Headline quoted by Mark Steyn:

Former British P.M. Tony Blair Rips Biden Afghanistan Withdrawal: Gives ‘Our Opponents A Belief Our Time Is Over’

On which Mark Steyn comments:

Well, our opponents aren’t wrong about that, are they? In fact … it’s not just “our opponents” who believe “our time is over”, but a significant percentage of the west’s ruling class. For why else would they have gone over to the other side? Our randomly selected Shill of the Day, Joe Biden’s jetsetting climate honcho:

John Kerry echoes China’s argument that human rights sanctions threaten climate talks

So many global A-listers are “echoing China’s argument” these days, don’t you find? Fauci and the public health gang, the stars and administrators of those crappy unwatchable corporate sports, Justin Trudeau, Hollywood, the WHO…

It suits China that climate change is the only Big Picture non-subterranean conversation we are permitted to have. Every minute we spend worrying about whether the Maldives will be washed away by rising sea levels in the twenty-second century makes it less likely we’ll notice that America is being washed away by China right now.

This Saturday [9/11] will provide, one would have thought, a rare glimpse of that subterranean reality. But tens of millions of Americans are so content being spectators in their nation’s eclipse that it may well be that the traditional cringe-makingly passive candle-in-the-windiness of 9/11 observances will for a few moments work its usual magic, and on its twentieth anniversary they won’t notice that the war on terror is over and America lost. The guys who toppled the Twin Towers have just been rewarded for their pains with a bazillion Humvees, Black Hawks, and more territory than they ever held back in the Nineties.

If by “us” we mean Western civilization, is our time over?

… but not of the stupid.

Paul Joseph Watson is on to them.

He shows some of the ways Big Virtue tries to discombobulate us.

Whatever Canada may once have been and whatever the talking heads may incessantly proclaim, Canada is no longer a viable political construct. It is a dead country walking.

So writes the Canadian writer David Solway at PJ Media.

Canada is presently in the throes of social and political disintegration. A left-leaning electorate has once again empowered a socialist government promoting all the lunatic ideological shibboleths of the day: global warming or “climate change,” radical feminism, indigenous [people’s] sovereignty, expansionary government, environmental strangulation of energy production, and the presumed efficiency of totalitarian legislation. Industry and manufacturing are abandoning the country in droves and heading south.

The link leads to another article of his, at American Thinker (February17, 2020), in which he gives details of the totalitarian legislation:

Bill C-25 seeking to impose “diversity” on all corporations; financial penalties against organizations that do not comply with government programs; a teeming brigade of government surveillance “inspectors” — that is, spies: wage spies, speech spies, feminist spies, pay equity spies, Human Rights spies; paralegal bodies known as Human Rights Tribunals with the power to levy crippling fines, bankrupt families, and shut down businesses, impose prison time for contempt of court, and compel conformity via “re-education”.  …

Bill C-16 prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression …  The bill effectively mandates that citizens address others by their preferred pronouns and transgender fantasies — or else! It’s “zir,” “ze,” “zem,” or “zeir,” or you’re done for.  …  There are other laws on the books, bills such as C-59,  C-75, and C-76, that reduce and even criminalize freedom of expression, infringe on privacy rights, compromise due process, and render government transparency a thing of the past.

The assault against normalcy, common sense, civil rights, and charter freedoms gives no indication of relenting.  Bill S-202, an act to amend the Criminal Code now before Parliament, would outlaw what the government misleadingly calls “Conversion Therapy” — that is, by criminalizing parents, lawyers, physicians, and church leaders who object to state-compelled hormone-drugging and genital mutilation procedures, the bill would effectively prevent minor children [who are] undergoing forced transgender operations, surgical and hormonal, from receiving the help they need. “This whole agenda to sterilize and mutilate children,” write the editors of Action4Canada, “is pure evil and in violation of … the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as a physician’s ethical commitment promising to ‘First, do no harm'”. …

Not satisfied with … conducting dodgy prosecutorial attacks on individuals whom the party wishes to intimidate, silence, or arrest, Trudeau’s Liberals are considering a motion requiring all news content–creators to procure a government license for approved content, thus controlling public access to information. …

Not content with such despotic measures, the CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission) proposes to identify news sites that are “accurate, trusted, and reliable” with the intent to enhance the “diversity of voices”.  Truth be told, there are precious few “accurate, trusted, and reliable” news sites in Canada. … Moreover, we know that emphasizing “diversity of voices” is equivalent to the imposition of the grievance-driven identity-group and social justice model on public broadcasting while constraining factual reporting and bridling the dissemination of genuine news.  It is … tantamount to a government monopoly on information …

All of Canada’s political parties signed on to Bill C-76, which … imposes further restrictions on third-party speech during extended election periods. …  Every political party steers to the Left, including, as noted, the Conservatives, who are essentially Liberal Lite.  Trudeau is simply the most visible embodiment and effective bellwether of the political virus infecting the country. …

He cites the case of Omar Khadr (see our post and the video here) as an example of the inverted values of the governing elite.

He characterizes the form of government as “soft totalitarianism”:

Soft totalitarianism is a considerable way from hard totalitarianism.  …

But the soft leads to the hard, and is doing so:

To say it can’t happen here … is an expression of overweening confidence and lack of historical awareness.  One does not have to think back to the demise of the Weimar Republic in Germany.  A mere glance at the European Union’s unelected, bureaucratic authoritarianism, or a recognition of what the Democrat Party is demonstrably planning for the United States, should awaken us to the danger.  To be awakened, we might remark, is the opposite of being woke.  Canada stands as a vivid illustration of what would be in store for the U.S. under a Democrat administration.

It can happen here, and it is happening right now, right here, in Canada.

He continues in his PJ Media article (written on February 24, 2020 – one week after his American Thinker column):

Canada is now reaping the whirlwind. The Red-Green Axis consisting of social justice warriors, hereditary band chiefs, renewable energy cronies, cultural Marxists, and their political and media enablers have effectively shut down the country. The economy is at a standstill, legislatures and City Halls have been barricaded, blockades dot the landscape, roads and bridges have been sabotaged, trains have been derailed (three crude-by-rail spillages in the last two months), goods are rotting in warehouses, heating supplies remain undelivered, violent protests and demonstrations continue to wreak havoc—and the hapless Prime Minister, who spent a week swanning around Africa as the crisis unfolded, is clearly out of his depth and has no idea how to control the mayhem. No surprise here. A wock pupper [? – woke puppet?] politico in thrall to the Marxist project and corporate financial interests, Justin Trudeau is generally baffed out when it comes to any serious or demanding concerns involving the welfare of the people and the economic vitality of the nation. Little is to be expected of him in the current emergency apart from boilerplate clichés and vague exhalations of roseate sentiment.

