For a year, Canada’s response to the Hamas massacre in Israel was feckless in government and frightening on the streets. Monday’s anniversary highlighted both in disturbing measure.
The scenes in Vancouver — “We are Hezbollah and we are Hamas!” — revealed a distressing level of hatred, including for Canada, complete with flag-burning. There is plenty of darkness in the land of sunny ways.
These days, my two favorite bookshops in Paris and London are devoting a full shelf to books on or inspired by Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Storm” October 7 invasion of Israel.
Some of these books offer various accounts of what happened on that day and could be classed as extended reportages of the kind news magazines offered in the good old days of print journalism. The most interesting of these, Trey Yingst’s Black Saturday, which broadens its scope to offer a portrayal of the subsequent war in Gaza. Because the author is a television reporter, his fast-paced reportage often resembles a newsreel. That, however, does not prevent him from offering often deep insights into the mind-sets of the two adversaries.
Imagine sending your child to school expecting them to learn basic subjects like math, science and languages, only to find out they attended and perhaps even participated in a political protest.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu published a statement Sunday urging the United Nations to withdraw so-called “peacekeeping” troops from Lebanon because they were acting as “human shields” for Hezbollah terrorists.
h/t patthedog
It’s open season on Jewish people and Jewish targets in Toronto – even on their holidays.
Another day, another hate crime directed to Jews in the city. Shooting up a Jewish school not once but twice is horrific, but to do it at Yom Kippur – the holiest day on the Jewish calendar – is diabolical.
However, this is the Toronto we now live in. When it comes to the treatment of Jews, it is ugly, violent and dangerous.
It is one of the clear signs of the aimlessness and moral decay of a society when large and representative groups of its intellectual class vocally support disreputable or even evil causes. In the same measure, it is a sign of a society’s fundamental strength when its intellectual leaders defy the majority and at some risk to themselves support righteous causes when they are oppressed by the authorities. In this last category are such heroic figures as Edmund Burke approving the American revolutionaries and disapproving the French revolutionaries, Wilberforce and Lincoln championing the emancipation of slaves, Emile Zola and Georges Clemenceau upholding Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, and the many culturally prominent supporters of civil rights in the United States from Dorothy Parker to Leonard Bernstein. A special case, commanding respect, are those eminent intellectuals who remain fundamentally loyal to a regional or national civilization even as they recognize that it is in important respects morally insupportable. This would apply to Albert Camus in respect of French Algeria, and William Faulkner in regard to the white Mississippi of olden times. (Both authors were awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.)
We slipped past the anniversary of a massacre this week. A year ago, a throng of crazed, heavily armed young men crossed the border from Gaza on a mission to kill Jews.
They raped and murdered at will, posting videos of their carnage on social media. They returned to Gaza as heroes, having murdered 1,200 Jews. They dragged with them 251 hostages, including women, children and the elderly.
It was, for those who hate Jews, a glorious day.
Source in Swedish criminal network says their targets are “anything connected to Israel—synagogues, embassies, diplomats.”
A 13-year-old boy has been apprehended by Swedish police after a shooting by Israeli company Elbit Systems’ building in Gothenburg. While nobody was injured in the shooting, the suspected shooter is facing charges of attempted murder and aggravated weapons offenses. Police said the boy was not from the area but appeared to have traveled there for the purpose of committing a crime.
It’s called the world’s oldest hatred for good reason because antisemitism goes back to the beginning of the 6th century with the birth of Islam, in what is now Saudi Arabia.
That is why Arab-born Troy Media columnist Gerry Chidiac’s assertion in Debunking the myth of Arab antisemitism that “the belief that we [Arabs] are inherently antisemitic and have been in conflict with Jews for centuries” is one of “many common misconceptions about Arabs” is itself a misconception, even though it is endlessly repeated by other Arab activists and their supporters.
For the second time this week, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre took a more hawkish stance on Iran and its regional allies than Canada or the United States, pressing the Trudeau government Thursday to add the Houthis, the Iran-allied group in Yemen, to Ottawa’s list of terrorist entities.
Poilievre’s remarks came days after he said he backed Israel’s right to hit nuclear facilities in Iran.
Further thoughts on the reaction to the anti-Israel demonstration in Vancouver on the anniversary of the October 7 terrorist attack…
The vast, vast majority of people I’ve seen react online and talked to in person expressed their anger and disappointment over what was done that day. They agreed that declaring “We are Hamas,” burning Canadian flags, and chanting “Death to Canada” are all unacceptable.
After setbacks in Lebanon and Gaza, Tehran is finding new ways to go after Israeli interests
Iran and its allies, battered by Israeli attacks and the killing of Hezbollah leaderHassan Nasrallah, are running out of options to strike back without risking a regional war that could set them back even further.
But there is one area where Western security agencies and experts fear Iran will try to hit Israel: by hiring criminal gangs in the West.
Iran has long used local militias to pursue its goals across the Middle East. In recent years, Tehran has exported that model to Europe, allying with drug lords and gangsters to go after Jewish or Israeli targets and other perceived opponents.
The Guardian has slammed a 7 October documentary for its depiction of the pogromists.
A new Channel 4 documentary about the events of 7 October lays bare the brutality that was meted out on Kibbutz Be’eri – one of the communities savaged by Hamas a year ago. Unsettling but important viewing, you might think. And yet the documentary has been criticised by the Guardian for ‘demonising Gazans’ – seemingly because it dared to depict Hamas’s horrors. The article has now been removed ‘pending review’.
Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force Brigadier-General Esmail Qaani is alive and currently under investigation in Iran, the Middle East Eye reported on Thursday, citing several sources.
His whereabouts have been unknown since Israel’s Saturday strike in Beirut that killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah’s presumed successor, Hashem Safieddine.
Khaled Mashal: ‘Iran assassinated Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran’
Senior Hamas official Khaled Mashal claimed in an interview with the Qatari Al Arabi news channel that Iran assassinated Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
September 1. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) announce that the bodies of six hostages, who were abducted alive by Hamas on October 7, were recovered from a tunnel in southern Gaza’s Rafah. All of them had received recent gunshot wounds to the head.
Several Israeli politicians did not incriminate Hamas. Instead, they tried to incriminate Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — as many, both inside Israel and outside it, have been trying do since he won election two years ago.
