Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Request for Information

Could the person who left a message (not currently published) regarding this incident please email ARC:

Police probe hate posters on Bells Corners mosque

ARC's email is arc(dot)collective200(at)gmail(dot)com.

Monday, January 29, 2018

In Memoriam

Ibrahima Barry, aged 39
Mamadou Tanou Barry, aged 42
Khaled Belkacemi, aged 60
Aboubaker Thabti, aged 44
Abdelkrim Hassane, aged 41
Azzedine Soufiane, aged 57


Sunday, January 28, 2018

Far-Right Attacks on Antifascist Protesters Appear Premeditated

When ARC wrote about the events that took place at both Nathan Phillips and Mel Lastman squares in Toronto yesterday, those that occurred at Mel Lastman Square appear to have been where most of the action occurred. PEGIDA, Northern Guard, III% militia, and Proud Boys were outnumbered significantly and were prevented from marching. While members of PEGIDA Canada were disappointed, it would appear that Northern Guard, the Threepers, and Proud Boys were very pleased because their motivations were different.

They were there specifically to assault counter-protesters.

In focusing on Northern Guard Toronto chapter leader Lee Down's video indicating that he had brought along a concealed weapon as well as his posts on his Facebook profile urging supporters to assault "liberals" and to burn down the homes of Trudeau supporters, I only very briefly discussed this post by a participant:


Since I was quite busy with things going on outside the blog (my detractors will no doubt be skeptical that I have a life outside the blog) I didn't actually click on "Bain Scott's" profile:


However upon receiving subsequent information I decided to give the guy a once over. Turns out he is someone ARC has discussed on the blog before:


Of course he didn't go by the name "Scott Bain" when ARC was first introduced to him. Then he was going by the name Shawn McBeath, though he did also use the moniker "Shawn Isgone" as well:





ARC was first introduced to McBeath on April 1, 2017 when as a member of the Soldiers of Odin he attended an anti-Muslim protest. He also was caught on video assaulting a counter-protester:


The next month he participated in another event, this time decked out in body armor and sporting Threeper iconography. At that protest McBeath can be seen in a video harassing journalist Kevin Metcalf prior to Metcalf being assaulted by JDL members and others anti-Muslim protesters:



Individuals were charged with assault the following month:

When ARC examined McBeath at the time my concern was, since he seemed to be able to act with impunity by the police, that he might attend future events armed. This concern was in part due to what was found on his Facebook profile:



That concern appears to have been justified based on posts made by McBeath (posting as "Scott Bain") and Tim Kelly of the Proud Boys on both the national and Ontario Northern Guard Facebook group pages:


The Proud Boys, Threepers, and now the Northern Guard often claim that their violence is in fact a reaction to real or perceived threats from the antifascists. However the other posts prove that this is a contrived justification as they brag about bringing weapons and singling out people to assault:


"Flagpole worked great," eh?

Not even very subtle.

Braying jackass Proud Boy member Tim Kelly further confirms that the flagpoles were always intended to be used as weapons:

Saturday, January 27, 2018

Anti-Muslim Protesters Outnumbered In Toronto At Mel Lastman and Nathan Phillips Squares; Islamophobes Possessed Weapons

On January 29, 2017, six men were murdered at a Quebec City mosque. While most decent humans were heartbroken and reached out in support of the Canadian-Muslim community, this blog has provided ample evidence that Alexandre Bissonnette fellow Islamophobes either were thrilled by the attack, attempted to blame Muslims, or denied it took place altogether.

And the ghouls to show their character as the JDL has organized a rally attacking the Canadian-Muslim community on the anniversary of the massacre:





Today a number of organizations held rallies to memorialize those who died in the Quebec City mosque massacre at Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto:


In what I'm guessing wasn't a coincidence PEGIDA Canada, as well as participants from the Northern Guard, III% militia, and the Proud Boys, had also planned on staging an anti-Muslim protest at Nathan Phillips Square on the same day though they later claimed to be moving the event to Mel Lastman Square. Suspecting duplicity, anti-fascists made sure to be at both locations. The suspicion proved correct when PEGIDA Canada, III%ers, Proud Boy, and Northern Guard members showed up at both squares, some wearing body armor and quasi-military gear:




However, in both locations, the anti-Muslim protesters were outnumbered significantly by antifascists, members of C.U.P.E., and ordinary Torontonians who wouldn't put up with their shit:






Now, people like the middle-aged Proud Boy Robert Jones tried to put a brave face on the situation and claimed their presence marked a victory of some kind:



However as the day progressed, things took a bit of a turn:


Northern Guard's Toronto Chapter leader was also present and provided some erudite political commentary :


So, the bad guys were outnumbered, kettled, and prevented from marching anywhere.

That's good.

