blame for shutting down the aboriginal fur trapping industry.)

I made my points, too, about ethical oil — how the oilsands are superior to OPEC oil by four measures of liberal values: Environmental responsibility, peace, treatment of workers and human rights.

Back and forth we went.

So far, so predictable. But near the end of the debate, the conversation turned to how things would be different if the oilsands were somehow shut down. Besides massive unemployment and the loss of billions in tax revenues for the government.

His comments were amazing and show why Greenpeace prefers stunts to debates.

Hudema said two things that still have my head shaking.

He said the oilsands "feed our addiction to oil."

As in, people use oil because the oilsands supplies it. As in, if the oilsands weren't there, people wouldn't be driving.

Uh, no.

We know this isn't true, because people were driving before the oilsands were a major producer. The U.S., which takes 99% of our oil exports, simply bought their oil from Saudi Arabia instead. That's what the oilsands do: They don't make Americans fill up their cars with gas. They let them fill up their cars with oilsands gas instead of Saudi gas. China and India are using more oil because they're no longer dirt poor, so they're buying cars too.

They're going to buy their oil from Iran and Saudi Arabia if they don't buy it from us.

Hudema's second whopper was more of a confession: Greenpeace doesn't have a clue of how to run the world without oil.

Hudema drove down from Edmonton for our debate. He jets around a lot too. Hudema calls for a green future, but when pressed on a real life version of that — as opposed to science fiction — he gets vague pretty quickly.

Sorry, we can't run cars on solar panels or windmills. Even experimental electric cars need electricity — much of it generated by coal.

Greenpeace is good at getting attention, because stunts and crimes make headlines.

But scratch beneath the surface and they really have no clue about how to get the world off oil. They just want the world to buy it from OPEC rather than Canada.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

Keystone cop-out
Obama chose conflict Venezuelan oil over ethical Canuck oil, and movie stars over working men, women

U.S. President Barack Obama made a choice last week: He chose Venezuela over Canada.

That's what he did when he rejected the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would have taken oilsands oil from Alberta to the Gulf Coast of Texas.

That pipeline would have delivered 700,000 barrels of oil every day from Canada (and from a new oilfield called Bakken that straddles the North Dakota-Saskatchewan border).

Which is almost precisely the amount of oil Venezuela now ships to the United States, to those same refineries in Texas.

With one fell swoop, Obama could have replaced conflict oil, from a belligerent, authoritarian OPEC regime, with ethical oil from Canada.

But he didn't.

Hugo Chavez, the bully ruler of Venezuela, is a serial human rights violator.

He's a Marxist, too, but that's a different matter. According to impeccably liberal human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, Chavez has shredded civil liberties in Venezuela — crushing independent labour unions, shutting down newspapers and radio stations that disagree with him, corrupting the political system and abusing Aboriginal people.

It won't surprise you to learn that a ruler who treats his own people that way threatens other countries, too.

Chavez routinely menaces Colombia, a true democracy, even massing troops on the border and giving cover support to narco-terrorists seeking to undermine Colombia's government.

And Chavez's new ally is none other than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — the two men share a hatred for Americans. And they have something else in common: If it weren't for oil revenues, they'd both have been toppled by now.

Venezuela sells an enormous amount of oil to the U.S. About 800,000 barrels a day. At a hundred bucks a barrel, that's $80 million a day.

That's about $30 billion a year America pays to its greatest enemy in the western hemisphere.

It's not just conflict oil, though. Venezuelan oil is some of the most carbon-intense oil in the world — even more so than Canada's oilsands.

So by replacing Venezuelan imports with Keystone XL oilsands oil, not only would Obama have been doing the right thing geopolitically, it would have reduced America's carbon footprint — which Obama claims to care about.

And it's more than environmental.

Venezuelan oil tankers don't give a lot of jobs to Americans. A few at the ports, but that's about it. Whereas a new pipeline coming down from Canada provides a lot of "shovel-ready" jobs for Americans still reeling from the worst recession in that country since the 1930s.

