Canadian First Nations, “Settlers,” and Palestine
Concerning activist ideology, alienation, and internalized historical memory
“Advice: Get-the-fuck-away from anyone who sees you as a ‘colonizer.’ That is a prelude to violence.” - Scott Adams
On November 23, I published a deep dive analysis called The Case for Israel on my personal website, The Turn. It is an 11,000 plus word essay with just under 100 end notes. In other words, I obsessively worked away at it for hundreds of hours and ended up with an essay on steroids (also an excerpt from a book I’m working on). It follows the recent 4-part essay series I published in these pages, called The history of Jews, Palestinians and Israel.
It would not be surprising if Woke Watch Canada readers wondered why, on a website dedicated to writing about Canada, has James given so much oxygen to the conflict in Israel. There are two reasons. The first is inspired by historian Stephen Kotkin, whom I love. I am dazzled by his conception of the world and the unfolding of history as an interconnected series of consequential events that shape the contours of societies and their power structures for centuries afterward. It is this emphasis on the consequential nature of things that has most infused my research approach with a renewed vigour. I now believe that the understanding of current events is directly proportional to the understanding of the historical events that preceded them. The context of consequential history is King, so to speak, and for me, has become an essential key.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is being flagrantly and falsely contextualized as part of the same struggle First Nations are said to be engaged in. In order to debunk this, and disentangle the conflation, the history of Canadian indigenous groups must be compared analytically to the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. My writing on Israel-Palestine, and on First Nations in Canada, is intended to do this.
The second reason why all the fuss over Israel will hopefully be made clear in the proceeding essay. However, it is a little lengthy, so I will cut the preamble short. Please do consider becoming a subscriber over at The Turn and reading my mega essay: The Case for Israel.
Canadian First Nations, “Settlers,” and Palestine
By
Canadians, or at least Canadian X users, seem to be catching on to the postmodern and acutely ahistorical academic framework of “postcolonial theory,” and its adjacent “settler colonialism,” which activists use to cast blame on “settler” populations in an aim to deny them their human rights. The reader may wish to pause here and ask: am I a settler?
The following deals with the dreary implications of being assigned the status of “settler-colonist,” a status I might add, the Social Justice movement has pinned as the sole blameworthy scapegoat for the inequities of the world.
While many of us might not know the origins or the finer details of the theory, we are starting to realize that all of the talk of “Decolonization,” “Resistance,” and “Direct Action,” might not be the vacuous Social Media sloganeering we initially dismissed it to be. Further, we have noticed that a lot of the same decolonization language used in the Canadian context is also being used by activists and media to describe the Israel-Palestine conflict, half a world away.
Clearly, there is a desire on the part of protest organizers to confuse Hamas attacks with the fight for Indigenous rights in Canada. However, it should be noted that last month, Karen Restoule, and other Canadian indigenous leaders (who sadly chose to remain anonymous out of fear of being targeted by pro-Palestinians) wrote a letter to Foreign Affairs minister Melanie Joly, which included:
“As Indigenous Peoples in Canada, we fundamentally reject the politically motivated adoption of our historic and ongoing relationship with the Crown by some Canadians to justify these evil actions by terrorists.”
However, a similarity between the two conflicts lies in “Feasibility Theory,” which according to Oxford scholar Paul Collier, lays out the preconditions that necessitate and signal an imminent insurrection. These preconditions are met in both the Israel-Palestine scenario, where Palestinians are deemed oppressed, and Israelis considered “settler colonists,” and the Canadian scenario, where First Nations are deemed oppressed by the non-indigenous “everyone else” - also known as, you guessed it: the “settler colonists.”
Part of the Feasibility Theory framework involves those who feel alienated (mostly young males) from, or by another group they share territory with. They internalize a historical narrative that casts blame on the other group. Feeling like they were robbed of land, opportunity, a heroic culture, and further denied the ability to tell their “true” history, they seek to break the yolk of settler colonial oppression and liberate their *ahem* nations, by “any means necessary.” First Nations activists, like Palestinian activists, have internalized an apophradic vision, a return of a dead way of life through the activation of some deep ancestral memory. A memory which does not exist, but is given shape by the writings of activist-scholars and echoed in the words of Free Palestine and indigenous Land Back street protestors.
In 2009, an astute student of Collier’s Feasibility Theory, retired Canadian Armed Forces lieutenant colonel, Douglas Bland - who taught defense studies for 15 years at Queen's University - wrote a work of Canadian fiction called Uprising. In the novel, Bland tells a story of radical First Nations activists who paralyze the country by attacking oil and gas infrastructure.
The controversial book famously inspired one critic to feel it was “the most dangerous book in Canada." And while others ignored or shrugged it off, many in First Nations or Canadian law-enforcement leadership positions, knew very well of the serious implications expressed in Bland’s work, even if they chose to avoid doing anything about it. They also knew that although Uprising was a work of fiction, it had been directly based on an analytical report previously done in Bland’s professional capacity (as an expert in threat assessment).
