'Systemic Islamophobia' In Tax Audits. Really?

As I've been hearing for years from friends and sources who happen to be Muslim, there's a very real problem within this country's Muslim-centred institutions: Islamist hate preachers, Islamist strong-arming, foreign influence operations and fundraising for terrorist groups overseas. There is nothing Islamophobic (if the term is meant to mean "animated by anti-Muslim prejudice") about saying so, out loud and often. All this is well known to the RCMP and to CSIS and to a handful of journalists, among whom there is sometimes an understandable reluctance to dig too deeply into the phenomenon because of the aggravation it invites (and wow, the aggravation). Some things just end up unreported. There are exceptions to this rule.

FULL ARTICLE BY TERRY GLAVIN

Then why go to the trouble of forging emails and text messages in hundreds of pages of fabricated documents to try to prove it. . . unless it wasn't true?

This newsletter is about a whole lot of under-the-radar manoeuvres in and around Ottawa that raise some pretty scary national-security implications. It's also about the Trudeau government's active hand in making things worse.

Real Story subscribers will be pretty much up to speed on the way Team Trudeau's "post-national" plans for Canada ended up leaving this country dangerously exposed to foreign interference from Beijing, and left Chinese-Canadians at the mercy of Beijing' powerful influence-peddling and dissent-monitoring operations in this country, in the bargain.

This newsletter is about how vulnerable Canadian Muslims have been rendered similarly friendless, and how the Islamic institutions that wield power over them are protected, defended and quite often directly funded by the Liberal government.

It's got to the point that Canada's intelligence, police, anti-money-laundering and anti-terror-financing agencies are on one page, and Prime Minister Trudeau is on the other.

This newsletter is going to deal with fairly sensitive and explosive material, much of it unreported, so there are some things I need to quickly get out of the way.

The first thing: If you're one of those characters that gets worked into a lather on the premise that Muslims are taking over this country or Muslim people are congenitally incapable of absorbing "Canadian values" or whatever, listen up. You are my enemy. The sociopathology of hysterical anti-Muslim bigotry is very real in Canada, and it gets people killed.

The second thing: As I've been hearing for years from friends and sources who happen to be Muslim, there's a very real problem within this country's Muslim-centred institutions: Islamist hate preachers, Islamist strong-arming, foreign influence operations and fundraising for terrorist groups overseas. There is nothing Islamophobic (if the term is meant to mean "animated by anti-Muslim prejudice") about saying so, out loud and often.

Iranian-Canadians are well aware of the long and terrifying reach of the Khomeinist regime and its ancillaries in the terrorist-listed Hezbollah organization and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Canada. The regime's reach runs through some powerful Shia institutions. In Sunni congregations, the Muslim Brotherhood (the Nazi-era fountainhead of the terror-listed Hamas organization) exerts a growing influence, thanks at least partly to its generous friends in high places (see The Liberals are funding hate. How else to describe the speakers at this Toronto convention?).

A third thing is thatall this is well known to the RCMP and to CSIS and to a handful of journalists, among whom there is sometimes an understandable reluctance to dig too deeply into the phenomenon because of the aggravation it invites (and wow, the aggravation). Some things just end up unreported. There are exceptions to this rule. Don't start banging on about "the MSM" in comments below.

It would help you through what follows if you draw two important distinctions. The first is that Islam is a religion; Islamism is a theocratic political ideology. The second is that Islamic institutions, while they may not be necessarily Islamist, are not owed the benefit of the doubt about whether they genuinely represent the Muslims on whose behalf they claim to speak. Muslims who really are singled out for their faith and persecuted by governments around the world cannot turn to Muslim-majority states or their leading clerics to defend them.

Just last week, in aid of the Beijing regime's genocidal persecution of Xinjiang's Uyghur Muslims, the World Muslim Communities Council (WMCC) brought 30 "Muslim scholars" from 14 Muslim-majority countries - notable among them Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates - on a kind of goodwill tour of Xinjiang. The WMCC parrots Beijing's line that China's persecution of the Uyghurs is about combatting terrorism.

