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The Iranian connection.

It’s well-known, or should be, that Iran is the epicenter of much of the chaos in the world, these days. Wherever you look, the Iranian regime’s destructive presence is being felt.

Iran-backed Houthis terrorists have targeted shipping in the Red Sea, shutting down 70 per cent of a vital part of the world’s supply chain.  Iran has carried out missile strikes against Pakistan, Iraq and Syria.  

It has allied itself with South Africa’s push to have Israel falsely accused of genocide at he International Court of Justice. And, of course, Iran has provided arms and funding to Hezbollah and Hamas, both now raining missiles down on Israeli citizens.

And all of that is just in the past week.

For a longer period, Iran has been busily attempting to disrupt democracy in the West. For example, America’s cyber-defence agency has reported that Iran is now “a major threat to the security of U.S. and allied networks and data.”

Less known, however, is the extent of Iran’s criminal activity in Canada.  While the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has acknowledged that Canadians have received “credible” death threats originating in Iran – and the Trudeau Liberals have insisted that they may designating the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist entity – Iran’s financial dealings with extremists are difficult to document.  But they exist.

In 2020, for example, Global News revealed that Iran used a Toronto-based company to wire millions of dollars to Canada despite sanctions being in place. For years, Canada has had in place laws – called the “Special Economic Measures (Iran) Regulations” – to halt any further development of nuclear weapons capability by Iran.  But the law also prohibits “entering into or facilitating any transaction” with Iran, as well as “providing any financial or related services.” The only exception is for humanitarian purposes.

The case of Laith Marouf is notorious: he was the “anti-racism” consultant who received more than $120,000 from the federal government – while he was simultaneously calling Jews “loud-mouthed bags of human feces, aka the Jewish White Supremacists” online.  Ottawa has said it wants the money back, but Marouf isn’t cooperating.

Marouf is now in Beirut, Lebanon, broadcasting more vile anti-Semitism via a channel called “Free Palestine Television.”  This newspaper, meanwhile, has obtained the program’s confidential production notes, describing Marouf as their “political commentator, Beirut studio.”

This newspaper has also been provided with documents clearly showing Marouf being paid by the state-controlled Iranian “news network.”  The problem? The payments are dated 2022 – when Marouf was still in Canada, and still being funded by the Trudeau government.  Which appears to fly in the face of the Trudeau government’s rules.

Marouf acknowledged being contacted by this newspaper, but did not say what the Iranian payments were for. 

Lesser-known groups have had secret financial dealings with Iran, too.  A self-described anarchist group – the “Anarchist Network of Vancouver Island – recently made a plea on X (formerly Twitter) for “support [for] Palestinian anarchists defending their community from genocide and apartheid against the settler-colonial state of Israel.”

The “anarchist network” – whose appeal was titled “EMERGENCY FUNDS FOR FAUDA – PALESTINIAN ANARCHISTS,” with what appeared to be blood dripping off of it – then shared a cryptocurrency address for donations.  Thousands were transmitted, in equivalent U.S. dollars.

Unsavory, yes.  But illegal? As it turns out, possibly both.  The address was for a cryptocurrency exchange called TRON – and the anarchists’ “wallet,” as it is called, was in the middle of three sanctioned Iranian crypto exchanges associated with the IRGC.  The anarchists on Vancouver Island also publicize their channel on Telegram, the encrypted platform favoured by terrorists everywhere. One of the threads was titled, in Arabic: “How to make a Molotov cocktail.” There are more than 2,000 pro-Palestinian or anarchist channels on Telegram.

Attempts to obtain a comment from the anarchist network also went unanswered.

Says Neil Schwartzman, the cyber-detective who examined the documents showing transactions to and from Iran: “It’s very, very dirty. And it raises the possibility that Iranian entities are funding some protests in Canada.”

He adds: “What we are seeing is financial interactions between local Canadian activists and groups who are potentially adjacent to, or are even actual terrorist groups. It is clear they are taking steps to prevent the origin of the funds from being seen.”

