Barbara Kay: The credulously pro-terror members of Mark Carney's caucus

Yahoo

11-05-2025

Prime Minister Mark Carney's election victory speech included a note of humility: 'Over my long career, I have made many mistakes, and I will make more, but I commit to admitting them openly, to correcting them quickly, and always learning from them.' Yet it is too late to correct one of his big mistakes. Will he at least admit to and learn from it?
During the election campaign, 28 Liberal candidates (19 of them elected) signed onto a five-point anti-Israel Vote Palestine platform. Vote Palestine began as a BDS project, and quickly gathered steam after a trial run in the 2021 election. The platform contains demands — such as a two-way arms embargo against Israel, a full boycott of Israel-controlled territories and recognition of Palestine as a state — that do not reflect current Liberal policy. In total, 362 candidates signed on.
Carney could have stopped his own candidates' irresponsible trend early in its trajectory by issuing a memo that foreign policy is the purview of party leadership, not individual candidates, and ordering signers to rescind their endorsement of the platform. Instead, he remained silent, essentially giving the green light for more candidates to pledge fealty to a platform crafted by ideological stakeholders in a global campaign to delegitimize Israel and whitewash terrorism.
By endorsing these demands, the candidates lent an air of respectability to the anti-Israel groups that organized the campaign — including the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), one of the lead organizers — obscuring their ugly values and activities, which include celebrating Hamas's October 7 pogrom, lionizing Hamas and Hezbollah, and organizing Jew-baiting student encampments at universities throughout the United States and Canada.
In May 2024, PYM organized the People's Conference for Palestine, featuring speakers affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, both designated as terrorist organizations in Canada, the U.S., Israel and the European Union.
PYM's aim is to normalize terror as a righteous response to (alleged) colonialists. The most insidious of the five Vote Palestine platform demands, therefore, is the innocuous sounding, 'Address anti-Palestinian racism (APR) and protect freedom of expression on Palestine.'
The definition of 'anti-Palestinian racism,' as conceived by the Canadian Arab Lawyers Association, includes speech or action that 'dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives.' The word 'narrative' — in this case an origin story held sacred by a group of people that is based in belief rather than evidence — is a trap, inserted into the APR definition to promote a legal prohibition against criticism of that group's beliefs.
Along with other Islamist groups obsessed with Israel's alleged sins, PYM represents a movement best described by Israeli politician Einat Wilf as 'Palestinianism.' The Palestinianism movement is dedicated to opposing the existence — and more important any right to the existence — of a Jewish state by any means necessary, including October 7-style massacres.
Palestinianism's umbrella narrative is that Zionism is an inherently racist ideology. Drawing on that premise, pro-Zionist expression may be legislated as hate speech, but the glorification of Hamas 'martyrs' and calls for the eradication of Israel should not be. (When Bill C-63, the online harms act, is revived, they may get their wish.)
Vote Palestine's strategy, according to one of its Instagram posts, is to 'force Palestine onto the debate stage through nationwide visibility' and shame political actors who do not endorse its platform.
Leading PYM activist Yara Shoufani, who has a long rap sheet of anti-Israel extremism, explained on a podcast how 'pressure is applied' by PYM foot soldiers within ridings to non-endorsing candidates. They 'make it impossible to organize fundraising events … impossible for those MPs to canvass without being met by someone from within the community asking, 'Why are you not supporting an arms embargo?' ' she said.
Shoufani seems proud that PYM has managed to, in her words, 'create a kind of crisis within the Canadian electoral system.' And all of this, fellow Canadians, is what 362 candidates — not a single one of them Conservative — signed onto.
At 1.8 million and growing, Muslims constitute around five per cent of Canada's population. The Canadian Muslim Vote, a nonprofit, estimates that Muslims hold significant influence in between 60-80 of 343 ridings.
According to Joe Adam George, lead researcher for Islamist threats in Canada at the Middle East Forum, 'Islamists have been working overtime' to see 'their favoured party,' the Liberals, re-elected, 'so that the good times keep rolling for them for at least another four years.'
Credulous candidates' greed for Muslim votes is understandable. Which is why it is so important in these matters that savvy political leaders provide a backstop to their candidates' lack of judgment in collaborating with what essentially amounts to foreign interference in the election.
As my colleague Tristin Hopper posted on X in regard to the Vote Palestine scandal, 'This is how foreign interference happens. If a literal pro-terror group can get an MP's signature without difficulty, you think they're standing guard for thee against Iran or China?'
National [e-mail]/BarbaraRKay
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