WCAI Hoping For Charlottesville North

The date of the planned Worldwide Coalition Against Islam rally is certainly not a coincidence as it coincides with the one year anniversary of the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally. The event was initially made infamous by the scene of white supremacists walking through the streets of the city chanting "Jews will not replace us" while carrying tiki torches:

It is this image that Joey Deluca, founder of the white supremacist and Islamophobic WCAI, said he would like to recreate in the streets of Toronto during an interview with "white nationalist" Ronny Cameron earlier this week:

After the rally, we were thinking like, it’d be pretty cool if we all marched through Toronto and maybe got some torches and just marched through after, right? And make a statement. Because nobody’s done that, right? I mean – and that’s why we need to do stuff like that.

I'm sure that Deluca is referring to torches never being used in Canadian far-right events, but even here he's wrong:

Members of the Ku Klux Klan set fire to a cross at a ceremony at Stave Lake near Vancouver in June 1981.

This shouldn't be surprising as Joey, known members of the WCAI, and other self-proclaimed "patriot" (read: racist) groups in Canada have been drawn to the spectacle that was Charlottesville, in particular the images resulting from the murder of an anti-racist protester as a car driven my a white supremacist plowed into the crowd of counter-protesters:

• Vigil held in Montreal in Honor of Heather Heyer and to Protest Hate Rally in Charlottesville

The day this tragedy occurred, WCAI vice-president Jesse Wielenga posted a video promoting upcoming WCAI events. One of those events, alluded to by Deluca in his interview with Cameron, was a WCAI rally in Vancouver that ultimately failed badly. In the video Wielenaga laughs about the murder and encourages others to do the same until he seems to realize that he has said something that would be illegal and he tries to walk it back:

Wielenga was certainly not alone in encouraging and/or minimizing murder. Deluca, as well as Cameron and neo-Nazi Kevin Goudreau who both plan on participating in the Toronto rally on August 11, celebrated the murder of Heather Heyer:

Much of this can be found in ARC's articles detailing the Canadian far-right reaction to Charlottesville:

• Events in Charlottesville, VA: Some Canadian Racists React
• Events in Charlottesville, VA: Some Canadian Racists React (Part II)

As mentioned earlier in this article, Deluca was interviewed about what the WCAI was about and what the plans were for the rally. I've taken the time to cut the audio into bite-sized segments while a friend created a transcript of key points. However before I start I should mention here that all of what you are all about to read and hear is Proud Boy approved:

That Jones would use the image of a murdered child for his profile photo to try to make a cheap
political point says all that really needs to be said about the man's sense of decency.

But remember, the Proud Boys deny they're racists or antisemites.

And remember as you listen to these excerpts that the real danger that Muslims pose are to mediocre chicken restaurants and primary school politics!

Anywho....

Regarding the rally itself and specifically why he decided on Toronto, Deluca says the following:

Our logo is a picture of a Muslim getting the boot the hell out of the country. I mean, we can’t get any more straightforward with our message than that.

Calgary Soldiers of Odin and others at WCAI fundraiser, July 28, 2018

I find it interesting how often the bullies claim to be the bullied.

Now while he and his supporters are now trying to claim that this rally is in response to the murders that occurred in the Greek Town area, Deluca was pretty clear in the video that isn't the reason:

JD - They do a prayer over loudspeakers. It’s really bad ‘cuz that’s what they do when they invade a country. That’s their way of showing you that it’s their country now, right? 

RC - That call to prayer, it’s like a dog or an animal marking its territory, you know? They’re just pissing all over an area, and we gotta go and clean it up.

It also isn't clear, based on his desire to have a meet and great and some sort of after party but with no actual plan established that Deluca's organizational skill might be.... lacking. Certainly one gets that impression from his answer to whether or not the police have been contacted which is sort of a staple for the far-right out east or where one can buy and ISIS flag to burn:

Then again, perhaps he doesn't really want police involvement?

Finally regarding the rally, Cameron plugs a shitbird's mayoral candidacy and suggests she might make an appearance:

The rest of the interview deals with a few other related topics, for example Deluca's desire to create gangs WCAI-supporting elementary students.

No, not kidding:

Form some kind of brotherhood in schools – elementary schools, for kids. Get WCAI shirts made for kids and they can like, patrol around together at recess, chanting “world coalition against islam”, you know, and that’ll scare off the bullies.

Deluca is also very proud of how he refers to Muslim-Canadians, immigrants, and refugees as "sewage" and his use of other dehumanizing language, as he does when he speaks of Somalis at the beginning of the interview:

So many of them are coming here and colonizing neighborhoods. Taking over. They don’t really contribute anything, they don’t work, they take up all the spots in low-income housing. Like, if you go for a walk in certain areas in Calgary, and cut through a subsidized housing, city housing complex, it’s all Somalians. All scum.