Still, Trudeau may have been right about one thing when he told The New York Times that Canada had no core identity—although this is not what a Prime Minister should say in public. Canada was always two “nations”, based on two founding peoples, the French and the English …  But it may be closer to the truth to portray Canada as an imaginary nation which comprises three territories and ten provinces, two of which, Quebec and Newfoundland, cherish a near-majoritarian conception of themselves as independent countries in their own right. Newfoundland narrowly joined Confederation only in 1949 and Quebec held two successive sovereignty referenda that came a hair’s breadth from breaking up the country.

The latest entry in the exit sweepstakes is oil-rich but hard-done-by Alberta, a province which suffered under the National Energy Program introduced in 1980 by the current PM’s father Pierre Trudeau, and is currently struggling under a concerted left-wing campaign, sponsored by Green-progressivist foundations (American consortiums masking via proxies as Canadian coalitions), clueless Nobel laureates at their virtue-signaling best, and a Liberal government ideologically aligned with the NDP (New Democratic Party) and the Greens, to prevent the development of its vast oil reserves. Alberta has always resented the indifference to and domination of the Canadian West by the so-called Laurentian Elite comprising “the political, academic, cultural, media and business elites” of central Canada. There is now a Wexit movement gathering momentum.

It might just as plausibly be argued that Canada is composed of a veritable congeries of competing, self-identified mini-nations—English, French, Islamic, Chinese, Sikh, native tribes with multiple patrimonies and unpronounceable names, and sundry political constituencies affiliated with the global left. Contributing factors like indiscriminate immigration from dysfunctional countries, metastasizing socialist doctrine verging on nascent totalitarianism, a state-funded national broadcaster and a deeply compromised print media subsidized by the Liberal government added to the destabilizing brew. Meanwhile, to quote lawyer and former philosophy professor Grant Brown, “the education system invites Extinction Rebellionkooks into the classroom to terrify the children”. … An army of little Gretas will carry the country-killing revolution even further.

It is often noted that America is a nation evenly divided between progressivist and conservative populations, a civil dilemma not easily resolved. But Canada is divided approximately 65-35 by these constituencies, and if one considers that the federal Conservative Party in its present manifestation can fairly be described as Liberal Lite, the breakdown is more like 95-5. This means there is no chance of reconciliation between our political disparities, such as they are, and Canada is doomed to plummet down the esker of every failed socialist experiment that preceded it and, indeed, that is presently on display in various foundering nations around the globe—North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and counting.

Trudeau père invoked the War Measures Act in 1970 to quell the Quebec separatist movement, the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), after a series of bombings and murders. It is obvious that the son has neither the political smarts nor the strength of character to act decisively against those who are busy reducing an already patchwork country into a heap of shards and rubble.

Nor, it would seem, the will. Is Justin Trudeau not the leading  destroyer of the country which he believes never had a “core identity” anyway?  

And there we find the proof that, whatever Canada may once have been and whatever the talking heads may incessantly proclaim, Canada is no longer a viable political construct. It is a dead country walking.

What hope have the remaining good Canadians? Perhaps they could hope that President Trump will make an offer on behalf of the US to buy the remains of Canada from the Queen, at the bargain price the corpse is now worth, and resurrect the nation as Canadian North Americans, annexed to the Republic, happy, prosperous, and free.

While the West is busy raging and plotting against President Trump, complaining about Russia, destroying statues, submitting to invasion by hordes from the Third World, deciding whether to let citizens return who had gone to help ISIS kill and torture, disentangling the European Union, adding new pronouns to the English language, changing men into women and vice verse, China has been reaching out, near and far, grasping chunks of the world by its real needs, making itself the center of a new international trade order, which could some day be a new political order with Beijing as its capital.

China calls it the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Wikipedia describes it thus:

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a development strategy adopted by the Chinese government involving infrastructure development and investments in [so far] 152 countries and international organizations in Europe, Asia, Middle East, Latin America and Africa.

“Belt” refers to overland routes for road and rail transportation, called “the Silk Road Economic Belt”; “Road” refers to the sea routes, the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

The old name “Silk Road” makes the Belt sound long-established, connoting beautiful merchandise being carried by traders from East to West, a romance of mutually beneficial trade.

Because the Chinese government wants the world to understand that its initiative is good for all concerned:

The Chinese government calls the initiative “a bid to enhance regional connectivity and embrace a brighter future” .

And it isn’t only regional, the connectivity: distant parts are brought into the embrace too:

North, central and south belts are proposed. The North belt passes from China through Central Asia and Russia to Europe; the Central belt from China through Central Asia and West Asia to the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean; the South belt from China to Southeast Asia, South Asia, to the Indian Ocean through Pakistan.

The land corridors include:

The New Eurasian Land Bridge, which runs from Western China to Western Russia through Kazakhstan, and includes the Silk Road Railway through China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region, Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland and Germany.

The China–Mongolia–Russia Corridor, which will run from Northern China to the Russian Far East. 

The China–Central Asia–West Asia Corridor, which will run from Western China to Turkey.

The China–Indochina Peninsula Corridor, which will run from Southern China to Singapore.

The Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar Economic Corridor, which runs from southern China to Myanmar.

The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor.

All of which is over land.

But China is reaching across the seas too.

The Maritime Silk Road is the name of the sea route corridors. It is a complementary initiative aimed at investing and fostering collaboration in Oceania [Australia and the islands round it], Africa, and South America, by way of the South China Sea, the South Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean area.

And China has made an agreement with Russia to create an ‘Ice Silk Road’ along the Northern Sea Route in the Arctic (a maritime route which Russia considers to be part of its internal waters). There Chinese and Russian companies are cooperating in oil and gas exploration, infrastructure construction, tourism, and scientific expeditions.

Most of the countries joined to China by Belt and Sea Road have become members of China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

The bank provides funds for the joint projects, each one of which is part of the great world-wide infrastructure project.

