Thanks for your article. Wonderful writing as usual. As a Canadian Jewish woman I grieve deeply for the current situation in Israel. However I am convinced the on-going conflict is being abetted by the woke left (a.k.a. cultural Marxists) in Israel and elsewhere who, regardless of what religion they claim to be, are working towards the dismantling of Western civilization. Although Israel's intelligence agencies certainly have much to answer for in failing to anticipate this brutal attack, the country's current crisis over judicial reform also played a role. This reform attempts to prevent Israeli judges from "making law", as many leftist judges want to do, instead of following the law. Leftist activists have successfully bamboozled many Israeli citizens into participating in massive pro-left protests and the ensuing chaos caused Israel’s leaders to take their eyes off the ball.
Wokism in the United States has also contributed to the massive attack on Israel. While Trump reduced funds to the terrorist-run Palestinians and dried up funds completely to Iran, their current “banker”, Biden has increased funds to Palestinians and, just weeks ago, sent a heap of money to Iran. A five-year-old could connect the dots.
I have no doubt that Israel’s current unity will eventually win this battle, but will it last long enough to win the war? If the cultural Marxists succeed you can kiss Israel goodbye, both as the seat of Judeo-Christian values and the free-market economy it has become. At which point, the radical Islamists will just stroll in and take over.
If, God forbid, that happens there will be no one left here in North America to protest. We will have already destroyed ourselves in the Marxist-inspired race and gender wars with the likes of Iran, China and Russia bickering over the spoils.
Examine maps of the Middle East that show the percentage of Muslims vs Christians at 1,000, 100, and 10 years ago. ... As you do keep in mind that this is all ISRAEL'S FAULT.
the police ought to charge the driver of that pickup truck with careless driving for allowing people to ride in the back of the pickup. Anyone found covering their face wearing a Palestinian headdress. and who is not a Canadian citizen, ought to be deported for supporting Hamas a terrorist organization. Same with the school board Trustee, if she is not a Canadian citizen, she should be targeted for deportation. Same goes for the Khalistan supporters -- leave your domestic politics at home where you came from. Free speech is one thing, but open support for nationally declared (by Canada) terrorist organizations is a non-starter. India is correct, Canada has to Crack down on its ignoring open support for terrorist groups.
We all know what Hamas and their "Canadian" supporters want and stand for. "God is great!" is the cry over and over again, in all the videos and clips from parading the bodies of dead Jewish women around in the back of their pickups to shooting commuters in their cars. Even the Nazis did not revel in their own depravity. Never again!
Can't let the Nazis off that hook. In particular, the Einsatzgruppen death squads come to mind. Unimaginably brutal and depraved. As I understand it, they had parties at the end of a day of massacre.
Wow, you are right, I just looked that up. Definite parallels between the Hamas invasion and this Nazi death squad. This is what these "Canadians" are cheering on. Chilling stuff.
260 young people were massacred by Hamas at a music festival, as they danced at sunrise, many others seriously injured. The terrorists fired RPG weaponry into the crowd and shot people as they fled. "God is Great," they yell as they kill these people. This is what these progressives and Hamas allies are celebrating here in Canada, cheering on the massacre of innocent people (mostly Jews) at a music festival. A report from CNN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O0NDhNW148
Unfortunately, selective compassion is a human failing, but it is particularly pronounced on the left, unsurprisingly and ironically. In 2021, leftists across the country celebrated as dozens of churches were vandalized or torched. “Burn it all down” and “Understandable” were quotes of the day coming from our leaders. Today Israel is being branded in the same way as a ‘colonial white supremacist state’. Any collectivist ideology will have a low regard for individual wellbeing, but will be especially virulent when providing a new cover for the oldest form of bigotry in history.
Stop with all the bull crap these acts were and are despicable by anyone regardless off so called faith. How our prime minister and or anyone in government allow those hateful people to remain in Canada is another matter.
I guess you could also say: "If you'd have been a young man in Germany in 1939, you'd be the first one over the border with the National Socialists attacking Poland, bombing England, and putting the Jews and the Gays in extermination camps." It's your own projection, plain and simple.
Only if you've been brainwashed by the deeply anti-semitic propaganda of radical Islamists. The brutal authoritarian Hamas regime has as its stated goal the destruction of Israel as an entity. There is no option of peace for them. Deliberately targeting civilians without warning is by definition a war crime, a barbaric act of terrorism. A great leader once said, if Palestine one day put down its arms, there would be peace. If Israel did the same, there would be a massacre. We saw the truth of that yesterday.
I am no more a fan of Muslim fundamentalists than Jewish ones. I am merely stating the obvious, that the Muslim world has never accepted a Jewish state (and the land heist that came with it) on its third most holy site, during a time of post-colonial weakness.
Israel cannot remain a fortress forever. It cannot bank on military hegemony indefinitely. And here we are 75 years after its declaration as state, and it still fighting wars of attrition, which will go on until eventually it's gone.
What October 7th demonstrated was that fortress Israel can be penetrated and violated, albeit for the time being, only briefly. Next time it may not be so 'lucky'. States that can only live by the sword will die by it.
If I were an Israeli, I would be looking at my options to come to sunny Australia. Our Jewish citizens are almost to a man and woman, a very welcome addition to our multicultural society and a hedge against our increasingly sizable Muslim community, who I really do not trust at all.
The obscene demonstrations by large numbers of Muslims across Canada and the Western world ostensibly on behalf of "Palestinians" but implicitly justifying the atrocities deliberately perpetrated upon Israeli civilians, including children, demonstrates that those who naively aligned themselves with this demographic in the struggle against radical gender ideology in schools made a major mistake.
If one is a Palestinian, 'the terrorists' are the Jewish occupation forces on their land.
I don't for a moment think that the characters down at Hezbollah or Hamas are wonderful people with fluttering hearts of gold, beating under their hard line and carapaced Islamism.
But you won't find a tougher bunch of hardliners than the Jewish settlers.
Everyone is playing for keeps in the Holy Land and while the US is still a major power, the Jewish settlers have the upper hand. But when it eventually retreats back into continental isolationism, it won't go well for the Jews of Palestine.
When the UN 'gave' Palestine to the Zionists, they started a war that would not stop. For the peoples who were displaced by that 'gift' that no one had the right to make, the legitimacy of the project would always be in dispute, forever.
Israel will always be surrounded by mortal enemies. Always.
No. Your equivalency and relativism betrays a lack of moral clarity. Only one side has offered peace. Only one side is capable of living with those on the other side. They prove it every day in the governing of their country. Only one side has made concessions, repeatedly. The other side only wants one thing, death to the Jews and total domination of the region. This is right in front of our eyes.
Well Ara, the people who hold all the cards are the ones in a position of strength to offer 'peace', because the only 'peace' on offer will be on their terms, which are never going to be acceptable to people who have never accepted the basic premiss that underpins such offers.
In 1948, every single Arab state vehemently rejected the creation of a Zionist state in Palestine. None of those states ever regarded it as legitimate. And despite knowing that this new state would be the subject of ongoing wars because of that, the US led Western international ascendancy ignored therm.
It was an easy mistake to make because the Arab states were only just coming out from under centuries old colonial and semi-colonial rule. They were relatively 'backward'. They didn't have the overwhelming clout of the Zionist lobbies. So they were rolled. But they never accepted it.
From their perspective, there was nothing to negotiate. Israel is a fortress state that only continues to exist because it access to overwhelming military force supplied by outside powers.....for the time being.
Even one of the greatest fortresses ever built, the Crac des Chevaliers, eventually fell. It is just a matter of time, patience and resolve; something that Islam is not short of. Mohammed wasn't just a prophet. He was also a general.
There is no such thing as peace in these matters; just lulls in the fighting. And there isn't the slightest reason why there should be any other outcome. You live by the sword. You die by it.
Legitimacy is regarded as a rather airy-fairy notion. But it isn't. It is a fundamental underpin that drives up from military power to respectable authority; from force to consent; from arbitrary to rules based governance; from temporary domination to sustainable collaboration.
Israel has absolutely no basis for even the beginnings of such a transformation in relation to any of its neighbors, or any other part of the Islamic world.
Um, Islamic world? don’t you know that the Jews were a people who grew and formed a kingdom in that at least 1500 years before Islam even existed? And have maintained a presence ever since, despite being attacked and driven away umpteen times by imperial powers, including Islamic imperial powers. The Jews are as much an indigenous people there as anyone. No. We pretend to champion the rights of indigenous peoples, but only if they are brown and victims of so-called white, Western people. Or in the case of the Jews, if they are merely called white (in order to make it acceptable to reflexively oppose), and happen to be successful adopting the values of Western civilization, despite having been victimized by the world for millennia. Israel was created unlike virtually every nation on Earth in history within a legal framework accepted at the time by the international community. It has far more legitimacy in terms of its history and roots than the United States, for example. The Islamic world has a serious problem if for them 22 theocratic tyrannies in the region comprised of hundreds of millions of people cannot abide one small bit of territory to 7 million Israelis. But even that isn’t true, as the Abraham Accords have proven, a path to peace that is now being scuttled in a very deadly way by Iran etc and its proxy, Hamas. Again, no. The idea that the Islamic world not only has a right to every bit of land but also are simply incapable of seeing things any other way because why?? is just not the case.
James, I think you are being a bit cavalier with the word 'antisemitic'. The Arabs and Jews of Palestine are all Semites, so being pro Arab simply can't be antisemitic. There is no race component here at all.
One can admit that the Jews of Palestine are colonial settlers in the same way that the the racist Boers were in South Africa. However the chauvinism of Jewish settlers on Palestinian land is about religious and cultural hegemonism founded on spurious deistic land claims.
I am disappointed in you, Christopher. The term "antisemitism," a misnomer as the term "semitic" properly refers only to language groupings was coined by German journalist Wilhelm Marr in the late 19th century as a badge of honor in the context of a growing reaction to the social inroads made by European Jews in the wake of emancipation earlier in the century. However imprecise, it has NEVER referred to anything other than an antipathy toward Jews and Judaism. You are parroting Arab propaganda.
My dear Nervous, I think if you cast your dictionary/historical net a bit more widely, you will find that Semitic peoples include both Arab and Jew (plus a few others).
In the case of European anti Jewish sentiment, it was part racial (anti-Semitic) part a religious antipathy that went back to the early church period when vehement rejection by Jews of the Christological claims of Christianity disrupted its evangelical progress for nearly 400 years, and finally, economic, as in involvement in the despised rent/tax collecting and financial services area that only existed in precapitalist societies as 'dirty work'.
The Nazis drew on all three sources of that antipathy.
In the Middle East today, that sentiment is entirely driven by religious land claims.
Examine maps of the Middle East that show the percentage of Muslims vs Christians at 1,000, 100, and 10 years ago. ... As you do keep in mind that this is all ISRAEL'S FAULT.
Thanks for your article. Wonderful writing as usual. As a Canadian Jewish woman I grieve deeply for the current situation in Israel. However I am convinced the on-going conflict is being abetted by the woke left (a.k.a. cultural Marxists) in Israel and elsewhere who, regardless of what religion they claim to be, are working towards the dismantling of Western civilization. Although Israel's intelligence agencies certainly have much to answer for in failing to anticipate this brutal attack, the country's current crisis over judicial reform also played a role. This reform attempts to prevent Israeli judges from "making law", as many leftist judges want to do, instead of following the law. Leftist activists have successfully bamboozled many Israeli citizens into participating in massive pro-left protests and the ensuing chaos caused Israel’s leaders to take their eyes off the ball.
Wokism in the United States has also contributed to the massive attack on Israel. While Trump reduced funds to the terrorist-run Palestinians and dried up funds completely to Iran, their current “banker”, Biden has increased funds to Palestinians and, just weeks ago, sent a heap of money to Iran. A five-year-old could connect the dots.
I have no doubt that Israel’s current unity will eventually win this battle, but will it last long enough to win the war? If the cultural Marxists succeed you can kiss Israel goodbye, both as the seat of Judeo-Christian values and the free-market economy it has become. At which point, the radical Islamists will just stroll in and take over.
If, God forbid, that happens there will be no one left here in North America to protest. We will have already destroyed ourselves in the Marxist-inspired race and gender wars with the likes of Iran, China and Russia bickering over the spoils.
Examine maps of the Middle East that show the percentage of Muslims vs Christians at 1,000, 100, and 10 years ago. ... As you do keep in mind that this is all ISRAEL'S FAULT.
Really? Israel's fault? What convoluted logic brings you to that conclusion?
Very convoluted ... I was being SARCASTIC.
the police ought to charge the driver of that pickup truck with careless driving for allowing people to ride in the back of the pickup. Anyone found covering their face wearing a Palestinian headdress. and who is not a Canadian citizen, ought to be deported for supporting Hamas a terrorist organization. Same with the school board Trustee, if she is not a Canadian citizen, she should be targeted for deportation. Same goes for the Khalistan supporters -- leave your domestic politics at home where you came from. Free speech is one thing, but open support for nationally declared (by Canada) terrorist organizations is a non-starter. India is correct, Canada has to Crack down on its ignoring open support for terrorist groups.
We all know what Hamas and their "Canadian" supporters want and stand for. "God is great!" is the cry over and over again, in all the videos and clips from parading the bodies of dead Jewish women around in the back of their pickups to shooting commuters in their cars. Even the Nazis did not revel in their own depravity. Never again!
Can't let the Nazis off that hook. In particular, the Einsatzgruppen death squads come to mind. Unimaginably brutal and depraved. As I understand it, they had parties at the end of a day of massacre.
Wow, you are right, I just looked that up. Definite parallels between the Hamas invasion and this Nazi death squad. This is what these "Canadians" are cheering on. Chilling stuff.
260 young people were massacred by Hamas at a music festival, as they danced at sunrise, many others seriously injured. The terrorists fired RPG weaponry into the crowd and shot people as they fled. "God is Great," they yell as they kill these people. This is what these progressives and Hamas allies are celebrating here in Canada, cheering on the massacre of innocent people (mostly Jews) at a music festival. A report from CNN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O0NDhNW148
Unfortunately, selective compassion is a human failing, but it is particularly pronounced on the left, unsurprisingly and ironically. In 2021, leftists across the country celebrated as dozens of churches were vandalized or torched. “Burn it all down” and “Understandable” were quotes of the day coming from our leaders. Today Israel is being branded in the same way as a ‘colonial white supremacist state’. Any collectivist ideology will have a low regard for individual wellbeing, but will be especially virulent when providing a new cover for the oldest form of bigotry in history.
The school district and provincial government can fire Sabreina Dahab, but we live in a time of lip-service.
That people can support the attack and murder of so many Israelis is shocking to all but the thinning Progressive fringe.
Stop with all the bull crap these acts were and are despicable by anyone regardless off so called faith. How our prime minister and or anyone in government allow those hateful people to remain in Canada is another matter.
Talk is cheap lets see some action.
I lottery of birth had caused you to be born in Palestine instead of Canada, you’d be the first one over the border with Hamas attacking Israel.
I guess you could also say: "If you'd have been a young man in Germany in 1939, you'd be the first one over the border with the National Socialists attacking Poland, bombing England, and putting the Jews and the Gays in extermination camps." It's your own projection, plain and simple.
Only if you've been brainwashed by the deeply anti-semitic propaganda of radical Islamists. The brutal authoritarian Hamas regime has as its stated goal the destruction of Israel as an entity. There is no option of peace for them. Deliberately targeting civilians without warning is by definition a war crime, a barbaric act of terrorism. A great leader once said, if Palestine one day put down its arms, there would be peace. If Israel did the same, there would be a massacre. We saw the truth of that yesterday.
I am no more a fan of Muslim fundamentalists than Jewish ones. I am merely stating the obvious, that the Muslim world has never accepted a Jewish state (and the land heist that came with it) on its third most holy site, during a time of post-colonial weakness.
Israel cannot remain a fortress forever. It cannot bank on military hegemony indefinitely. And here we are 75 years after its declaration as state, and it still fighting wars of attrition, which will go on until eventually it's gone.
What October 7th demonstrated was that fortress Israel can be penetrated and violated, albeit for the time being, only briefly. Next time it may not be so 'lucky'. States that can only live by the sword will die by it.
If I were an Israeli, I would be looking at my options to come to sunny Australia. Our Jewish citizens are almost to a man and woman, a very welcome addition to our multicultural society and a hedge against our increasingly sizable Muslim community, who I really do not trust at all.
The obscene demonstrations by large numbers of Muslims across Canada and the Western world ostensibly on behalf of "Palestinians" but implicitly justifying the atrocities deliberately perpetrated upon Israeli civilians, including children, demonstrates that those who naively aligned themselves with this demographic in the struggle against radical gender ideology in schools made a major mistake.
Tell you what...Why not join Hamas - you are as insane as they are. lol
'Terrorism' is all in the eye of the beholder.
If one is a Palestinian, 'the terrorists' are the Jewish occupation forces on their land.
I don't for a moment think that the characters down at Hezbollah or Hamas are wonderful people with fluttering hearts of gold, beating under their hard line and carapaced Islamism.
But you won't find a tougher bunch of hardliners than the Jewish settlers.
Everyone is playing for keeps in the Holy Land and while the US is still a major power, the Jewish settlers have the upper hand. But when it eventually retreats back into continental isolationism, it won't go well for the Jews of Palestine.
When the UN 'gave' Palestine to the Zionists, they started a war that would not stop. For the peoples who were displaced by that 'gift' that no one had the right to make, the legitimacy of the project would always be in dispute, forever.
Israel will always be surrounded by mortal enemies. Always.
No. Your equivalency and relativism betrays a lack of moral clarity. Only one side has offered peace. Only one side is capable of living with those on the other side. They prove it every day in the governing of their country. Only one side has made concessions, repeatedly. The other side only wants one thing, death to the Jews and total domination of the region. This is right in front of our eyes.
Well Ara, the people who hold all the cards are the ones in a position of strength to offer 'peace', because the only 'peace' on offer will be on their terms, which are never going to be acceptable to people who have never accepted the basic premiss that underpins such offers.
In 1948, every single Arab state vehemently rejected the creation of a Zionist state in Palestine. None of those states ever regarded it as legitimate. And despite knowing that this new state would be the subject of ongoing wars because of that, the US led Western international ascendancy ignored therm.
It was an easy mistake to make because the Arab states were only just coming out from under centuries old colonial and semi-colonial rule. They were relatively 'backward'. They didn't have the overwhelming clout of the Zionist lobbies. So they were rolled. But they never accepted it.
From their perspective, there was nothing to negotiate. Israel is a fortress state that only continues to exist because it access to overwhelming military force supplied by outside powers.....for the time being.
Even one of the greatest fortresses ever built, the Crac des Chevaliers, eventually fell. It is just a matter of time, patience and resolve; something that Islam is not short of. Mohammed wasn't just a prophet. He was also a general.
There is no such thing as peace in these matters; just lulls in the fighting. And there isn't the slightest reason why there should be any other outcome. You live by the sword. You die by it.
Legitimacy is regarded as a rather airy-fairy notion. But it isn't. It is a fundamental underpin that drives up from military power to respectable authority; from force to consent; from arbitrary to rules based governance; from temporary domination to sustainable collaboration.
Israel has absolutely no basis for even the beginnings of such a transformation in relation to any of its neighbors, or any other part of the Islamic world.
Um, Islamic world? don’t you know that the Jews were a people who grew and formed a kingdom in that at least 1500 years before Islam even existed? And have maintained a presence ever since, despite being attacked and driven away umpteen times by imperial powers, including Islamic imperial powers. The Jews are as much an indigenous people there as anyone. No. We pretend to champion the rights of indigenous peoples, but only if they are brown and victims of so-called white, Western people. Or in the case of the Jews, if they are merely called white (in order to make it acceptable to reflexively oppose), and happen to be successful adopting the values of Western civilization, despite having been victimized by the world for millennia. Israel was created unlike virtually every nation on Earth in history within a legal framework accepted at the time by the international community. It has far more legitimacy in terms of its history and roots than the United States, for example. The Islamic world has a serious problem if for them 22 theocratic tyrannies in the region comprised of hundreds of millions of people cannot abide one small bit of territory to 7 million Israelis. But even that isn’t true, as the Abraham Accords have proven, a path to peace that is now being scuttled in a very deadly way by Iran etc and its proxy, Hamas. Again, no. The idea that the Islamic world not only has a right to every bit of land but also are simply incapable of seeing things any other way because why?? is just not the case.
James, I think you are being a bit cavalier with the word 'antisemitic'. The Arabs and Jews of Palestine are all Semites, so being pro Arab simply can't be antisemitic. There is no race component here at all.
One can admit that the Jews of Palestine are colonial settlers in the same way that the the racist Boers were in South Africa. However the chauvinism of Jewish settlers on Palestinian land is about religious and cultural hegemonism founded on spurious deistic land claims.
They are all of the same racial stock.
https://www.writing.com/main/books/entry_id/866717
I am disappointed in you, Christopher. The term "antisemitism," a misnomer as the term "semitic" properly refers only to language groupings was coined by German journalist Wilhelm Marr in the late 19th century as a badge of honor in the context of a growing reaction to the social inroads made by European Jews in the wake of emancipation earlier in the century. However imprecise, it has NEVER referred to anything other than an antipathy toward Jews and Judaism. You are parroting Arab propaganda.
My dear Nervous, I think if you cast your dictionary/historical net a bit more widely, you will find that Semitic peoples include both Arab and Jew (plus a few others).
In the case of European anti Jewish sentiment, it was part racial (anti-Semitic) part a religious antipathy that went back to the early church period when vehement rejection by Jews of the Christological claims of Christianity disrupted its evangelical progress for nearly 400 years, and finally, economic, as in involvement in the despised rent/tax collecting and financial services area that only existed in precapitalist societies as 'dirty work'.
The Nazis drew on all three sources of that antipathy.
In the Middle East today, that sentiment is entirely driven by religious land claims.
Examine maps of the Middle East that show the percentage of Muslims vs Christians at 1,000, 100, and 10 years ago. ... As you do keep in mind that this is all ISRAEL'S FAULT.
Disgraceful.