On a guided tour of Urumqi last week, a delegation of 30 Islamic scholars from more than a dozen countries lent support to Beijing's genocidal persecution the Uygur Muslims of Xinjiang. It's all about "anti-terrorism," they say. - Global Times propaganda photo.

Whose Side Is The Trudeau Government On Here?

In recent years, the Research and Analysis Division of the Canada Revenue Agency's Charities Directorate has been engaged with Canada's intelligence agencies, the RCMP, border-security officials and Department of Finance investigators in the effort to shut down money-laundering and terrorist-financing operations that abuse Canada's tax regulations, skirt Canada's sanctions laws and jump national-security guardrails.

The fact that terrorist-financing operations are often run under a "Muslim" cover and exploit the generosity and vulnerability of Canada's Muslims should not be surprising. It is not evidence of "Islamophobia" when federal agencies act accordingly, and it's certainly not evidence of discrimination of the "systemic" variety.

In the weeks before the Trudeau government came to power back in 2015, the Department of Finance went public with a major analysis: Assessment of Inherent Risks of Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing in Canada.

The assessment noted that the "most likely" destinations for money laundered to support terrorism were Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Lebanon, Pakistan, the Palestinian Territories, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. That's still pretty much the case. All but two of these countries are Muslim-majority states.

The terrorist groups identified with "a Canadian nexus" in the Department of Finance assessment were three Al Qaeda groupings, Al Shabaab, Hamas, Hezbollah, various foreign fighters/extremist travellers, ISIS, Jabhat Al-Nusra, "Khalistani Extremist Groups" and the remnants of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, in India and Sri Lanka.

Systemic racism is a real thing, but it's true that the names of these terror groups are not suspiciously Lutheran-sounding. It's not Islamophobic to notice this, and it's especially unhelpful for Prime Minister Trudeau to insist that "Islamophobia" is embedded in the agencies charged with the responsibility to shut down money-laundering and terror-financing in Canada. But here we are.

According to Trudeau, Canada's Muslim charities face "systemic challenges and barriers that go back many, many years, indeed, starting with actions under the previous government," as in that 2015 Assessment of Inherent Risks of Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing in Canada.

(A humorous interregnum: The always-interesting Press Gallery dynamo Blacklocks Reporter just came upon a Corrections Canada study showing that Filipino and Chinese-Canadians are disproportionately under-represented in Canada's penitentiaries, and it's been that way for at least a decade. Does this mean Filipino and Chinese-Canadians are being subjected to "systemic racism" by Corrections Canada? Sorry. I'll move on now.)

Here's an example of what I mean by Trudeau not being on the same page as the federal agencies canvassed for the 2015 Risk Assessment, or, for that matter, a 2016 International Monetary Fund evaluation of Canada's efforts in combating money-laundering and the financing of terrorism.

The Muslim Association of Canada explicitly and openly takes its theological cues from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which founded Hamas as its Palestinian military wing. The MAC has been the subject of an ongoing CRA audit since 2015, but the organization has received roughly $3 million in federal "anti-hate," youth engagement and security funding, just in the past three years.

As I pointed out above, the news media (with notable exceptions, which I'll get to) hasn't always been on the ball either.

Let's take these particular instances of reportage and analysis as examples. A Canadian Press story, appearing in the Globe and Mail: 'More to do' on systemic barriers facing Muslim charities, Trudeau acknowledges. Toronto Star: Islamophobia and the insidious threat of systemic racism.Ottawa Citizen, Why is the Canadian government still targeting Muslim charities?

Trigger warning (that's a joke): There might be a bit of both fact-based truth and the manipulative deployment of faddish "systemic" racism theory at work here, complicated by (how shall I put this delicately) incautious journalism ("Trudeau acknowledges" that Muslim charities face systemic barriers? So you're saying it's true?).

Each of those articles and several just like them - and importantly, the Trudeau government's own pre-judgments in the matter - consistently rely on either or both of two studies, one by the National Council of Canadian Muslims and the University of Toronto Institute of Islamic Studies, and one by the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group (ICLMG).

