Mob justice has struck again, giving the political left yet another datapoint to accuse all Canadians of being “racist.” 

This time, it comes after a woman from Hamilton, Ontario was caught on tape uttering threats at a Chinese woman. The altercation occurred in a parking lot at an outlet mall on Boxing Day.

Patricia Zammit, 51, referred to a Chinese woman using derogatory language and mocked her for apparently not using her turn signal, saying “even in China they have signal lights.” The Chinese woman, who has refused to give her own identity for fear of retribution, was recording the interaction. At one point Zammit attempts to slap the phone out of her hands and says “I’ll take those f***ing glasses off your face and shove them through your…” and pretends to moon the woman. 

Zammit’s identity was unknown until immediate calls on social media went out to “name and shame this racist.” She was eventually doxxed and outed, allowing the police to arrest and charge the Hamilton resident.

Though these viral recordings are relatively rare, and the aggressors often come off as unstable people, these incidents are used to indict Canada as an extremely racist country. 

The racist comments made in these kinds of videos are indefensible and shameful, but I am frightened by the idea of living in a society where everyone has their camera phones out and ready to record confrontations fueled by anger and lapses in judgment. 

Just two months prior, in October 2019, video footage of a confrontation at a Shoppers Drug Mart in Burnaby, BC made rounds on the internet. In the video, a woman is aggressively telling the store staff they are rude for “speaking Chinese” in front of her, and that they should “speak English in Canada.”

The woman repeatedly berates the staff and calls them “idiots,” tells them to shut up, and tells them they’re “f***ing rude.” She accuses the staff of “s***-talking” her in their language. 

Many were quick to denounce the woman as a “racist;” but it is not racist to insist English be spoken in English Canada.  While the woman at Shoppers Drug Mart was perhaps not technically making racist comments, there have been other racist incidents caught on film.

This past summer, a conflict in a Richmond, BC parking lot was filmed by a woman being yelled at by another woman, who blows a raspberry at her, calls her derogatory names that refer to her Asian heritage, and tells her she is a “f***ing a******” who should “go back to China.”

A 2017 video shows a woman asking an employee at a walk-in clinic in Mississauga, ON, “Can I see a doctor please that’s white, that doesn’t have brown teeth, that speaks English?”

Think of a time when you lost your cool in a confrontation with a stranger. Now imagine that confrontation was recorded on video, went viral on social media, was in all the national news media, and was forever connected to your name and location on the internet.

The truth is, when people are enraged and want to berate you but they don’t know anything about you, they will rely on your physical characteristics as their basis of attack. When a middle-aged woman once tried to cut in front of me in a very long line, I asked her to wait like everyone else was, and she called me a “stupid teenager” — choosing to attack the physical characteristic of age (I was 21 or so at the time). When I was in high school, a group of Hispanic students in the hallway yelled that I was a “skinny white b****” — comments that focused on my weight and race. 

A lot of schadenfreude and excitement comes from witnessing public confrontations, which is why the “racist rant” genre of videos make a popular news story. 

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in Skin in the Game, “In the past, bad deeds were only transmitted to acquaintances who knew how to put things in perspective. Today, strangers, incapable of judging a person’s general character, have become self-appointed behavior police. Web-shaming is much more powerful than past reputational blots.”

Speaking of “self-appointed behavior police,” in the left-wing Georgia Straight’s coverage of the recent parking dispute and racist rant, they added a poll at the end asking, “if the Crown won’t lay charges, should cities ticket and fine people caught on video making racist rants?” A disturbing 74% of their readers answered, “yes.” Who would have thought the idea of living in citizen-led police state municipalities would be so attractive to so many people?

The targeted killing of top Iranian warmonger and terrorist Qassem Soleimani should be treated with the same reaction as the killing of Osama bin Laden.

To many Iranian dissidents and freedom fighters around the world, it was cause for major celebration. Indeed, Iranians and Iraqis were dancing on the streets and celebrating this major blow to the Iranian regime.

Soleimani is the primary reason that Iran is known as the world’s foremost terrorist state.

Leading the top branch of Iran’s secret army, the Quds Force — which has been designated as a terrorist entity by both the U.S. and Canadian governments for a decade — Soleimani’s fingerprints are all over terrorist insurgencies and destabilizing wars throughout the Middle East.

Soleimani has led the Quds Force since the late 1990s, and he personally guided Iran’s imperialist ambitions to expand the Shia and Iranian influence and become the hegemonic power in the region.

While the United States aimed to stabilize the Middle East and promote peace, freedom, democracy and the rule of law (often a fool’s errand, causing more harm than good), Iran sought to promote terrorism, push Islamist fundamentalism, exploit tribal hatreds, and pit Sunnis against Shias and both against Jews.

The Quds force was responsible for creating and expanding the militant wing of Hezbollah and leading the Lebanese war against Israel in 2006. At the time, Soleimani was living in Lebanon to oversee the conflict.

He replicated his hands-on role in subsequent conflicts across the Middle East, including by propping Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in the prolonged Syrian war and forging a new military alliance with Russia to lead a conflict in Iraq.

Whenever allied forces were trying to stabilize a region and wipe out a terrorist insurgency over the past two decades, there was Soleimani, training terrorists and waging war.

Even The New York Times, which is generally too kind to the Islamist regime in Tehran, described Soleimani as “the architect of nearly every significant operation by Iranian intelligence and military forces over the past two decades,” and they conceded that “his death was a staggering blow for Iran at a time of sweeping geopolitical conflict.”

When Barack Obama ordered the targeted killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, the Western world celebrated. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives acknowledged it was a serious blow to the al-Qaida network and the terrorist army’s ability to fund-raise and orchestrate major attacks.

That didn’t mean the war was over, as a new generation of terrorists began using new technology to spread propaganda and carry out low-grade attacks.

This time around, however, with the killing of Soleimani it’s different. “World War Three” began trending online, and leftists jumped on their soap box to condemn Trump and accuse him of being a reckless warmonger.

This hatred for Trump stands in contrast to the feelings of those who know Iran’s despotic regime best.

When I was reporting from a large protest of the Iranian diaspora in Toronto last month, I was surprised to talk to many dissidents who applauded Trump and thanked him for his forceful push back against the Iranian regime.

You don’t expect Canadian Muslims to be openly supportive of Trump, and you’d never see that kind of coverage in the mainstream media. But those who have lived through the Iran wars know that you need to fight strength with strength.

They see that Donald Trump is an ally in their battle against Tehran’s murderous terrorists. And he proved it again this week by killing Qassem Soleimani.