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It should come as no surprise that the Syrian mass murderer and war criminal Bashar al-Assad and his backers in Tehran and Moscow have been lately drawing increasing support from European fascists and other such riffraff, as well as from the usual neo-Stalinist “anti-war” zombies who clutter all up the conversations that a genuinely “progressive” left might otherwise be capable of having about the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria.

But it was quite a surprise when Donald Lafleur, executive vice-president of the 3.3-million-member Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), showed up in Damascus last week at a jamboree of so-called trade unionists from North Korea, Iran, China and the fictional Luhansk People’s Republic — the Eastern Ukraine region invaded by Russia in 2014.

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Perhaps most surprised of all was the CLC. “We had no interest in being represented there,” CLC spokesman Joel Duff told me. “We take our international relations very seriously. When we make a conscious decision to get involved internationally, there’s a discussion that happens. That never happened. So obviously we’re really concerned, and we’re trying to get to the bottom of how this came to pass.”