RANT: O CAN-A-DA! OUR HOME AND NA-TIVE ETC.

 

I FOUND IT SOMEWHAT DISTURBING, the other day, to learn my country doesn’t believe in democracy. Oh, in Canada, we Canadians have the vote and all, our elections are free and fair, and, to my knowledge, the wishes of the electorate are represented in the governments we choose and so on. I mean that we don’t believe in democracy for other people. At least some other people. I’m thinking of Syrian citizens living in Canada or Syrian Canadians who possess dual citizenship. In the recent presidential elections held in Syria, a number of countries, Canada included, refused to accept the legitimacy of the election’s outcome. Global Affairs Canada issued a strongly-worded statement on the matter. That’s fine, everybody’s entitled to their opinion (one that I disagree with, BTW). But my concern here is the fact that our government, again along with a number of other governments (carrying water for the Americans, as usual) denied consular services for Syrian ex-pats wishing to vote. If I am correct, the Syrian Embassy in Ottawa and the consulate in Montreal were closed to anyone who went there to vote on May 26. I couldn’t find details about what exactly happened—it wasn’t much covered in the news. Did mounted RCMP officers stand guard at the embassy doors? Was crime scene tape used to seal the place off from the public that day? I’m not sure.

I think it is one thing to disagree with how Syria is being run; I think you can rightly call Bashar al-Assad an authoritarian ruler. Granted; there’s much to criticize about him and his government. However, for Canada to deny people, citizens, foreign nationals, in our country, the right to vote at their country's embassy if they want and for whomever they want, is unacceptable. What if it were Canadian expats in, say, Costa Rica (to pick  randomly a country I’d like to buy a condo in), who were denied access to the Canadian embassy in San José? Our government would be screaming blue murder and shouting tidal waves of foam-flecked diplomatic outrage!

Regardless of whether the election was up to Canadian standards of transparency and fair play, I think the majority of Syrians did indeed vote to re-elect Assad. Maybe not at the level of 93% of them as the polls said, perhaps. Still, if I were living in that war-torn and devastated country, I might well vote for someone trying to bring stability and order following a decade and more of war. I won’t debate here the long, sordid history of the Syrian War; the Assad government has its share of blame. But foreign actors, including radical Islamists, are part of the terrible mix of forces that have nearly destroyed this once-stable and prosperous country (but that’s a Rant for another time.) 

For example, former American Secretary of State John Kerry, in a 2016 audio recording leaked from an interview he did with “Syrian activists”, admitted the United States, for some time, had been "watching" ISIL, the radical Islamist terror group, grow in power in Syria and saw them as “leverage” to be used against the Assad government. And in an earlier 2015  trove of emails leaked to Wikileaks*, Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State prior to John Kerry, indicated that the United States saw an opportunity to support “moderate rebels” in Syria to fight Assad. In addition, as the article by Ben Norton I cite here indicates, the Americans were aware that their allies in the Gulf region (Saudi Arabia, Qatar) directly supported ISIL with arms and equipment. The Americans, instead of raising hell over their activities, turned a blind eye to what their allies were doing in Syria, which is  a slippery slope to complicity in the direct funding of terrorist groups. (Don’t forget that the Americans funded bin Laden and his crew in Afghanistan during the 1980s. How'd that work out for y'all?)

Suffice it to say that if the plan the Americans had gamed out had succeeded, Syria today might be run by these so-called “moderate rebels” who are, in fact, more radical than their public relations campaigns would indicate, and who prefer caliphates and stoning women to death in public squares for the crime of adultery. Nice.

 

POINT IS: What Canada did on May 26 was wrong. Plain and simple. They acted arbitrarily to deny people in this country their democratic right to vote. Shameful!

 

Jake. 

_____________________________________________________

 

*I should note that this was a Wikileaks publication that further enraged American authorities against Julian Assange, who continues, after nine years,  to battle extradition to the United States from Britain where he faces federal charges that could land him in prison for 175 years! He was doing his job as a journalist and has been shamefully treated by both governments (or should I call them “regimes” since that’s how our often sanctimonious political leaders and MSM describe  governments they deem not true democracies or one's that don't tow the party line: the “Assad regime”, the Maduro regime”, etc.) Such Draconian legal procedures used to prosecute and persecute Assange are what you might expect to find in a regime.

 

    Julian's removal from Ecuadorian embassy in London, 2019