So China has become the indispensable benefactor of countries that could not on their own afford to build their “ports, railways, highways, power stations, aviation and telecommunication facilities”. China joins them together in vast international enterprises. For instance: “the super grid project aims to develop six ultra high voltage electricity grids across China, north-east Asia, Southeast Asia, south Asia, central Asia and west Asia” .

Formal respect is paid to global warming belief:

The wind power resources of central Asia would form one component of this grid.

Back in 2016, This Week in Asia pointed out in what ways and how greatly China would benefit from BRI:

[The Chinese] will generate enough demand abroad to keep their excess steel mills, cement plants and construction companies in business, so preserving jobs at home. They will tie neighboring countries more closely into their own economic orbit, so enhancing both their hard and soft power around the region. They will further their long term plan to promote their own currency as an international alternative to the US dollar. And to finance it all, they will set up a new multi-lateral infrastructure bank, which will undermine the influence of the existing Washington-based institutions, with all their tedious insistence on transparency and best practice, by making more “culturally sensitive” soft loans. The result will be the regional hegemony they regard as their right as Asia’s leading economic and political power.

The paper predicted that BRI was “doomed to fail”. But it seems to be succeeding.

European governments, other than those of Poland and Belarus, have not yet agreed to step on to the Belt, but Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte intends to, and it is rumored that Britain’s insane Prime Minister Theresa May is thinking of it.

General Electric and Caterpillar have signed up to work on BRI projects.

New Zealand has launched itself on the Road.

No doubt President Xi Jinping has his eye on North America.

This would be a good time for him to woo Canada with the Brighter Future song, while Justin Trudeau is still there making destructive decisions.

As for the US, we wonder – did Xi broach Belt and Road propositions to President Trump? If he did, we can probably guess the gist of the answer he got.

But what will the next US President say? Will he/she/zir take America into the warm embrace of China?

Ads like this, the Chinese suppose, will win the hearts and minds of American millennials:

But for now – has anybody noticed that China’s hegemony is growing by the day, not just in its region, but world-wide?

Our Western civilization is roiled by conflict; political struggles of the utmost importance.

Some call them “wars”. They are being fought mostly without weapons and violence, though one side (the wrong side of course) often resorts to physical attack, convinced that its righteousness justifies and demands it.

We quote from an article by Paul Collits at the Australian magazine Quadrant. (Our cuts include most of the specifically Australian references.)

By my reckoning there are six key wars, all of which must be identified, understood and, most of all, fought.

First, there is the war that must be won against political correctness in all its forms.  This is a fight between the elites and the punters.  It is a battle for the heart and soul of our society.  On one side are the careerists and ideologues of the fevered swamps of Washington, Canberra and so on; on the other, the deplorables, the Reagan Democrats, the Howard Battlers, the Struggle Street listeners tuned in to talkback radio, the small businessmen and women, the two-income families who want what is right for their kids. …

Second, there is the war against environmentalism in all its guises.  The god of “sustainability”, born in the 1980s … is now so embedded in schools, universities and media it is not remotely clear how one might fight back.  The god of sustainability has delivered to us the scourges and nonsenses that are “peak oil”, “climate change” and “renewable” energy.

Third, there is the war between Islam and the West.  This takes many forms – from global migration of economic refugees, to sharia law, welfare fraud, gangs and terrorism.  Its fronts are the banlieu of Paris, the bookshops of Lakemba and the streets of Melbourne.  Taking the side of Islam in this war is politics 101 for today’s “leaders”.

Fourth, there is the war against the Administrative State.  The State’s overreach is now all but complete.  The nanny state rules our lives.  It is the tool by which political correctness is enforced, by which freedom of speech and freedom of belief are purged and personal conduct regulated. Paranoia, you say? … The State’s nannyism combines with political correctness to haul the innocent before the faux courts of our time … Their crime? Saying that which others do not want heard. …

Fifth, there is the war between globalism and nationalism. The Davos brigade, the Soros network of lavishly funded activists, and their many lackeys in politics, Silicon Valley and elsewhere, lead the charge. Their weapons are globalisation and technology.  Their institutions are global, not national. Their aim is global governance and the end of the nation state, with its old fashioned values of patriotism flag and family.

Finally, there is the war on truth. This is the biggest of them all. …  [We must fight for truth against] the victory of Derrida, Foucault and their fellow-travelling Marxists and neo-Marxists who occupy the commanding cultural heights of our society and have succeeded in embedding and seizing our key institutions – the media, political parties, schools, universities, Hollywood and now even the corporations. The whole phenomenon of fake news bespeaks their success. …

[Their] biggest victory … was over our poor dumb millennials, now two generations removed from any proper understanding of Western values and virtues, and the core value of the West is truth. Earlier, when I spoke of schools, I did not say “our” schools, for they no longer are. They, too, have been colonised. Their graduates will list the ills and crimes of the West and rattle them off by Pavlovian rote, and thus do we hear of a past populated by the likes of Simon Legree [the cruel slave-owner in Uncle Tom’s Cabin – ed] but seldom if ever of Wilberforce [who launched the successful campaign to free all the slaves in the British Empire – ed]. The ease with which, for example, the young are convinced of something patently untrue can be seen in the numbers of our young who lazily embrace the ersatz version of marriage now de rigueur. …

There are other battles outside the six wars, of course, but it would be hard to find a front or even a minor skirmish that is not a theatre of these six conflicts. …

In [the] “darkest hours” [of World War II] Churchill certainly did not believe that checking and defeating an existential threat to the very being of the British Isles would be easy, nor that it could be avoided. Everything was on the line. His own War Cabinet was divided.  A serious argument was made … that Britain should seek an accommodation with Hitler.  Much of the British army was stranded and exposed in a foreign land, albeit only 22 miles away at its closest. … Victory would be deemed by any reasonable appraisal as most unlikely. …

The two wars since – Vietnam and the second Iraq War – featured murky enemies, often hard to find and certainly hard to destroy, and new technologies. But far more telling was the lack of consensus at home about whether those wars should be fought at all — whether the enemy was, indeed, “the enemy”. What Churchill could count on was a united and angry populace … committed to the fight with heart and soul — “blood, sweat and tears”, as he put it. …

Who do we have manning the barricades today? 

The barricades of the wrong side, that is to say.

