FIRST READING: Why a convicted synagogue bomber is teaching at Carleton University

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On the same weekend that Montreal hosted a conference featuring the head of Samidoun, Canada’s newest listed terror organization, Ottawa’s Carleton University faced renewed outrage for employing a lecturer wanted as a convicted terrorist.

Last year, 70-year-old Hassan Diab was convicted in absentia by a French court in connection with the 1980 bombing of the Rue Copernic synagogue in Paris.

The explosion, which killed four people, was the first deadly attack against French Jews since the Second World War — and marked the beginning of a new era of French antisemitic violence committed by Palestinian or Islamist terrorists.

This fall, Diab is teaching the third-year course Social Justice in Action at Carleton — a fact that made headlines in Jewish and Israeli media over the weekend after it was the subject of an open letter by the group B’nai Brith.

Addressed to Carleton University president Jerry Tomberlin, the letter demands Diab’s dismissal, saying it “raises significant questions regarding Carlton’s dedication to the safety and well-being of its students and staff.”

One of the victims in the 1980 bombing was Israeli cinematographer Aliza Shagrir, whose widowed husband Micha Shagrir became one of the central figures of Israeli cinema.

“Apparently carrying out a murderous terrorist act against a Jewish target does not go against the values of Carleton University,” read a statement published this week in the Jerusalem Post by the Shagrirs’ two sons, one of whom was with their mother at the time of the blast.

Diab has been teaching at Carleton since 2006. Not only is the university aware of his overseas terror conviction, but it has persistently been one of the loudest champions of his innocence.

Diab, who came to Canada in 1993, has said he is a victim of mistaken identity and had nothing to do with the bombing — a contention that has been repeatedly endorsed by his colleagues at Carleton’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology.

Immediately after his conviction last April, the department sent out an official communiqué demanding that the federal Liberal government block Diab’s extradition (the statement has since been deleted from the Carleton University website).

The year before that, the department even organized a rally in downtown Ottawa to assert that French authorities were pursuing a sham case against Diab. “Hassan Diab was not involved at all in that bombing that took place in 1980,” read an event listing.

The entire course outline of Social Justice of Action seems to consist of Diab reiterating his innocence.

“The course puts central emphasis on miscarriages of justice in the context of Canadian extradition law, with close examination of a high-profile extradition case that highlights the pertinent issues,” it reads.

The “high-profile extradition case” is his own, and among the course’s required reading is the website JusticeforHassanDiab.org.

Diab wasn’t a suspect in the bombing until the late 1990s, and the French case against him relied on four main pieces of circumstantial evidence.

One, his passport showed him entering and exiting Europe just before and just after the bombing. Two, French authorities had testimony from friends alleging that Diab was connected with the terror group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Three, he matched descriptions of “Alexander Panadriyu,” the pseudonymous figure who planted the bomb.

Finally, French handwriting analysts found similarities between Diab’s writing and that of the fictional Panadriyu on a hotel registration card.

Diab has been extradited to France once before, and the failure of French authorities to prosecute his case in that instance raised criticisms of Canadian extradition law.

Diab was turned over to French authorities in 2014 following a lengthy extradition process that had begun in 2008. Diab was then detained for three years but then ultimately released without trial, with judges ruling that there was insufficient evidence to proceed.

Diab’s lawyers have long maintained that he was in Lebanon at the time of the attacks and that his was a case of mistaken identity.

The case would not be brought to trial until a 2021 French Supreme Court decision ordered the case reopened. By that time Diab was back in Canada and the federal government was reluctant to turn him over again.

In 2018, the Trudeau government ordered an external review of Diab’s case, and to investigate criticisms that Canada had been too quick to accede to French demands.

A final report, published in 2021, concluded that Diab had not been treated differently than any other Canadian, but acknowledged the “discomfort” of the Ministry of Justice going through the extradition process only for Diab to be sent home after three years of detention in a French jail.

“He was legally extradited having been afforded all appropriate procedural protections,” it read. “The fact that he was not convicted in France does not render the extradition process flawed.”

Ujjal Dosanjh, the former health minister under prime minister Paul Martin, has long been one of the most outspoken of the pre-Trudeau Liberals. Still, in a recent interview with the National Post, he was blunter than usual in stating “Trudeau, sociologically and politically, is an idiot.” He then added, “you can actually quote me, I really don’t care. Because he’s an imbecile in terms of understanding how you build nations, how you build countries.”

Canada Post could strike this week. It wasn’t too long ago that postal strikes could – and did – grind Canada to a halt. But with most daily communications in the hands of digital means and with package delivery increasingly in the hands of non-Canada Post entities, it’s entirely possible most Canadians wouldn’t even notice a work stoppage. Thus, the National Post prepared this explainer to outline how it might make a difference, if any.  

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