Money coming into Canada for extremism and anti-Semitism – and money going out in the direction of the major state sponsor of terrorism in the world, Iran. Will the Canadian government take action?  

Or will it look the other way, as it did for too long with Iran’s mouthpiece, Laith Marouf?

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The Trudeau Liberals are still a government, yes.

But make no mistake: they are dying. And they are dying without dignity.

Yes, they have all the trappings of government. The expense accounts. The limousines and chauffeurs. The legions of officials producing mountains of unread memoranda for them. All that.

But, when observed from less than a distance, the Trudeau regime has only a thin, brittle exoskeleton of power: they’re a hologram of a government. They’re as lifeless as cold ashes.

The Trudeau Liberals have 158 seats, the opposition parties have 179, a Parliamentary minority. In the real world, that is kind of the equivalent of being strapped to a death row gurney, waiting for the governor to call. (Or not.)

The Trudeau government’s may not look entirely dead, from the outside. But they are inarguably dead inside, and only a Lazarus-like miracle can revive them, now.

Proof of all that was seen, in the past week. In the Middle East, a war is raging between civilization and barbarity. That’s what it is, in its essence.

Israel and Hamas, respectively. Civilization’s victory seems likely, but is by no means a certain or permanent thing. October 7 made that clear: if the conditions are right, if the evil side are sufficiently organized, any one of us – men, women, children, babies – can die in the most horrific of ways. All captured on a smirking terrorist’s GoPro camera.

When war is being waged by civilization on one side, and utter savagery on the other, it shouldn’t be difficult to pick sides. It shouldn’t be hard. Choosing sides, as Graham Greene once wrote, is how we remain human.

The civilized world has chosen Israel. South Africa, a Russian satellite that has pimped itself out to Hamas, brought a case before the International Court of Justice, alleging that Israel is committing “genocide” against Hamas’ vassal state, Gaza.

International law, of course, is written by angels, sought by despots, and mostly ignored by the sane. But, in South Africa’s case, it was important to take sides. So, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Ireland, the European Union and others either vigorously opposed, or refused to support, South Africa’s Hamas-approved litigation.

But what of Canada? What of the Trudeau government?

On Friday afternoon, in a statement that washed up onshore like a dead whale, Trudeau said this: “Our wholehearted support of the ICJ and its processes does not mean that we support the premise of the case brought forward by South Africa.”

People poked and prodded the dead whale. It wasn’t a ringing endorsement of Israel – it wasn’t particularly clear – but it read, to most, like Canada did not support South Africa’s lawsuit against the victims of October 7. A fuller statement would be forthcoming, Trudeau hurriedly added, on that same day, Friday.

This writer, and other supporters of Israel, offered up some reluctant applause. We thought Trudeau would support South Africa’s stunt. He didn’t, it seemed. Good.

Since he made his statement on a Friday afternoon, just as the Jewish sabbath was about to begin, few Jewish spokespeople could be found to speak. So, Trudeau and his witless Global Affairs Minister snagged some applause over the weekend.

And then, this week, the truth spilled out. On CBC, no less.

A fine reporter there, Evan Dyer, wrote a story headlined thus: “After days of confusion, Trudeau government says it will abide by ICJ on genocide case against Israel.”

His sub-headline: “Prime minister, foreign affairs minister issued a statement that left many observers baffled.”

It was a “clarification,” Dyer wrote, issued by functionaries at Global Affairs on Monday. He wrote: “Sources said the government also didn’t want to signal that it was rejecting the genocide claim outright.”

Ah, now we see. Support, if necessary, for public relations purposes. But not necessarily actual support, where it counts.

The language games promptly blew up in the Trudeau regime’s faces. They achieved what would be otherwise impossible: they united both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. Both sides condemned them for their dishonesty. Their deceit and duplicity.

But it’s more than simple dishonesty, isn’t it? It’s what happens when a government is just dead inside.

Like the government of Justin Trudeau is.

