What Can the Diab Affair Tell us About Far-Right Politics?
Some believe that the Diab Affair has been settled. This is a gross misconception; and the responsibility for this erroneous view rests squarely on the Trudeau Liberals’ shoulders. For many months, the former Liberal government deferred all necessary action that would have brought this case to a close and granted Hassan Diab his much-deserved justice – freedom from merciless harassment, persecution, and the threat of life in prison.
Two years have elapsed since France’s Kangaroo Court convicted Hassan Diab. Yet Justice Minister Arif Virani (who announced some weeks ago that he would not run for re-election) and former PM Trudeau remained utterly silent. Whether by design or sheer neglect, they effectively consigned the facts of the Diab file to oblivion. Reluctant to disclose publicly the sordid details of this miscarriage of justice, they preferred craven inaction to bold intervention, leaving a political vacuum for others to fill. And those who stepped into the breach have been Conservative politicians, tycoons, right-wing pundits, the Israel lobby, and tendentious podcasters.
Stepping into the Breach
The former Liberal Government abdicated its duty to manage the Diab Affair according to moral principle and legal integrity. With Trudeau’s shameful silence, the Diab Affair is now up for grabs. Right-wing elements that have longed to see Hassan Diab extradited a second time continue to seize and twist the Diab saga to suit their interests. These actors have repeatedly re-ignited their vilification of Diab and thrown hate-filled verbiage into the frothing crucible of social media to secure political advantage.
If to some the Diab Affair seems paltry beside the menace of Trumpite politics, in reality, the entire saga of a man falsely accused of the 1980 Copernic bombing is teeming with lessons, illuminating in a nutshell the pernicious workings of far-right politics, the undoing of laws and regulations once conceived in the name of justice, equality, and human decency. To peer through the prism of the Diab Affair is to see clearly the key underpinnings of fascism.
Political Vultures: Feasting on Falsehoods
Over the past months, right-wing forces seeking to have Diab extradited a second time have amplified their collective voice. Vindictive, they draw their ferocity from a decades-long misinformation campaign, aimed at sowing confusion in the public’s perception of Hassan Diab. They have treated the Diab Affair as a political football, kicking Diab’s name about in the court of public opinion as well as in the arena of pre-electoral mudslinging. (Pierre Poilievre’s provocative tweets of November 2024, in which he needled the Trudeau Liberals for not extraditing Diab, are clearly a shameless tactic to poach votes from the Liberal Zionist community.)
No longer confined to the halls of the judiciary, the Diab saga has surfaced elsewhere: e.g., in the tabloid-like remarks of Conservative pundits, politicians, and foreign tycoons, as well as in podcasts, such as “The Copernic Affair,” hosted and published by Jesse Brown’s Canadaland. Brown’s production about Diab, likely influenced by Brown’s openly pro-Israel stance, feeds the anti-Diab biases with which the Lobby and Co. have sought to hoodwink unsuspecting Canadians.
The Playbook of Far-Right Politics
Turned into a political football by right-wing forces, the Diab Affair is now visibly far larger than an iconic case of miscarried justice, fuelled and sustained by the relentless persecution of an innocent Lebanese-Canadian. With pundits and persons in high office smearing and harassing Diab, a politically tainted system, responsible for persecuting this long-suffering man, is now discernible. The Diab Affair can be seen as the playbook – albeit writ small – of Far-Right politics. For the key elements of the Diab Affair are replicas of classic neo-conservative tactics bordering on authoritarianism: 1) scapegoating the innocent and suppressing the truth; 2) collaborating with imperialists while criminalizing marginalized groups and the disenfranchised; and 3) weaponizing atrocity propaganda while dissimulating inconvenient truths. A close look at the Diab case makes this plain.
1) Scapegoating the Innocent and Suppressing the Truth
The Diab scapegoat is a fictitious persona, not the living Hassan Diab. Created as part of a politics of distraction, this scapegoat was conceived to catch public opinion in a web of deceit. For the entire story that was cobbled together between 1980 and 1999, and that formed the basis of France’s wrongful 2023 verdict, was a red herring writ large, a veritable diversion. Indeed, the project of simulating a search for this scapegoat took 19 years to design (from 1980 to 1999) and 24 years to stage – from 1999 to 2023 – with the Copernic trial as the final moment of a decades-long theatrical stunt.
But in 2018, two unbiased counter-terrorist investigative magistrates (Jean-Marc Herbaut and Richard Foltzer) exploded this fiction. Herbaut and Foltzer’s scrupulous study of the Diab file not only proved that Diab was not guilty, it revealed the treacherous nature of their predecessors’ scheme, the purpose of which was to fabricate an ersatz bomber and sequester the real culprit in darkness. Herbaut’s dismissal order (supported by Foltzer), which released Diab from prison in 2018, subverted the entire tale that several generations of French authorities wove from 1980/1981 onwards. But that subversion did not align with France’s anti-Arab counter-terrorist policies. Herbaut and Foltzer’s efforts had to be quashed by a corrupt appeals court that would buckle under political pressure to see Diab convicted at any cost. And thus, the 2018 dismissal order was overturned, and between April 3rd and April 20th of 2023, France’s Assizes Court staged a show trial that would disparage and suppress the investigative work of the two prestigious magistrates who dared to speak truth to power.
The Copernic trial and its lengthy period of gestation was a textbook case of the suppression of exculpatory evidence, a rigged judicial process aimed at declaring Diab guilty, regardless of his powerful alibi and 10 fingerprint comparisons that excluded him from the crime. But the trial not only suppressed this crucial proof of innocence, it also deep-sixed the history of the 1980 Copernic attack and neo-Nazi acts of terror, which marked that volatile late 20th-century conjuncture.
