Rex Murphy’s National Post column defending Canada against racism accusations ignites backlash from journalists Van Mala Subramanium (Toronto Star), Sri Paradkar, and Dakshana Bhaskaramurty (Globe), who dismiss his 73-year tenure as irrelevant. Subramanium’s anecdotes—like a 1995 police incident—fail to counter census data showing Indo-Canadians’ higher incomes or the presence of Black police chiefs. Meanwhile, Tarek Fatah critiques India’s media for ignoring economic threats like China’s debt-trap diplomacy and border incursions while fixating on cultural grievances, questioning why some Indo-Canadians profit from racial narratives in Canada despite their own privilege. The debate exposes tensions between historical claims and modern activism, revealing how identity politics often overshadows systemic critiques. [Automatically generated summary]
Oh my rebels, have I got a monologue for you today?
I spent a lot of time on this.
I talk about Rex Murphy's column in the National Post.
He says Canada is not racist.
Well, three race inspectors say you are so wrong, you racist.
Only a racist would say you're not racist.
I go through it and I tell you a little secret about the three race inspectors.
That's all ahead.
And by the way, can I invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus?
It's $8 a month or $80 a year.
And you get access to the video version of the show.
And I would like you to see that because I want you to see what these three race inspectors look like.
It's actually relevant.
Okay, that's my pitch for you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
You can do that at RebelNews.com.
Here is the podcast.
Tonight, Rex Murphy says Canada is not racist, but some racists disagree.
It's June 5th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Thank God we live in Canada where, as part of the British Empire, we abolished slavery two centuries ago.
And the Royal Navy interdicted slave ships.
We were literally the world's first do-gooders.
But it wasn't about being woke, it was about being Christian.
The whole anti-slavery movement was a Christian project, as told in the movie Amazing Grace.
One man will risk everything.
Payment in kind.
There's nothing you have at once, Your Grace.
He'd fetch at least 25 guineas.
The game is over.
To speak for those who could not, they do this, to let you know that you no longer belong to God, but to a man, to make the blind see.
We have no evidence that the Africans themselves have any objection to the trade.
And to lead a movement that would change the world.
Do it.
Throw the dirty, filthy ships out of the water.
Slave trade has 300 MPs in its pocket.
It would be just you against them.
So that's us.
We're the good guys.
We were the destination for the Underground Railroad, where slaves from the southern U.S. ran away to.
I'm not saying there was never any slavery in Canada.
In fact, slavery predates Canada.
As I've shown you before, slavery was commonplace amongst different Indian tribes across the Americas, including in Canada.
One more movie recommendation, if I may, Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, which takes place in the days before the Spanish landed in Central America, 500 and plus years ago.
So we're lucky we escaped the moral calamity of slavery and its echoes, including Jim Crow laws in the States, which were segregation-style laws.
I'm not saying things were perfect in Canada, certainly not from a 21st century wokeness measure.
I mean, have you even read the Indian Act and its current racism that is in effect now?
But still, we're doing pretty well.
If you look at the top countries that are a source for Canadian immigration every year, you'll notice one thing about them.
They are visible minorities.
So unless hundreds of thousands of minorities every year are wrong, this is not just a good place to be.
Montreal's Multicultural Comment00:15:09
It is literally better than their own homeland.
Somalis think we're better than Somalia.
Bangladeshis think we're better than Bangladesh.
As Ahmed Hassan himself said before he became a liberal MP and turned bitter and racist, Canada is actually a better place to be a Muslim than most places in the Muslim world.
It is a fact lost on many Muslims, including Canadian Somalis, that it is countries like the United States and Canada that guarantee human rights and religious freedoms, that we can actually practice our faith best in these sorts of environment.
The civil rights of our community members must be protected, but obviously it's also equally important to disseminate these integration-friendly messages in order to contribute to a process where our communities emphasize the defense and attachment to the countries of Canada and the United States.
So yeah, I'm not saying there aren't any racists among us, but our society is not racist as a culture.
That's just an obvious fact.
But look, it's just too useful for politicians on the left to whip up race baiting.
It's too tempting.
And so despite the fact that the recent race riots in America have precisely nothing to do with Canada, Canadian criminals and politicians have tried to make it our business, like these folks looting the guitar store in Montreal the other day.
Yeah, do you think they could tell you a single thing about George Floyd or Floyd George or whatever they would say their looting was about?
Here's a guy who seems deeply motivated by racial justice in Montreal.
Well, if you think that's gross, look at this.
They're guitars, not human lives.
Montreal merchant says getting looted was worth it to fight racism.
I'm serious, that's a headline.
Without any questions whatsoever, it's a noble demonstration, and it's clearly far overdue, says Lenny Lataine.