Not only would the pipeline construction create jobs, but Keystone XL would have been the largest property taxpayer in many of the counties through which it flowed.

But Obama made another choice this week: Hollywood celebrities over working men and women.

See, those Hollywood celebrities — mainly airheads, such as Daryl Hannah, or pro-Chavez socialists, such as Sean Penn — will raise tens of millions of dollars for Obama's re-election now that he nixed Canadian oil.

Whereas the thousands of American construction workers — well, they're from states like Nebraska that weren't going to vote Democrat anyways.

Obama's decision is a disgrace, but it's America's business.

So now our business is to sell our oil to Asia.

Not just for our economic success, but to prove we are an independent country.

If Obama doesn't want our oil, well, the rest of the world does.

Obama's decisions are bad for America. They're bad for U.S. jobs, U.S. energy security and U.S. foreign political entanglements.

But they're bad for us, too. Canadians love America — we did before Obama came along, we do now, and we will after Obama is gone.

But let's not sit by the phone waiting for Obama to love us in return.

Let's open up markets in Asia and grow up as a country — a country with friends and trading partners around the world.

It's about self-respect — and it will make America respect us more, too.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

Tempest in a pee-pot
Fascinating response by Media Party to Marines' urinating video

NATO soldiers can shoot Taliban terrorists. They can bomb them from the air. They can fire missiles at them from remote-controlled drones.

But they can't pee on their dead bodies.

That is the latest anti-American, anti-troops "scandal" being cooked up by the Media Party against four U.S. marines videotaped relieving themselves on terrorist corpses in Afghanistan.

The Taliban terrorist group — mass murderers — was outraged by the peeing. Its spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, actually said: "This is not the first time we see such brutality."

So the murderers of thousands, and the enslavers of millions, condemn peeing as "brutality."

All of which is reported with a straight face by our anti-war media.

It's not just our enemies who are calling it brutal. So are our so-called allies.

Arsala Rahmani, part of Aghanistan's "High Peace Council," said the peeing video, available on YouTube, will "leave a very, very bad impact on peace efforts."

Really? Is that really true? Is the peeing incident really the reason why Islamic fundamentalist terrorists want to kill westerners? Is it really the stumbling block — especially in a country where Internet access is a rarity except for the elite class? Is that really the problem and not, say, the incompatibility of a totalitarian Islamic theocracy vs. western liberal democracy?

Peeing has a great place in the annals of war. U.S. Gen. George Patton peed into the German Rhine River during the Second World War. He insisted he be photographed doing it — as a symbol of his contempt for the Nazis.

Could you imagine if President Franklin Roosevelt had denounced his top general and prosecuted him for celebrating a victory over a barbaric foe? And Patton was just a general.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made a point of peeing on the German Siegfried Line when the Allies breached that defensive barrier.

There is a moral difference between micturating in a river and a fortress and on a corpse. And an essential difference between our side and the enemy is we fight with certain basic rules of morality and civilization.

But do not forget the currency of war is killing, and peeing on dead terrorists is hardly a capital offence.

Which is exactly how the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has treated it — loud, repeated national condemnations and calls for prosecutions to the fullest extent of the law. This after another round of lusty funding cuts targetting the Pentagon. But it's not just Obama who is happy to defame the Marines. Much more fascinating is the response by the liberal media.

Remember, the same Media Party condemned former President George W. Bush for the violent misconduct by rogue soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison.

That, apparently, was Bush's personal responsibility, and that of the defence secretary. The perpetrators were prosecuted by Bush. But it was hung around his neck.

Not so with Obama — the Media Party has not blamed Obama, the soldiers' commander-in-chief. They imply Obama is the PR victim here, not the responsible party.

Allied soldiers shouldn't pee on dead terrorists. But Obama shouldn't throw the book at those exuberant soldiers.

And the Media Party needs to explain why it hanged one offence around Bush's neck, but gave Obama a pass on this one.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

Right down to the letter
Given a chance to refute the allegations against them, these antis prove Oliver was correct on all counts

Last week Joe Oliver, Canada's natural resources minister, fired off a public letter ripping U.S.-funded lobbyists who are trying to derail Canada's Northern Gateway pipeline that would go from the oilsands to the B.C. coast.

