A couple months ago, on the first day of a major Islamic religious holiday, a man casually walked up to a mosque in Stockholm, Sweden. With hundreds of people looking on, he produced a Koran and began ripping out the pages. He wiped a few of these pages on his shoe. Then, the man set the Koran on fire.
Five thousand miles away, at the U.S. State Department, Joe Biden’s diplomats sprang into action. Within hours, the State Department issued the strongest possible condemnation of the Koran burning. “I will say that we do condemn it,” said a State Department spokesman. The spokesman added that the demonstration had created “an environment of fear” that “will impact the ability of Muslims and members of other religious minority groups from freely exercising their right to freedom of religion or belief in Sweden.”
Whatever you think of that response, you have to admit it’s a bit surprising. It was just two years ago that criminals torched, vandalized, and looted more than 80 churches across Canada. Unlike Sweden, Canada sits directly on the border of the United States. Some churches that went up in flames are a ten-minute drive from major population centers in this country. And yet, as the churches were razed, Joe Biden’s State Department didn’t say a word. One Koran burning in Sweden gets their attention. The destruction of dozens of churches a few miles north of the U.S. border? They can’t be bothered.
Neither could Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau. As his country witnessed a historic campaign of anti-Christian terrorism two years ago — a campaign that, somehow, led to just one arrest — Trudeau said the violence was unacceptable but also “understandable.” Watch:
It’s “understandable,” Justin Trudeau says, as thugs torch Christian churches. He ignores the attack on Christianity in his country, just as politicians in the United States ignored the deadly mass shooting by a trans terrorist at a Christian school in Nashville earlier this year. And just as they ignored the campaign of terrorism directed against pro-life pregnancy centers.
In all of these cases, elected officials didn’t simply excuse violence against Christians. Instead, for years, with the help of corporate media, these officials engineered hoaxes for the purpose of demonizing Christians. The point of these hoaxes was to create a pretext for the violence that inevitably followed. In the U.S., the hoax took the form of disingenuous warnings about “trans genocide” and an entirely fictional epidemic of anti-trans murders — murders that turn out, in nearly every case, to be related to domestic disputes, drugs or prostitution and had nothing to do with the fact that the victim identified as trans.
In Canada, the hoax that prompted the church burnings began in earnest in May 2021, when Canadian media reported that ground-penetrating radar had found the unmarked graves of more than 200 children near an Indian Residential School in Kamloops, which is located in British Columbia. Many of the media reports and social media posts referred to these alleged sites as “mass graves.” The Canadian government had established these residential schools in the 19th century to assimilate native Canadian children into Canadian culture. They were mainly operated and funded by the Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist and Anglican churches.
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Leftists in Canada have long maintained that these schools mistreated children. That’s been conventional wisdom for some time in Canada; it’s one of the reasons Canadian activists now argue that Canada should strip Catholic schools of all provincial funding. These supposed “mass graves” were the confirmation that they needed. The evidence to support the narrative they already believed.
Now, to be clear, it’s long been suspected that children did die of diseases like tuberculosis and influenza at these schools. It’s also true that, in that time period, countless children of all races and ethnicities across the world died of these diseases. But the discovery of supposed “mass graves” at one of these schools, to the media and the Canadian government, meant something very different. The finding, they suggested, meant that Christians had systematically murdered children at these schools and then covered up the evidence.
The Toronto Star reported, “The Remains of 215 Children Have Been Found.” The AP reported, “Over 600 bodies found at another Catholic school for Indigenous children in Canada.” U.S. News and many other outlets called it confirmation of “genocide.” Within days, there were reports that ground-penetrating radar had found unmarked graves at residential school sites all over Canada. Here’s a Bloomberg report on an additional discovery:
There were dozens of reports like this, all throughout the summer of 2021. This was the reporting from the entire news media in the United States and Canada. In response, Justin Trudeau knelt at one of the supposed grave sites and pretended to cry. Canada Day celebrations were canceled. The government pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to investigate. There were mass protests. Statutes were toppled.
One outlet that says it “serves” indigenous communities, APTN News, reported that “Demonstrators toppled statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth in Winnipeg during rallies honouring the children discovered in unmarked graves on the sites of former residential schools over the past month.” Here’s what that looked like:
Demonstrators toppled statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth in Winnipeg this afternoon during rallies honouring the children discovered in unmarked graves on the sites of former residential schools over the past month. pic.twitter.com/Zx0aqPGcOW
— APTN News (@APTNNews) July 2, 2021
In the eyes of these rioters, Queen Elizabeth represents colonialism, and colonialism means taking advantage of the natives, not helping them. This anti-colonialist narrative is absurdly simplistic, and ignores the actual facts of history. So naturally they want to destroy all remnants of that history, starting with the statues. This was the mainstream position on the Canadian Left. Harsha Walia, the executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association — Canada’s version of the ACLU — encouraged the vandals. She declared, “Burn it all down.”
