Global News, Stewart Bell and race problem
It looks like Global News has picked up from where the right-wing National Post left off in being the primary defamer of the Tamil community in Canada. Global News has been having a race problem in general lately but if any field needs DEI it would be the one shaping public opinion. Journalists are not some impartial arbiters of truth, especially not when reporting on something as contentious as “terrorism” with its inbuilt pro-state assumptions. Political and ideological leanings dictate the nature of coverage. Oftentimes the role of the media is to manufacture consent for state policies and you can always count on the right-wing rags to take the side of the oppressors anywhere there’s a conflict.
The common denominator connecting both these outlets is Stewart Bell, whose only talent is professional fearmongering. Like a vulture, he feeds on the struggles of marginalized communities. Tamils especially are a safe bet and he has made a career out of demonizing them for over two decades now, attempting to influence a more hardline state policy on them since liberals were seen as being soft. Aside from journalism, he has also published bestselling books on terror threat posed by racialized groups in Canada. Fearmongering became a lucrative industry especially in the post-9/11 west as it spoke to white anxiety.
In the past 4 months alone, Bell has written a total of 9 articles on Canada’s first Tamil Public Safety Minister, Gary Anandasangaree, all scrutinizing his past involvements with his community including alleged former LTTE “members”. This is an overkill and reeks of politically motivated witch-hunt, considering that Gary had already recused himself from handling cases involving his community. Consider also the facts that the LTTE has been defunct since 2009 and had never threatened Canadian national security; and the alleged LTTE “members” that Bell covered recently had only tenuous links (which they claim were coerced) as a paperboy and a cook in the 1990s when the LTTE hadn’t yet been banned in Canada. The former cook is a 51-year-old woman seeking to reunite with her family in Canada but her brief involvement 31 years ago is being used against her and Gary for so much as simply having enquired about her!
Does Bell seriously believe this is the pressing security threat to Canada right now, at a time when there’s a growing domestic threat from the white far right which has been flagged by western authorities as a bigger threat than Islamic extremism and which has even infiltrated the ranks of the Canadian military itself? If his real concern was about national security, he would focus on that, or question Canada’s participation in the U.S.-led ruinous interventions in the Middle East and its unconditional support for Israel as it carries out what a leading Canadian genocide scholar has described as a genocide which is bound to provoke backlash. In fact, much of the west’s external threat has been the result of its own doings as the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Group has found that the Muslim world’s anger toward the U.S. is fuelled in large part by the plight of Palestinians.
But that would be to miss the whole point of the Terrorism-Industrial Complex (TIC) which emerged to serve western interests during the Cold War when communists were the “terrorists”. Bell is only a cog in the machine whose whole career depends on magnifying non-white threat than accurately assessing actual threat. He will bend rules to serve this end, like his attempt in 2021 to inflate the number of terrorism-related Canadian deaths by counting Taliban attacks on Canadian troops in Afghanistan. According to his logic, terrorism isn’t only about targeting civilians as it’s commonly understood but any violence conducted by groups that western states designate as terrorists, including attacks on legitimate military targets to remove foreign occupation.
This is all perfectly in keeping with the logics of TIC which sustains itself by constantly amplifying threat perception and whose naughty list just consists of groups that the west and its allies oppose. But the list itself creates a false threat perception by lumping together disparate groups which, by design, doesn’t serve to elucidate but confuse. An ethnic separatist group in Sri Lanka doesn’t pose the same threat to Canada as global Islamism does.
But the U.S.-led liberal international order counted Sri Lanka as an ally and made its national security a western concern. In 2006 the conservative Harper government banned the LTTE as a terrorist organization under the influence of Washington which was the key co-chair of the Sri Lankan peace process and was also behind the EU decision to enact the ban soon after. It was part of a coordinated containment strategy to force the LTTE to accept a solution on Sri Lankan government’s terms after the rebels refused to toe the line. Ironically, Washington’s justification for supporting a united Sri Lanka was DEI and high-ranking Bush government officials personally delivered this message to Tamils in Jaffna, the same values that conservatives now decry as the root of all evil. However, had it still been the Cold War and Sri Lanka picked the wrong side, CIA itself would have armed the LTTE as freedoms fighters and instructed them on “terror” techniques like it did with the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
To further illustrate the absurdities of TIC, the same Washington has recently welcomed a former Al-Qaeda militant turned Syrian leader to New York since he’s favoured by its regional allies. But a former cook of the long defunct LTTE is permanently blacklisted from entering Canada for much less. The reason Canada gave was that cooking provided a “functional support” that “improved the efficiency of the LTTE”. Similarly, the former paperboy for the organization was blacklisted because his action had “the effect of facilitating the organization’s efforts to spread its messaging at a time to LTTE was actively involved in committing terrorist acts.”
By that logic, shouldn’t Rohan Gunaratna, a Sinhalese Sri Lankan national who Canada has not only welcomed but hired as an “expert witness” to decide the fate of Tamil refugees, in his capacity as a “terrorism expert” who coordinates with the Sri Lankan defence establishment, be held to an even higher standard, considering his more prominent role in abetting the Sri Lankan military whose former heads that Canada itself has now sanctioned for war crimes? Could it be then this double standard is better explained by anti-refugee politics than any objective assessment of threat?
No serious “investigative journalist” can ignore this blatant hypocrisy of the Canadian government and uncritically parrot its pronouncements. But Bell won’t provide these crucial nuances since he’s just a mouthpiece for the state. His livelihood depends on sowing panic and polarization through sensationalist headlines. In fact, Bell names Gunaratna as one of his guides in the acknowledgments of both his books The Martyr’s Oath and Cold Terror, in which he approvingly cites Gunaratna as “a leading world expert on the LTTE,” without mentioning his links to the Sri Lankan government.
Kagusthan Ariaratnam knows only too well the inner workings of TIC and all its absurdities, having gone from being an LTTE defector who was coerced by Gunaratna to collaborate with Sri Lankan intelligence to later becoming an informant for Canadian intelligence. In 2009, he challenged Canadian government’s decision to hire his former tormentor, Gunaratna, to smear Tamil refugees fleeing the genocide as security threat. Today, he’s also best suited to expose Gunaratna’s Canadian counterpart, Bell, with whom he’s also had interactions:
“[Bell] frequently relied on unnamed sources aligned with Sri Lankan intelligence, reflecting a narrative steeped in security-state logic and lacking broader context…His recent reporting on Anandasangaree’s past advocacy subtly demeans the Minister, framing his transformation as questionable…This portrayal reflects what many in the Tamil-Canadian community perceive as consistent alignment with state interests rather than neutral journalism.”