The national chief of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), activist Shawn Brant, was quoted by Al Jazeera in 2010: "The government ran its infrastructure through our land ... it serves as an incredibly powerful tool of influence that allows us now as a society to engage government in a dialogue, a relationship based on us having the power."1
In 2012, Justice Murray Sinclair, chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, declared that "Canadian society must heal the damage caused by the residential school system or deal with the violence that will be undoubtedly unleashed against it."
Indeed, we had quite the taste of that violence when decolonizing indigenous activists burned down and desecrated dozens of churches for the retribution of imagined crimes, which fit their imagined internalized narrative.
A year after Uprising, Bland published the follow up Time Bomb, which argued that a conflict between settlers and First nations was increasingly likely, and offered military advice to prepare the government for such a conflict.
First Nations writer, Jamie Scout, called Time Bomb an "enemy text." However, he felt there was much to be learned, and perhaps used, from Bland's analysis. In the following quote Scout doesn’t bat an eye in calling Bland “paranoid” but then immediately suggesting to his radical readership that they do the things he says Bland is paranoid about:
“Still, I find his assessment of Canada’s vulnerabilities compelling. His paranoid thought experiment does offer an interesting toolbox of tactics for economic disruption by relatively small groups of people. If we can identify economic bottlenecks close to where we live, build our capacity to target those bottlenecks, and prioritize well-timed actions when the calls for solidarity go out, we can affirm our power and put Canada’s vulnerability on display. If these acts are effective they would inspire others to join us or take action themselves.”2
Some insightful and recent analysis was provided by Canadian columnist Barbara Kay when she wrote in the pages of the Epoch Times on October 31st, “Under the decolonization rubric, ‘any means necessary’ is permitted for liberation, transforming terrorism into heroism.”
Next, she details the way activists associate the Israel-Palestine scenario to the Canadian one:
“The alleged correlation of indigenous Canadians and Palestinians emerges through three narrative strands. The first is conquest: the alleged theft of the land and the myriad crimes committed by white settlers/Jews; the second is alleged ‘cultural genocide’/Palestinian ethnic cleansing; and the latest strand is the decolonizing ‘Land Back’ notion that both indigenous peoples here and Palestinians were once independent and sovereign, but were cheated of their rightful estate by wily white settlers/European Jews.”
The reader may wish to pause here and ask: if Israelis were viciously attacked by terrorists because of their status as “settler colonists,” what might happen to those similarly labeled in other parts of the world, like Canada? Seeing as conflicts involving so called settler colonists are said to be united with a common purpose.
On the morning of November 10th an Indigo store located at Bay St. and Bloor St. W. in Toronto was vandalized with red paint and “Funding Genocide” posters wrongfully accusing founder and CEO, Heather Reisman, of involvement in the Middle East conflict.3 Israel, being one of the countries at the centre of the conflict, happens to be the world’s only Jewish state. Heather Resiman, coincidentally, happens also to be Jewish. However, the link between Reisman and the actions taken by the IDF in the Gaza Strip ends there.
But in the minds of Free Palestine activists, Reisman’s Jewishness makes her somehow culpable for the war casualties of Hamas’ innocent human shields. Sadly, it would seem Reisman wins no points with activists for all of the years worth of Indigo book displays prominently featuring volumes of pro-indigenous / anti-Canadian propaganda.
Late last week eleven individuals were arrested and charged with mischief over $5000 in connection with the alleged antisemitic property attack. Those arrested include: Ian Doty, a teacher at the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), Suzanne Narain, a former TDSB primary teacher, Nisha Toomey, a York University (YU) researcher specializing in migration and critical studies, Lesley Wood, a YU associate professor, and Sharmeen Khan, a financial coordinator at the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE 3903).4
In addition, Doty, Wood, and Khan have been charged with Conspiracy to Commit an Indictable Offense. The following is a list of ten of the eleven charged published on True North5:
Sharmeen Khan, 45, of Toronto
MacDonald Scott, 56, of Toronto
Mercedes Lee, 44, of Toronto
Suzanne Narain, 38, of Toronto
Lesley Wood, 56, of Toronto
Sarom Rho, 29, of Toronto
Ian Doty, 43, of Toronto
Stuart Schussler, 39, of Toronto
Karl Sebastian Gardner, 33, of Toronto
Clement Cheng, 26, of Toronto
On November 17th, approximately 1,300 Jewish students at Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto were evacuated due to a bomb threat which promised “death by fire.”6 Jewish people, not just in Toronto, but all over Canada, indeed, all over North America do not feel safe. A Jewish student from M.I.T, Talia Kahn, told CNN just that.7 At the same time we are hearing reports of Jewish students hiding from mobs of protestors in school libraries, or needing to enter or exit their schools through back entrances. As Jake Tapper reported, “it’s descended into outright antisemitism.”
More than a few astute observers have noticed how oversimplified and reductive is the thinking of decolonizing activists. With some of the loudest protests coming from universities, we have also noticed that the most virulent activists often are young people who - no offense to the future leaders of society - don’t really know much of anything yet. Most of them are still living at mom and dad’s house, or are out on their own for the very first time. These are not people with any real experience in the world, they haven’t had the time to either travel extensively and learn first hand about the places they judge so harshly, nor have they had the opportunity to read the thousands of books, articles and essays necessary to break the spell of the low-information nit-wit.
While we all start out as low-information idiots, and sadly, far too many stay that way, University students are supposedly the people in transition out of nit-wit-doom and into the enlightened world where objective and reasoned rational analysis become the standard upon which former nit-wits interface with, and make sense of the world. However, something has happened in higher education that has not resulted in the traditional intellectual humbling that would occur in the recent past when students' minds were expanded into areas they had not previously imagined. This process, while filling them with complex details about the nature of reality, would also leave far more unanswered questions and an authentic appreciation for studying the nature of the world, and how the pool of knowledge generated by past scholars, enabled them to understand, at the very least, a hazy outline of the mechanisms involved. There is so much left to be discovered, yet a modern student's experience within higher education no longer means becoming part of this illustrious tradition of academic sense-making.
Students have always been easily led “nit-wits in transition,” but in recent years, Leftist scholars have led them to an uninspired life of destructive and divisive Social Justice activism, while robbing them of the richness of a true life of the mind.
Is this what parents worked so hard for? Oftentimes while negotiating much personal sacrifice as they consistently stashed away savings, in many cases, since before their kids were born, all in the hopes of realizing for their progeny a dream of higher education.
Not only have the children of well-intentioned parents been misled by activists masquerading as academics, they have been indoctrinated so thoroughly into anti-Westernism, that they no longer have respect or admiration for their forefathers. Nor have they any interest in the details of Western history, and certainly no interest in any of its successes, however resounding some may have been. They have dismissed the West entirely. It was nothing but plunder, injustice, and colonial oppression. Like the practice of slavery, the ultimate in human oppression, absolutely no positive outcomes can be attributed to its influence.
Because of this, students are not being trained to be future upholders of Western liberal democracies, but Social Justice dismantlers of liberalism in the name of equity. Decolonization is their pathway to achieving this. Violence is ok, even encouraged by the most radical among them. We should all be extremely concerned and united in our opposition.
The October 7th terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens did not result in a universal outpouring of outrage and sympathy for innocent Israeli victims, or an unequivocal unified international condemnation of the savage acts. Even though Hamas’ pre-civilizational barbarism was filmed and streamed to social media, the world's largest news agencies and publications have chosen repeatedly to warn us of the dangers of Islamophobia. Yes, from Justin Trudeau and other leaders, there have been mealy-mouthed mentions of antisemitism, but always in tandem with the Islamophobia they clearly consider far more dire.
Of the equivocating that has taken place over the inhuman atrocities inflicted on innocent Israelis, Simon Sebag Montefiore recently wrote:
“Once-respectable intellectuals have shamelessly debated whether 40 babies were dismembered or some smaller number merely had their throats cut or were burned alive. Students now regularly tear down posters of children held as Hamas hostages. It is hard to understand such heartless inhumanity. Our definition of a hate crime is constantly expanding, but if this is not a hate crime, what is? What is happening in our societies? Something has gone wrong.”8
A bright shining light in all of this darkness has been Iran-born Ontario MPP Goldie Ghamari who has been a strong advocate for Jews and Israel. From a rousing speech, with no moral equivocation delivered in the Ontario Legislature that went viral around the world:
“I chose to speak from my heart and from my experience as an immigrant whose family escaped from the most brutal radical Islamofacist regime in the world: the terrorist Islamic Regime in Iran.”9
In closing, considering how things have unfolded since October 7th, now more than ever, we must continue to press the historical facts, evidence, and the philosophically sound argumentation that refutes the activist nonsense that so clearly divides people and societies and almost assuredly will lead to more violence. This is why I wrote The Case for Israel, and while I’ll keep making the case for Canada.
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Thanks for reading. For more form this author, read The dangerous rhetoric of activists
Also, for more evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!
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In terms of being indigenous to a region, North American First Nations and Israel have more in common with each other than First Nations and the so-called Palestinians do. It's important to remember that Palestinians are indigenous to mostly Jordan, Lebanon and Syria while there is evidence beyond Judaism's historical/religious scriptures (e.g. archeological finds) to prove that Jews are indigenous to the region known as Israel. Moreover, Jews have suffered persecution for 2000 years, including massive genocide during the WW2 Holocaust, and still managed to adapt successfully to life in Western countries while making the desert "bloom" in Israel. Like the Jews, First Nations would do well to harness the initiative and brains in their own communities to turn a narrative of "oppression" into one of success. They might even consider becoming friends and trading partners with Israel - who does not seek to convert anyone to its religion or way of life.
“Students are not being trained to be future upholders of Western liberal democracies, but Social Justice dismantlers of liberalism in the name of equity.” The manipulation is bad enough, but the ideology is atrocious.