There are some awards that should give recipients pause and make them reconsider their life choices. Like receiving a Razzie Award for worst actor, a Grand Cross of the German Eagle from the Nazis or a human rights award from the Islamic Republic of Iran. But for Canadian terror apologist Charlotte Kates, the Iranian regime’s recognition of her anti-Israel campaign is considered a badge of honour.
Kates is the international co-ordinator of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, a registered Canadian non-profit that was founded by members of, and is closely associated with, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which Canada recognizes as a terrorist entity.
Samidoun is also responsible for organizing and funding many of the vile anti-Israel protests that have taken place on Canadian streets since October 7.
Readers may remember Kates as the woman who stood in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery in April, shouting “Long live October 7!” and praising the massacre in which 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, were brutally raped and murdered, and over 250 were taken into captivity, where many remain to this day.
Kates was arrested as part of a hate-crime investigation and released on the condition that she not attend any rallies, pending a court date in the fall. But that did not stop her from boarding a plane to Tehran, where she — along with five other individuals, including slain Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh — received an Islamic Human Rights Award for her “anti-Zionist activities” earlier this month.
A couple days later, Kates appeared as a guest on Iranian TV, clad in a hijab and appropriately spaced from her male host, where she blamed “Zionist organizations and political officials” for her arrest and opined about the “lie of so-called western democracy and concern for human rights.”
Iran, of course, has one of the world’s most dismal human rights records. This is the country where, in 2022, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was arrested and subsequently murdered for improperly wearing a headscarf in public. The government crackdown on the ensuing protests resulted in hundreds of deaths, tens of thousands of arrests and numerous executions.
The Islamic Republic is also one of the world’s top exporters of terrorism (and pistachios — or “terror nuts,” as I like to call them). It funds a vast network of terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East and North Africa — including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, along with militias in Iraq and Syria — that have been responsible for attacks on Israel, U.S. forces in the region and international shipping through the Red Sea.
The Iranian mullahs also have no qualms about striking targets overseas, as was the case with the 1994 AMIA Jewish centre bombing in Argentina, which Iran is widely believed to have directed.
Yet Kates and her husband Khaled Barakat — who helped found Samidoun and has ties to the PFLP — do not see anything wrong with this. Their organization campaigns for the release of convicted Palestinian terrorists and murderers who are being held in Israeli prisons. And as Kates made clear at that Vancouver rally in the spring, she does not consider them to be terrorists.
“Hamas is not a terrorist organization. Islamic Jihad is not a terrorist organization. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is not a terrorist organization. Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization,” she told a jubilant crowd of terrorist sympathizers. “These are resistance fighters. These are our heroes.”
Samidoun, however, is considered a terrorist organization by Israel, which it accuses of acting as a “front for the PFLP,” and being involved in “establishing militant cells and motivating terrorist activity in Judea & Samaria and abroad.” It was also banned by Germany, which labelled it a “terrorist organization that aims to destroy the State of Israel (and) spread anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda.”
Even credit card companies and payment processors — including Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Paypal — have recognized the unsavoury nature of Samidoun’s activities and cut off donations to the group.
Ottawa, however, has allowed Kates and Barakat to use Canada as a base of operations to organize antisemitic rallies, distribute Hamas propaganda and run virtual seminars where they have advocated for violence to be perpetrated against Israelis and trained students occupying American universities.
Which means that the guys who ding small businesses with high credit card fees and charge consumers outlandish interest rates actually care more about curtailing terrorist financing than Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.
The fact that the despots in Tehran have recognized Kates for spreading the regime’s anti-Israel propaganda in the West shows that many of the “pro-Palestinian” protests taking place here at home have less to do with the welfare of Palestinian civilians and more to do with advocating for the destruction of the Jewish state and spreading terrorism throughout the world.
It also shows that foreign governments have likely played a role in fomenting the discord that has been seen in many western countries since October 7, and that they’re using it to further their own ends.
Hopefully, the so-called progressive university students who were occupying their campuses in the spring will come to realize that they have become the “useful idiots” of a despotic regime that subjugates women and murders innocent civilians in cold blood. But that’s about as likely as the Trudeau Liberals cracking down on groups like Samidoun and actually doing something about the hatred that has been seething in the streets.
Source » nationalpost