The Truth about Rights & Democracy....

Leave it to Terry Glavin to tell the real story about Rights & Democracy...

If you pay attention to Ottawa scandals, you will be familiar with the story of Rights and Democracy by now: a hostile Conservative takeover of the quasi-governmental agency has destroyed R&D’s spotless international reputation as a wellspring and global clarion for human rights. Sinister Zionists are behind the whole thing.

The story’s narrative arc was further entrenched in the public record last week when a House of Commons committee recommended the ousting of R&D board chairman Aurel Braun, so it must be true. After all, former R&D presidents Warren Allmand and Ed Broadbent read from that very script before the Foreign Affairs Committee during its hearings into R&D, and the New Democratic Party’s Paul Dewar last week proclaimed that Braun and his R&D board allies have “poisoned the well” and ruined R&D’s “stellar reputation.”

There is a small problem with the story: it’s a convenient fiction that has served to hide a real scandal that had been quietly unfolding at Rights and Democracy for several years now. The vanishing of staff computers during a mysterious break-in at R&D’s Montreal offices in January – were they stolen, or conveniently removed? – is just the beginning of the intrigue.

The story so far would have you believe that everything was just fine at R&D until last year when Braun was appointed chairman of the board. In that story, Braun and his Conservative-Zionist allies immediately proceeded to wield their newfound board majority to undertake a witch hunt for anyone at R&D insufficiently possessed of an affection for Israel.

As the putsch proceeded, R&D president Remy Beauregard suffered such stress that he died of a heart attack, the entire staff revolted, and Braun then fired key management officials Charles Vallerand, Marie-France Cloutier, and Razmik Panossian. The trio emerge as the story’s heroes, and hey presto, even the otherwise intelligent Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae piles on to defend R&D as “an internationally-recognized, non-partisan organization” with “decades of work promoting human and democratic rights around the world” at stake.

This is a neatly structured story, with a beginning, a middle, and what might even be something approaching an end. It is particularly gripping on account of its plot motif (Jews Behaving Badly), which is so wildly popular these days. Told this way, the story is delightfully intriguing. But it has meant that a number of rather important questions about the whole affair have gone unanswered.

Here’s just one question that the Foreign Affairs Committee might have put to R&D’s brave “dissident” managers, Cloutier and Panossian, but did not: What’s the deal with the payments you made not long ago to Donald McCleery, the infiltration-and-surveillance specialist perhaps best known for burning a barn in Quebec back in the 1970s while he was with the RCMP’s notorious and shadowy “G” Section?

Here’s a question we might all ask ourselves about the affair. Is it overweeningly Zionist to notice that for years prior to January’s management-engineered staff revolt, Cloutier and Panossian were overseeing a bully regime at R&D that former employees have described as “Nonrespect of staff, misallocation of resources, micro-management, arbitrary imposition of weakly developed policies designed with no consultation from staff, and even the appearance of systemic sexism”?

This is just a taste...go and read the whole thing...it's a must read.