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I speak of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. At the moment, the SSNP is busy running death squads on behalf of its patron, the Syrian tyrant and mass-murderer Bashar Al-Assad, mostly in the vicinity of Homs and the suburbs of Damascus.

Open nominations were supposed to be about “building a team as diverse as our great nation,” as Trudeau put it recently, but among Arab Canadians, perhaps especially within Canada’s heartbroken Syrian community, “diversity” is complicated. Syria’s brave young democrats are almost all dead, in jail or on the run, and those who’ve found a home in Canada are up against a network of well-connected regime hangers-on with deeper roots here.

This brings us to the Liberal party’s dilemma in having given the green light last year to University of Ottawa professor Nour El Kadri, a former vice-president of the Canadian Arab Federation, in his hopes to beat three other “green-lighted” challengers in the contest to serve as Nepean’s Liberal standard-bearer. Late Tuesday night, the decision was made. El Kadri had to go.

The story begins several weeks ago when certain members of the Syrian-Canadian community brought to my attention a troubling number of concerns about El Kadri, mainly relating to his apparent intimacy with the fascist SSNP. But for a brief and friendly interregnum during the Baathist regime’s phoney national elections of 2012, the SSNP has been a member of Assad’s ruling coalition since 2005.