Two years later, the lies that these barbarians have been telling have completely fallen apart. No mass graves have been found at these supposed “unmarked grave sites” that have been allegedly uncovered with ground-penetrating radar. No bodies, no remains have been unearthed. None at all. It was all a hoax.
The alleged gravesite in Kamloops, it turns out, was the site of a septic field, which was used to dispose of the school’s sewage. The school dug a massive line of trenches three-feet deep for this purpose, but the “researchers” who scanned the site with ground-penetrating radar somehow weren’t aware of that. How could they miss that little detail? How could they fail to consider other potential reasons why a school might dig trenches? How was a “mass grave” the very first and only assumption? Remember that the radar never detected bodies. It detected “anomalies.” Anomaly just means something unexpected or strange. If there is something unexpected in the ground, why would you assume that the thing must be a mass grave of dead children?
In two years, no one in Canadian state media has bothered to ask that question. Instead, they’ve sought to discredit anyone who doubts the false narrative. As recently as this summer, the state media outlet CBC ran this headline: “Residential school denialists tried to dig up suspected unmarked graves in Kamloops.” The Toronto Star wrote last year, “Genocide deniers ask: Where are the bodies of the residential schoolchildren?”
One senior member of parliament, Marc Miller, argued that Canadians who ask questions are, “part of a pattern of denialism and distortion.” In other words, seeking verifiable evidence of the media’s claims is now “denialism.” It’s precisely what they do with climate change. They make these outlandish, unsupported claims, and then when you look into those claims at all, they call you a “denier.” What happens to deniers? You can probably guess. If you’re not on their side of the issue, then you might go to prison. This summer, as Jon Kay reported at Quillette, the investigator appointed by Trudeau to investigate these graves called on the government to give “urgent consideration” to “civil and criminal sanctions” against residential school “denialism.”
If we take that proposal seriously — and there are signs the Canadian government will — then, ironically, it could mean a lot of natives are about to go to prison. In their efforts to prove their theory of residential school mass graves, these natives are inadvertently debunking it.
Chief Derek Nepinak of one Indian tribe just decided to dig up some graves at a residential school in Manitoba. This is a school that, just a few weeks ago, was reported to be the site of 14 “possible burial sites.” Here’s what the Chief found:
There’s a big buildup and all the disclaimers before he gets around to the reveal, which is that the “ground-penetrating radar” hadn’t picked up unmarked graves. In fact, it picked up a bunch of oddly shaped rocks. Alas, more than a dozen children had not been buried under this school.
You’d think that would be a cause for celebration. This man just confirmed that children had not, in fact, been murdered and stuffed underground while attending a school many years ago. To most people, that’d be an uplifting development. A relief. But that’s not what you see in that video. Instead, the “Chief” is clearly bothered by the discovery or lack thereof. He says he’s worried “denialists” might use reality to undermine his activism and his quest for victimhood. The lack of dead children in the ground worries him. Think about that. And he concludes by insisting that, despite this little setback with his theory, everyone knows the Canadian residential school system was abusive. Everyone knows the Christians treated these kids horribly, he says.
Do we know that? What reason do we have to believe that, exactly? The Canadian government and media just spent two years lying about an obviously falsifiable story, which is that there were mass graves at these schools. They lied about genocide when they knew people could simply dig up the graves and prove them wrong. So why should we believe anything they have to say about how horribly these schools were run for centuries? If these schools were so horrible, why did they have to concoct a blatant, grotesque lie about them?
If you didn’t want people to ask those questions, you’d be honest with them. You’d do the exact opposite of what these cretins are doing. Lying like this creates chaos and derails any possibility of a reasonable, fact-based conversation about what actually happened at these schools. It’s almost as if they’re doing it on purpose.
It’s tempting to dismiss all of this and say it’s only happening in Canada, which is a uniquely godless place. And at some level, that’s true. Canada is one of the few nations on earth to permit abortion up to the moment of birth. They’re one of the only places on Earth where people who don’t even have terminal illnesses can be euthanized like stray dogs. That level of savagery is exceptional.
But on this issue, as with so many others, the Left in this country agrees with Canadian liberals. Recall that, a year before the Canadian church burnings, rioters in this country torched St. John’s church across from the White House. No one on the Left pretended to care. When Donald Trump tried to tour the damage, they called him a fascist.
The kind of people I’m talking about here are not confined to Canada. And their goal is not simply to win elections. Their goal is destroying the foundation of Western civilization, most notably Christianity. And in the face of this effort, virtually no one is pushing back — not even the Vatican. In fact, the Pope has apologized to these Canadian activists. He went on a “pilgrimage of penance” over Canada’s residential schools.
What did that accomplish? Nothing, of course. Cultural vandals will forget their own lies the moment they’re disproven. They’ll just move on to the next lie. But they’ll never forget weakness once they see it. They’ll never be deterred by anyone who doesn’t tell the truth about what they’re doing. So here’s the truth. Like Justin Trudeau, Joe Biden’s handlers hate Catholics, hate Western civilization, and they’ll use whatever hammer is available to beat us over the head. They are spiritual enemies. It’s time to stop giving them the upper hand.