The Star Is Renowned For Playing With A 53 Card Deck

Jonathan Kay: This week's award for lunatic overstatement in a newspaper column goes to …

Posted: August 13, 2009, 5:51 PM by Jonathan Kay

… Christopher Hume of the Toronto Star! Come up and accept your prize for your award-winning August 12 column.

By way of explanation: Hume's column concerns the federal government's treatment of Suaad Hagi Mohamud, a Canadian who spent two-and-a-half months in a Kenyan detention facility after Kenyan and Canadian officials falsely accused her of being someone other than who she claims to be on her passport.

What Mohamud endured was terrible — and it seems likely that someone in the Canadian government screwed up quite massively. On the other hand, there is zero evidence of malice (let alone racially motivated malice) toward the woman. She seems merely to have been victimized by a maddening, Kafkaesque instance of incompetence by Canadian officials seeking to protect the skies, and Canada, from a possible threat originating in a nasty and violent part of the world.

In comes Hume, both fists of racial flurry flying. He declares this is but the latest piece of "mounting evidence" that the Harper regime is plotting to assign rights to Canadians based on the "colour of your skin."

"God help you if you're not white," Hume adds. And then — in a line that would set a writer with any hint of self-awareness into a bout of next-morning cringing — he declares "This isn't just another political scandal; this is cause for deep national shame. This smacks not just of prejudice, but of apartheid." (My italics)

Yes — that's right: apartheid. A Toronto Star columnist thinks that the mistaken, temporary detention of a black Canadian by black officials in a black African country because of incorrect information provided by bungling Canadian bureaucrats is akin to an explicitly racist South African political system in which millions of blacks were brutalized, subordinated — and in thousands of cases, tortured and murdered.

What epic crimes against humanity will the Star's intrepid race activist next be placing at the Harper government's doorstep? The Holocaust? Cambodia's killing fields? The Ukraine famine? King Leopold's depradations in the Belgian Congo? Star readers can only wonder.

Jonathon Narvey: Guilty of a lousy passport photo

Posted: August 13, 2009, 4:30 PM by NP Editor

Here’s hoping I don’t get rejected at the airport and thrown into the clink on my way back New York City later this year.

In my most recent passport picture, my cheeks appear to be a little sunken. Apparently, I’ve been eating better in the last four years. Also, my eyebrows have gotten a bit bushier. It happens when you reach a certain age. But I don’t know if the Canadian High Commission is going to buy that.

The case of Suaad Hagi Mohamud, following so soon from the disgrace of the Abdelrazik affair, is leaving a lot of Canadians wondering just what the hell is going on here. I’m aligned with my friend Raphael Alexander’s latest outraged take on this troubling trend:

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