Oh my God, you said that.
The Liberal cabinet put out such forced statements about racism.
It was so cringeworthy.
Especially the white liberal women of the Liberal cabinet who didn't say one word, not one word, about Trudeau's black face and who happily stabbed in the back an aboriginal woman, a woman of color, as they say, Jodi Wilson Raybold, when she became too uppity and forgot her place and was fired as Trudeau's justice minister.
So yeah, spare me, liberal white women of the Trudeau cabinet.
Here's Justin Trudeau when he was asked about the race riots in America.
You've been reluctant to comment on the words and actions of the U.S. president, but we do have Donald Trump now calling for military action against protesters.
We saw protesters tear gas yesterday to make way for a presidential photo op.
I'd like to ask you what you think about that.
And if you don't want to comment, what message do you think you're sending?
We all watch in horror and consternation what's going on in the United States.
That was a 21-second pause.
Did he just sort of malfunction?
Did he forget his memorized line?
Was his earpiece not working?
Did he want to insult Donald Trump, as he surely has been doing in private with the rest of his friends, but was telling himself to be better and not start an international incident?
Or was he just, I don't know, still stoned again?
I'm not being mean.
I'm just asking a question.
21 seconds.
Here's what Al Sharpton had to say about that.
This is the tipping point for changing how policing is going to be done in America.
And I'm going to be forthright in that.
The hope I have is I've seen as many whites marching as blacks.
I've seen people old and young.
It's a new day.
The time has met the moment of change in America.
And I'm going to express that in my eulogy and since you're from Canada, I won't have a 21-second gap before I say what I have to say.
Ouch.
I'm guessing Sharpton didn't forgive the blackface incident as easily as the white women in his cabinet did.
So anyways, Rex Murphy weighed in on things in a brilliant column in the National Post, their most read item of the month for sure.
It's this one.
Canada is not a racist country, despite what the liberals say.
To any fair mind, Canada is a mature, welcoming, open-minded, and generous country.
It would be helpful if these liberals kept the full story of this country in mind when discussing racism.
The full story, I think that's the key.
In a country centuries old with millions of people, there have been atrocious moments, either by today's standards or even by standards of the past.
Sure.
But tell the full story, please.
How much are racism and discrimination actually a part of Canadian reality?
Are they overwhelmingly present?
Are they, in McKenna's view, a central part of Canadian life?
Where do they manifest themselves?
Are some provinces more racist and discriminatory than others?
Those are good questions, and I can assure you that Rex spent more time thinking about McKenna's statements than McKenna did.
Do we not have welcoming immigration policies?
Are our largest cities not a great montage of people from every corner of the world of every color and creed?
Do we not, both in private and public, to celebrate Canada's multicultural nature?
Do our schools not press the ideas of tolerance and acceptance towards all peoples and all faiths from kindergarten through high school?
Is it not a doctrine of Canadian civic life that to end any trace of discrimination or racism is a cardinal rationale for the very existence of modern Canada?
Of course, I mean, it's so obvious it's amazing that anyone had to say it.
But what an outrage it was that he did say it.
How dare he, the racist, by championing anti-racism and saying Canada was in fact anti-racist, don't you know that thereby Rex just proved how racist he was?
I mean, that's the riddle of it.
If you say you're not racist, well, that is the proof that you are racist, because only a racist would say he's not racist.
I saw this tweet in response by a co-worker of Rex Murphy.
I unfortunately had to click on and read this horrifying column in its entirety in order to write an email to my editor expressing my utter disappointment that we decided to run him.
There's no point reading it.
I assure you, there's nothing to learn here.
By the way, she didn't provide a link to Rex Murphy's article, just a screenshot of it.
She didn't want to infect anyone else, you see.
Here's what I wrote in reply to that comment.
Said, a journalist telling people not to read the other side of the story is closed-minded.
But a journalist telling people not to read her own newspaper is not trustworthy.
Why would she continue to work there against her own conscience?
Not someone I can trust.
That's the thing.
I mean, her name is Van Mala Subramanium.
And as you can see by her LinkedIn biography, she is a business writer.
for the same newspaper she writes for the Financial Post section of the National Post.
And before that, she worked for Vice, and before that, she worked for Bloomberg, and before that, she worked for CBC.
So you can see her life in Canada has been blocked by systemic racism.
Just no opportunities at all.
But like I said, what an odd reply to snipe at your own newspaper, but to take its money.
It's almost like she was just virtue signaling and actually, when push comes to shove, puts money ahead of principles.
Well, to their credit, instead of firing Van Mala for disparaging their newspaper as racist, the National Post invited her to make her case.
I confess I had never heard of Van Mala before, so I was unfamiliar with her work.
