Mid-Week Post

Your mid-week moment of calm ...

 

This is the government Canadians want:

Last week, the Canada-Palestine Parliamentary Friendship Group drew unwelcome attention to itself when it was revealed that publisher Nazih Khatatba, whose newspaper al-Meshwar is notorious for such indecencies as referring to the Holocaust as the “Holohoax” and claiming that Jewish bankers financed the Nazi Party, was one of the guests in attendance.

Now it turns out that Khatatba has enjoyed a long acquaintance with Friendship Group chair Salma Zahid, the Liberal MP for Scarborough Centre who explained last week’s controversy by saying the Friendship Group is unable to “research the history of every attendee that responded” to its invitation. Three years ago, when Zahid came under fire for buying a full-page advertisement in Khatatba’s newspaper, she promised she’d never again advertise in al-Meshwar. But a year later, Khatatba was one of 16 attendees in a Zoom meeting Zahid hosted as an introductory planning session following her appointment as the Parliamentary Friendship Group’s chair.

Last month, prompted by the media monitoring group Honest Reporting Canada, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said he’d look into how it was that Khatatba’s al-Meshwar was awarded $2,000 in federal Covid-19 subsidies. It’s not like Khatatba was a stranger to the Parliamentary Friendship Group, but Khatatba wasn’t the only dubious guest at last week’s Parliament Hill event.

The advocacy group Documenting Antisemitism in Canada noticed that Nabil Nassar, the Secretary of the Fatah Movement in Canada, was also in attendance. Nassar’s June 2020 appointment to lead the Canadian branch of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’ party was widely noticed in Canada’s Jewish community.

Only days before his appointment, Nassar was mourning the death of Ramadan Shalah, a former leader of the terror-listed Palestinian Islamic Jihad group. He has praised terrorists such as Ali Hassan Salameh, who planned the 1972 Munich Olympics (Khatatba, on the other hand, has claimed the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes in Munich was an operation undertaken by Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency). Nasser has also had kind words for Dalal al-Mughrabi, one of the terrorists involved in the 1978 slaughter of 37 Israelis, including 12 children. He called her the “epitome of the Palestinian woman” and “a symbol of resistance and pride.”

These latest embarrassments follow August’s scandal involving federal monies doled out to a Beirut-based contributor to the Kremlin’s pseudo-news mouthpiece Sputnik and the Khomeinists’ English-language propaganda platform Press TV. But far more federal money has been hoovered up by Laith Marouf, whose grossly antisemitic and racist outbursts on Twitter proved his undoing this past August, than has been reported thus far.

Diversity and Inclusion Minister Ahmed Hussen had personally and publicly endorsed the $133,000 “anti-racist action” grant to Marouf’s Community Media Advocacy Centre to allow Marouf to instruct federally-regulated broadcasters in diversity and inclusion – even though Marouf’s infamously violent “anti-Zionist” rhetoric goes back 20 years. Among other claims, Marouf says Zionism — the cause of an independent Jewish state — is a project of “white Jews who adopted Nazism.”

After Mount Royal Liberal MP Anthony Housefather alerted Hussen to Marouf’s ugly habits — “I persistently communicated with the minister in his office, from the day I learned about it,” Housefather said — it took a month for Hussen to acknowledge the controversy, pledging to look into the matter. Marouf’s contract was eventually cancelled, with a promise for “guidelines” to govern funding applications.

By then, Telecom industry specialist Mark Goldberg had been blowing the whistle for 18 months. Golberg uncovered nearly $600,000 in consultation and process-participation fees Marouf had been granted by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission over the years.

Marouf acquired that funding via his Community Media Advocacy Centre (CMAC), which consists mostly of himself and his wife, Gretchen King.

But, there is even more federal money on top of that, according to federal documents that have not been previously reported on, which was procured by Marouf’s Independent Community Television — Montreal (ICTV-Mtl), which lists Marouf as its CEO. King is an ICTV-Mtl board member and is currently conducting research at Beirut’s Lebanese American University, subsidized by a grant from the federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Between 2016 and 2018 Marouf’s ICTV-Mtl was awarded more than $60,000 from the CRTC’s Broadcast Participation Fund.

