Protesters gather on Parliament Hill to demonstrate against vaccine mandates, on Saturday. (Alexander Behne/CBC)

I noticed a news item in one of our daily newspapers to the effect that the peaceful anti-government protests that began in Kazakhstan over rising fuel prices a month ago got away from protest organizers when they turned violent, led by masked men. There is anger among protest organizers and participants over what they perceive as having been tricked into fuelling a power struggle with the government; that highly organized, armed men hijacked their protest.

That type of thing has been happening for decades in the West. Where protests meant to demonstrate to authorities that their decision-making has failed to reflect the wishes of those who voted them into a position of administrative power have been taken advantage of by malign forces. Far-right groups have always sought to take advantage of mass gatherings to infuse their own message into a general protest.

 

Often protests over civil liberties or mandates that fail to sit well among a population fed up with government edicts see both the left and the right entering the fray, coming to loggerheads with threats and intimidation, leaving a layer of soiled intentions over the decision of people to gather in a civil display of efforts to counter government infringement on nations' covenant rights between government and the governed. 

People and vehicles fill Wellington Street near Parliament Hill during a rally against COVID-19 restrictions, which began as a cross-country convoy protesting a federal vaccine mandate for truckers, in Ottawa on Saturday. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)

 

My parents were socialists. My mother never saw a peace rally that she wouldn't take part in. I found it personally puzzling that my mother would engage in these protests, sometimes bordering on civil disobedience. She and the others who gathered their courage to march in a joint declaration condemning war and human rights abuses were confident that justice should prevail.

Years ago I prevailed upon my Christian-Egyptian neighbours to accompany me to a peace rally protesting the incipient invasion of Iraq by a U.S.-led coalition. I knew far less then than I do now about Saddam Hussein's virulent nationalism, Arabism and racist ideology responsible for attempted genocide of Iraqi Kurds and a prolonged, deadly war with Iran. We three drove downtown to the site of the peace rally, on a frigid -20C winter day.

I recall marching across a bridge linking Quebec and Ontario and being aware that the sheer numbers and the cadence of the marchers was swaying the bridge. And I became aware of something that quite shocked me: the presence of people carrying banners and placards holding Israel responsible for the oncoming Western coalition determined to invade Iraq only years after the U.S. had formed an earlier coalition to free Kuwait from Iraq's invasion.

I'm sure my Egyptian neighbours saw the signs, they were impossible to ignore. I said nothing, they said nothing, the protest continued. I will never attend another such protest in the knowledge that Canadian society is well infiltrated with Hamas and PFLP sympathizers and Palestinians who sought refuge in Canada from a greater Middle East that saw their presence as unpalatable, yet brought their deceptive slurs against Israel with them, to infect a wider audience who now feel free to express their vicious anti-Semitism for a 'cause'.

The current truckers' rally presently taking place throughout Canada and where long convoys of trucks have gathered in Ottawa to express their dissatisfaction with the Liberal government's mandates on vaccinations against the coronavirus being unreasonable and a potential threat to vital distribution of goods and food in the country represents a free society's citizens exercising their rights of protest.

And it has been infiltrated by those same malign, vicious, violence-prone influences of far-right nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism. It's there, and it's a curse on any society. Swastikas and Confederate flags in full view, expressing sentiments this truckers' rally was not meant to reflect. At the National Cenotaph, rioters deliberately trampled on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, 'dancing'.

Protesters gathered around Parliament Hill and the downtown core for the Freedom Convoy protest, some making their way from various locations across Canada, Sunday January 30, 2022. Photo by Ashley Fraser /Postmedia