Oliver wrote: "These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada's national economic interest."

Those are tough words: Hijack, radical, kill, undermine.

What do the people who were criticized by Oliver's letter have to say in return?

Oliver said three main things about them: They're bankrolled by foreigners; they're radical; and they're trying to rig the rules of the review panel.

Did the antis dispute the truth of his three essential claims?

(Antis are a good name for them. They're anti-industry, anti-oil, anti-pipeline and anti-jobs. But selectively. They've never had an anti-tanker campaign opposing OPEC tankers bringing Saudi oil to eastern Canada. They've never had a protest against the pipeline that brings OPEC oil from a port in Maine up to Montreal. OPEC tankers even sail right up the St. Lawrence. The antis have never complained about that).

But let's ask an anti himself. His name is Eric Swanson. He's with a lobby group called the Dogwood Initiative. That's a great name. Dogwood is B.C.'s official flower. So it sounds very Canadian.

But in fact, the Dogwood Initiative is an American branch plant. Dogwood has accepted more than $620,000 from well-heeled U.S. foundations and their Canadian affiliates.

U.S. billionaires funnel money through foundations to fund puppet groups in Canada to fight against our national interest.

So what does Swanson have to say about Oliver's accusation that he's a foreign hijacker? Does he deny it? Is he ashamed of it? Does he express remorse or regret for taking money to do foreign interests' bidding?

Last weekend on CTV, Swanson was asked about the propriety of taking foreign money. His answer: "If I got dufflebags of money delivered from Martians from outer space I would still take that money."

He'd take money from anyone to fight against a Canadian project ­ from any foreigner, even from aliens. He obviously can't raise enough money from real Canadians. They don't support him. But he has no pangs of disloyalty about going to foreigners.

Let's put Oliver's second challenge to Swanson. Oliver wrote that many of the people who signed up to testify before the government review panel are just jamming the system and abusing the process to delay it. What did Swanson say to this accusation?

Asked about it on CTV, Swanson didn't deny it, he boasted about it: "We helped sign up 1,600 people to participate at those hearings."

His website calls the campaign "mob the mic."

That's why the hearings have been delayed a year: It's been mobbed with names of anyone who can slow things down. Including foreigners. Elementary school children. Fake names. Even Captain Jack Sparrow.

Sixteen-hundred names. That's more than one-third of all witnesses.

What about Oliver's last criticism, that these antis are extremist radicals? Let's turn to John Bennett for this one. He's an anti with the Sierra Club of Canada, which has taken more than $900,000 from U.S. funders to fight against Canadian resource industries.

He told Sun News Network's Brian Lilley last week that oil was morally comparable to heroin, but actually worse in terms of death toll.

So when you drive the kids to school or hockey practice, you're worse than a heroin user.

That's just insane. These aren't reasonable people. They aren't quibbling about some detail in the pipeline project. They hate all oil. They hate all industry. They're antis.

Joe Oliver was right about the antis. They're foreign-backed, they're rigging the rules, they're extremist­ and they're proud of it.

Big-time bias
Pipeline review boss' double standard for accepting late registrations penalizes patriots

Today, the federal government panel reviewing the proposed Northern Gateway oil pipeline to the west coast begins its public hearings. Over 4,500 people — including many foreigners, and even minor children — have registered to testify, just to gum up the procedure.

Sheila Leggett, the clueless bureaucrat running the review, has lost control of the process. Instead of weeding out irrelevant, repetitive and non-Canadian witnesses, she unilaterally declared she'd add on an entire extra year of hearings so that every single man, woman and elementary school child in the world can use the review as some sort of political soapbox. Canada's economic development and thousands of jobs will take a back seat to Leggett's personal Oprah Winfrey Show.

Fortunately, adult supervision has arrived in the form of Joe Oliver, the National Resources minister. Yesterday he announced that if Leggett won't protect the integrity of the review from foreign-funded environmental extremists, he will.

