Silly Infidel Compares Entity Formerly Known as CAIR-CAN's Libel Case Against the Harper Gov't to Maher Arar's

Found a link to this one (under "LATEST TWEETS") on the NCCM site:

What happened to Maher Arar wasn't supposed to ever happen again.

 

Arar, a Canadian citizen with a wife, a family and a good job, was 'rendered' to a Syrian prison in 2002. There he was tortured for months because anonymous Canadian officials, working hand-in-glove with the U.S. government, used bogus 'intelligence' to tar him as a terrorist.

 

Simply put, that's what former Ontario Associate Chief Justice Dennis O'Connor concluded after he exhaustively examined what happened to Arar and why it happened.  In the end, Ottawa had to pay Arar millions of dollars for smearing his name and for permitting a loyal Canadian to be secretly shipped like a piece of baggage - first to Jordan, then to Syria, where he was kept in a coffin-like cell where rats roamed free.

 

Despite the horror that Arar endured - and the undeniable role that powerful Canadian officials played in it - more Canadians are being put in a position of having to defend themselves against the terrorist smear. This time, the powerful government officials making the terrorist-ties accusation aren't anonymous. They're in the PMO.

 

And the latest target of the thinly-veiled 'terrorist' smear is the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM), an independent, non-partisan, non-profit group that has worked for 14 years on human rights and civil liberties issues on behalf of Canadian Muslims.

 

The NCCM is having none of it. In May, the Ottawa-based NGO filed a defamation lawsuit against Harper and his chief spokesperson Jason MacDonald, after the latter told Sun News that he would "not take seriously criticism from an organization with documented ties to a terrorist organization such as Hamas."

 

And what did the NCCM do to offend the government's notoriously fragile (verging on paranoid) sensibilities? It criticized Harper for including a controversial rabbi in his official delegation to Israel in January. That's it, largely. This rather mild rebuke prompted MacDonald to go nuclear and accuse one of Canada's oldest Muslim-Canadian advocacy groups of having concrete links to Hamas.

 

Let's be frank about what that incendiary broadside - delivered to a so-called news channel operating as a bullhorn for the Conservative party - really means. The odious accusation here is that the NCCM is a hive of terrorist sympathizers, or worse. The ghost of Joe McCarthy haunts the PMO.

Let's be frank about what this infidel is doing by hauling out Joe McCarthy's ghost: he's trying to smear the most pro-Israel government in the world. And let's be frank about what NCCM really is: not a victim, and certainly not a victim of torture. It's CAIR mutton dressed up as a sort of Anti-Defamation League lamb.