Ten years ago when Marouf was its “equity officer,” the National Campus and Community Radio Association (NCCRA) was granted $74,289 by the Department of Canadian Heritage. Over the past five years, the NCCRA has been granted roughly $225,000 from Canadian Heritage and Employment and Social Development Canada.

The NCCRA operates a “radio exchange” that has distributed 50 episodes of the Global Research News Hour between March 2021 and March 2022. Marouf has routinely contributed to the News Hour as a “Middle East expert,” echoing the same “anti-Zionist” commentary he offers to Moscow’s Sputnik and Tehran’s Press TV. The weekly News Hour show is broadcast on dozens of campus, community and FM stations across Canada and the United States.

The program originates with the Centre for Research on Globalization, which has been identified by the U.S. State Department and NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence as one of the main conduits of disinformation and propaganda for the Kremlin, and for Syrian mass murderer Bashar Assad, in the English-speaking world.

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Revenue Minister Diane Lebouthillier yesterday dismissed an auditor’s warning taxpayers are unlikely to recover billions wasted on pandemic relief programs. At least $32 billion was paid to underserving claimants after the Canada Revenue Agency failed to make cursory background checks: ‘I want to tell them how proud I am.’  

**

Political aides knew to be false a cabinet claim the Freedom Convoy received suspicious foreign donations, internal records show. Rumours spread by the Prime Minister and others went uncorrected because the issue was “a hot potato,” wrote one press secretary: “We’ve tried to avoid questions about the foreign funding angle.”

**

Anxious depositors lit up credit union hotlines within hours of cabinet’s freeze on accounts held by Freedom Convoy sympathizers, records show. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland acknowledged she was unsure of the reach of her own orders under the Emergencies Act: “What have the banks actually been doing?”

 

And let's not forget Justin's bosses:

But thus far, Canadian law enforcement have been hesitant to lend credence to the Safeguard Defenders report. The alleged stations have been under investigation by the RCMP since October, but police have failed to confirm that anything illegal is happening at them.

 

This RCMP: 

The federal government awarded a contract to provide and maintain RCMP communications equipment to a company with ties to the Chinese government, Radio-Canada has learned.

The contract has security experts raising concerns about potential Chinese access to RCMP communications and data.

On October 6, 2021, the federal government awarded Sinclair Technologies a contract worth $549,637 for a radio frequency (RF) filtering system. One of the system's purposes is to protect the RCMP's land-based radio communications from eavesdropping.

While Sinclair Technologies is based in Ontario, the company has been controlled by Hytera Communications of Shenzen, China since 2017, when Hytera purchased Norsat International, Sinclair's parent company.

The Chinese government owns approximately 10 per cent of Hytera Communications through an investment fund.

The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) blacklisted Hytera in 2021. The FCC says the company is one of several Chinese firms that pose "an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons."

Sales and imports of Hytera equipment are banned in the United States as a result.

 

Justin is completely fine with this.

 

 

I'm sure it's nothing to be concerned with:

Governor Tiff Macklem raised the benchmark interest rate a half point on Dec. 7, which surprised some Bay Street economists, as they thought the central bank would opt to taper a series of outsized increases to avoid causing undue damage to the economy.

** 

Taxing home equity would be “your political funeral,” a real estate lobbyist yesterday told the Senate national finance committee. It followed testimony from a CMHC tax consultant who complained housing made widows rich in Vancouver: “Those who do suggest it would probably preside at your political funeral.”

 **

Citing worldwide critical minerals reserves data from the U.S. Geological Survey, the authors point out that Canada is a bit player in lithium, cobalt, copper, graphite and nickel, all of which are used in low-carbon energy, such as electric vehicle batteries. Reserves are minerals in the ground whose economic viability has been proven.

The stark reality of Canada’s weak standing in critical minerals goes against the rhetoric often espoused by federal and provincial politicians, who have claimed that Canada is a critical minerals powerhouse.

 

 

Yes, but an industry is based on this, so ... :

Their silence doesn’t surprise me. The putative children’s graves that remain mysteriously unexcavated are central to a major plank in the residential-school narrative, whose frequent departures from facts and linguistic precision rarely elicit challenge from politicians or mainstream media. Only a handful of resolutely objective researchers—notwithstanding their genuine, sincerely expressed sympathy for the real and pervasive problems plaguing a significant swathe of Canada’s indigenous population—privilege evidence-based scholarship over rumours, oral history, and emotion-based “knowing.” As punishment for their academic integrity, they are routinely excoriated for their “denialism,” including by Marc Miller, minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, on Twitter.