I would have thought she would have taken this unique opportunity to make a convincing case, but yeah, no.
Let me take you through some of it.
It's quite remarkable.
Here it is.
She says, before you declare Canada is not a racist country, do your homework.
Okay.
I'm always open to doing homework.
She says, Rex Murphy, the conservative commentator, former CBC radio host, and a 73-year-old white man, is convinced that racism does not exist in this country and that the vast majority of Canadians would never participate in it.
Okay, hang on.
Is that an argument?
Her very first sentence, which I always think is the most important sentence, is chastising Rex Murphy for being a certain age and a certain race.
You're an old white man.
That's not an argument.
And you know, it's a little bit racist.
She says that Rex effectively erases centuries of history that pertain to the founding of this nation.
I'm not sure he did, by the way.
I think he was saying that Canada is not a racist country.
I'm not sure if he's going back to historical issues, and I'll come back to this, but she mocks Rex's points, including the fact that Canada had welcoming immigration policies.
She recaps Rex's points with some spin, and then she says this.
It is perhaps too obvious to state that someone who has absolutely no lived experience of racism, discrimination, bigotry, who has never been anything other than accepted, who has clearly no interest in really understanding race issues in this country beyond performative platitudes and slogans pushed forward by corporate institutions and the political class, should not be weighing in on the subject of racism.
Oh boy, that's a lot of sociology terms there.
So there you have it.
It's like we talked about yesterday in my interview with Philip Slayton.
You don't make arguments anymore.
You just check the right identity boxes and it's decided.
If you're a 73-year-old white man, don't even open your mouth.
If you don't have a lived experience of racism, you should not be talking because your ideas don't work.
Because no one has lived a tougher life than Van Mala Subramanium, who was clearly born in the ghetto and had to sit at the back of the bus and drink from the water fountain that said colored people only and had KKK crosses burning on her front yard.
I mean, the racist hardships she has faced in life.
She can talk about Canada, but not you.
And apparently, actually growing up poor in Newfoundland doesn't teach anyone about hardship and overcoming challenges, but working for Vice and the CBC does.
Hey, can I stop and point out something here before I continue?
Van Mela Subramanium is not black.
She's just not.
I think it's a Tamil name.
Tamils are rather newcomers to Canada.
They weren't interned in the Second World War.
That was the Japanese.
They weren't given second-class citizenship and forced to live on a reserve.
Those are Indians.
Like I say, I had never heard of her before, so I just Googled her.
And here's just a random sample of what I found.
Steve, there were a couple of sensible things I thought.
So for one, just basic things like making sure there's no peak electricity rates for the next 45 days, deferring interest payments on student loans.
So I think I hear a foreign accent, as in she came here pretty recently.
She hasn't actually lived Canadian racism herself.
Neither did her parents, obviously, or her grandparents.
They might have lived under racism, but it wasn't here in Canada.
Subramanium didn't hear stories growing up about, I don't know, how it was like to be Irish in Montreal in the 1850s, or how it was like to be black in Halifax in the 1920s or Jewish in Montreal in the 1950s.
So she's not from here.
She actually doesn't know the lived experience here.
In fact, the one thing she knows about is what she mocked Rex about, our welcoming immigration policies.
That's her lived experience.
What does she know about our past, racist or not, that Rex Murphy doesn't, who has lived here for 73 years and surely has memories of what his parents and grandparents told him, memories maybe that stretch back 400 years of Newfoundland.
Yeah, if you're a newcomer, mocking someone for living here for 73 years is not persuasive when you're saying you know Canada better than Rex does.
But remember who we're talking about here, a journalist in a newspaper.
I had never heard of this woman before.
She looks modestly successful, I guess.
Rex is a national star, easily the biggest draw in the National Post since the untimely passing of Christy Blatford.
But they're both writers for a living.
They both depend on freedom of speech.
But Van Mala Subramanium has apparently decided that free speech is not a Canadian value.
People like Rex should not be weighing in on the subject of racism.
They certainly should not be allowed to declare that racism is over, nor be given a national platform to do so.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
So it's one thing for her to say, I don't think you should talk.
That's a kind of rhetorical bullying, just telling someone to shut up.
That's not argument.
That's not discourse.
It frankly makes me doubt the quality of her journalism.
Does she just tell people to shut up if they have facts or arguments that don't fit her preconceived narrative for a story?
Sounds pretty close-minded to me, which is not the mark of a good reporter.
But she moves quickly from, I don't think Rex should weigh in to he should not to, she says, he most certainly should not be allowed to say that Canada is not racist, and certainly not in a national platform.
So he shouldn't talk at all about racism.
But if he dares to talk about racism, he absolutely should not say Canada isn't racist.