Justin Trudeau.  Macron.  Merkel. Theresa May. Jean-Claude Juncker.  Turnbull.  The Davos set.  The UN.  Pope Francis. Mark Zuckerberg. Oprah. Prince Charles. These are the figures that flit across the world’s TV screens and its collective frontal lobe, mouth their platitudes and move on to the next sound byte, their pronouncement’s on Islam’s amity or the wickedness of cheap power seldom questioned by a media imbued with the same views, the same agendas, the same presumption that projected virtue can trump the precedent of history. Just how they never explain. These leaders, so called, are almost to a man or woman, batting for the enemy by word and deed and silence.  The worst of them actively collaborate and work against the interests of their own people. …

If, on the off-chance, our young people might be cajoled to see [the film] Darkest Hour, they just might begin to see with a clarity not previously available to them how we are, indeed, involved in a number of lethal wars. To lose them will destroy their futures in ways even more insidious than Hitler or even Stalin could have imagined. And they might consider voting for folks who might be minded to fight the battles that matter now.  An outsider?  One hated by his own party?  Someone who sees enemies and understands how to fight them.  Someone willing to spare the niceties?  Someone willing to make his country great again?  Err, wait a minute …

Although at present we have on our side – the side of truth, freedom, civilized values, and the nation state – a great Commander-in-Chief in the person of President Trump, it is not at all clear at this time which side will be victorious.

In all the wars, the enemy is the Left. With its “political correctness”, environmentalism, alliance with Islam, deep-state socialism, globalism, and hatred of our civilization which it is determined to destroy, the Left has conquered the institutions of education, most of the media, the entertainment industry, and the pinnacles of power in many Western states. It held the pinnacle of power in the US for eight years and did much harm to America, making the people poorer and the country weaker; and to the world by upheaving populations, sending millions pouring out of shithole countries and flooding into our world. The tide is against us.

Will President Trump, standing alone among leaders as Churchill did, succeed as he did in turning the tide?

A Canadian Muslim traitor, Omar Khadr, has recently been awarded $10.5 million “compensation” by the government of the country he betrayed, which is led at present by the Islam-loving leftist, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The award was given sneakily in an out-of-court settlement. Determined to do this evil thing, while being fully aware that it was evil, the government avoided the publicity of process in open court.

We posted our article about this shocking case, Reward for treason, on July 5, 2017.

We now quote from an article at Gatestone by Ruthie Blum, which brings more information about the Muslim traitor to light. It shows that far from his having been “tortured” – the alleged abuse for which it is said he deserves compensation – he was given extremely expensive medical treatment and nursed like a baby at Guantanamo.

His father too was a traitor to Canada, and another Canadian leftist Prime Minister saved him from punishment in Pakistan and brought him back to safety in the country he had betrayed.  

The Khadr family is obviously very wealthy. How much of Omar Khadr’s gift from the Canadian tax-payer of $10.5 million will go –  as much of the family wealth has already gone – to funding Islamic terrorism?  

Khadr is the son of a Palestinian mother and an Egyptian father (Ahmed Khadr), who had strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and became one of Osama bin Laden’s loyal lieutenants. After 9/11, Ahmed Khadr was placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list in relations to the attacks. He was arrested in Pakistan in 1995 on suspicion of financing the suicide bombing at the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, in which 16 people were killed. Protesting his innocence, he went on a hunger strike, and the Canadian government, then headed by Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, rallied behind him.

While on a trade mission to Pakistan, Chrétien appealed to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and a few months later, Ahmed was released from prison and sent back with his family to Toronto. However, according to the New York Post, the Khadr clan soon returned to Pakistan, where Ahmed Khadr resumed his connections with al Qaeda and the Taliban. Young Omar Khadr not only met with the leaders of these terrorist groups, but lived with his parents and siblings in the bin Laden family compound, attending al Qaeda training camps, which his father — who was killed in 2003 — partly funded.

The report continued:

A month before he joined an al Qaeda cell in 2002, Omar was sent by his father for private instruction in explosives and combat… [where he] learned to launch rocket-propelled grenades and became skilled at planting improvised explosive devices that were used to blow up US armored vehicles in Afghanistan.

In his interrogation about the incident that led to his arrest and subsequent incarceration at Guantanamo, Omar Khadr said he had been on a suicide mission “to kill as many Americans as possible”.

This did not prevent the U.S. military from flying an ophthalmologist to the Bagram Air Base – where was being treated for wounds he sustained while fighting American and Canadian soldiers – to save his eyes and keep him from going blind.

That can bear repeating. While Omar Khadr, the al-Qaeda terrorist whose mission and accomplishment was to kill Canadians and Americans, was being held at Guantanamo, the U.S. military flew an ophthalmologist to where he was being treated for wounds that he sustained while fighting American and Canadian soldiers, “to save his eyes and keep him from going blind”.

Is that a definition of torture? Saving the enemy’s eyesight?

It is bitterly ironic in the light of the fact that one of Khadr’s victims, the American soldier Layne Morris, was blinded by Khadr with a grenade.

Nor did it cause Omar to experience gratitude on the one hand, or remorse on the other. On the contrary, as military court documents revealed, when he was informed that [the American soldier he had attacked, Wayne Speer] had died, he said he “felt happy” for having murdered an American. He also said that whenever he remembered killing Speer, it would make him “feel good”. 

And now, this monster, on whom undeserved benefits have already been heaped, is further rewarded for his treachery and murder by being made richer; and again made “very happy” by having the government of Canada, representing the people of Canada, humbly apologize to him. For what?

This is a miscarriage of justice so egregious, so destructive of the very idea of justice, that it can burn the mind of every decent citizen of every country under the rule of law, if any such country with such citizens still exists.

Is Canada in uproar about it?

The Muslim traitor’s victims were American soldiers.

Are United States citizens in uproar about it?

Have the people of the West, whose ancestors built our powerful, rich, brilliant civilization on the idea of the rule of law protecting the liberty of every individual, now become quivering infants when faced by the world’s bully, Islam?

A Canadian Muslim goes to Afghanistan, joins Canada’s enemy al-Qaeda, fights against Canadian and US forces, kills a US serviceman – and no, he is not punished as a traitor. He is awarded $10.5 million of Canadian tax-payers’ money.  

The Globe And Mail (Canada) reports:

The Trudeau government is poised to offer an apology and a $10-million compensation package to former child soldier Omar Khadr for abuses he suffered while detained in the U.S. military prison for captured and suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 2010 that the actions of federal officials who participated in U.S. interrogations of Mr. Khadr had offended “the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects”.

The court said the action of the Canadian government had violated the former child soldier’s rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and deprived him of fundamental principles of justice.