By remaining uninterrogated, the alleged children’s graves can be exploited as testimony to the stubborn assertion that forced assimilation is a form of “cultural genocide.” Once subsumed under the “genocide” rubric, it logically follows that all indigenous Canadians whose forebears attended the residential schools have inherited “intergenerational trauma.” And it is this intergenerational trauma that is presumed to explain such stubbornly persisting disparities with the general population as lower life expectancy, higher morbidity, substance abuse, unemployment, and disproportionate crime.

Intergenerational trauma is a compelling idea that relies on a ballooning fascination with “epigenetics,” whose driving theory is that individual genes can be altered by life experience, and the changes passed on to future generations (so far, actual testing of the theory has been done only on mice). In the case of the residential schools, oddly enough, considering the research-friendly existence of a sizable control and comparison group—those who attended residential schools (fewer than one third of all indigenous children) and those who attended day schools in their communities—virtually no research has been done that would support or weaken the intergenerational-trauma hypothesis.

Mark Smith, professor of social work at the University of Dundee, Scotland, has carried out extensive research in the field of trauma associated with residential schools. In an email exchange, Prof. Smith told me, with regard to Canada’s residential-school narrative: “A trauma ideology underpins a lot of what is going on here. It fabricates or exaggerates past experience and legitimizes claims for damages … [yet] there is no evidence for any notion of trauma passing across generations like some sort of stigmata.”

Research on transgenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma bears out Prof. Smith’s conclusion. A meta-study of 35 comparative studies on the mental state of offspring of Holocaust survivors, published between 1973-1999, “Psychopathology in children of Holocaust survivors: a review of the research literature,” finds “rather conclusively that the non-clinical population of children of Holocaust survivors tend to function rather well in terms of manifest psychopathology, and differences in the mental state of offspring and people in general are small.”

Another study—controlled, double blind—“confirmed previous findings that the offspring of Holocaust survivors do not show more psychopathology than the general population.” Indeed, survivors “strived to secure a better and safer life for their children as evidenced by the relatively higher level of education that the offspring of the survivors were able to achieve than the comparison group.” Empirically, for what it’s worth, I estimate about half my Jewish social peer group are themselves Holocaust survivors or children of survivors. My observation is that many of them are higher strung than average, but none ever underperformed academically or professionally. If anything, I find them more driven toward high achievement than other friends and acquaintances.

It seems pretty clear that trauma—a very real phenomenon that has traditionally been applied to lingering responses to scarifying experiences in war or natural disasters—is, in the case of the residential-school activists, being dumbed down for political and rent-seeking reasons. It is no coincidence that in our victim-centric culture, suffering offers a path to social status, which exacerbates the tendency to dumb definitions down. Self-diagnosis of trauma has proliferated. Descriptions of personal trauma—even when exaggerated or imaginary—can reap social and even material rewards. The average North American is more likely to associate trauma with COVID lockdowns than with Anne Frank’s attic incarceration.

Such concept creep is useful to progressive activists because it allows them to elevate experiences that were once thought of, legitimately, as extremely difficult, unjust, or painful, into the realm of evil, a category that should be approached with caution and a certain reverence for its victims. Thus, since there is no word for something that is worse than a genocide, it should be reserved for the worst of the worst. You do not find in real genocides leaders of the victim communities calling for more of it, but indigenous leaders in Canada did demand more residential schools. You do not find, in the memoirs of real genocide survivors, fond recollections and gratitude for the education that permitted them to succeed in the world beyond their doorsteps. But you do find such accounts—a significant number—from former residential-school students.

Today, disturbingly, thanks to activists’ concept manipulation, the residential schools are commingled with Auschwitz in the public imagination.

When we perceive descendants as literally genetically altered by their forebears’ experiences, it does nothing to encourage resilience or confidence in the personal agency that denotes, in democracies at least, our common human estate. In the case of the residential schools, our elites’ embrace of “narrative” over evidence buys them virtue offsets for their settler privilege, even as they cheerfully demonize principled scholars, while consigning indigenous children to hopelessness.