"These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda," Oliver wrote in a public letter. "They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada's national economic interest."

That's all true. But it's worse than that. Leggett hasn't just allowed the panel to be swamped by foreign witnesses, such as Hugo Chavez's state-owned oil company CITGO, and environmentalist front-groups paid for by U.S. billionaires like the Rockefellers.

Being "hijacked" implies that Leggett is just a naive, passive victim of scheming foreigners. But it's even worse than that. Leggett herself is actively demonstrating bias.

Here's an example. The official rules of Leggett's panel say that people who wanted to register to speak had to do so by Oct. 6, 2011.

Clear enough. And rules are rules, right?

Wrong. Leggett kept letting new people register to testify against the pipeline after the deadline passed. Over a hundred new people were sneaked in after Oct. 6 including Kat Haber from Alaska. Patricia Rypka from New York. And Ines Gudic from Brazil.

These aren't experts in pipelines. They're just people who clicked on the review panel's website — little more effort than clicking "like" on Facebook. Yet Leggett let them sneak through and register after the rules said registrations were closed.

You can see the full list of 4,522 registrations online, sorted by date, on their website (the site loads slowly).

They're fun to click on. Some are Canadian. Some are fake. Some are duplicates. Some are minor children. But Sheila Leggett has agreed to hear from all of them. Even those registered after the rules said they weren't allowed to.

As a test, a representative of EthicalOil.org, the Canadian NGO I founded, contacted Leggett's staff to see if a pro-oilsands supporter could register late, too.

No way, was the answer.

Got it?

If you're an anti-Canadian activist from Alaska or New York or Brazil, Leggett will let you jam up the hearings. Even if you register after the rules say registrations are closed.

But if you're a Canadian citizen who supports the oilsands, Leggett will slam the door in your face.

It's bad enough that Leggett has allowed foreign moneyed interests to hijack her panel. But by having two sets of rules for who can register — one standard for foreign meddlers, and a stricter standard for Canadian patriots — Leggett shows not only incompetence, but bias, too.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

A non-foreign affair
Pipeline review hearings allowing foreign input is ridiculous — we don't need another country's permission. It's all Canada

Who should decide whether Canada should build an oil pipeline to our west coast — Canadian citizens or foreign interests?

That's what the fight over the Northern Gateway pipeline is about. Sure, it's also about $20 billion a year for the Canadian economy and thousands of jobs. It's about opening up export markets in Asia. It's about enough new tax dollars to pay for countless hospitals and schools.

But it's really about Canadian sovereignty. Do we get to make our own national decisions, or will we let foreign interests interfere?

The answer should be obvious to any self-respecting Canadian: This is a Canadian matter, and Canadians should decide it. Unlike the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would have crossed into the U.S., we don't need another country's permission. It's all Canada.

The federal government's review panel begins public hearings this week. But the bureaucrat in charge, Sheila Leggett, has done something bizarre: She opened up the hearings to foreign citizens, foreign lobbyists and even foreign governments.

Here's what Leggett says on her website: "Our job is to make sure that everyone who wants to talk to us about this project has an opportunity to be heard," she says. "We'll take whatever time it takes to ensure that everybody's views are heard."

The world's Canada-bashers laughed, then signed up to testify. Almost 5,000 of them. Including Hugo Chavez's state-owned oil company, CITGO. Including foreigners from Uruguay to Louisiana to Italy to Austria.

Then something really crazy happened. To ensure all those foreigners have time to talk, Leggett announced she was adding an extra year to her review.

Instead of telling foreigners to butt out, Leggett told Canadian workers to lean on their shovels while she listens to people who don't live here, work here or have any connection here.

It's not just foreigners. A classroom of children from Tahayghen Elementary School signed up. Maybe Leggett will build in nap time and snack time to her hearings.

Captain Jack Sparrow has signed up. Seriously. So has "Cave Man." And 20 different people, all with the same e-mail address: sawyer@hayduke.ca. John Stevenson signed up under his own name. Then he signed up again as J. Stevenson. Same address. And on and on.