And for sure, for sure, for sure, he shouldn't be given a platform for that.
He shouldn't be allowed.
Someone should stop him, ban him.
So now an employee of the National Post, who's worked there for one year and 10 months, according to her LinkedIn biographer, she's telling the newspaper that she definitely should never publish things that Rex Murphy has to say if she doesn't agree with him.
I couldn't help but notice that Van Mala Subramanium worked at Vice for also one year and 11 months before the Post, and she worked at Bloomberg for only five months before that.
Lived Experience Debate00:12:20
Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on there, but it sort of makes me laugh that she's telling the National Post who is or isn't allowed to write in it.
I wonder if that's why she left those other places.
But what makes me cry after laughing is that the National Post ran this self-abasing piece crapping all over them.
Not that Rex Murphy shouldn't be challenged.
Why not?
And it's a good idea for the National Post to host debates, even about its star writers.
Perfect place.
But this is the argument.
Hey guys, I'm Brown.
Rex is white.
QED, debate over.
Yeah, no, I don't think so.
But let me show you one more thing.
I mentioned that Vamela Subramanium is Tamil, I think.
And that means a Tamil name and she has an accent.
So she's from Sri Lanka.
So she's brown, not black.
She's not African-American.
And I'm sorry to talk about these things.
In my mind, this is all irrelevant.
But it's the basis of her entire argument from her very first sentence.
So would you permit me?
So she's brown, a newcomer to Canada.
Looks like she's never had a hard day in her life here.
Came here to get away from her home country, I guess.
But look at what she does.
For the rest of the op-ed, she talks about anecdotes of black people.
Let me quote.
Because the Canada that Rex Murphy says is not racist is the same Canada where his own former black colleague, the esteemed television journalist Dwight Drummond, host of CBC Toronto's Evening News, was handcuffed by police, face down on streetcar tracks with guns, plural, trained on him and his friend for the crime of leaving his home to get takeout in downtown Toronto, unquote.
Okay.
Now again, I didn't know who she was talking about or what she was talking about, so I Googled it.
So apparently, back in the year 1995, 25 years ago, Dwight Drummond was arrested and people claimed it was racial profiling.
So a 25-year-old anecdote, and let's say that that's accurately what happened.
Let's just say it was because he was black.
I don't know if that's a fact.
Even if it were the case, is that your proof that Canada is a racist society?
That anecdote.
Let me read some more.
It is the same Canada where the CBC investigative journalist Asha Tomlinson, another former black colleague of Murphy's, said her brother, while a teenager in the predominantly non-white Toronto suburbs of Scarborough, was repeatedly stopped and interrogated by police on drives to the corner store over nothing.
Okay, I hadn't heard of that either.
So I read an article about this woman's brother as a teenager.
When my brother was a teenager in the early 1990s, living in Toronto's eastern suburb of Scarborough, he would drive to our corner store to get candy and pop all the time.
That is until he started to get stopped by police.
They would question him, ask him where he was going, why he was out at night.
And that's it.
That's the story.
Again, maybe it was racism, although there's actually nothing racial about the story, just a teenager being asked what he's doing out at night in a car by police.
Could be because he was black.
Could be because he was a teen.
We don't actually know.
Also, it's a 25-year-old anecdote.
And that's your proof that the Canada we live in today is racist and why Rex Murphy has to shut up.
She cites a few more anecdotes.
There are plenty of anecdotes in a country of 37 million people.
Some of them involve criminals or police shooting criminals or accused criminals.
Some is just gossip.
They're so rare that she has to reach back 25 years.
It's hard to make that case when so many police in 2020 are black, including, you know, the chief of police for Sabramian's own city.
Subramanium didn't live any of this, though.
This wasn't her lived experience.
I don't even know if she was here 25 years ago, judging by her accent and her age.
So she didn't live this.
But again, she's not black.
And that's important because the black grievance in America comes in large part from their history of slavery.
And then the history of segregation and Jim Crow laws.
And I'm sorry, we just didn't have that up here.
We just didn't.
And thank God we didn't.
But what's the angle here?
Why is Supermanium trying to appropriate? the American black experience.
She's not American.
She's not black.
She's not a descendant of American slaves.
It's a bit pitiful, but I think it's transparent.
I don't really buy into the concept of cultural appropriation.
Supermanium has appropriated the English language and other Western concepts, not her native Tamil ones.
Hey, me too.
I'm Jewish.
And I even appropriated the Christian custom of calling the year 2020 counting from Jesus' birth.
And I'm not even Christian.
I eat Chinese food and drive a Japanese car, but I'm not pretending I'm part of the experience of descendants of American slaves just to get some weird clout.
But the weird thing, the extra weird thing is it's the same over at the Toronto Star, by the way.
