Hybrid War: More News from the Front

Just popping in today because I’ve been otherwise engaged in inquiries that may or may not soon see the light of day. I’ll have a more detailed newsletter on all that later. For now:

While Prime Minister Mark Carney instructs us to mind our tone when we talk about the gruesome human rights abusers in the Saudi royal family, U.S. President Donald Trump conjures a deep-state conspiracy to cover up Chinese meddling in American presidential elections.

I mean, seriously, Mr President.

The Europeans might be at last slowly and timidily getting their act together, and I’ll have some background tomorrow on a second undisclosed Memorandum of Understanding binding Canada to the state police of a nasty dictatorship: Qatar. Not proposing to “lecture from afar” or anything, but where’s the news media when you need it?

In the National Post, I’ve got a full page looking at what was left unreported from Prime Minister Carney’s visit to Jeddah.

It was perfectly packaged, deftly marketed, efficiently delivered and widely accepted as reasonable and wise: Prime Minister Mark Carney, in Jeddah, being suave and properly indisposed to “lecturing countries from afar,” would sensibly and of necessity do business with Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s worst serial human rights abusers.

Of course, we would emphasize “Canadian values” in discussions behind closed doors, we’re assured, because, after all, there are disagreements. But three important realities appear to have been missed in this reading of events.

The first is that there is in fact no “disagreement” between Riyadh and Ottawa on the point that foreign investment must take precedence over any contradictions arising from differing “values.” The second is that there are in fact no distinctly “Canadian” values at stake here: The values the House of Saud routinely tramples upon are embedded in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The third point is that nobody was proposing that the Saudis should be “lectured from afar” in the first place, and the tediously repeated claim that this is what former foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland was up to in 2018 — prompting the Saudis to blow a gasket, evict Canada’s ambassador and suspend all new trade and investment transactions — rests on a tidy little fiction.

Canada wasn’t interfering in Saudi affairs (as if that would be a bad thing anyway) back then. It was the other way around. And I don’t mean just the Saudi financing of religious institutions in Canada to propagandize the austere Salafist wing of Islam and bully Canadian Muslims into shutting up about the excesses of the kingdom’s thousands of jet-setting “princes.”

I mean something rather more insidious.

It has become a thing one simply mustn’t mention in polite company: Mohammed Bin Salman directed the team of 15 Saudi agents that arrived in Istanbul on a government plane in October, 2018, with instructions to kidnap or kill Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent journalist and Saudi dissident.

Khashoggi had been invited to the Saudi consulate to pick up documents necessary for his planned marriage to a Turkish woman. He never left alive. The Central Intelligence Agency, an investigation by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Turkish authorities concluded he was murdered. The CIA was explicit about it: Mohammed Bin Salman directed the operation.

At the same time, Bin Salman was demanding that Canada extradite the senior Saudi intelligence official Saad Aljabri, who had fled for his life and found refuge in Canada ahead of the diplomatic rupture. Aljabri’s transgression was that his patron had been another prince, bin Salman’s rival, the deposed Mohammed bin Nayef.

Bin Salman had imprisoned Aljabri’s sons, effectively taking them hostage, and in a civil suit filed in a U.S. court in 2020 Aljabri claimed that agents from the same unit that murdered and dismembered Khashoggi with a bone saw in Istanbul had been dispatched to Canada to kill him, but the would-be assassins had been turned away by suspicious Canada customs officials at the border.

It’s got to the point that Uyghur, Tibetan and Hongkonger activists in Canada are increasingly going silent for fear of their relatives being persecuted back home. The extraterritorial reach of Beijing’s National Security Law and its recently promulgated Ethnic Unity law means that travel to any country that has concluded an extradition treaty with China will run the risk of arrest and extradition to face criminal charges back in China.

Instances of Russian hacking and cyber-sabotage have become commonplace. On Tuesday the Macdonald-Laurier Institute — one of Moscow’s favourite Canadian targets — learned that its entire website had been replicated online. The mock site is believed to be an operation of the type the Five Eyes intelligence services have lately warned about: an effort to procure sensitive or even classified information from unsuspecting Canadian sources.

Iranian dissidents say they live in fear of the Khomeinist regime’s agents here in Canada, and just this week, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab released a report about a major surveillance and intimidation operation targeting Belarusian exiles in Canada. Run by the Lukashenko regime in Belarus, Moscow’s primary front-line client state, the operation identifies Belarusian democracy activists in Canada and then goes after their family members and their properties in Belarus.

There’s a lot more in my National Post piece about what Canada should be doing, rather than “lecturing from afar,” to at least protect Canada and Canadians from the long reach of police states. Have a read.

More on all this later.