Foreign influence in Canada is bad if it comes from China, but not even worth mentioning if it comes from Israel. That seems to be the position of the Globe and Mail.
Canada's 'paper of record' is so gripped with anti-Chinese fervor that it is blind to a blatant double standard. Contrasting the Globe and Mail's reporting on Canadian groups close to China and Israel highlights the xenophobic nature of their coverage.
Alongside Washington's bid to build international opposition to China, the Globe has sought to expose Chinese influence in Canada. The paper has recently criticized Chinese government funded Confucius Institutes, which sponsor Mandarin programs and other cultural endeavors. In an October 15 story titled "Beijing used influence over B.C. schools to push its agenda and keep tabs on Canadian politics, documents show" the Globe reported on a Vancouver area Confucius-Institute-promoted school program where children read a poem that included the line "I am proud! I am Chinese!"
In a follow-up column citing the poem reading titled "It's time to kick the Confucius Institute out of Canada" Gary Mason complained, "we have no laws or protections to force organizations acting in the interest of foreign powers to be registered and accountable."
In a column on Thursday titled "Canada's laws about foreign agents haven't caught up to the modern world" Campbell Clark also called for legislation to blunt Chinese influence in Canada. "The first [to do] is to establish much greater transparency about the people in Canada working on behalf of foreign interests. The second is a law that signals it is not acceptable to secretly do the bidding of a foreign government in Canada."
On October 28 the Globe published a story headlined "Chinese-Canadian groups laud China's fight against U.S., allies in Korean War". The story quoted former Canadian diplomat and senior fellow at the right-wing Macdonald Laurier Institute, Charles Burton, saying "it is so wrong to get Canadians to identify with the interests of a foreign state. That goes against the principle of citizenship."
(The Chinese-Canadian groups' statement on the 1950-53 Korean War was historically accurate. As many as 4 million mostly Koreans and Chinese died in a war that was partly a response to the success of China's communist/nationalist revolution. Before China entered the war US aircraft bombed that country and Beijing only sent forces into Korea after hundreds of thousands of hostile US-led troops approached its border.)
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