Hassan Diab wrongly targeted by French prosecutors, and betrayed by the Canadian government yet again | Op-Ed
Photo Credit: (CTV News/Google Images)
Written by: Peter Gose
Three years ago, when French investigating judge Jean-Marc Herbaut found insufficient evidence to charge Hassan Diab for the 1980 bombing of a Paris synagogue, Dr. Diab and his supporters dared to hope that his ordeal (ongoing since 2007) might finally be over. Even Prime Minister Trudeau said at the time that Dr. Diab’s lengthy extradition proceedings and three years in a French jail “never should have happened” and “should never happen again.” Sadly, however, on January 27, 2021, a French court overturned the 2018 decision and ordered Dr. Diab to stand trial. It is “happening again” and instead of defending its own citizen the Trudeau government’s hapless response is merely to review the decision and refuse comment.
The French court’s decision to put Dr. Diab on trial is purely political and lacks even the weak evidence used to extradite him from Canada in 2014. Judge Herbaut found “consistent evidence” that Dr. Diab was in Beirut writing university exams at the time of the bombing and therefore could not have committed it. He also dismissed the French police handwriting analysis as an incompetent attempt to link Dr. Diab to a hotel registry card the bomber signed. An independent French review upheld this conclusion, thus eliminating the key piece of evidence used to extradite him and confirming what expert witnesses had already told the Canadian extradition court. Moreover, it eventually emerged that French police found fingerprints on that hotel registry card and a shoplifting confession signed by the presumptive bomber, fingerprints that do not match Dr. Diab’s. The French suppressed this hard exonerating evidence during Dr. Diab’s extradition hearing because it would refute the bogus handwriting analysis they used to place him at the scene of the crime. This reveals that French authorities and their Canadian legal representatives were long aware of Dr. Diab’s innocence, and pursued the case against him maliciously, even lying to our extradition court when they claimed no such evidence existed.
Why go to trial with such a discredited case? Pressure from the victims’ families is the public justification. They have waited more than 40 years for justice and were promised that the culprit was finally found. Their disappointment over the implosion of the case against Dr. Diab is understandable but would be better directed at their own inept authorities than an innocent scapegoat. Nonetheless, a host of powerful bad-faith actors continues to exploit the victims’ suffering, advancing their own nefarious interests by directing blame towards Dr. Diab. Foremost among them are the French police and judiciary (with the honourable exception of Judge Herbaut) whose embarassing failure to solve this case has created strong institutional pressure to wrongfully accuse and convict Dr. Diab. Their incompetence and dishonesty are obvious. Next are organizations such as the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, for whom the mere accusation of anti-semitic violence is enough to presume guilt. Finally, there were the multiple interventions of an unnamed state to introduce recycled intelligence chatter into the French investigation, which shows that foreign geopolitical interests are at work in continuing the case.
Given this array of malevolent actors and the pervasive climate of anti-Arab racism in France, our government must state unequivocally that it will not subject Dr. Diab to another extradition. It must also end its deference to the broken French legal system and intervene diplomatically to request that France drop this unsubstantiated case, the continuation of which amounts to the psychological torture of Dr. Diab and his family. Finally, Canada must reconsider its extradition treaty with France. That treaty was already shocking for its asymmetry, allowing the extradition of Canadians to France but not the reverse. Add to that France’s egregious judicial disregard for evidence in this case, its willingness to lie to our courts, and overt politicization of the case and the conclusion is inescapable: France is an unworthy extradition partner. No truly sovereign state would allow such abuse of its courts and citizens’ rights. Canada’s geopolitical subservience, our failure to repudiate the global “war on terror” and active identification with imperial interests keeps us in such humiliating relationships. People like Dr. Diab and his family, however, pay the deep human cost of this national disgrace.
Peter Gose is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Carleton University, where he was a colleague of Hassan Diab. He now lives near Victoria, BC, where he is active in permaculture, land defense and ecosocialist initiatives.
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