The following report by Janice Fiamengo was originally published at FrontPage Mag.
Valerie Price, Executive-Director of Act! For Canada with friends Tarek Fatah (left) and Salim Mansur (right)
Canada’s Anti-Hate Network Attacks ‘Act! For Canada’ in Desperate Hunt for Hate
Inside the Left’s twisted world of innuendo and unfounded allegations.
The Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN) is Canada’s ironically named version of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an intolerant organization that can’t stop patting itself on the back for opposing intolerance. Though lacking the formidable political heft, war chest, and extensive reach of its more robust American cousin, the CAHN exists to rain calumny down upon groups or individuals who do not share its progressivist viewpoints. Never content merely to disagree or rebut, the network pursues its ends almost exclusively through Hall of Shame-style attacks on those it deems “far right” enemies.
Recently, Peter Smith and Elizabeth Simons of the CAHN published a wordy hit piece on Valerie Price, long-time Executive-Director of Act! For Canada (AFC), an organization founded in 2009 and dedicated to defending Canada’s freedoms, security, and core values. To this end, Price hosts a website, distributes a weekly e-newsletter, encourages activism, and (pre-Covid) organized conferences and special speakers on such subjects as Islamic terrorism, the Islamization of Canadian culture, and threats to freedom of speech.
Smith and Simons’ innuendo-laden “M-103 to the Pandemic: Evolution of Canadian Islamophobic Activists Shows How Hate Movements Adapt” has all the incisiveness of a midnight-concocted term paper by two second-year Sociology students who never learned the principles of argument. It also clearly illuminates the challenges that face the CAHN and similar groups in Canada. What are hate-hunters to do when there is no hate to be found? Having spent hours combing through AFC’s website and affiliated Facebook group — as well as those of a later-formed companion group, Action4Canada, run by Price’s associate Tanya Gaw-Smith — Simons found nothing objectively hateful nor anything dishonest or defamatory. The very worst they could discover was a supportive message for a young ex-Muslim activist, Sandra Solomon, who subsequently tore out pages of the Koran and left them on car windshields around a mosque. AFC’s failure to disavow Solomon, who objects to the treatment of women in Islam, left Smith and Simons aghast.
With nothing worse to expose, the vigilante authors could only present the facts of AFC’s various information campaigns as if they were far more incendiary than they actually are, informing readers breathlessly that Price has, over the years, posted articles on her website about the arrests of terror suspects, the possibility of Iran launching an EMP attack (with “electromagnetic pulse” put in scare quotes, as if the authors couldn’t hold back their incredulous laughter), and about the political results of the Arab Spring. The implication, never made clear in the article, is that pure-hearted multi-culturalists should have no truck with any such discussions.
According to Smith and Simons, AFC has also posted articles expressing dismay at the legalization of marijuana, criticizing the radical trans agenda, and supporting the right to life of unborn children; during the last two election campaigns, Price went so far as to endorse the People’s Party of Canada and the Christian Heritage Party. Perhaps realizing that such actions are nowhere near enough to justify calling AFC a hate site, the authors also rely heavily on innuendo and unfounded allegations too numerous to catalogue here, with special emphasis on Price’s alleged “anti-Muslim” sentiments, for which not one iota of evidence is ever presented. In the process, the article pretends to analyze how “the far-right adopts and packages new grievances to recruit support.”
