The Socialism of Fools: Reports From The Front

UPDATE: Is it possible that there's not just one but two neo-communist, pro-Islamist, Jew-bashing Canadian translator-journalists who live or lived until very recently in Tashkent, Uzbekistan? "Simon Jones" admits he's using that name as an alias, but he says he's not Eric Walberg. He also says Adolph Hitler "copied the zionist programme to the letter" so take what he says with a grain of salt; besides, his former editor outed him. When I called Metta Spencer, editor of Toronto's Peace Magazine (which has run articles about Uzbekistan under both bylines, Walberg and Jones), to find out more about this Eric Walberg character, I asked who "Simon Jones" was, and Metta said: "Oh, that's his pseudonym. He needed a pseudonym because of where he was living, you see."

For an account of the recent strategy sessions in Cairo that brought together Canadian and British "anti-war" activists with some of the world's most violent and sinister Islamists and jihadists, the English-speaking world was obliged to rely almost exclusively upon an account ("Anti-Globalists Reach Out to Islamists") in the Egyptian weekly Al Ahram, written by a certain Canadian by the name of Eric Walberg.

There was something odd about his report, I thought. There was a weirdly euphoric tone about it, and it was also a kind of hybrid as these things go. It was partly a celebration of the ongoing convergence between the Islamist far-right and a certain far-left groupuscule that has insinuated itself into the leadership of the "anti-war" movement (in Canada, it runs the Toronto Stop The War Coalition, the umbrella Canadian Peace Alliance, the War Resisters Support Campaign, etc.). The report was also partly a work of dutiful stenography, in service to the conference participants themselves.

Curious to know why this Eric Walberg would be so happy about the moral squalor he had witnessed and participated in, I made some conventional journalistic inquiries about him. You can make up your own mind about whether the result adequately explain Walberg's obvious delight at the prospect of an ongoing convergence of the far-left and far-right. You can make up your own mind about how significant the Cairo conference was in that phenomenon.

Walberg, who appears sometimes to write under the pseudonym Simon Jones, is a Canadian economist and a frequent contributor to Canada's Peace Magazine, a reputable journal based out of Toronto. Walberg has also been a regular contributor to the deliberations of a notoriously anti-semitic thinktank known as the Adelaide Institute, whose leader, Frederich Töben, has done hate-speech jail time in Germany. Töben was one of the more prominent guests at Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust-denial conference last December.

A survey of Walberg's writings show that he regards Jews as having been the authors of their own misfortunes over the past 2,000 years, and all the great wars of the past century can be laid at the feet of shadowy Zionists - even the "still mysterious collapse" of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11. He has written approvingly of the contents of the Protocols of The Elders of Zion - that classic text of pathological Jew-hatred.

As far as I can determine, Walberg's last real job was a public-relations gig in Tashkent, in the Office of Uzbekstan President Islam Karimov - a dictator who reportedly murders his opponents by boiling them in oil. I've also confirmed the substance of an Adelaide Institute report that Walberg was turfed out of Uzbekistan after being sloppy in the work of hiding his identity behind the pseudonyms he adopts. Writing favourably about underground Uzbek Islamist groups was not so smart, it would seem.

I should point out that it was with the help of a fellow journalist and Walberg's former friends and associates in Canada that I assiduously confirmed Walberg's impressive cirruculum vitae - his degrees from Cambridge, from the Pushkin Institute in Moscow, and so on - and his strange trajectory from a Stalinist campus "peace activist" in Toronto to true-believer in the restoration of the Caliphate, as well as his various personae and noms de plume.

And I should point that by now, you should see whay Walberg was so happy about what went on in Cairo.

In the absence of any in-depth report from a legitimately independent journalist about what really happened at the Cairo conference - about what oaths were pledged, what commitments were made and what vows were uttered - we are left to rely upon Walberg, upon a videotape provided to the Reuters news agency (from which Reuters cobbled together a "news" report), and upon the accounts of the participants themselves.

The "anti-war" participants, thankfully, are not especially reticent. They are not ashamed of their conduct. They are proud of it.

And just in case you think this is all just a matter of cross-cultural ecumenism or something, and the poor dears from Hamas and Hezbollah at the Cairo conference are merely defending the honour of Muslims against the war-making agression of the infidels, you should have heard what Hezbollah's Ali Fayyad had to say about his co-religionists:

We in Hezbollah and in the Lebanese resistance see that secular fighters in Venezuela or in any place in the world, secular or Christian, are nearer to us than the Muslims or Arabs who cooperate with imperialism.

Try to imagine, if you can, the chill that would overcome you, reading those words, if you happened to be a liberal or progressive or a gay Muslim living within the police-state confines of Hezbollah's illegal Lebanon statelet.

The Canadian participants in the Cairo conference will be boasting of their escapades tomorrow night at the Steelworkers Hall in Toronto. If you're anywhere near the neighbourhood, by all means, go and take it in. And be sure to ask Ali Mallah about his Hezbollah-guided side trip to Beirut. It appears to have been very illuminating for him.

Meanwhile, I've touched on a lot of this in my Georgia Straight column today (most of what I submitted appeared in the column, anyway). It begins this way:

During the Israel-Hezbollah war last summer, this column examined Canada's so-called antiwar movement, and concluded that its conduct was squalid, and its "peace" was really about opposing Israel.

I expressed support for the struggles of the Palestinian people, but I pointed out that there's another, much larger, war going on. It's a war against modernity, against the emancipation of women, against the Jews, and against everything any self-respecting liberal or socialist or democrat has ever stood for.

This time, I'm here to say Canada's main "antiwar" groups have finally, fully, and openly exposed themselves to be active participants in that war. And they're on the side of the enemy.

For those of my readers who will continue to insist after reading this that that they are "shocked" and "appalled" that I write disparagingly about the key leadership of this country's "anti-war" movement, I'm afraid we no longer have anything to discuss.

For the last time, I am not "smearing the anti-war movement." The anti-war movement has disgraced itself. It is Eric Walberg who has disgraced Peace Magazine and the magazine's fine and decent editor, Metta Spencer. I haven't smeared her. Walberg has, by his mere association with her. And I expect there are many sincere peace activists who will be disgusted by what I've had to point out here.

Well, to them I say, now's your chance. Denounce these frauds. Disown them. Stand up and be counted, and started acting like grown-ups. If you don't, you're no better than them.

As for me, I'm outta here. You won't be reading anything more from me in either the Georgia Straight or the Tyee for some while. I have a life to get on with.

Slainte,

TG