They have a professional full-time race huckster over there called Sri Paradkar.
It's literally all she writes about.
She is paid to call Canadians racist every time.
It's her beat.
She's been in overdrive these past few weeks about black civil rights in America.
But how do I put this gently?
She's not black.
She's not American.
And she just came here too, judging by her accent.
Oh, say, you know what?
There's a couple people that are bad.
We'll never root it out, but there's no institutionalized systemic racism.
Certainly not in Quebec.
What do you make of that?
My first thought was, well, here is another white guy in power telling us that racism doesn't exist, right?
And I don't know based on what he says it.
I just, it made me sad because I wish we moved away from this framing of does racism exist to what are we going to do about it.
Because I feel like in so many ways, this denial of racism is a denial of basic dignity, particularly of black and First Nations Métier people.
Do you think she's ever lived in Quebec that she even speaks French?
I mean, she's still working on her English, sounds like.
Hey, as the saying goes, if someone has an accent, that means they speak one more language than you do.
So good for her for learning English so well, better than I know any other language.
But for her to condemn the entire province of Quebec as racist, yeah, no.
I love that little flourish at the end.
She has appointed herself as the spokesman for black people and Aboriginal people, and I didn't catch her whole list.
Maybe she might talk about the racism of India's caste system if she's bored, you know, lived experience stuff.
But that might take some introspection rather than smearing the country that has welcomed her and given her such privileges.
These people are such ingrates.
Who would move to a country to call its people racist for a living?
If you think it's a racist, why didn't you hear?
I kid you not.
That is her job description.
But you heard her.
She really said it.
If you deny you're racist, that is proof you're racist.
I think that's how it used to work with witches.
I think if you threw them into the water, only a witch would float.
If someone wasn't a witch, they would drown.
Denial of racism demands no change, no accountability.
It is complicity, really.
See, I wonder if that applies to her.
I'm just kidding.
Of course, she's racist, like Van Mala Subermanium.
It's essential that she attacks people for being white.
That's not racist, you see, but not being racist is racist, you see.
Here's a race journalist at the Globe and Mail.
Seriously, that is her beat.
Dakshana Bhaskaramurty, also a Tamil name, I think.
She writes, was so happy to see Van Mala write this biting evisceration of that terrible Rex Murphy column.
But why did she, one of the only racialized National Post writers, have to do it?
Would have been nice to see one of her white colleagues stick their neck out instead.
Well, Dakshana, didn't you read the column?
White people are not allowed to talk about race.
Especially, especially old white men.
Let me read to you that part of Van Mala's column again.
It is perhaps too obvious to state that someone who has absolutely no lived experience of racism, discrimination, bigotry, who has never been anything other than accepted, who has clearly no interest in really understanding race issues in this country beyond performative platitudes and slogans pushed forward by corporate institutions and the political class, should not be weighing in on the subject of racism.
So shut up, white people, about race.
You can't weigh in on the subject of race either way.
Oh, but you're racist if you don't weigh in on the subject of race.
And you're racist if you're not a racist.
Look, I want to tell you, I really admire people from India and from Sri Lanka.
I don't want to stereotype, but I think people from India are often very smart and industrious and successful and extremely hardworking, very studious, excellent students.
I think it's okay to stereotype people for admirable qualities.
I hope you agree, because I'm sort of a fan of people from India.
And every Tamil I know is a wonderful person.
I'm just telling you my biases.
In both Canada and the United States, you know, we collect census data on people based on race.
Did you know that?
In the United States, it's quite detailed.
In North America, it's pretty much the same in both Canada and the United States.
In North America, did you know that Asians make more money than any other race does?
Double what black people earn on average.
And amongst Asian people, obviously Asia is a big continent, Indian Americans and Indo-Canadians have a higher household income than any other Asian group.
Just way, way, way ahead of everyone else.
Tamils too.
So my point is, you're not black.
You were never a slave or a descendant of slaves.
You're rich.
The average Indo-Canadian is a lot richer, by the way, than the average Newfoundlander.
So what's going on here?
This isn't about legitimate grievances.
This is about racism.
It's about the left using racism to silence their own enemies and to get rich, I think.
There's actually no one more privileged in Canada than Indo-Canadians and Tamils.
And I think that's great.
I'm so glad Canada is a good match for the intelligence and entrepreneurial spirit of so many people.
But stop pretending that you're a victim.
Stop pretending that this country is racist.
It's actually being far better to you than your home country.
And can you do me a favor?
Can you stop pretending that you're black?
Van Mala Subramanium just can't stop running y'all and pretending she's some ghetto gangster with rapper street crab.
What are you doing?
You're a rich Tamil girl.
Do a victory lap.
