The media’s trial of Jagmeet Singh for alleged “extremism” exposes an extreme double standard.

Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s associations with extremism were routinely ignored: from his role in establishing the pro-apartheid Northern Foundation, whose speaker roster included neo-Nazi Paul Fromm, in 1988; to his inclusion of a representative from the Jewish Defence League, labelled a “right-wing terrorist group” by the FBI in 2001, on a taxpayer-funded trip to Israel in 2014.

During Harper’s tenure as Prime Minister, “a militant charismatic fringe [of Christian nationalists] … gained influence out of all proportion to its numerical heft,” as former Maclean’s Washington bureau chief Marci McDonald documented in her book The Armageddon Factor.

“Not only [did] it help to reshape foreign policy, the public service and the courts,” noted McDonald, but “it [threw] its weight behind a range of socially conservative policies that it regards as prerequisites to remaking Canada as a distinctly Christian nation” — even while “media failed to pick up the clues to its increasing influence.”

Current Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer’s connections to extreme right-wing Rebel Media — described as “a global platform for an extreme anti-Muslim ideology” by National Post journalist Richard Warnica — have similarly received shockingly inadequate scrutiny.

Scheer’s campaign manager for the 2019 election is former Rebel Media corporate director Hamish Marshall, who had previously steered Scheer’s party leadership campaign to victory while working from the Rebel offices in Toronto.

In an interview with Toronto Life last May, Scheer listed the Rebel as one of his “go-to news sources.” Twenty-five per cent of sitting Conservative MPs — including Scheer himself, as well as House Opposition Leader Candice Bergen and shadow cabinet members Maxime Bernier, Steven Blaney, and Pierre Poilievre — have made guest appearances on Rebel Media shows.

In August — after the Rebel’s pro-White supremacist coverage of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville elicited widespread outrage (due to the killing of anti-fascism activist Heather Heyer) — Scheer announced he would temporarily suspend interviews with the outlet “as long as the editorial direction of that particular institution remains as it is.”

The fact that it took Scheer so long to distance himself even so meekly from the Rebel demonstrates a disturbing tolerance for its brand of hateful intolerance. The flagrant racism of Scheer’s “go-to news source” was not only apparent, but notorious, long before the neo-Nazi riots in Charlottesville.

For example, in March 2017, then-Rebel host Gavin McInnes — founder of the self-described “Western chauvinist” group the Proud Boys, whose militant arm has been characterized as an “accelerant for violence at right-wing rallies” by the Southern Poverty Law Center — published a video on the site entitled “10 Things I Hate About Jews,” attracting international condemnation.

That same month, another Rebel host at the time, Faith Goldy, called for a “crusade” against Muslims in Bethlehem, invoking the white nationalist battle cry “deus vult” (“God wills it”).

The Rebel’s former U.K. correspondent, Tommy Robinson, started the English Defence League, which has been linked to bomb plots and mob violence directed against Muslims in the U.K.

And yet, Scheer’s enduring relationships with personalities involved in the development of Rebel Media, like Hamish Marshall, have garnered relatively scant media attention — in stark contrast to the hounding of Jagmeet Singh for speaking at a 2015 rally commemorating the 1984 Sikh massacre, and a 2016 event where one of Singh’s co-panellists appeared to endorse violence in Sikh sovereignty activism.

Commentators have indicted Singh of extremism by association with Sikh separatists, while omitting crucial pieces of context: that the last fatality connected with Sikh insurgency occurred more than two decades ago; and that Sikhs themselves have been subjected to extreme violence by Indian security forces, which “arbitrarily detained, tortured, executed, and ‘disappeared’ tens of thousands of Sikhs in counter-insurgency operations” with impunity, according to Human Rights Watch.

While Singh has been called to account for atrocities committed by his co-religionists when he was just a child, Scheer has been permitted to evade accountability for his connections with groups perpetrating violence in the present.

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This is symptomatic of Canadian media’s terrorism tunnel-vision, which seems to have trouble seeing extremism unless it comes with a turban and beard.

Azeezah Kanji is a legal analyst.

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