A federal insider said the announcement of an official apology and compensation is expected this week.

Mr. Khadr’s lawyer, Dennis Edney, has been seeking a formal apology from the United States and from the Trudeau government for the alleged abuse and neglect of Mr. Khadr while he was in the prison. …

Mr. Khadr was captured in Afghanistan at the age of 15 in 2002, following a shootout with U.S. troops where he was badly wounded – blinded by shrapnel in one eye and with fist-sized exit wounds in his shoulder and chest.

He was accused of throwing a grenade that killed U.S. army medic Christopher Speer in the firefight and was sent to the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay.

Mr. Khadr, now 30, spent more than 10 years in U.S. and Canadian custody, much of that time in the Guantanamo Bay detention centre. Once the youngest detainee in Guantanamo, he was transferred to Canada in 2012 after accepting a plea deal.

Mr. Edney has said his client was treated abysmally even though he was a child soldier and his body shattered from wounds. U.S. interrogators subjected him to sleep deprivation and solitary confinement.

Mr. Edney said Mr. Khadr was coerced into fighting by his father, Ahmed Said Khadr – a top al-Qaeda operative until he was killed in a gunfight with Pakistani troops in 2003.

In March, Mr. Khadr underwent a 19-hour operation in an Edmonton hospital to repair his shoulder, which was severely damaged during the firefight with U.S soldiers.

“Nobody advocated for his health whatsoever. Even when he came back to Canada, I raised all those issues with the Correctional Services and of course [former prime minister Stephen] Harper was not interested in hearing anything like that,” Mr. Edney said in an interview last March.

Mr. Khadr was freed on bail in May, 2015, and released under the supervision of Mr. Edney

He said he would “prove to [Canadians] that I’m a good person”.

The International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group and Lawyer’s Rights Watch Canada have concluded that Canada contravened its obligations under the Conventions against Torture by failing to prevent and investigate what happened to Mr. Khadr in Guantanamo Bay.

What do the near relatives of Mr. Khadr’s murdered victim, Christopher Speer, think about this, we wonder. Are they to be paid compensation too?

This report from the Hamilton Spectator (Canada), answers that question:

“When a Canadian soldier is injured in battle, the government provides a disability award up to a maximum of $360,000,” Conservative MP Michelle Rempel said in a tweet. “Despite this, the current government is willing to provide $10 million to a convicted terrorist.”

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation started an online petition aimed at Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was in Ireland, deploring the deal one source said was signed last week.

“This is offensive to many Canadians,” the petition states. “Canadians should not be forced to pay millions of dollars to a killer.”

Social media exploded with denunciation of the agreement, which sources said would see the government pay Khadr $10.5 million — part of which would go to his lawyers — and the justice and public safety ministers formally apologize to him.

Posters used words such as “disgraceful”, some called for the Canadian citizen to be kicked out of the country, while others argued the money should go to the family of Chris Speer, the U.S. special forces soldier Khadr is alleged to have killed in 2002.

“Most Canadians’ thoughts would be with Christopher Speer’s widow and family, who are reliving their terrible ordeal once again because of the actions of the Canadian government this time,” said Tony Clement, another Conservative MP.

The Toronto-born Khadr, 30, pleaded guilty to five war crimes before a much maligned military commission in 2010. He has claimed — with some evidence — his American captors tortured him. …

Speer’s widow Tabitha Speer and retired American sergeant Layne Morris, who was blinded by a grenade at the Afghan compound, won a default US$134.2 million in damages against Khadr in Utah in 2015. Canadian experts called it unlikely the judgment could be enforced.

Neither Speer nor Morris returned calls seeking comment, but Morris’s wife had only one word when told of the deal: “Wow.”

In 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Canadian intelligence officials had obtained evidence from Khadr under “oppressive circumstances”, such as sleep deprivation during interrogations at Guantanamo Bay in 2003, and shared the evidence with U.S agents and prosecutors.

“Such as sleep deprivation”? What else? Anything else? Is sleep deprivation torture? It is certainly miserable and debilitating, but nothing very bad in comparison with the horrifying torture that al-Qaeda inflicts on its captives. See here and here.

Was this justice, or was it a political decision?

*

Update:

Andrew Lawton writes at Global News (Canada):

Every terrorist in the country will soon be lining up at the trough for a $10.5 million cheque.

Such is apparently the fate awaiting enemies of Canada according to the country’s own government, as seen in the settlement of a lawsuit by Omar Khadr, the man who confessed that at age 15 he threw the grenade that killed American army medic Christopher Speer in Afghanistan.

Khadr’s actions in the 2002 firefight that killed Speer have not been tested in court in Canada, and his American appeal is not yet complete. He has not been exonerated — he’s simply out on bail. Despite his Canadian citizenship, we must not forget that Khadr was an enemy combatant. Despite recanting his confession of killing Speer (he now says he doesn’t know whether he did it), Khadr was undeniably on the battlefield, and is also on video constructing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) — technology responsible for the deaths of 97 Canadians.

Whether Khadr’s devices killed any of them we’ll never know, but he was making deadly weapons. Surely he didn’t think it was simply an al-Qaida arts and crafts project.

For the last 15 years, Khadr has tried to hide behind protections of his Canadian identity despite fighting for the enemy in the most literal sense. If Canadians won’t accept the legitimacy of the American military tribunal, let’s litigate this on our own soil. He should be treated as a defector and charged with treason — an offense without a statute of limitations, I’d remind Canada’s attorney general.

Canada’s criminal code says anyone who “assists an enemy at war with Canada, or any armed forces against whom Canadian Forces are engaged in hostilities, whether or not a state of war exists between Canada and the country whose forces they are” is guilty of high treason, which carries a life sentence.

Canada’s mission in Afghanistan began in October of 2001, making the United States’ enemies our own as well.

Yet Khadr received a red carpet welcome when he was released from custody in 2015.

He’s not a hero, nor is he a victim. But the misinformation about this case doesn’t stop there.

Contrary to claims circulating this week, the multimillion-dollar deal was not ordered by the Supreme Court or any other level. It was brokered behind closed doors by Khadr’s lawyers and government officials. …

Khadr’s supporters see him as a “child soldier” and liken the military tribunal that convicted him to a kangaroo court.

According to testimony from lawyer Howard Anglin, speaking before the House of Commons’ international human rights subcommittee in 2008, Khadr was not a child soldier under international law, and his military tribunal was conducted in accordance with Geneva Convention standards.