There are serious problems with these studies.

The most-often-quoted ICLMG study is profoundly misleading, and "misleading" doesn't even begin to describe Prime Minister Trudeau's claim that the Muslim charities have been made a "target" of the CRA, which is a dangerous, incendiary and baseless claim to make.

The ICLMG study is the source of the ubiquitous assertion in the news media that 75 per cent of all charities revoked by the CRA's Review and Analysis Division (RAD) between 2008 and 2015 (the year Trudeau got the prime minister's job) were Muslim charities. The gist of the claim is that the CRA's RAD audited 16 charities in those years, and six of the eight charities that had their status revoked were Muslim-centred, so this must be "systemic" Islamophobia at work.

A closer look at CRA data shows that as many as 800 charities get audited annually, and 243 charities had their charitable status revoked between 2008 and 2015. Only six of them were Muslim-centred charities. The ICLMG report's case studies don't offer any evidence of "systemic" Islamophobia, either. I'll come to them below because they mirror the case studies in the earlier report by the NCCM and the UofT's Institute for Islamic Studies.

But before I get to that, here's where the ICLMG (sorry for all the acronyms) has a point: The Research and Analysis Division of the CRA's Charities Directorate should be subjected to the same sort of oversight as other agencies with a national security mandate. Here's where the ICLMG loses points: It wants a "moratorium on audits of Muslim charities" in the meantime (The CRA is supposed to be independent of political interference, especially from the Prime Minister's Office. Oops.).

An underlying problem with the ICLMG itself is that it's essentially a post-911 holdover from the yesteryear White Poppy community, which is generally hostile to any anti-terrorism measures. It doesn't flatter our prime minister that he's more or less on the same page as this crew.

Here's an excellent overview of the entire subject by Charity Intelligence Canada: Fact Check: Bogus claims that charities directorate is on a witch hunt of Muslim charities.

Now for the NCCM-UofT report. Referring to Al Qaida and Al Shabaab and Hezbollah and the other terrorist groups identified with "a Canadian nexus" in the Department of Finance assessment, the report, titled Under Layered Suspicion, makes this argument: "Even if we accept that the above groups pose a serious threat, that does not justify the potentially disproportionate effect it will have on one group of Canadians." A problem: Al Qaida and the rest do rather disproportionately claim Islamic avowals for themselves.

The Under Layered Suspicion report complains that federal agencies associate terror-financing risks entirely with Canada's "racial minority communities." Another way of describing the same facts: Federal agencies have been serving as a shield to defend Muslims and Sikhs and Tamils in Canada from exploitation by Islamist, Khalistani, Liberation Tiger and other terror-linked global networks and institutions, like the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Here are the case studies in the report.

The Ottawa Islamic Centre and the Assalam Mosque had their status revoked for failing the "public benefit" test in hosting speakers notorious for their association with hate speech and radicalization. There were also problems with the absence of filings with the CRA, and the group's accounting. The CRA audit found that the guest speakers had espoused misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic and anti-Christian ideology, and the organization had "allowed its resources to be used for activities that promote hate and intolerance."

As for the International Relief Fund for the Afflicted and Needy (Canada), better known as IRFAN-Canada, the CRA's investigation revealed that the organization maintained secret bank accounts and had funnelled $14.6 million to Hamas over the years. Here's the CRA's March 2011 letter to IRFAN-Canada explaining its decision to revoke the group's status. It's a doozy. Three years later, IRFAN-Canada was formally listed as a terrorist organization in Canada.

Three years ago, the CRA concluded that the Islamic Shi'a Assembly of Canada (ISAC) was established as more or less the Canadian wing of the Khomeinist regime's Ahlul-Bait World Association (ABWA). ISAC lost its status after decades of cultivating relationships in Toronto establishment circles. The CRA determined that it couldn't be considered "charitable" in Canadian law to be serving the purpose of ABWA, not least because the organization's secretary-general was also the "operational father" of Hezbollah.