You won the lottery in life.
I mean, take it from Dakshana and some other rich grievance mongers just profiteering here in this bizarre video produced by The Globe and Mail.
Listen to these guys.
Cultural appropriation is theft.
Theft.
Theft.
Yeah, guys, stop stealing from George Floyd, okay?
It's not always about you.
We know you like calling people names, but can you stop using dead American black men to promote your own Canadian careers as scolds?
And if you want to take a run at Rex Murphy, try criticizing his arguments, not his skin color.
You racists.
Cultural Appropriation Debate00:17:43
Stay with us for more.
Well, the other day when we had a barber here, I invited my friend Tarek Fada, who I knew needed a haircut, to come and get his haircut too.
And while he was here, I said, well, now that you look so sharp, let's sit down and have a catch-up.
So this is a conversation Tarek Fatah and I had on Tuesday.
And you know what, Tarek, you never know where the conversation is going to go, but he's such a hoot.
Take a look.
Hey, welcome back.
You know, I got a phone call from my old friend Tarek Fatah the other day, and we started to banter.
I said, hey, come on in for a haircut, because we've got black market haircuts going on here at Mobile Herb headquarters.
And then we had a nice lunch, and I said, Tarek, instead of you and I just having a private conversation, I know a lot of our viewers love to hear what you're up to because you're up to a second.
Go ahead.
I paid you under the table.
Well, it was a free catch.
It was a free haircut.
If you insist.
You know what?
It's just so nice to see you and to see other human beings in person.
I think we're all sort of missing a little bit of that social contact.
So give us an update.
It's been months.
I don't even think I've seen you this year.
Last time we talked, you had a very hit show in India.
You talked about India and Pakistan and Canada and America.
Give us an update.
What have you been up to?
Well, I was in India till end of January.
I knew this was coming because the coronavirus thing was coming up because suddenly I saw masks being sold in New Delhi.
And this was early, mid-January.
And in India, we thought it was just a Chinese thing happening over there.
And people were talking about, oh, this is what happens when you eat animals and it's crossed over.
Nobody thought at that time that this is.
So I came here February 3rd.
I had my appointment with my cancer doctor and it hit us.
After a week, there were no flights out.
I would have been stuck there.
And I had gone there to do a series of shows.
Fata Fatwa?
Or is it another one?
No, this is what the Fatah.
That's such an easy thing.
There's some fun titles you can have with your name, but you have to pronounce them very carefully.
I recorded about 30 shows, gave it to them, and flew out.
But many of them become redundant because the world changed.
Yeah.
What TV station is this for?
Is this for a big channel in the middle?
No, this is the New Delhi Times trying to reach out through changing the print edition into a webmag page.
Fair enough, that's around the world.
And is it in English or a different language?
It's in English.
The New Delhi Times is a very interesting.
And have they started to put them up yet?
Yes, they are.
And that's the New Delhi Times.
New Daily Times on YouTube.
And people started listening to it because, first of all, it was in English and Hindi as well.
And we touched on issues that were specific to Indian society.
For example, arranged marriages.
And I had fun task, calling people up and said, can I, you know, make an arrangement?
No, no, no, no, but because it would be fair and lovely girl needs much, you know, like well-placed Canadian or American.
Well, you're a well-placed Canadian.
And I say, I'm Muslim, I can have three more, you know.
Why would have an objection to that?
But it was, the point was, Indians are so introvert.
You know, in 10,000 years, Indians have never invaded any other country, ever.
Like, they are so happy with themselves laid back.
Well, last time, remember you said India is like a whole world.
I mean, there's 14 billion people.
And the diversity.
I've never been, but some of you.
Oh, you should.
The diversity of city.
What are the cities you like to go to in India?
The South.
Delhi is a symbol for me of the plundering of India.
Because it had a Muslim identity, but one that had contempt for the native population.
And so, for example, the Indian Muslim is more likely to relish and portray the invaders of India as the heroes.
Now, the Taj Mahal itself is a Muslim.
Yes, but made by Indian workers, Indian material, Indian river.
We forget everything.
And 200 years of the British, too, they were so mesmerized by the caliphates of Turkey.
For them, being a Hindu was, it's just in India.
You don't have 15 Hindu countries.
Right.
The organization of Hindu countries.
Yeah, it's one person.
200.
What about Mumbai?
I've heard that's an amazing thing.
It's any place in India is worth visiting and observing because there is humility, there is color, there is language.
There is nobody who says my language is superior than you.
The culture mixes.
There is a naivety in which the Indian Hindu is still psychologically damaged from over a thousand years of occupation.
It's like white minority rule in South Africa.
So the Muslims came, butchered the native Muslims, but the Muslims of India and Pakistan only honor those who plundered India.