Still, this writer has significant concerns as these hate groups become increasingly militant and violent. ARC has already shown in an earlier screen shot members of the Proud Boys bragging about assaulting people at this rally including using a flagpole as an improvised weapon:


But in addition to the body armor and makeshift weapons, it appears that at least some members are bringing actual weapons to these events, something we've suspected for a long time:


I will remind the readers that Lee Down is the Toronto chapter leader of the Northern Guard providing evidence that he brought a concealed and prohibited weapon to an anti-Muslim protest..

In addition to carrying a weapon to the event, Down has encouraged his followers to engage in politically motivated terrorism.

That isn't an exaggeration:


His threats are not anomalous:

Lee Down appears to have been fooled by an obvious false document

ARC hopes the TPS will scrutinize the heavily armored anti-Muslim protesters as closely as they do those antifascists wearing black hoodies next time.

UPDATE: A report on the event was published yesterday by some of those who participated.


Friday, January 26, 2018

Mark and Connie Fournier of Free Dominion Declare Bankruptcy

It has been a while since ARC last wrote about Mark and Connie Fournier of the (not so) dearly departed Free Dominion. While ARC certainly had a rather contentious relationship with the denizens of Free Dominion (they even inspired ARC's "History of Violence" article), their defamation of Mr. Richard Warman is what ultimately led to their precipitous downfall as the Fourniers and co-defendants lost a defamation suit to Mr. Warman.

The Fourniers decided to appeal the decision and attempted to crowdfund their effort which resulted in some rather interesting support:
Though the writing was on the wall as others who had defamed Mr. Warman settled and apologized, the Fourniers stubbornly soldiered on. 


Since then it seems that Mr. Warman has spent at least some time trying to get Mark and Connie to pay the damage and costs, but they seem to be rather recalcitrant. 

And as of yesterday....



Mr. Warman posted the following regarding the declaration of bankruptcy:
26 January 2018 
Connie Fournier is bankrupt. Mark Fournier is bankrupt. 
I suppose that as between honouring the payment plan they agreed to or bankruptcy, it had to come to this. 
As readers may recall, Connie Fournier and Mark Fournier published defamatory attacks against me through their website forum Freedominion (RIP). I asked them to remove the material and while they initially did so, they then refused to remove further defamatory material that was posted by their users or themselves. 
I sued them for libel. The Fourniers demanded a jury trial and their day in court. After a three-week trial, the jury found the Fourniers and their fellow defendants had defamed me and awarded me $42,000 in general, aggravated, and punitive damages. The judge also ordered the defendants to pay me $85,000 in legal costs. 
The Fourniers appealed to the Ontario Court of Appeal and lost spectacularly there too. The Court of Appeal ordered them to pay me a further $23,000 in costs. 
The Fourniers agreed to pay me the jury’s award of damages and costs at a rate of $500/month. They made 2 payments but then there were always reasons why they couldn’t pay the next month and then they just went silent. It wasn’t like they weren’t earning income – at the first judgment debtor exam, they estimated that Mark’s income from truck driving earned them $30,000-$50,000 per year. For her part, Connie had been voluntarily or otherwise unemployed or underemployed for years despite advertising herself as a computer programmer. 
Tired of waiting for the Fourniers or Godot to show up with the money they said they’d pay me, I recently arranged for them to attend a new judgment debtor examination where my lawyer would ask them why they hadn’t honoured the payment plan they agreed to and they would produce all of their financial records showing their ability to pay the judgment.
Now if Mark and Connie thought that this would means to avoid any legal obligations, there is some very bad news for them:
Instead of attending the examination they agreed to they decided to go bankrupt instead. They have the legal ability to do that, but the Courts have said repeatedly that people who try to take advantage of bankruptcy protection to avoid paying civil judgments against them shouldn’t emerge from bankruptcy until they’ve paid at least 1/2 of their outstanding debts. Given they owe in excess of $100,000, Connie Fournier and Mark Fournier have likely condemned themselves to a lifetime status as bankrupts. 
Sad but true…
However, Mr. Warman does include a postscript that may, if the Fourniers take up the offer, might help them to get out of the hole they have dug for themselves:
NB – The Fourniers were always successful at crowdfunding money to support their defence. I’d be happy to endorse or run a similar campaign now in their hour of need to pay off their debt and would donate all the money raised to charities or non-profits. I would also deduct an equivalent amount from the 50% of their outstanding debt to me before I would no longer object to them emerging from bankruptcy. The Fourniers and charities/non-profits would benefit – sounds like a win-win. Ball is in their court.
So we'll see what happens.

What I do know is that I have better taste in music than Mr. Warman:

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Kevin "Poodle" Johnston: No Credible Evidence

Back on June 3, 2017, a number of anti-Muslim protests occurred in Canadian cities across the country; most of them were dismal failures that attracted substantially more counter-protesters than Islamophobes. One of the events which really has to be considered to be a failure was "One Million Canadian March Against Trudeau" on Parliament Hill which, rather than featuring the million people advertised, may have had fewer than 130. In fact a group yoga session that occurred a few hours before attracted substantially more people.