Later Cameron approvingly provides an example of Deluca's rhetoric:

Deluca rationalizes his racism by trying to use a metaphor:

In my speeches, I refer to them as sewage, and scum, and filth, and parasites, because it’s what they are. I mean, the ‘sewage’ things I’ve gotten a lot of negative feedback from cucked-out conservatives who have said “Oh, you make all conservatives look bad when you call them sewage, and I can’t associate with that”. You know, that’s what I’ve heard for the past year. And.. people don’t understand it’s the most accurate thing to call them because.. what they are is.. A country is like a beautiful, crystal, glacier lake. You know? A pure lake. Pure, clean water that you can drink out of and swim in. And then all of a sudden you start dumping sewage into it, eventually that lake becomes like, contaminated. And it ruins the quality of the water in that lake. And by dumping Muslims into certain communities – certain like, mass immigration, it’s the same effect as dumping sewage into a lake. If you think about it, right? Like, places that used to be nice neighbourhoods with nice families and all that, and all of a sudden these people – bunch of Somalis or whatever get dumped there, and then all of a sudden they’re not nice towns anymore. Right? And that’s where the whole ‘sewage’ thing comes from.

I can't help but find it ironic that a man convicted of drug trafficking and assault would have the gall to refer to anyone as a parasite, sewage, or of wasting "taxpayer dollars" when he has cost the system far more that the average refugee ever will. But then Deluca seems to think discussion of his criminal record isn't relevant to the discussion:

Deluca is also a bit salty about the harm caused his gang as a result of being called Nazis just because a few members posted antisemitic posts on their Facebook groups:

So what happened last year is, you know there was some bad rumours about us being, um – like I guess some members of our group started posting some anti-Semitic stuff and, uh, so then these people who like to cause division and trouble saw that as an [inaudible].. “this is what they all – WCAI’s motives are, to the Nazis.” The JDL took shots at us and other people. There’s people who want to cause division and trouble, and they did do some damage. A lot of people kind of turned away from us. A lot of people didn’t like how intense my speeches were.

The thing is, one of the "members" Deluca is referring to without mentioning him by name is the WCAI vice-president Jesse Wielenga. Here are just a few examples:

However, even if you are a Nazi, if you show up to rallies you're okay in Deluca's books:

By this point listeners have likely noticed that Cameron is really pushing anti-Jewish and antisemitic rhetoric. There's quite a bit more of that:

I appreciate that Ronny hold grudges. 

None of this is really all that surprising. Also not surprising, but still interesting, was the discussion of how right-wing demagogues (my words) like Donald Trump and Doug Ford provide groups like the WCAI and people like Deluca and Cameron the moral licence to be racists:

RC - I think that as things continue to get more and more intense and more severe, perhaps I may say screw it, we gotta make the Quran – we gotta ban the Quran. We gotta make it, Islam, illegal in the Western world. It might get to that point but for now I would say we just need to really attack it on an intellectual level and on a street level. So definitely 100% back you on that.
....
JD - The scum is trying to come across our borders here, because they’re not good enough to be in the States, so they feel they have to sneak across into Canada and come here. ‘Cuz we have better welfare or whatever. And it goes to show like, Donald Trump is doing the right thing by kicking those people out.
....
RC - Without Donald Trump we might not be even having this conversation, and he’s – whether you disagree with him or agree with him I think one thing we can all agree with is that he’s really created this cascading ripple effect throughout the West, and given people hope to form organizations such as the WCAI or start up a YouTube channel like I have and really start trying to network with people and get the message out there.

RC - If we don’t get a politician who’s at least willing to dog-whistle that type of narrative – because I do understand that a lot of politicians are kind of handcuffed with how far they can really bring things, and Donald Trump and Doug Ford.. they’ve done a very good job of saying certain things that lets certain people know “ok, he gets it”. Like, when he called Mexicans rapists and gang members and all of that, I believe that was intentionally done. He said it in a way where he could mean ‘not all’, but he wanted to generalize. He wanted to let people like us know that, you know, they’re sewage. It’s very similar to how you put it with Islam. So I think we need politicians who are willing to kind of do that at the very least, and our influencers and our organizers and what not, we can be a little bit more bold with our language. 

JD - Yeah, for sure and like, by speaking out against it, like I said earlier it’s – it’s just a good way of inspiring others to do so at the same time, right?

As the interview was live, those who were listening were able to leave comments in real time. Here are a selection of those comments:

Quality people there....

Now, the WCAI claim they will be showing up with 100s of people. But if there's something that organizers of any counter-rally can take away from this is that they are actually quite frightened of you all.

No, really.

They posture and they puff out their chests, but in the end they begrudgingly admit they aren't as strong as those who oppose them. They'll deny this, but it is the truth:

I'll give Ronny Cameron the last word:

Blogs?

Oh, come on Ronny....

You know you want to.