Anglin cited a claim from Khadr’s own former military lawyer, Lt.-Cmdr. William Kuebler, that no law or treaty prevents prosecution of minors for war crimes. …

However, these legal arguments appear to take backseat to the emotional ones driving the narrative that Khadr is a victim of tragedy, rather than a perpetrator of it.

“No one reading this can say, with certainty, that his or her life would have turned out different from Omar Khadr’s if he or she was raised as he was,” said Jonathan Kay in a CBC column.

I agree that upbringing shapes much of one’s existence, but we must still be accountable for our own actions. We didn’t afford the benefit of the doubt to Nazi war criminals whose conduct could be linked to indoctrination, nor should we have.

Khadr’s father, Ahmed, was in Osama bin Laden’s inner circle. His older sister, Zaynab, has publicly praised bin Laden. His mother said in a CBC interview some years back that Canadians should wish their sons were as “brave” as hers.

If Khadr isn’t his father’s son, why has he not distanced himself from the family that set him up for failure?

Khadr was mature enough to know the consequences of his actions. I just wish the same could be said of the federal government.

(Hat-tip for the Global News link to Mike Watson, our Facebook commenter)

The Left hates gays and wants them to be killed. The Left believes women should be the slaves of men. The Left wants a world-ruling totalitarian theocracy. The Left wants the Jewish state to be wiped off the face of the earth, and all Jews ditto unless they humbly pay the theocrats protection money. The Left wants to forbid free speech. 

Of course the Left does not SAY it wants all that. It SAYS it really likes gays. It SAYS it believes in women’s equality and self-determination. It SAYS it wants religion kept out of politics. It SAYS – sometimes? occasionally? okay very occasionally – that it is against anti-Semitism. It SAYS it is for free speech.

Yet it protects, cossets, excuses, adulates, fawns upon, grovels to, and promotes Islam which wants all that.

Present proof:

The leader of the so-called Conservative Party of Britain hastened to recruit the 10 members of the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party to her side in order to have a (barely) working majority in Parliament after she lost many seats in a recent unnecessary general election. But no sooner did she think she had secured a life-saver, than furious protestors, including some Scottish members of her own party, tried to snatched it away. Hundreds took to the streets to demand that the DUP be kept out of government.

Mark Steyn writes about this new maelstrom set swirling in the ever more turbulent waters of the government in which Prime Minister Theresa May is flailing.

According to the slogans, the Democratic Unionist Party is a “hate” group because it is “anti-gay, anti-green, anti-women”. That’s to say, they’re opposed to same-sex marriage, abortion, and take a relaxed view of the impending climate apocalypse.

Oh, my.

Even worse, such views have made them Ulster’s most popular political party … Still, you can understand why the mob has briefly roused itself from Google to take to the streets to protest this week’s designated haters. It’s certainly unfortunate that Theresa May’s grip on power depends on such “anti-gay” and “anti-women” types, isn’t it?

But surely it’s also unfortunate that Jeremy Corbyn’s grip on power in the resurgent Labour Party depends on “anti-gay” and “anti-women” types, too. As Brendan O’Neill points out:

And all the while we have Labourites like Jeremy Corbyn mixing with Islamist groups that share all these same social views, except in an even more extreme form. Yet the people beating the streets over the DUP say nothing.

That’s true. Theresa May’s more recalcitrant friends in the DUP think gays are godless sodomites who’ll be spending eternity on a roasting spit in hell. Jeremy Corbyn’s more recalcitrant friends are disinclined to wait that long and would rather light them up now – or hurl them off the roof. Hamas, which Mr Corbyn supports, is fairly typical. Sample headline from Newsweek:

Hamas Executes Prominent Commander After Accusations Of Gay Sex

Doesn’t that make Hamas an anti-gay “hate group”? Well, no. You can bet that 90 per cent of the Google activists in the street protesting Theresa May’s ties to people who think men who love men shouldn’t be permitted to marry are entirely relaxed about Jeremy Corbyn’s ties to people who think men who love men should be burned alive or tossed off tall buildings.

This contradiction exists all over the western world. Today’s progressives cling to the most cobwebbed cliches: Polygamy? That’s something Mormons do in Utah, not Muslims in Canada, France, Britain, Sweden, with the not so tacit connivance of the state welfare systems. First-cousin marriage? That’s something stump-toothed Appalachians do after a bunk-up with Cindy Mae and a jigger of moonshine, not 75 per cent of Pakistani Britons in Bradford, and some 58 per cent throughout the rest of the country.

As for gays, forget Hamas and consider Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters in the United Kingdom: Fifty-two per cent of Muslims told Channel 4 they believed homosexuality should be illegal. Yet Mr Corbyn’s Labour Party has so assiduously courted these “haters” that it’s now electorally dependent on them. Mrs May didn’t court her haters in Ulster, and she’s wound up depending on them merely as an unintended consequence of her own ineptitude on the hustings.

Just to spell it out even more plainly, last year YouGov polled Britons in general on their attitudes to the aforementioned sodomites. Seventeen per cent thought homosexuality was “morally wrong”. If that sounds unnervingly high to you, what’s the reason? Over-sampling in East Belfast? A few rural backwaters not quite up to speed on the new gayer-than-thou Britain? No. In most parts of the country about 15 per cent declined to get with the beat. But in diverse, multicultural London, 29 per cent of the population regarded homosexuality as “morally wrong”.

So all those ninnies in the streets of London protesting 300,000 haters they’d never heard of twenty minutes earlier are surrounded by two-and-a-half million haters every day of their lives – in the Tube, in the restaurants, in the shops and offices of their supposedly vibrant, progressive metropolis.

Now why do you think that is? Could it possibly be connected to the fact that London is more “diverse”? As Douglas Murray points out in his soberly provocative new book The Strange Death of Europe, by the 2011 census in 23 of the capital’s 33 boroughs so-called “white British” people were in a minority. (You can bet it’s even more boroughs now.) And you can’t help noticing, sauntering around, say, Tower Hamlets, that the more “diverse” the community gets the fewer gays you see, and uncovered women, at least after dusk and walking about unaccompanied. It’s not quite the “Gay-Free Zone” promised by the posters of the Sharia Patrols, but it’s getting there.

So, if you think Ulster’s homophobic now, wait till its population is as multicultural as London’s. Boy, that’ll be a vote bonanza for the DUP haters, right? Except that, by then, Jeremy Corbyn will be posing in Fermanagh and Tyrone villages beaming next to body-bagged crones and full-bearded imams.