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Governments-funded hate rallies?

Anti-Israel and anti-Semitic protestors are getting paid to protest.  That was the revelation that Postmedia shared last week.  In Canada and the United States, groups and individuals are receiving thousands – sometimes tens of thousands – to stage angry, and occasionally violent, protests against the Jewish state.

But some of that money, this newspaper has now discovered, is actually coming from levels of government.

Some will say they aren’t surprised.  The shocking tale of Laith Marouf, for example, is why.

Marouf and his “Community Media Advocacy Centre” received more than $125,000 from the federal government to ostensibly fund projects to help combat anti-racism. But, after Marouf was found posting wildly anti-Semitic content online – one tweet saw Marouf describing Jews as “loud-mouthed bags of human feces, aka the Jewish White Supremacists” – the Justin Trudeau government reluctantly agreed to try and get the money back.

But Marouf is now in Beirut, broadcasting more vile anti-Semitism – with the full support of the Iranian regime, we have learned.  And few expect the Trudeau government will be successful in getting back the $125,000.

Watchdog Honest Reporting Canada, meanwhile, has found that the feds have supplied another anti-Israel organization – the Pride Centre of Edmonton – with $138,000 in funds.  The Centre recently signed onto a notorious anti-Semitic open letter that denied that Israeli women and girls were raped, and subjected to horrific sexual violence, by Hamas on October 7. That letter referred to this country as “so-called Canada” and called on MPs to resign for their “complicity” in “genocide.”

Meanwhile, Postmedia has now confirmed that the Plenty Collective – a Victoria, B.C. group that has supplied anti-Israel protestors with as much as $20,000 a month to participate in hate rallies – has actually received monies from government.

The collective, which has organized multiple anti-Israel protests for months, received $28,000 from the Victoria Foundation, a registered charity.  The foundation, in turn, receives hundreds of thousands in funding from the Trudeau government’s “Investment Readiness Program.”

Just last year, for example, the foundation got more than half a million from the feds.  It in turn passed along thousands to the Plenty Collective for “gender equity.”  But it has now announced it has initiated a “review process” to see how that money was used.

But the anti-Israel Plenty Collective benefitted from its relationship with the Victoria-based Belfry Theatre, too.  The theatre group is a not-for-profit, putting on half-a-dozen plays a year.  But – for reasons that are unclear – the Belfry Theatre also passed along monies received from the government-supported Victoria Foundation to the Plenty Collective.

On its web site, the theatre claims that “through the Victoria Foundation Community Grants Program the Belfry similarly assisted the Plenty Collective to implement queer community building, with an intersectional lens, through nourishment, art, and connection.” But after Postmedia reported the collective was funding anti-Israel protests, the theatre hurriedly announced this:

“We have been assured by the Plenty Collective that the Victoria Foundation grant is being used for community arts-based projects. Together with the Victoria Foundation and the Plenty Collective, we are reviewing the grant activities undertaken by the Plenty Collective.”

The theatre group has not responded to this reporter’s questions about its relationship with the anti-Israel Plenty Collective – and whether federal government, non-profit or charity funds were used to fund anti-Israel protests.

Tellingly, however, the theatre has cancelled a showing of a play called The Runner, after the Plenty Collective objected to it.  The play sympathetically depicts an Orthodox Jew who works for ZAKA, an organization that collects the remains of Jews killed by terrorists. (Full disclosure: this writer has raised funds for ZAKA in the past through the sale of my paintings.)

It is a disturbing tale: anti-Israel protestors being paid to protest. And, now, multiple examples of government funding, directly or indirectly, the organizations that put on those protests.

Says Ian Ward, a councillor for Colwood on Vancouver Island, who has led the charge against anti-Semitic activity there: “As long as municipal, provincial and federal politicians refuse to condemn antisemitism, and stall on a needed call for investigations into funding, we will continue to see our cities held hostage and our democracy under threat.”

Ward is right. It’s time for an inquiry.  It’s time to follow the money.

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