The “Ransom of Red Chief” jokes started flying soon after infamous troublemakers Tarek Loubani and John Greyson were thrown into an Egyptian jail in August.
The pair are known anti-Israel “activists.”
That would be their own damn business if Canadian taxpayers weren’t forced to directly or indirectly sponsor their never-ending nonsense — stunts no Egyptian citizen would survive doing for a second.
Loubani is, in fact, a doctor from London, Ont. He calls himself a Palestinian refugee, though he came to Canada from Kuwait, where he was born. But it’s politically sexier to say you’re Palestinian.
Loubani is an extreme activist. When a Canadian cabinet minister was announcing a grant to help people with disabilities, Loubani stormed into the press conference, disrupting it, shouting about how he’s a refugee from Palestine. Even though he’s been in Canada since he was a child. And he’s a rich doctor, doing just fine.
Loubani just wouldn’t leave the press conference, even when security guards asked him to. He kept shouting like a crazy person until police escorted him away.
It’s technically accurate to call Greyson a filmmaker. But it is more informative to mention he’s a leader of the extremist group called Queers Against Israeli Apartheid – the anti-Israel group that has marched in the gay pride parade in Toronto. Which is odd, because Israel is the only country in the Middle East where homosexuality isn’t a crime and where they actually have a gay pride parade, too.
The punishment for being gay in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip is the death penalty.
Greyson is obsessed with sex. He makes movies about his obsessions, with titles like Urinal and After the Bath. He explores his sexual feelings about Pierre Trudeau. Of course he’s a professor at York University.
York University being the place where “Israeli Apartheid Week” was invented.
As for the sex stuff, if you think you can cope, you can see samples of Greyson’s gay-sex-themed “filmmaking” in the videos above.
Hilariously, the pair’s description of their treatment at the hands (and feet) of their Egyptian jailers sounds an awful lot like the sorts of activities some gay men travel all the way to San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair (do NOT Google it) to enjoy:
That’s when we were: arrested, searched, caged, questioned, interrogated, videotaped with a ‘Syrian terrorist’, slapped, beaten, ridiculed, hot-boxed, refused phone calls, stripped, shaved bald, accused of being foreign mercenaries. Was it our Canadian passports, or the footage of Tarek performing CPR, or our ice cream wrappers that set them off? They screamed ‘Canadian’ as they kicked and hit us. John had a precisely etched bootprint bruise on his back for a week.
All I can think of is a classic The Kids in the Hall monologue.
Flamboyant Buddy Cole winds up in jail, but luckily, he’s worked out an arrangement with his cellmate:
“I pretend that he rapes me, and he rapes me.”
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So Greyson and Loubani ponced off to Egypt to “raise awareness” about something or other, when they were captured in possession of two hobby-sized helicopters fitted with GoPro cameras.
Almost like, you know, spy drones or something.
The pair insisted these devices were actually going to be used for, in their own words, “the testing of the transportation of medical samples.”
Uh huh.
The two were duly tossed into a Cairo prison. They went on a juice fast hunger strike. Gullible liberals back home campaigned for their return.
Then on Saturday night, Greyson and Loubani were freed.
I like to think that their demands for organic pomegranate squeezings and their caterwauling of Wicked tunes drove their jailers to ship them back to Canada, where they will dine out on their status as secular saints for the rest of their natural lives.
When he’s not blogging, Richard Klagsbrun works in Canada’s film industry, such as it is.
While he’s called for the pair’s release as a simple matter of common decency, Klagsbrun probably hasn’t done his career much good by wittily mocking Greyson’s not-so-excellent adventures in protest-tourism, not to mention our “second-rate arts community’s” support for this “fourth-rate filmmaker.”
Klagsbrun calls this entire affair “hypocrisy” and even a kind of “colonialism,” and it’s hard to argue, although I doubt his subtle reasoning will penetrate the average Canadian leftist’s skull.
After news of Greyson and Loubani’s release broke, Klagsbrun blogged:
Evidently, my appeal on Monday to Egyptian authorities convinced them it was a waste of time to hold on to the buffoons John Greyson and Tarek Loubani any longer. Rather than being a terrorist threat, they are clearly a pair of clowns who are too incompetent to pose a threat to their national security.
This release was about time, too! Greyson was complaining that a great torment he had to endure was that the Egyptians were ridiculing him.
Damn those Egyptians! Ridiculing John Greyson is my job!
It really is a shame.
Greyson’s brief overseas detention provided millions of ordinary Canadians with more pleasure and entertainment than all of his unwatchable “movies” combined.
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