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Barbara Kay: The brand new "Canadian Charger" invites Taliban stooge to keynote fundraiser
Posted: April 17, 2009, 8:09 AM by Jonathan Kay Filed under: Barbara Kay
"Canada deserves better!" That's the opening salvo on the donation-seeking website of the newest journalistic kid on the Canadian block, The Canadian Charger (TCC), a "national weekly multimedia interactive online current-affairs" venture. TCC is "committed to presenting a diversity of views and counter-views on issues of importance to Canadians...for one vital and urgent reason: We believe that Canada deserves better!" They don't say what they think they can do better than, but I am assuming they mean better than what you are reading right now.
As Jonathan Kay noted here in December, 2008: "Given that the Charger's editorial board includes outgoing CIC chief Mohamed Elmasry and 9/11 skeptic Michael Keefer, it's not hard to imagine what the outfit's politics will be: Think Counterpunch for Canadians." So far, so good. Instead of moaning and groaning about how the mainstream media never gives Muslims an even break, here's a group of Muslims (not all contributors listed are Muslims, but a majority are) who've adopted the time-honoured democratic habit of using free speech to counter free speech. Axcellonto, as a young friend of mine says.
Now TCC is holding its first fundraisers, one in Toronto on May 30, another in Waterloo May 31. And who did TCC ask to speak on this significant occasion? None other than Yvonne Ridley, not a household name outside of jihadist circles, but very popular within them.
Just as nothing makes an honest policeman more unhappy than a cop on the take from criminals, nothing makes journalists more unhappy than a columnist on the take from our enemies. The name of Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Walter Duranty lives on in infamy, because he acted as a shill for Communism during his stint as New York Times Bureau Chief from 1922-36. He saw and failed to report massive famine in Ukraine. He saw and glossed over Stalin's obscene show trials. In an ordinary person, such a blinkered will to believe that evil is good is a trait to be pitied. But in a journalist it is wicked, for there are public, often tragic consequences for the victims of that evil springing directly from the writer's duplicity.
Yesterday it was the Soviet Union, today it is Islamism. British journalist Yvonne Ridley, whose claim to fame rests on her conversion to Islam after a brief (and by her account very jolly) internment in Kabul as a kidnapee of the Taliban is not likely to win a Pulitzer prize any time soon, for she has none of Duranty's intelligence and writing skill. Her blatant support of Islamist terrorism is so transparent it was too much even for Al Jazeera where, after a brief stint of employment, she was fired for her "overly vocal and argumentative style."
You can find many of Ridley's more outrageous anti-western and terror-supportive statements here, some of which I catalogued in a column I wrote about her in September, 2007. That column was a response to Ridley's appearance at a fundraiser for the Canadian Islamic Congress in Montreal, at which she openly boasted of the thousands of pounds she had raised at a Hezbollah fundraiser abroad. She concluded her remarks - misty-eyed - with the rather chilling, "I wish I had that [Hezbollah] flag tonight." I pointed out then - it is still true - that Hezbollah is officially classified as a terrorist organization in Canada, and fundraising on their behalf forbidden in the criminal code.
Indeed, it is on that very ground that the even more odious George Galloway, Ridley's companion on a recent trek to Gaza to deliver a whole whack of money to the terrorist Hamas, was denied entry to Canada a few weeks ago. I have a call in to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney's office to ask him why, if Galloway has been refused on fundraising grounds, his partner in crime should not be subjected to the same constraints.
To be clear, I am a great believer in freedom of speech, but freedom of movement is something else. Visiting Canada is a privilege, and I think it makes perfect sense to say to someone who whitewashes all Muslim terrorists (no exaggeration with Ridley) and paints the Taliban as kindly, misunderstood idealists, while Canadian soldiers are dying in Afghanistan: You're not welcome here. Anyone can listen to Ridley's nauseating drivel on the web, so it isn't about suppressing speech.
And now let's turn to the wisdom of a new political media organ advertising itself as a seeker of a "diversity of views" and an "alternative news source" in aligning itself with a journalist who works for Press TV, as Ridley does, an Iranian government organization. In other words, Ridley's employer is a mullah-run government that cheerfully suffocates the "progressive" and the "alternate" news sources vaunted by TCC in its self-presentation. Ridley herself has often proved impervious to any understanding of irony, and I think I could say the same for Prof Elmasry, but consider the absurdity of a state functionary of a media-censoring, journalist-jailing dictatorship being welcomed as an advocate of alternative media.
For example, in its press guidelines around election campaigns the Iranian News Agency includes, as "impermissible acts": the release of any news about popular boycotts of elections; the release of "insulting" materials about candidates; the release of any news which may disrupt the elections; the release of opinion polls and the like; disclosure of the number of voters or release of information about complaints; any reference to the purchase of votes or other fraudulent methods of tampering; disclosure of the opinions of personalities of the regime without their consent; the instrumental use of pictures of women and the lack of adherence to Islamic behaviour in internet electioneering. The list goes on.
Back in the day Lenin called those naïve leftists in the west that were so eager to advance the cause of Communism they prostituted their integrity in every conceivable way, up to and including passing sensitive information to the Soviets, "useful idiots." Today the same western leftists, briefly bereft after the fall of the Berlin Wall of a cudgel to beat themselves up with, have found a new cause: Islamism. It's true that leftists and Islamists are odd bedfellows: Islamists aren't very nice to women, suppress freedom of speech and have some rather nasty things to say about infidels, homosexuals and Jews, all of which should be anathema to liberals. But hey, you can't have everything. Islamists hate the west and that's the main thing for useful idiots.
In the current context, though, I think we need a new, more pertinent name for Islamist-hugging leftists like Yvonne Ridley and her ilk. How about "useful jihidiots"? And what about the folks who invite useful jihidiots to speak at their fundraisers? When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. If TCC wants to have a shred of credibility amongst reasonable Canadians, they would do well to withdraw their invitation to the toxic - and even more damning to supposedly intelligent people, the ridiculous - Yvonne Ridley.