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What’s the deal with all those public occasions at which El Kadri is affectionately presented by the SSNP as one of its own?

After having acquired quite a bulging file on the subject, I put a series of questions to El Kadri Tuesday morning. I copied my questions to Gerald Butts, Justin Trudeau’s tireless and valiant principal adviser. Among the things I was curious to know: For years, the SSNP itself has been referring to El Kadri as one of its leading personalities in Canada -a member of the national council, a member of the national directorate, and so on – so what was up with that? How to explain reports in the independent Arab-language press identifying El Kadri similarly?

What’s the deal with all those public occasions at which El Kadri is affectionately presented by the SSNP as one of its own? What about the photographs of El Kadri with SSNP bigshots at an SSNP summer-camp event where he reportedly delivered a rousing homily commemorating the life of Antoun Saadeh, the SSNP’s jackbooted founder, or that other photograph at an SSNP event with El Kadri delivering another speech at a lectern adorned with a larger-than-life poster of Il Duce Saadeh?

Ordinarily one might put at least some of these questions to the SSNP, say, to its media representative in Canada. Awkwardly, according to an April, 2012 report in the Arabic Shahba News about an “anti-war” rally (or more precisely, a pro-Assad rally) in Ottawa, that person is, or was, Nour El Kadri.

At the Ottawa funeral of SSNP secretary Nasri Saab, there’s El Kadri again, identified as a member of the SSNP’s Canadian national council. Here he is yet again, at an event organized by the SSNP’s Ottawa chapter attended by the since-evicted Russian ambassador Georgiy Mamedov, and again El Kadri is identified as a member of the SSNP’s national council. Of course it’s possible that all these years the SSNP in Canada has been mistaking El Kadri for one of its own leading figures, and that he is not a “rafiq,” a comrade, as SSNP propaganda calls him, and also that all this time El Kadri has been wholly unaware of this astonishing cavalcade of magnificent error.