To the credit of the NCCM-UofT report's authors, they claim only that federal "whole-of-government policies and patterns of audit practices" demonstrate "potential biases" against Muslim-led charities, and the conditions for "potential structural bias" against those charities. What the study proposed: the Government of Canada should formally investigate "patterns of bias within the machinery of its agencies and bureaucracies."

So that's what the Trudeau government set out to do, clearly hoping to discover evidences of the systemic Islamophobia it always goes on about. And that brings us up to the present. Almost.

The Mother of All Hoaxes

Some weeks ago I reported in this newsletter that there was a weird cloak-and-dagger standoff between the Taxpayers' Ombudsperson Office and the CRA. Ombudsperson François Boileau had been tasked by Trudeau to ferret out the CRA's "Islamophobia" but Boileau had been stumped by "certain national security information that's top secret and only divulged on a "need-to-know basis," and it was unavailable to him.

Boileau told the Senate Committee on Human Rights in November that he couldn't get the CRA to explain "the mandates and respective roles of a number of national security partner organizations" involved in the audits of the Muslim groups. With the impasse, the Muslim Association of Canada, the National Council of Canadian Muslims and the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group said the whole enterprise should be deemed "inherently flawed."

Anyway, I was beginning my inquiries into all this for the National Post when Bob Fife and Steve Chase at the Globe and Mail broke an absolutely extraordinary story. It involved the Muslim Association of Canada - the Muslim Brotherhood proxy that is so angry with me for having revealed the greatest hits and curricula vitae of the gruesome guest speakers at its annual jamboree in Toronto last Canada Day. The MAC says I'm Islamophobic, I rely on Islamophobic sources, and I'm an all-round bad person.

Of course I couldn't say who it is, and Chase and Fife don't know either, but somebody has gone to the most elaborate lengths to gin up the idea that the CRA, the RCMP and other federal agencies are so deeply Islamophobic and determined to bring the MAC to ruin that they've been paying stooges inside the MAC to frame up the organization as a funder of terrorism overseas.

The whole thing is an elaborate fiction involving hundreds of pages of carefully constructed forgeries of RCMP and CRA documents, fake emails, fake search warrants, and forged SWIFT interbank transfers to overseas accounts. The trove has been slowly doled out over the past several months.

Taxpayers' Ombudsperson Boileau told the Globe he was "completely flabbergasted" that someone would go to such lengths in such a lame effort to make the CRA look like a sinister deep-state lair of megalomaniacal Muslim-hating nut jobs. "Wow. Someone, somewhere is going to a lot of trouble inventing this scheme. So there is something very troubling," he added.

I'll say.

The RCMP initially said it would investigate the matter, then declined on the grounds that it was clearly a heap of forged documents and the scam should be taken up by local police and the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. Then there was a hubbub about that and Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said, of course the government is committed to "zero tolerance for any form of Islamophobia," and then the RCMP investigation was back on again, just before Christmas.

Fife and Chase went to inordinate lengths to conclusively prove the documents were fake, but even so, the MAC says it isn't convinced. The documents show that "some government agency officials are crossing lines unethically and unlawfully to intimidate, and entrap MAC and other government officials speaking out against such activities. . .

"Whether the documents are genuine or not, they are undoubtedly an effort by some branch(es) of the federal government to disrupt the MAC, the largest Muslim organization in Canada. It can only be assumed that the documents or their contents originate from within the federal government, or its agencies, as no one outside of the federal government or its agencies would have had access to such information."

So, when you've got no real evidence of systemic Islamophobia embedded in the RCMP and the CRA, I guess any old forgeries will do.

In my last newsletter, I left subscribers with this: Over the holidays, what the hell was New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh thinking? That nobody would notice, I guess, but I thought the NDP was supposed to be the party that was militantly opposed to truck or trade with antisemites and homophobes and misogynists.