2) Collaborators: Imperialism, Zionism, and the Far Right
The 1980 bombing of the synagogue on rue Copernic was not the first of its kind. In 1941, the Nazis bombed the very same synagogue (along with several other synagogues) in October of that year. The 1980 bombing of the synagogue on rue Copernic is thus the approximate 40th anniversary of the 1941 bombing of the same synagogue. In recounting the Copernic Affair, few draw attention to this historical precedent. But it was precisely the Nazi shadow from the past that led François Mitterand to claim that neo-Nazi actors were involved in the 1980 (anniversary) attack. In response, the French police at the time interrogated 80 neo-Nazi figures but then released them, claiming they had found no evidence of guilt. The investigation immediately turned to pursuing PFLP terrorists, and thus began the fabrication of a story about Hassan Diab.
Why did the Copernic investigation tilt away from European neo-Nazism (e.g., German, French, and Italian) to the anti-colonial militant groups, such as the PFLP? Simply because after WWII, the militant, anti-imperialist elements from the Middle East were dubbed the new anti-Semites while the US and its Nato allies sequestered Europe’s residual Nazism by offering ex-Nazi officers and soldiers safe haven in North America and beyond. With this whitewashing of European neo-Nazism, blame for terrorist attacks during the 1970s and 80s was frequently (and wrongly) attributed to anti-imperialist groups from Europe and the Middle East. Against this historical backdrop, it is clear that an unsuspecting Lebanese sociology student, with the generic name of Hassan Diab, would become a useful scapegoat for French police authorities to exploit in whitewashing their Islamophobic, right-wing agenda; they would be keen to blame an Arab rather than a European neo-Nazi for an attack that, by definition, was deemed anti-Semitic.
But just as Jean-Marc Herbaut and Richard Foltzer proved to be honest magistrates within France’s counter-terrorist unit, so former Vice-President of the DST (Direction de la sécurité du Territoire) Jean Baklouti proved equally open-minded. He stated uninhibitedly that the Copernic attack was sponsored by Mossad. And, indeed, there are indicators in the Diab file that point to Baklouti’s theory. Another hypothesis suggests that neo-Nazi elements within the police force collaborated with the Mossad to frame Hassan Diab. It is known that Zionism and anti-Semitism have often worked in concert, the latter benefitting the former. Moreover, history tells us that Israel is known for its false flags and for its Hannibal Directive, which it deployed on October 7th.
3) Weaponizing Atrocity Propaganda: the Show Trial of Hassan Diab
It was the august imprimatur of the Assizes Court that allowed the sham trial of Hassan Diab to be received as gospel. The French pro-Israel lobby, its sister lobbies in Canada and Israel, as well as extreme right-wing elements (Poilievre and Musk), were quick to weaponize this wrongful verdict as a supreme truth, and resume their unbridled anti-Diab campaign. In November 2024, these various actors all pounced on Hassan Diab with hateful speech, peddling France’s lie (p.4) that he was a member of the PFLP-SO, and demanding he be extradited anew.
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In three respects, the Diab Affair offers a lens through which to discern the key practices of Far-Right politics.
1) Scapegoatism – the preferred feature of Poilievre’s political rhetoric. Over many months, he scapegoated Trudeau for every economic and other crisis unfolding in Canada. Once Trudeau resigned, Poilievre’s scapegoating attention turned to progressive movements (e.g., the marginalized sectors of society calling for justice and an end to war and genocide). He has called these dissenters “Woke,” and promised to penalize them upon becoming PM. Trump’s scapegoating schemes invariably come to mind.
2) Birds of a feather – Poilievre has courted a whole range of extreme right-wing elements, attempting, whenever challenged by the press, to finesse or deny his flirtation with neo-Nazis. More a pragmatic opportunist than an ideologue, Poilievre is like the weathercock, governed by “powerful winds,” lobby groups he knows will secure his careerist ambitions. But careerism is typically complicit in barbarism. Thus, when Hamas’s October 7th attacks were sensationalized into atrocity propaganda (propaganda that served to justify a full-blown genocide), Pierre Poilievre, the opportunist, sided with Israel’s rogue regime, endorsing the latter’s barbaric destruction of Gaza and the horrific human toll it has inflicted on the Gazan population. By pandering to Canada’s mainstream Jewish community, Poilievre displayed his morally bankrupt efforts to gain votes for the coming election, leaping on the anti-Diab bandwagon to garner electoral support from the Zionist elite while trafficking in deceit and falsehoods about an innocent Canadian citizen.
3) When Victimhood becomes Persecution – The fictitious case that France (and others) manufactured to convict Hassan Diab can be classified as atrocity propaganda: the shock of the 1980 Copernic attack– echoing attacks from WWII – has been weaponized for almost 20 years to divert attention from the real (still undetected) culprit. But more recently, this weaponization of Jewish victimhood, with the express purpose of blaming an Arab, has shifted to the fanciful idea that there is a “Jihadist” murderer parading as a sociology professor at Carleton University. The exploitation of such a myth, intended to cover up the root cause of a crime, is the stuff of authoritarian politics.
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The Far-Right’s toxic defamation of Hassan Diab can tell us much about how political elites deploy scapegoatism to criminalize society’s most vulnerable. Indeed, the entire Diab Affair brings into sharp focus the silhouette of Poilievre’s sinister political agenda. If elected, the leader of the opposition represents nothing short of bad news – not only for racialized communities, but, down the road, for all Canadians. Such a contingency must be averted at all costs. •
This article is dedicated to the memory of Judith Deutsch (March 19, 1945 — April 14, 2025), who passed away a few days ago. As a prolific writer, she was a most ardent and eloquent defender of Hassan Diab. Her trenchant critique of the system that violated him will stand the test of time.
