What was Canadian Labour Congress official doing in Syria?

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.

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.”

Formerly a national vice-president of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, Lafleur has been a senior CLC officer since May 2014. While the Damascus event was convened by the World Federation of Trade Unions, a Soviet-era relic, the CLC is affiliated with the Brussels-based International Trade Union Confederation.

Duff said Lafleur appears to have travelled to Damascus on his holiday time, and it wasn’t known this week where the CLC executive vice-president is, exactly. The matter will be dealt with when CLC president Hassan Yussuff returns from a meeting of the International Union of Operating Engineers in the United States. “We’re taking this seriously,” Duff said. “We’re trying to get to the bottom of it.”

Also in attendance at the Damascus meeting was a kind of travelling show of nominally left-wing activist-journalists who have made a habit of popping in for public-relations exercises of one sort or another in Russia, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Among them were the Kremlin-friendly American gadflies Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil, both associated with a pseudo-journalism project called The Grayzone, which is notorious for its lurid anti-Israel propaganda, its conspiracy theories, its virulent loathing of Israel and its flattering portraits of Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro.

The Twitter phenomenon Rania Khalek, who works for the Kremlin propaganda start-up In the Now, posted a “breathtaking view of Syria” from a vantage point that would have given her a direct view of Saydnaya Prison, where Amnesty International reckons more than 13,000 civilians were executed, incinerated and buried during the four years prior to 2015.

Fra Hughes of the Irish Republican Socialist Party appears to have travelled directly from Caracas to Damascus where he was pleased to meet Assad himself, “an affable, engaging, clever man,” Hughes recounted. Forget what everybody else tells you about Syria, Hughes has advised on his personal website. The 500,000 dead, the six million refugees, the continuing bombardment of heavily-populated civilian districts, the regime’s meticulously-documented use of sarin gas and chlorine gas — don’t blame Assad or Russia or Iran.

It’s all the doing of “the West,” Hughes explains, to ensure that “the expansionist dreams of Zionism come to fruition.”

Also conventioneering in Damascus were Ajamu Baraka, the U.S. Green Party’s nominee for vice-president in 2016, and Paul Larudee, the Lebanese-Californian founder of the Free Gaza Movement.

Just a few days before the arrival of these purportedly “left-wing” characters, three French Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) — Thierry Mariani, Virginie Joron and Nicolas Bay of the extreme-right National Rally Party, formerly the National Front — were in Damascus for talks and sightseeing. And a few days before that, the Assad regime was hosting a trio from the Italian neo-fascist CasaPound group, in Aleppo. The Syrian tourism ministry boasted that the Italian delegation was mighty impressed with the pace of Aleppo’s recovery. “Syria is getting its tourism groove back.”

That the European far right would embrace Assad makes sense, since Assad’s barbaric Ba’ath Party is a deafening echo of the Nazis of the 1940s. Hungary’s right-populist Viktor Orbán has announced his intention to break with the Europe Union and begin the process of diplomatic normalization with the Assad regime. To Orbán’s right, Hungary’s Jobbik Party is more explicit, declaring its unequivocal backing of Assad’s tyranny. Assad has his very own support group among Europe’s neo-fascist and extreme-right groups: the European Solidarity Front for Syria (ESFS).

So what was the vice-president of the Canadian Labour Congress doing in Damascus, swanning around with officials from Assad’s brutal dictatorship and giving interviews with Venezuela’s Telesur propaganda station pledging the support of Canada’s labour movement in Assad’s efforts to get out from under Canada’s sanctions on the regime?

“Having someone more or less freestyle like this is beyond my immediate experience,” the CLC’s Joel Duff told me. “We need to find out how and why this came to pass. Questions need to be answered.”

WE’RE TAKING THIS SERIOUSLY.

— CLC SPOKESMAN JOEL DUFF

TERRY GLAVIN