Among those who did show up in Ottawa was a the shamelessly self-promoting anti-Muslim YouTuber, perennial Mississauga mayoral candidate, and provocateur currently up on hate crime charges Kevin "Poodle" Johnston. In fact he arrived in Ottawa a day before the rally, spending much of that time posting messages and photos on now suspended twitter account trying to antagonize anti-fascists:


It seems that Johnston was determined to try and cause an incident. On the day of the protest, there was some sort of confrontation as Johnston appears to have actively sought out counter-protesters. He later posted the following which he claimed resulted from that encounter:




Johnston's claims, many of which were promptly disputed by the police, immediately failed the smell test. For example, Johnston claimed that one of the people who participated in the alleged assault against him was journalist Kevin Metcalf. Metcalf has become a bit of a bogeyman in Islamophobic circles and is fairly easily identifiable at this point. Johnston claimed that Metcalf had stood by taking video of the alleged assault against him and his partner:

The problem is that this claim was verifiable false as Metcalf was conducting interview as well as being interviewed in a different, and distant, location with reliable witnesses conforming this to be the case:
One man Johnston targeted is Kevin Metcalf, a member of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, who says he was at the Hill protest as an observer, shooting pictures and video of people at what was billed the “Million Canadian March.” 
Johnston posted a video Tuesday showing Metcalf’s picture and called him “a coward, domestic terrorist and stalker of women.” 
“If you see this man, you have to assume he is armed,” Johnston told his followers. “We have to get this guy behind bars, people. Get him behind bars now.” 
Metcalf says he was on Parliament Hill conducting interviews around 11:30 a.m., the time it’s alleged Johnston was assaulted in Confederation Park. He says he’s considering legal action against Johnston over the online video.
Journalist Evan Balgord also noted in his article a number of other inconsistencies in Johnston's allegations, including the use of a knife:



However....
Johnston originally reported on Twitter that he was the victim of a knife attack. But Sergeant Hrabchak of the Ottawa Police Service tells CANADALAND that there was no knife attack. “We don’t have any information of that,” says Hrabchak. “None whatsoever. We’ve got one victim, and he’s not even being cooperative with us now.”
None of these contradictions prevented the Islamophobes who support Johnston from rallying to his side in support and making threats towards those whom they claimed had targeted him:



Well, a funny thing apparently happened yesterday as reported by a friend who has been following this case and reported on ARC's twitter account:


Interesting. Not entirely unexpected, but interesting.

Timely too.

Since reports that an 11 year old child had not been truthful about an alleged Islamophobic attack against her, the bigots that we've been covering have been apoplectic, some demanding charges filed against the child, her mother or both, the deportation of the girl and her entire family, an apology from the Prime Minister for having the audacity to suggest that attacking a child is wrong, and claiming that ALL attacks that have been committed against Muslims past and future have been lies.

Now, if they are to be logically and morally consistent, shouldn't that same anger be directed towards a middle-aged man who may very well have provided a false report to the police about being attacked by "antifa?"

Don't bother answering that question. It's sort of a rhetorical one.

As far as this writer knows Johnston has not yet responded to news about the Crown dropping assault charges. Currently he is on his way back to Canada after having spent about a week in Burma in the guise of a "journalist" and where he spent much of his time demonizing the Rohingya, a Muslim minority currently facing severe persecution and potential genocide at the hands of the Burmese state and military.

Actually, his presence in Burma is also interesting, but that is a story for a different time.

Monday, January 22, 2018

Ronny Cameron Off The Rails: Part 3

If a group of roughly two dozen Proud Boys and supporters march around in Brantford for half and hour, and no one paid any attention, did they really march at all?

I suppose that isn't exactly a Zen kōan, but it is something to consider.

Yep, this past Saturday a group of Proud Boys, most of whom appear to be from elsewhere, bravely faced off against the good, and probably mildly confused, people of Brantford because students at the university hurt some of their members' feelings. Now the PBs really didn't actually DO anything other than march around with a Trump banner, at least one Christian flag (because Islamic theocracy = bad but Christian theocracy = awesome!), a few PB flags, a couple of Canadian flags, and some old Red Ensigns, but they sure.... did something?

I guess?

Luckily ARC was able to procure some footage of the event, such as it was:



So having walked around a bit with few people paying them much attention to them, the PBs declared victory:


Despite the victory they claimed which, compared to say the Battle of Saragarhi (the Sikh troops didn't even have a cup of Timmies), is sort of gilding the lilies a bit, the group was rattled by a lone man with a cell phone:



Oh, the threats made by Brandon Vaughan are just adorable!

