Smeared and Harassed: Hassan Diab’s Long Road to Freedom
“How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?” — Bob Dylan
You know him well by now. His story is notorious. For almost two decades, and in collaboration with Canada’s Ministry of Justice, France has raked him over the coals for a crime he did not commit. Since 2007, French authorities have been on a relentless persecution campaign, conceived to scapegoat him and bring closure to the 1980 Copernic attack in Paris. This innocent Canadian citizen has been subjected to an agonizing ordeal at the hands of a foreign state that wrongfully sentenced him in 2023 to life in prison. His name is Hassan Diab.
Capitalizing on a Wrongful Verdict
For months after the verdict had been pronounced, the Canadian government stood by, obdurate in its reticence and supine in its refusal to act and defend its own citizen against injustice. The toxic fallout of that neglect was predictable. The government’s eerie silence created a void for an ignorant public to fill. And fill it did with vile speech, death threats (1:52 – 2:40; 2:52-3:03) and invective, levelled both at Dr. Diab and at Carleton University where he teaches.
In November 2024, mainstream pundits and lobby groups openly displayed their brute belligerence for a man they hardly knew, littering the digital landscape with verbal aggressions – utterances deemed criminal by legal definition. In an admixture of sadism and schadenfreude, this sector of Canadian society applauded the Assize Court’s wrongful 2023 decision, trumpeting falsehoods (3:25-3:45) and celebrating the verdict of a trial that was a pure sham, replete with defamatory fabrications, secret (undocumented) “intelligence, blatant suppression of exculpatory evidence, and perjury.
A Politics of Violent Contempt
Persons in high office have not been detached onlookers (6:34 – 6:43) in this whole affair. On the contrary, they have leapt into the fray with alacrity. Capitalizing on the aura surrounding France’s judicial authority, these individuals have weaponized a widely felt reverence for an antiquated (but gravely flawed) judicial institution so as to violate Hassan Diab in what resembles a modern-day Dionysian rite. Happy to see a French court play God, persecute, and convict an innocent Canadian citizen, members of France’s Israel lobby and its sundry supporters cheered with smug satisfaction when Diab’s life sentence was made public. They have since exploited that verdict to harass Diab mercilessly and repeatedly. Israeli ambassador Iddo Moed (figurehead of the Israel lobby in Canada) has behaved similarly. In November of last year, he amplified the defamatory anti-Diab chorus in an OpEd titled “Carleton fans the flames of toxicity by employing convicted terrorist.”
Arrogant Bluster:
It takes exceptional gall to broadcast lies so cavalierly as did Mr. Moed in his opinion piece. He had no compunction in presuming to school Carleton University on its hiring practices when he, himself, is unfit to lecture academic institutions on their selection process, and not least on the Diab Affair. Those who know the case intimately will say that Mr. Moed is not qualified to comment. They will say that the ambassador has not done his homework and the argument he advances is groundless. As for Canadian politicians and far-right American personalities, who are now smearing Hassan Diab on twitter, they, like Mr. Moed, have either failed to check their sources or are cynically trafficking in deceit.
The Facts:
Hassan Diab is at once irrefutably innocent and highly qualified to teach a course on social injustice, having first-hand knowledge of it. His own case is a textbook example of justice denied, and not least of the significant defects of Canada’s extradition law. His case of miscarried justice is iconic. Leading Canadian experts in law have invoked the Diab Affair in scholarly journals and public political statements to illustrate the discriminatory rules and underlying structures of Canada’s 1999 Extradition Act.
The label “convicted synagogue bomber,” plastered on Hassan Diab’s identity, is a vilification resting on the verdict of a Kangaroo trial, where a French court of no record, and bereft of concrete proof, exploited its judicial privilege to convict an innocent man, using a falsified facsimile of a passport as its so-called smoking gun. The Assize Court’s 2023 “decision” that sentenced Diab was a fabric of fictions, conceived in advance to annul the scrupulous and irrefutable work of France’s most prestigious investigative magistrates: Jean-Marc Herbaut and Richard Foltzer. In 2018, the latter two magistrates found no evidence of guilt and no grounds on which to send Diab to trial. After 38 months of incarceration without charge, and largely in solitary confinement, he was released. He had a powerful alibi and his fingerprints, taken no less than 10 times, excluded him from the crime.
Misinformation through Innuendo:
The claim that Hassan Diab is the synagogue bomber flies in the face of these facts. In spreading this myth, Mr. Moed does considerable disservice to the less informed Canadian public. Among his misleading remarks is the following: “While Diab awaits the extradition to France to be processed, to serve his life sentence, he is employed by Carleton University to teach a course on […] social justice…” Here, the ambassador gives the impression that the extradition of Dr. Diab has been confirmed, that the Minister of Justice is poised on signing the extradition order, and that Dr. Diab is simply in purgatory awaiting his expulsion to France. Not so.
Since Dr. Diab’s date of conviction (April 21, 2023), Canada has not publicly acknowledged receipt of any extradition request. Had it received one and accepted it, Dr. Diab would have been the first to know, not Mr. Moed. And the fact is, even if an extradition request had been sent to Canada – something only the Ministry of Justice knows – no extradition request has been accepted to date. But Mr. Moed writes with overweening confidence, proclaiming that Dr. Diab’s fate has been sealed. If this is wishful thinking, it is also sheer disinformation.
The Court of Louis XIV:
By treating France’s judicial word – i.e., the 2023 conviction of Hassan Diab – as gospel, Mr. Moed and many others have genuflected before a medievalist institution. France’s Assize court is not a beacon of justice or rectitude. It represents a system of criminal law, resting on an antiquated legal prerogative known as “conviction intime”: a judge’s right to convict the accused without conclusive evidence, without a burden of proof. The result of this arbitrary judicial privilege can only be a travesty of justice. And the Diab Affair makes this plain. The Assize Court allowed French authorities to criminalize Dr. Diab, knowing that their defamatory act would scarcely be challenged. The court’s “prestige” granted them immunity from public criticism.
Meanwhile, the slanderous tale used to criminalize Diab would fuel the lobby’s anti-Arab vengeance. And, predictably, Hassan Diab, his family, and the entirety of Carleton University would be smeared and subjected to an onslaught of psychological warfare – as was the case in November of 2024 and once again today.
The Canadian government’s obdurate silence is responsible for allowing a foreign state to interfere in its domestic politics. In their cowardly reticence and failure to condemn both France’s malfeasance and the defamatory conduct of the Israel Lobby, Mr. Trudeau, Arif Virani, and their associates have colluded in sacrificing a worthy and most noble Canadian citizen at the altar of corrupted power. •