They don't, for example, even know that Muhammad's family, Prophet Muhammad's family, had to take refuge in India under a Hindu king to save their lives.
So we honor those who killed the Prophet's children and yet try to be Islamist.
How is India these days?
Because I know Donald Trump has focused on his personal rapport with Narendra Modi and they've both had rallies in each other's countries.
Is that just a political tit-for-tat?
Do you think they're genuinely friends?
Is America and India getting closer as a triangulation against China?
Well, Chinese jets are flying 35 kilometers from the Indian border.
Why jet fighting incursion?
An incursion into Indian territory.
Yes, yes.
What's that all about?
China today is, how should I put it in a mild way?
I won't put it in a mild way.
Is the evil empire that is out to destroy Asian African countries of their dignity?
So you talk to Vietnamese or you talk to Indians, you talk to Zambians, Eritreans, everywhere that China has gone has by investing money and bringing their own workers who are usually prisoners.
Yeah, they're almost like indented.
No, no, they're not indented.
So they shift their prisons.
I'm talking of Pakistan.
They shifted their prisons into what is Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
And then they bid for contracts because their labor is free.
Yeah.
Well, I'm shocked they haven't done that in Canada yet.
It wouldn't surprise me if they did very soon.
They are there.
Now, does India, does the Indian Prime Minister, does the Indian government, does the Indian media, does the Indian establishment regard China as a threat or an investor or a market?
This is the tragedy of corporate business, and this is why I'm on the left all the time, that the business community is least interested in the country they deal with.
This is the reality.
They're dazzled by China's money.
The new form of capitalism that has emerged after 1990 is, I don't give a damn about what happens to my country.
I'm interested in the share value that I get.
So an Indian businessman who's invested in China or Chinese businessman who manufacture 80% of India's cell phones, they don't, on the Chinese side, they are Chinese nationalists.
On the Indian side, it's not so.
Just like it's not so in how Zambia lost its sovereignty to China or Zimbabwe, they've given loans and then the country can't pay back the loans, so they say, we'll take your city.
They've done it in Sri Lanka, they've done it in Bangladesh.
It is the worst form of imperialism that is coming together with this notion that money can buy anything.
Now, imperialism is normally an insult directed at white Western European countries.
But I agree with you, imperialism today, I think it's in many ways a Chinese phenomenon.
It is.
Where are the decolonialists of the left criticizing Chinese imperialism?
This is very significant because the pro-Chinese left in India, for example, which is the only place that has Maoists, the Chinese dumped Mao, but the Indian pro-Chinese, it's called the Communist Party of India, Marxist-Leninists, they are what are called the Naxals.
Naxalbari was a town where the Maoist, supposed Maoist uprising had to take place, fell down, but now Indian hardline urban rural guerrillas who are supposedly Maoists call themselves Naxalites.
And they have very bizarre interests.
So you have all these millionaire Marxists, the Greta types, you know, with expensive eyeglasses and who worry about whale, the right of whales somewhere in the South Pacific or how about, you know, gay birds, you know, all things that have nothing to do with the working people.
So suddenly they've taken over the left after 1990.
Places where Ed Broadbent used to win cannot elect a new Democrat anymore.
So that's in Canada.
I'm saying the same.
And it's the same in India.
It's the same in India.
The Communist Party of India that used to elect 40 to 50 members of parliament right across the country, it used to form government in two states.
Kerala, which is the only Indian state with 100% literacy.
They speak the Malayali language, a wonderful place, by the way.
And this is where the Jewish community, after the destruction of the first temple, settled over there.
So you have synagogues there as well.
You should go there.
All these places the CPI or the CPM had, and in West Bengal, which is now almost an Islamist government over there, because the chief minister over there supports all anti-Indian Islamist parties from India's city of Calcutta.
It's shocking sometimes because nobody is analyzing that the world's economy has changed and therefore what you're studying about how to end poverty, how will it happen?
How will we make sure that decent wages now, of course, if there is no place to go to employment, the question of decent wages doesn't come.
So we haven't on the left come at a place where we could study economics.
We've ended up with gay rights, we've ended up with feminism, we've ended up with green, you know, greening of the earth and all that.
And as I said, nobody in Oshawa wants to talk about that issue.
You know, I remember when Donald Trump went very quickly, this was right before the virus.
Yes.
He went to, I think it was called Namaste Trump.
Yes.
It was a huge rally.
Yeah.
But it was sabotaged.
How was it sabotaged?
I didn't know.
It was sabotaged by the Islamists.
How is it?
The day Mr. Trump was there, they had an all-out riot in the capital.
And they, now, try to imagine how sometimes I consider even Indian politicians too dumb to understand the threat they face.