Thirteen years ago in The Spectator I wrote the following:

A few weeks back I was strolling along the Boulevard de Maisonneuve in Montreal when I saw a Muslim woman across the street, all in black, covered head to toe, the full hejab. She was passing a condom boutique, its window filled with various revolting novelty prophylactics, ‘cum rags’, etc. It was a perfect snapshot of the internal contradictions of multicultural diversity. In 30 years’ time, either the Arab lady will still be there, or the condom store, but not both. Which would you bet on?

We are not yet halfway through that thirty years, but the condom boutique has gone. And in Canadian citizenship ceremonies the Muslim woman can now take her oath of allegiance wearing the full body-bag – while Justin Trudeau marches in the LGBTQWERTY Pride Parade. Like I said: In the medium run, which would you bet on? Forty per cent of five-year-olds in Germany are of “non-European” extraction: What do you think their attitudes to gays and women will be in twenty years’ time? Or are you hoping you can hold the line on the “anti-green” thing and they’ll still support the Paris Accords? …

The fools prancing in the London streets denouncing a benign and harmless Democratic Unionist Party are auditioning to be Islam’s prison bitches. But they’ll be obsessing about the last socially conservative right-wing redneck on earth even as the haters all around consume them.

The Marxist Left and its fellow-travelers are mourning the death of Fidel Castro. It would be good if they realized that his death marks the moment when their appalling creed started to die. The last possible new Marxist regime was perhaps – in the hopes of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and their followers – to be the United States, and even the Whole World (“to save it from climate change”). But they lost their grip on power just when they thought they had it for keeps. And as they stood bewildered, wondering how it had happened, Fidel Castro croaked.

At present there are still lots of Marxists in the world to eulogize the dead tyrant of Cuba.

Among the mourning parties are the Greens.

Jeremy Lott writes at the Washington Examiner:

Green Party perennial presidential hopeful Jill Stein praised former Cuban strongman Fidel Castro on Saturday, as encomiums by many left-of-center politicians continued to roll in following his death.

“Fidel Castro was a symbol of the struggle for justice in the shadow of empire. Presente!” Stein wrote on Twitter Saturday afternoon. The verb form of the word literally means “present.” The way Stein used it was something like a military salute (“present arms!”) but for Latin American leftist radicals. …

Castro’s death Friday, she told [Paste Magazine], “feels like the passing of an era of incredible struggle against empire right across the water — whether you live in Haiti or in Cuba or even much of the rest of South America, there’s been a real struggle for social justice and it’s been very difficult. Cuba was in many ways the face of that movement, which continues to this day”.

In praising Castro, Stein joined former Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, and many others with progressive pedigrees in heaping praise on the Marxist ruler who has a great deal of blood on his hands.

Just how much blood is a matter of some dispute.

“In our country there have never been death squads – not a single disappearance, no political assassinations, not one person tortured,” Fidel Castro himself insisted in 2001.

However, countless people fled the country over several decades for some reason and many of them have stories to tell.

According to the Cuba Archive, which tries to document the atrocities of the Fidel regime, on his watch at least 3,116 people were killed by firing squad and 1,116 people were executed in other extrajudicial killings. All told, they chalk up an admittedly far from complete death toll of over 7,000 Cubans on his watch.

Far from complete is right. (More on that below.)

Russian President Vladimir Putin remembered Castro as a “strong and wise man” according to a statement released by the Kremlin.

“He embodied high ideals of a politician, citizen and patriot, and was sincerely convinced of the rightness of the cause, to which he gave his whole life,” the Russian leader wrote. “His memory will live forever in the hearts of Russian citizens.”

And this is part of the pablum issued by out-going President Obama:

For nearly six decades, the relationship between the United States and Cuba was marked by discord and profound political disagreements. During my presidency, we have worked hard to put the past behind us, pursuing a future in which the relationship between our two countries is defined not by our differences but by the many things that we share as neighbors and friends – bonds of family, culture, commerce, and common humanity.

The past is always behind us. Thing is, what parts of it provide lessons we need to learn?

Paul Kengor writes at Western Journalism:

How many people were killed by Fidel and his communist dystopia? Unfortunately, no one truly knows … No one knows how many poor souls he tossed into his jails, from political dissidents to priests to homosexuals. Fidel’s prison-state has never permitted human-rights observers … Many sources have tried to pin down numbers and have generated some common estimates:

The Black Book of Communism, the seminal Harvard University Press work, which specialized in trying to get accurate data on the enormous volume of deaths produced by communist tyrants, states that in the 1960s alone, when Fidel and his brother Raul (Cuba’s current leader) established their complete control, with the help of their murdering buddy Che Guevara, an estimated 30,000 people were arrested in Cuba for political reasons and 7,000 to 10,000 were believed to have been executed. Even then, that was merely the start.

From the late 1950s to the late 1990s, it’s estimated that Castro killed between 15,000 to 18,000 people, whether victims of long-term imprisonment or outright execution by bullets.

That is a lot of people for a small island. And it isn’t all. Cuba is a surreal island of no boats, where boats are banned — because people with boats flee. Thus, untold numbers of citizens have attempted the treacherous nearly 100-mile swim to Florida in shark-infested waters. An estimated 100,000 have risked the journey. Of those, perhaps as many as 30,000 to 40,000 died from drowning. As they bob for breath, the Castro government sends military helicopters to drop large bags of sand on them from above. …

So, Fidel Castro is responsible for a lot of death.

Nowhere near enough to satisfy his appetite for it. 

But here, too, these numbers do not capture the level of Fidel’s brutal madness. Consider the actual millions he badly wanted to kill, especially here in America.

If Fidel Castro had his way in October 1962, the United States would have been leveled by atomic bombs and so would little Cuba, which would’ve ceased to exist. The fact is that Fidel recommended to Nikita Khrushchev that Cuba and the USSR together launch an all-out nuclear attack upon the United States, literally igniting Armageddon.

This is no secret. Castro admitted it. In an open forum discussing the Cuban Missile Crisis 30 years later, Castro told Robert McNamara, JFK’s secretary of defense: “Bob, I did recommend they [the nuclear missiles] were to be used.”

“Bob”, eh? The Communist tyrant of Cuba and Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense came to be on first name terms?