Here's a question. How would you feel if Ottawa was pouring money into the Westboro Baptist Church or some ecclesiastical aggregation of the warmongering gargoyle Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev, Patriarch Kirill of the Putin-worshipping Russian Orthodox Church?

And how would you feel if you were a New Democrat, and Jagmeet Singh was an honoured guest at a conference featuring the likes of Wolfgang Droege, Ernst Zundel, Tom Metzger, and Kaleb Cole. That's essentially what was going on in Toronto December 23-25. The moral slovenliness required to whine that it's "Islamophobic" to merely point this out is to engage in the soft bigotry of low expectations and exhibit a frightfully dim opinion of Canada's Muslim citizens in the bargain.

Singh is a regular guest at the annual Reviving the Islamic Spirit (RIS) conference in Toronto. He was in attendance as a panelist again three weeks ago. Two years ago, Conservative leader Erin O'Toole attended, and the featured speakers at that RIS conference were nearly as foul as the crew at this latest event.

The latest conference was put on by a number of groups, one of which is the National Council of Canadian Muslims - co-author of the Under Layered Suspicion report. The NCCM has pulled in about $600,000 from Ottawa over the past four years. Another sponsoring group was the Islamic Society of North America - Canada (ISNA-Canada), which had two of its affiliates stripped of their charitable status in 2017 for non-compliance with the tax law on charitable donations.

The Canada Revenue Agency's concern was that donations to the ISNA-Canada affiliates were open to being disbursed to the Hizbul Mujahideen organization, which is listed by the European Union and India as a terrorist group. The U.S. State Department listed Hizbul Mujahideen leader Syed Salahuddin as a designated terrorist in 2017 after Salahuddin threatened to train suicide bombers to turn the disputed Kashmir region "into a graveyard" of Indian s oldiers.

As Global News' Stewart Bell reported back in 2017, politicians of all parties have attended ISNA-Canada events, including Justin Trudeau in 2013, two years before he was prime minister, and Ralph Goodale, who was the public safety minister when he made his appearance in 2017. To be fair to ISNA-Canada, they recognized the problems their affiliates' "shoddy" accounting had caused and vowed to get them sorted. They made no claim of "systemic Islamophobia back then.

This year, Singh was on a panel titled "Valor of the Veil and the Nonsense over the Niqaab." I expect he'd say nothing that wasn't predictable and boring on a panel like that. But without getting too deep into the bloodcurdling, Holocaust-denying, gay-bashing and antisemitic stuff other speakers at the RIS conference have said, here's who Singh was invited to chat with on his panel.

Imam Zaid Shakir, for instance. From an article he wrote: "The legal and political system of America is sinful and constitutes open rebellion against Allah. . . The relevant point for Muslims is that Islam presents an absolutist political agenda, or one which doesn't lend itself to compromise, nor to coalition building." That is not Islam, by the way. It's Islamism. There's a difference.

Another of Singh's co-panelists: Ieasha Prime. I wonder if Singh thought to ask her what she thinks about female genital mutilation. Probably not.

Other speakers at the conference: The imam Siraj Wahhaj, who says homosexuality is a disease and once threatened to come to Toronto to fight gay Muslims. Wahhaj is well-known to New Yorkers (so is his gun-toting, child-abusing compound-having son); Wahhaj was a character witness for Sheikh Omar Rahman, the "blind sheikh" convicted in 1995 for planning terror attacks in the U.S.

Then there's Yahir Qadi, who says the "Hoax of the Holocaust" is a "very good book," and Europe's Ashkenazi Jews are not genuine children of Israel, and that Jews shouldn't teach Islamic Studies because they're out to destroy Islam. Really fun at parties, I bet.

For a full run-down of some of creepier speakers at the Toronto conference three weeks ago, the Middle East Forum covers the waterfront here: Hate-Filled Islamist Clerics Gather in Toronto, Bridging Theological Divides.

Muslims in this country are routinely obliged to put up with these incitements. Everybody knows this. It's more or less accepted, and our political class has helped to normalize this state of affairs.

In a "post-national" country with "no core identity," this is normal.