So Donald Trump is there, Mr. Modi is there.
You would think that any Indian would be pleased that this is taking place.
Guess what?
Right in the heart of Delhi is an institute called the University, I'm translating, the University of the Islamic State.
And right on top of it is written Allahu Akbar, which is not the case in Islamic universities.
Islamic universities have Rabbi Zanni Ilma, which means, oh God, let me study or make me educated.
This particular university has the war cry.
And over here, an Islamic institute starts a protest that we want secularism in India.
I don't get it.
Nobody gets it because everybody's after money.
That's the point.
Either someone's short-selling, someone's trying to make, someone's trying to get an MBA.
There used to be a term in our communist circles called the whole timer.
That meant no matter what you did, you'll just get 100 rupees a month.
You'll dedicate your life to working because you educated for the poor.
I can bet you every one of them is a millionaire today who talks about, oh, you know, trying this red wine.
I didn't think about it.
I mean, I don't know my history of India that well, but when you say India has never invaded another country, I can't think of a counterpoint to that.
So it rings true.
So no war.
No war.
Within.
There are wars within.
Sure.
Yeah.
Lots of English speaking.
I mean, of course, the British legacy, a lot of common language of England.
Rule of law.
Bureaucracy, for all its flaws, is better than a monarchy.
I could cut away about 100,000 of them.
Sure.
And we'd function.
But at least there's some problems.
It is the only democracy in the developing world.
And it's the largest democracy in the world.
So the way I think of it is going through, and it's...
It's an ally of Canada.
It's a counterweight to China.
It is Canada's number one ally.
And yet we have to do that.
Do we seem like it?
I mean, true acts like China is his number one ally.
Because he's got Khalistanis in his cabinet.
Oh, so you're saying the Sikh extremism...
Not just Sikh extremists.
Islamists?
The M103 people?
Those are all people who don't like India and their victims.
This is the Pakistan Embassy working in Canada.
Very interesting.
You got Khalistan, Islamism?
Well, I tell you, Tarek, you're welcome to come and hang out in our barbershop anytime.
This is good barbershop talk.
Tarek, it's so good to see you.
And this is post-haircut trend.
Look, I'm looking good, man.
Come on.
Well, it's great to see you again.
Good to see you, man.
Are we supposed to shake hands?
You know what?
We're doing every day.
You know, as far as I'm concerned, the pandemic is over, thank God.
It's great to see you, my friend.
Come by anytime for a haircut or for lunch.
And it's good to talk about the world and to talk about places that we don't think about often enough.
And India is certainly a place to keep an eye on.
Great to see you.
Take it.
All right, there you have it.
Tarek Fada, we'll have to keep an eye peeled for what the fuck is.
I got to look that up on YouTube.
I'd like to see some of those episodes.
Stay with us for a little bit more.
Welcome back.
On my interview yesterday with Professor Philip Slayton about the state of freedom in Canada, Barb writes, I enjoyed this discussion for two reasons.
First, I believe strongly in free speech, but who doesn't?
Also, because you and the professor disagree on global warming, but managed to have a civilized conversation anyway.
I'm so fed up with the notion that we have to shut down and shout down any opposing thoughts and beliefs.
Yeah, you know, you're so right.
And I didn't want to really burrow into the global warming thing because that was sort of a tangent and we went long as it was.
But yeah, absolutely.
He wasn't saying ban him, you know?
He's the old school, true liberal in the old meaning of the word.
Civil Conversations Count00:01:31
Alas, there's so few people like that.
Sherry writes, very entertaining interview.
It felt like the two of you could have gone for hours.
A breath of fresh air after learning that the liberals wanting to censor the internet again.
You're so right.
And I hope this book gets a lot of play.
And I've emailed that video out to our subscribers, our broader group.
We put it on YouTube and I emailed it out to our broader list.
So hopefully people will see it.
John writes, very warm conversation.
Wouldn't it be nice if our PM could sit down and have a civil conversation with Canadians instead of calling us racists?
Instead, we have to be mocked by his paid-off media party.
Yeah, you know, the idea of talking to someone that makes you a little bit uncomfortable, I think that's okay.
I think that's real life, by the way.
But apparently in politics, you're not allowed to do it.
Well, that's our show for today.
What do you think about my Rex Murphy talk?
I like people from India.
I like Tamils.
I grew up in Calgary, watching a large Tamil population back there in the 70s and 80s.
But these are successful Canadians, Indo-Canadians by far the most successful group economically.
I just don't get it why people who won the lottery in life, successful, wealthy, no barriers in front of them at all, are trying to appropriate American black crises to promote their media careers in Canada when they're not black.
I find that pretty weird.
It's sort of a racial dole-a-zole thing, don't you think?