It's a circus. But the biggest threat isn't the clowns. It's the well-paid foreign professional lobbyists who used Leggett's weakness to take over the process.

Like the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation. They've hired the West Coast Environmental Law Foundation to "prevent the development of a pipeline and tanker port" in B.C.

That lobby group took $200,000 to do the Rockefellers' bidding. They're signed up to speak at the hearings.

San Francisco's Moore Foundation has poured in more than $9 million to Aboriginal groups on the north coast of B.C. to oppose resource development.

Their Canadian lobby group, Ecotrust, will testify to Leggett also.

According to research by Vivian Krause, the U.S. Tides Foundation and their Canadian affiliate have poured millions of dollars into 36 cookie-cutter groups to oppose Canadian resource industries.

They all sound so local and real — the Dogwood Initiative, the Rainforest Action Network, the Natural Resources Defence Council, etc.

But they're just tentacles of the same foreign foundation.

I don't blame foreign billionaires like the Rockefellers. It's normal for them to want to control other people, even other countries.

I blame their Canadian puppets for taking money to undermine their own country's interests.

One group, the Pembina Institute, was recently caught soliciting money from a foreign embassy to fight against Canada (they got $60,000).

On Friday, Stephen Harper warned that the pipeline review "cannot be hijacked (by) foreign money to really overload the public consultation phase of the regulatory hearings, just for the purpose of slowing down the process." So who's going to win?

Foreign billionaires? Or Canada?

The prime minister has now taken sides publicly. It will be fascinating to see if Leggett listens to him — or to Hugo Chavez and the Rockefellers instead.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

Grim reality check
A glance around the globe reveals a not-so-rosy picture

This will be a year of disillusionment. But it is better to live in reality than under an illusion.

Abroad, it's the year the so-called Arab Spring will bear its bitter fruit. Syria's dictator, Bashar Assad, will surely tumble. A year ago, some utopian fools, mainly in the press gallery and the White House, would have suggested he would be succeeded by some sort of democracy.

That self-delusion isn't possible anymore after the disasters in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, where dictatorships were replaced by even worse Islamic fundamentalist parties.

Barack Hussein Obama had promised an outreach to the Muslim world more effective than that of George W. Bush — a bumbling Christian cowboy, in the eyes of foreign affairs sophisticates.

Today, the Middle East is in flames, America is even more despised, and its influence at its lowest ebb since Jimmy Carter. Obama's much ballyhooed speech in Cairo in 2009 was an American embarrassment — no president has ever been so mealy-mouthed about democracy and freedom. But his audience listened carefully. They learned Obama would stand by meekly and do nothing, just as he was deaf to the pleas of Iranian democracy activists.

But to say the Middle East is an American policy failure misses the point. It's a failure for the people of the Middle East, who lost their chance for a Berlin Wall moment. The world is darker there and will get worse in 2012.

Europe is in for a reckoning, too. The artificial creation of a single European pretend nation, with a single currency and a central bureaucracy that often trumps governments in individual countries, is staggering to a halt. Is there any doubt that their economic laggards — Greece, Spain, Portugal, perhaps Italy — will collapse, either dragging down Germany and France with them, or causing Germany and France to escape from an economic treaty in which they subsidize perpetually vacationing unionized workers in the Mediterranean countries?

Lucky for the United Kingdom, it never gave up the British pound. The dream of a unified Europe was always a stepping-stone to the bureaucrats' dream of one world government. That will end in 2012, as will Kyoto.

The United States became disillusioned with its own president within a year. During the greatest recession since the 1930s, Obama chose not job creation or tax relief, but the opposite — the nationalization of that country's heath-care system, bank bailouts and a borrowing streak that has even his Chinese bankers worried.

In reaction, Americans have tilted Republican.In 2010, the Republicans won back the Congress with a 50-seat majority. Mitt Romney, a bland, centrist ex-governor will surely be the Republican candidate. He's not inspiring, but he doesn't have to be — Obama's 9% unemployment and a $15-trillion debt are all the inspiration Americans will need to change course.

