Professor in Canada Convicted of Bombing Synagogue, Media Focuses on His ‘Ordeal’

The headline in Sunday’s Ottawa Citizen was strange: “‘The ordeal’ is not over for Hassan Diab after French court sentences him to life in prison.” Clearly, the Citizen’s sympathy is with Diab, despite the fact that he must have been convicted of something extremely serious to warrant being given life in prison. And the Citizen is not alone.

Hassan Diab is a darling of the Leftist political and media establishment, despite the fact that the crime he was convicted of committing was the bombing of the Rue Copernic synagogue in Paris during Shabbat services on Oct. 3, 1980. Four people were killed and 46 others were injured. Or given the Left’s increasing antisemitism, is the support he has received not despite the nature of his crime, but because of it?

Diab, a lecturer at Carleton University in Ottawa, didn’t attend his trial in Paris and scorned the proceedings. After he was convicted Friday, Canada’s state-funded CBC reported that he “expressed disappointment and called his situation ‘Kafkaesque.’” He added, “We hoped reason would prevail,” and said that it was “still devastating to know they pursued that biased road which led to the unfortunate decision.”

Diab’s lawyer, Donald Bayne, agreed, and decried the unfairness of the proceedings in Paris: “The evidence shows he’s innocent and yet they’ve convicted him. It’s a political result. It’s a wrongful conviction.” Maybe. It’s nothing unusual for people who have been convicted of crimes to insist upon their innocence, but Diab has Leftist friends in high places, including Justin Trudeau.

Randall Garrison, whom the CBC identifies as a New Democratic Party “justice critic,” declared: “The horrible conditions Dr. Diab suffered over flimsy and discredited evidence violated his rights and poisoned the process.

despite the fact that he must have been convicted of something extremely serious to warrant being given life in prison. And the Citizen is not alone.Hassan Diab is a darling of the Leftist political and media establishment, despite the fact that the crime he was convicted of committing was the bombing of the Rue Copernic synagogue in Paris during Shabbat services on Oct. 3, 198

As the Ottawa citizen reports,

Looking for more of examples typical PC liberal sympathy, such as the Boston Globe's treatment of the surviving Boston Marathon bomber, I found that it appears that his conviction warrants doubt: "Evidence presented during the extradition hearing was circumstantial, relying heavily on a handwriting analysis that linked Diab to words the suspected bomber penned on a hotel registration card."

and

The attack was initially cited as a Neo-Nazi hate crime but was eventually linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated terrorist group since 1997, that has been known to carry out many attacks against the Jewish state of Israel, according to NYT. After nearly two decades, police identified Diab, who had been teaching as a sociology professor in Canada, as a suspect using “police sketches,” “handwriting analysis” and passport stamps. - https://dailycaller.com/2023/04/21/paris-synagogue-bombing-jewish/

and

And It did not seem to matter to Canadian and French authorities that he was in Beirut at the time of the bombing, that his fingerprints did not match the proffered evidence and that the handwriting analysis was flawed. There was no personal history that could connect Hassan Diab in any way with this deed, and Canadian judge Maranger said that the evidence was “very problematic”, “convoluted”, “very confusing”, and “with conclusions that are suspect” - https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/the-ordeal-of-hassan-diab

While the Left treats Islam with kid gloves, since they both count the God of the Bible as its enemy, which He is, and the Left would hardly be running sympathetic headlines for a conservative Christian who was convicted on such circumstantial evidence, yet we cannot sanction such weak evidence as this, which would put someone in prison for life. In the Bible, 2 or 3 eyewitnesses are required for capital crime convictions, and with false witnesses receiving the penalty that their lying received.

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