"Do you even lift, bro?"
That said, our astute readers will recognize Ronny Cameron's presence amongst the Proud Boys as he also attended the march. Earlier in the he also interviewed the braying jackass Tim Kelly, a PB and Brantford local for his "Get To Know a Patriot" series.

Cameron, pulling no punches, begins with the hard-hitting question that is on the minds of all patriotic Canadians: which Canadian alt-right personality would he like to bang the most?


Now, besides connecting us once again to a recent story ARC published regarding misogyny in the alt-right and the racist overtones of that misogyny, it also reminds this hack writer that I had been working on a mini-series detailing Ronny Cameron's embrace of white nationalism:


Ronny here is referring to having initially rejecting white nationalists as racists:

By January 8, Ronny decided that white nationalism was actually peachy keen and announced he would post a video explaining his sudden change of heart.

Others, anticipating the video, responded to the above post. Many of those responses, as well as Ronny's own commentary, are quite enlightening:

Sunday, January 21, 2018

Revisiting the Hijab Story and the General Denial of Islamophobic Violence

Back in 1982, one of my Grade 2 classmates arrived at school more than an hour late. The teacher began to admonish him and demand why it had taken him so long to walk to school AGAIN (we lived in a small town).

Benjamin stammered that someone tried to pull him into a van.

At that point I remember my teacher's face turning to ash. You see there was a time in the late 70s through the late 80s when news of people trying to abduct children was frequently on the news and constituted, in retrospect, somewhat of a widely believed urban myth since even then it was far more likely that a child would be kidnapped by someone he or she knew rather than a stranger. The teacher took Ben to the office immediately. Not long after we saw police cars pull up in the parking lot out the window and his mother sprinting into the school, frantically heading straight to the office sobbing all the while. One by one the Grade 2 class was taken into an empty classroom to be questioned by the police to see if we could maybe provide any information. Did we see that van? What color was it? How many people were inside? Where did we see the van?

Wanting to please the police officers who were trying to protect us, we all provided what we thought would be helpful answers.

I told the police officers the van was black with a painting of a girl with a sword in a bikini riding a big cat (remembering that my uncle had a van just like that because, you know, he was a classy fella) and one person driving. One of my friends said she saw a red van by the park with two men and one woman. Another saw a blue van with two people and a dog. All of us, so far as I know, gave the officers what we believed to be "helpful" answers and endeavored to be as creative as possible.

Of course if they has asked where we had last SEEN Ben on our way to school, some of us might also have said we saw him between the Johnstone's garage and fence feeding their pet rabbits as he often did on his way to and from school through the back alley shortcut many of us took and  which is why he was often late for school.

It didn't take long for the police to figure this out for themselves. I don't remember much of what happened after, though I do remember Ben being made to stay in the class during recess for a week and his parents grounding him for a month; he was playing outside within the week after his parents apparently relented. The incident wasn't really ever spoken about again until graduation when it was recounted as a humorous anecdote about Ben during the grad dinner a decade later, but other than that it was mostly a forgotten story.

Sometimes children lie. They lie because they don't want to get into trouble. They lie because they want to provide the "correct" answers to people in positions of authority either through subtle or not subtle coaching or through their own form of creative fill-in-the-blanks. They lie because it results in attention. They lie because of psychological troubles. They lie for a variety of reasons. It doesn't make them bad. It just means they are kids who aren't entirely aware of the consequences of their lie. For example, not long ago in Okotoks, AB a young teen claimed to have been attacked at her home and had her throat slashed before the suspect, described as a blond male, ran off. The story made the news provincially and nationally and was actually used as an example by some of the Islamophobic bigots and groups ARC covers as an example of Islamic violence since some automatically assumed the suspect was a Muslim:


However by November 24 the police had determined that the young girl had made up the story. There was no follow-up in the news after that and people promptly forgot about it though I remember some people express sympathy for both the girl ("she needs psychological help and I'm praying for her") and her family ("oh, they must be so embarrassed!).

Similar sympathetic attitudes were not expressed towards the 11 year old girl who claimed to have been attacked by a man who cut up her hijab or her family who, once the realized the story wasn't true, soon apologized "to all Canadians." (though this act of contrition was not expected or demanded of the Okotoks family previously mentioned):


Lee Down is the Toronto chapter leader of the Northern Guard


In the world of Islamophobes, guilt is assigned to the group. An 11 year old child lied, so that means all Muslims are complicit:


That last claim by Myatt isn't exactly an original one. On January 29, 2017, Alexandre Bissonnette is alleged to have entered the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City where he then opened fire. As a result six people were killed and others injured. At the time of the tragedy, the groups and individuals ARC monitors had three primary reactions to the tragedy:

  1. They celebrated the attack and hoped for more.
  2. They accused Muslims of killing Muslims (and again, some were very happy about this as well).
  3. They claimed it didn't happen, that Bissonnette was a patsy, or that it was a "false flag."