The Ugly Canadian
BEICHMAN, ARNOLD
The Ugly Canadian The governor-general's spouse produces an amazingly anti-American film. by ARNOLD BEICHMAN Vancouver LET US SUPPOSE the White House appointee as U.S. ambassador to Canada were...
...Lafond's film, produced last year, highlights, says Geiger, "a long-discredited claim that campaign aides of Ronald Reagan and George Bush sr...
...There is a significant sector of elite opinion in Canada, in the intellectual and academic worlds, and in the civil service bureaucracy concentrated in Ontario, that regards the United States as Canada's main enemy...
...The article about Lafond's project is headlined: "Paul Martin's hand-picked conspiracy theorist...
...ambassador to Canada were an American diplomat whose spouse, a film producer, had just completed an exposé documentary with this brutal theme: a Canadian government conspiracy supporting osama bin Ladenstyle terrorism against the American people...
...First, because he is a Quebec separatist who favors breaking up Canada...
...Geiger writes: It's like U.S...
...Daniel Lafond, a film producer, who has set off an uproar in Canada...
...All this was known, of course, to those who dreamed up Madame Jean's appointment by then prime Minister Martin...
...Canada's minority government is in the shaky hands of the Conservative party for the moment, and at least its leader and prime minister, stephen Harper, respects his democratic neighbor to the south, which is more than can be said for Martin, as fanatical in his hatred of the united states as was his late predecessor pierre Trudeau...
...And second, because his anti-Americanism is so vicious it is unlikely he could ever be invited to the White House, despite his being consort of the governor general...
...But the queen names whoever is recommended to her by the Canadian prime minister, and Jean will serve for the next five years...
...Lafond's latest project, according to a report in the Toronto-based National Post, is a documentary that has just debuted at a Toronto film festival called American Fugitive: The Truth About Hassan...
...Inconceivable...
...Yes, for the united states...
...Technically, Britain's Queen Elizabeth appointed Jean, as the governor general is the vice-regent, the queen's representative in Canada...
...He fled to Tehran, where he lives now, still wanted for the murder in the Washington suburbs...
...The rise to prominence of Michaëlle Jean and her husband is a new high-water mark for this crowd...
...It is Jean's leftist husband, JeanArnold Beichman is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University...
...John Geiger, National Post editorials editor, describes Lafond's film in these words: It provides a podium to a confessed assassin and Islamist thug living in Iran to rant about "American state terrorism" and to claim "George Bush is killing people every day"— and it is premiering at a time when Canadian soldiers are fighting Islamist militants in Afghanistan and Iran's president is threatening to wipe Israel off the map...
...Whether prime Minister Harper can effectuate a turnaround is yet to be seen...
...made a secret deal to delay the release of the American hostages in Tehran until after the 1980 presidential election in order to facilitate the defeat of Jimmy Carter...
...First Lady Laura Bush making a film suggesting that pierre Trudeau was involved with Fidel Castro and the Chicago mob in the assassination of JFK...
...government" coming from the governor-general's husband...
...In fulfilling his role as Canada's America-hater Number one, Martin, when he was still prime minister last fall, appointed Michaëlle Jean, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television host of Haitian origin, to be the governor general...
...The film, says Geiger, also gives "credence to outrageous conspiracy theories purporting to involve the u.s...
...This was so even in the days when Soviet imperialism was in the ascendant...
...The "Hassan" in question is an American man, born David Belfield, who converted to Islam while at Howard university, and in July 1980 murdered Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a spokesman for the exiled shah of Iran, in Bethesda, Md...
...Not so for Canada, however, or at least for Canada's Liberal party and its leader paul Martin, now out of power...
Vol. 11 • May 2006 • No. 33
