More on those burdens on the Canadian taxpayer, John Greyson and Tarek Loubani

Yesterday, Michael Coren and I discussed those two exploiters of the Canadian taxpayer, John Greyson and Tarek Loubani.

There are a few post-scripts to the interview.

As we noted in the interview, the Globe and Mail's columnist Margaret Wente wrote an article a few days ago, one of very few outside Sun News,  that provided factual background information on Greyson and Loubani and was harshly critical of the duo.

She concluded her column with:

In this case, the government – one that Mr. Greyson and Mr. Loubani viscerally despise – applied the heat at the highest level. Foreign Minister John Baird even met with his Egyptian counterpart. These two should kiss Mr. Baird’s feet. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

As it turns out, Wente was completely correct. Yesterday, Greyson and Loubani released a nauseating video in which they thanked their supporters, but did not offer a single word of thanks to the Canadian government, or the rest of us who have now paid exorbitant costs to exculpate them from the consequences of their narcissistic conflict tourism.

Also, during the conversation, Michael made the significant point that Islamic news service al Jazeera, will expunge parts of the background of western useful idiots who invest immeasurable amounts of time into vilifying Israel, to make them more palatable to their religious Muslim audience. The example he used was the notorious Jenny Peto, in the case of whom, her openly "queer" background never came up.

The fact that Peto is one of Greyson and Loubani's most ardent supporters, and that she shares their beliefs is significant.

At a sparsely attended rally at Ryerson University earlier this week that drew more media than spectators, Peto was one of the people tied in with the organizers, including Greyson's sister Cecilia and Ryerson "Social Justice" professor Winnie Ng. It was unusual for Peto to be front and center at such an event recently. Prior to late 2010, she was at the forefront of Canada's anti-Israel fanaticism, but the exposure of an anti-Semitic thesis she wrote for the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education made her an embarrassment to them.

The thesis, which was both facile and laughably absent of actual research even brought the academic standards University of Toronto into disrepute. Essentially, her thesis, which paralleled the sort of writing one can find from neo-Nazi authors, asserted that Jews are privileged racists who use the Holocaust to perpetuate the myth of their own victimhood while advancing the cause of an "oppressive" Zionist Jewish state.

The anti-Semitism of her thesis was condemned by, among others, Ontario Liberal Cabinet Minister Dr. Eric Hoskins, who is not a right-wing reactionary by anyone's standards.

Jenny Peto's new look at the "John and Tarek" rally
has a strange familiarity

Michael referred to the "Freudian subtext" of Peto, a Jewish, atheist, anti-Israel fanatic who authored an anti-Semitic essay and coincidentally, three years ago, I wrote a piece about that titled, "You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to connect these dots."

There is an even wider Freudian subtext to people like Greyson and Peto, untalented Gays who have dedicated themselves to the demonization of the only country that respects Gay rights and minority religious rights in the middle east. The lies they tell about Israel reveals nothing about Zionism or the Jewish state, but it reveals a great deal about their own unresolved personal issues.

Hey Look! After Sun Media and bloggers have been doing it for 2 months, the mainstream media finally gets around to telling the truth about fanatics Greyson & Loubani

Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail:

John Greyson and Tarek Loubani have been portrayed as innocents abroad, humanitarian do-gooders who were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. This picture is inaccurate and incomplete. The two are hard-core anti-Israel activists who’ve been mixed up in Middle East politics for years. They should have known what they were getting into.

When they were arrested, the two were on their way to deliver medical equipment to a hospital in Hamas-controlled Gaza. The whole world knew that the situation in Egypt was highly volatile. The government was determined to shut down the Muslim Brotherhood (an ally of Hamas) and unlikely to look kindly on a couple of foreigners who decided to film a bloody crackdown.

Jon Kay in the National Post:

Egyptian military authorities have been co-operating with Israel in controlling the flow of weapons and militants to and from Gaza for years. But till now, Western pro-Palestinian activists generally have preferred to play down this fact. The case against Israel works best when it is presented as a simple morality play about indigenous Arabs battling neo-colonialist Jews. And so the fact that many Arab leaders in the region (including not only those in Egypt, but also Lebanon and Jordan) share Israel’s fear of Palestinian militancy is seen as an embarrassment to the conceit of anti-Zionist solidarity. 

(to be fair to John and the NP, they did do a couple of articles touching on the radical fanaticism of Greyson and Loubani before.)

I think Jon's article is overly optimistic in its assessment that the Greyson/Loubani saga will refocus the Canadian radical left away from its anti-Israel depravity onto real human rights crises, but he does make some very valid observations about the other facets of this episode. 

Sun News, as its viewers are aware, has been providing the complete story on Greyson and Loubani from the start: