Author: Blazingcatfur

I recently had a perplexing encounter with some American exchange students at a brasserie in Brussels. They had just come from a pro-Palestine protest, and none of them could understand my support for Israel. When I asked them how they could attend such a protest after the atrocities of 7 October, one of them countered with: ‘How do you know that 7 October even happened?’

The residents of kibbutzes near Gaza dreamt of a two-state solution with their Palestinian neighbours – then the Oct 7 attacks began…

There used to be a saying among those Israelis who lived in the communities next to the border with Gaza, commonly said with a shrug as missiles flew overhead: “We live in paradise 95 per cent of the time. The other 5 per cent is hell.”

The paradise was all too clear for them: loving communities where those living next door felt more like family than neighbours; gorgeous scenery overlooking the arid majesty of the Negev desert; a still quietness that would only be pierced by the laughter of children playing.

Gaza situation ‘heartbreaking,’ says Freeland when asked about Netanyahu’s rebuke

OTTAWA – The situation in the Gaza Strip is “heartbreaking,” Canada’s deputy prime minister said Wednesday, the day after Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rebuked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for urging Israel to show the highest level of restraint in the besieged Palestinian territory.

“I think everyone would agree that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is heartbreaking. It’s really difficult to see the images of what’s happening,” Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland told reporters Wednesday in Mascouche, Que.

Freeland, who is also the federal finance minister, had been asked to respond to Netanyahu calling out Trudeau on Tuesday evening, hours after he had urged Israel’s government to “exercise maximum restraint” in its war against Hamas, which has included regular airstrikes in Gaza.

Some in Parliament appease them because they want their votes. Others fear confrontation. The door is closing.

Nemo propheta in patria (no man is a prophet in his own land)…But on August 21, 2021, I wrote:

“‘The Taliban have defeated the West,’ says Lord Dannatt, former head of the British military mission in Afghanistan. London today sends its military to evacuate British citizens in Kabul. Tomorrow what will you do with the English cities that have fallen into the hands of the same Islamic fundamentalists?”.

November 11 was Remembrance Day in Great Britain, the day on which the English solemnly remember all those who have fallen in the nation’s wars. A huge event emotionally, no doubt due to the country’s heavy losses in the First World War.

On Hamas and the moral blindness of identity politics

Support for Hamas on U.S. college campuses has not surprised those of us who have witnessed the slow but decisive erosion of liberal thought on the hallowed grounds ostensibly committed to nourishing it. The humanities capitulated decades ago; now the natural and social sciences have succumbed as well. Every discipline stumbles over itself seeking absolution for sins its present-day adherents did not commit. College administrators respond to, and accelerate, this longing, while students bear the ever-rising cost of an anti-liberal crusade. In gatherings formal and informal, faculty, staff, and students signal their religious need to be counted among the redeemed rather than the damned.