“When you’ve never had any problems with the law and all of a sudden to be handcuffed and foot-chained and driven to RCMP headquarters and then to court, it’s distressing,” Duval [Hassan Diab’s lawyer] said from his home in Trois-Rivieres, Que....[H]e’s a devoted teacher who has the support of his students and the universities, Duval said....."This is a gentleman who is a very professional person and, of course, everyone is surprised by this thing that happened. You will have a hard time finding someone who will say something negative about him.” – from this news article
He’s “never had any problems with the law,” yet “all of a sudden” is “handcuffed and footchained and driven to RCMP headquarters...its distressing.” He is a part-time instructor at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, where he is “a devoted teacher.” He’s “a gentleman.” He’s a “very professional person.” And “you will have a hard time finding someone who will say something negative about him.”
Ah yes. The idiotic irrelevancies.
Might it be possible that “a devoted teacher,” “a gentleman,” a “very professional person” of whom it can be said that “you will have a hard time finding someone who will say something negative about him” could possibly have been involved in a bombing outside a Paris synagogue that killed four people in October 1980?
Is it possible? Or does his devotion, his gentlemanliness, his professionalism, make it absurdly out of the question that he could have ever been involved in such a thing, even twenty-eight years ago?
Points for consideration:
Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian. He loved dogs. He loved children, provided they were blonde Aryan children.
Josef Stalin was a wonderful fellow, the Father of his Country and, come to think of it, of his Countrymen, who could always be counted on. And if you only saw the outpouring of grief in March 1953 in the Soviet Union, it certainly outdid the outpouring of grief for FDR in April 1945 in the United States, in both scope and duration. This grief was not all orchestrated. Much of it was clearly genuine.
As for Chairman Mao, one simply can’t say enough about his splendid qualities. Why, his calligraphy alone is so distinctive and heart-warming that the ideograms on the sign advertising the Yenching Restaurant in Harvard Square are, or at least used to be, written in the exact calligraphic style of Chairman Mao. And where shall we begin with his natatory abilities, and his deep concern for the Chinese people?
And Germany all through the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s and 1980s and 1990s, in numbers ever-diminishing of course, because of Father Time and Mother Nature, had all kinds of men, some of sober mien, fine upstanding fellows, even some of them with those heartwarming crinkles around the eyes, who were liked by all the neighborhood. And few would have guessed, and many would not have cared, what those men did on the Eastern Front, or the Western, in the years between 1939 and 1945, or even, some of them, before the war began.
It’s the same story.
Never caused any problem. Never swatted a fly. Never did any damage. Why don’t you leave him alone? For god’s sake, how far back must we go in our insensate urge to wreak a cruel revenge? And will punishing Diab, after all these years, bring anyone back anyway? What good would it do to punish him now?
But there was that bomb at that synagogue, and the people killed by, it is charged, among others, Hassan Diab, part-time instructor at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, who managed to escape justice all these years. For the evidence against Diab must have been very strong, even overwhelming, for the RCMP to come knocking on his door.
And no one of sense should for one minute treat with anything but disgust those who seem to think his being a “caring” teacher -- or whatever it is some seem to think --mitigates what is charged. And what is charged is that Hassan Diab, part-time instructor at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, participated in the mass-murder of people at a synagogue in Paris, on the rue Copernic, in October of 1980.