In total, said McNamara, there were 162 Soviet missiles on the island. The firing of those missiles alone would have led to (according to McNamara) at least 80 million dead Americans, which would have been half the population, plus added tens of millions of casualties.

That, however, is a conservative estimate, given that 162 missiles was far the sum total that would have been subsequently launched. The United States in turn would have launched on Cuba, and also on the USSR. President Kennedy made that commitment clear in his nationally televised speech on October 22, 1962: “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” In response, of course, the Soviets would have automatically launched on America from Soviet soil. Even then, the fireworks would just be starting: Under the terms of their NATO and Warsaw Pact charters, the territories of Western and Eastern Europe would also erupt.

Once the smoke cleared, hundreds of millions to possibly over a billion people could have perished, with Western civilization in its death throes. If Fidel Castro had gotten his way, he would have precipitated the greatest slaughter in human history. (Che Guevara also wanted to launch the nukes.)

The Soviets were horrified. Their ambassador to Cuba, Alexander Alekseyev, was so stunned at what Castro told him that he stood frozen, speechless, crushed. Without waiting for an answer from the numb ambassador, Castro started writing his feelings on paper, which Alekseyev saw as a kind of “last testament, a farewell”.

Fidel was ready to go — go up in a giant mushroom cloud for Marxism. As McNamara learned, this was Fidel’s big chance to die as a “martyr” for Marxism-Leninism. He was ready to “pull the temple down on his head”. 

A shocked Nikita Khrushchev realized he was dealing with madmen. Khrushchev’s son Sergei, in his three-volume biography of his father, said that the Soviet general secretary huddled with top officials in the “code room” of the Foreign Ministry late on a Sunday night and repeatedly ordered, “Remove them, and as quickly as possible”.

Remove the Soviet missiles from Cuba, he presumably meant; not the “madmen” from power, which would have been even better.

Khrushchev urged Andrei Gromyko to instantly get in touch with Washington in order “to save the world from those pushing us toward war”.

As for Fidel, he was “furious” with Khrushchev. “Castro was mortally offended,” recorded Sergei. “He had not managed to engage in a fight with the Americans. He had made up his mind to die a hero, and to have it end that way.” He had been ready to “die beautifully,” as one Soviet official put it. Denied his glorious opportunity, he now considered Khrushchev “a traitor”.

Thankfully, the world averted nuclear war, through the leadership of Khrushchev and Kennedy, and no thanks to bloodthirsty lunatics like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, who were ready to blow up the world in the name of their Marxist-Leninist nightmare.

In the name of their Marxist-Leninist religion, rather. To them it was no nightmare. To them, vast destruction, the laying waste of continents, the obliteration of cities, the death of all living things, was a glorious dream.

Enough social justice in it for you, Jill Stein?

But for the sane: whose voice among the voices that are heard by multitudes has said what needs to be said?

President-elect Donald Trump:

Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights. While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve. Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty.”

And Vice President-elect Mike Pence tweeted: “The tyrant Castro is dead. New hope dawns.”

Obama over. Hillary out. Merkel, Juncker, Hollande soon to go. Maduro done for. FIDEL CASTRO DEAD.

It’s over. The terrible century of Socialist idealism in practice, whether just depressingly as in the United States under Obama, or with totalitarian horror elsewhere under Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, is coming to its end.

There are still a few Socialists in power – to mourn the death of the Monster of Cuba. Instead of abominating him as he deserves and condemning his cruel tyranny, they will heap praise on him.

As does the prime minister of Canada:

Statement by the Prime Minister of Canada on the death of former Cuban President Fidel Castro:

November 26, 2016

The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today issued the following statement on the death of former Cuban President Fidel Castro:

“It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest serving President.

“Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.

“While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for “el Comandante”.

“I know my father was very proud to call him a friend and I had the opportunity to meet Fidel when my father passed away. It was also a real honour to meet his three sons and his brother President Raúl Castro during my recent visit to Cuba.

“On behalf of all Canadians, Sophie and I offer our deepest condolences to the family, friends and many, many supporters of Mr. Castro. We join the people of Cuba today in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader.”

This punchinello must fall – and will of course.

The Left has nowhere to go but into oblivion. It has proved its own ideas to be disastrously wrong over and over again. It is utterly discredited.

Hundreds of cheers for the death of Fidel Castro!

*

Fabiola Santiago writes at the Miami Herald:

During the six decades of the Castro brothers totalitarian rule, more than two million Cubans fled their beloved island …

One of Castro’s most heinous crimes was the massacre of 41 men, women and children attempting to flee Cuba on a tugboat on July 13, 1994. Cuban authorities sprayed the vessel with water hoses, rammed and sank it. This is not something I read. I interviewed survivors at the Guantanamo Cuban refugee camps months later. The Cuban Coast Guard refused to rescue the drowning, they told me.

There were so many other crimes and human rights abuses, largely ignored or benignly viewed by a world that gave Castro the benefit of the doubt, and only slapped him on the wrist occasionally at some forums like the United Nations.

Fidel Castro, myth and legend to the international left, has died without being brought to justice for his crimes against his people — the passing of the torch and title of president to his brother in 2006 challenged only by brave dissidents who are beaten and detained daily. The Castros have installed their children and grandchildren in government roles, an indication they plan to sustain the family dynasty beyond Raúl’s promised retirement in 2018.

There’s joy, excitement — and hope — at the news of Fidel Castro’s death at 90. I’m skeptical. Castro didn’t govern alone. He had accomplices. …

Still, it won’t be the same without the patriarch. With his death, it feels as if an evil curse — the heaviest of weights — has been lifted on a nation whose children are scattered all over the world. The bogeyman is gone.

At the break of morning, the streets of Havana were deserted. People were told to stay inside, refrain from playing music, close their doors.

Miami never went to sleep, some of the arteries that run through its Cuban heart closed so that people could express the accumulation of 58 years of loss and separation, of disillusionment and never-ending hope.

Cuba sí, Castro no more.

There will be no farewell comandante from us, only a good riddance.

*

CELEBRATING THE DEATH OF FIDEL CASTRO IN MIAMI

*

Here is President-elect Trump’s official statement on the death of Fidel Castro. It deserves applause:

“Today, the world marks the passing of a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades. Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights. While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve. Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty. I join the many Cuban Americans who supported me so greatly in the presidential campaign, including the Brigade 2506 Veterans Association that endorsed me, with the hope of one day soon seeing a free Cuba.”