In Canada, we had a spate of elections in 2011, and on the whole, Canadians voted for stability. Unlike America and Europe, we've been cutting taxes and reducing our deficits. But Ontario, the largest province, has been spending like Greeks and Californians. Can a Euro-style credit downgrade of that province be far behind? 2012 will tell us.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

All means all
Calgary mayor thinks religious tolerance is a one-way street, a point he made again brutally at Christmas

Calgary's Muslim mayor, Naheed Nenshi, has been held up as a symbol of the city's tolerance. Which is ironic, given his own anti-Christian bigotry in return.

Last week, Nenshi ordered city police, backed up with a ridiculously large contingent of private security, to arrest a Christian pastor and five of his congregants who had the temerity to lead a Christmas service in the public atrium of Calgary's City Hall.

Artur Pawlowski, lead pastor of Calgary's Street Church, had foolishly taken the mayor at his word when he described city hall as the city's "living room," open to all.

What Pawlowski didn't understand is that Nenshi didn't mean Christians. Nenshi meant his own co-religionists — no, not Muslims, but the leftist activists who had comprised the Occupy Calgary protests for two months with Nenshi's blessing.

Nenshi permitted that two-month trespass in a public park, claiming the "Charter" prevented him from evicting the socialists, communists, anarchists and petty criminals who inhabited downtown Calgary's Olympic Plaza.

Of course, there is no Charter guarantee to set up tents, do drugs and have public sex in a city park.

Here's how Nenshi defended turning a blind eye to law breaking: "It's funny, the number of people who have talked to me in the last couple of days who have said ‘the Occupy Calgary people need to get off Olympic Plaza so that all citizens can have rights to their front lawn.' And I say, OK, so all citizens except the ones you don't like should have a right to the front lawn. Because all means all in my opinion."

All means all.

Unless they're Christians having a peaceful, drug-free, sex-free celebration of Christmas in the people's "living room." Then Nenshi sends in boys with the billy clubs. For a pastor singing Christmas carols and reading Bible passages.

This isn't the first time Nenshi — or the city of Calgary — has harassed Pawlowski or his Street Church. Over the past six years, Pawlowski has literally been to court more than 70 times fighting against a series of tickets, charges and other fabricated penalties cooked up by City Hall — none of which was applied to Nenshi's favourites in the Occupy movement.

He has been charged by the City of Calgary for such horrific crimes as serving food and drink without proper permits.

But Pawlowski's mission is to bring meals to the homeless who are turned away from official shelters because they are still abusing drugs or alcohol.

Occupy didn't have permits for their food, either. But because Pawlowski does so in the name of Christian charity, Nenshi targeted him.

Don't take Pawlowski's word for it. Judge after judge has condemned the city's behaviour. One trial judge said the city bylaw officers engaged in "abusive conduct."

This year, an appeal judge said the city's bullying of Pawlowski came "precariously close to being excessive and an abuse of power."

For a few weeks, Nenshi's policy of anything goes on public property was a reprieve for Pawlowski. While Occupy Calgary was allowed to break the laws, Pawlowski was allowed to minister to the homeless, too. But now that it's cold and Occupy Calgary has gone back to their parents' basements, Pawlowski's brief enjoyment of his real Charter rights — freedom of speech; freedom of religion; freedom of assembly — has been curtailed.

Speaking of grown men who live in their parents' basement, Nenshi is once again enforcing the law with precisely the brutality and bigotry that Calgary's courts warned him against. And during Christmas, no less.

Nenshi is a left-wing mayor. That's not new — Calgary's last four mayors have been Liberal, as are most of its city councillors. He's a minority politician in Alberta — that's hardly new either, in the province that gave us everyone from the Famous Five suffragettes to Canada's first Hindu and Muslim MPs.

What is new is that the Muslim mayor thinks religious tolerance is a one-way street — a point he made again brutally this Christmas.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY