Author: Blazingcatfur

Canada must use its clout to demand Israel stop collective punishment

… But Israel is not fighting Nazis. Naziism was a far graver threat to Jews. And it was based on pure racism, not on a battle over land — which, unlike racism, is possibly negotiable.

Bennett and others might prefer to characterize Israel as fighting Nazis because that makes it easier to justify relentlessly bombing and cutting off water and electricity to Palestinian civilians, effectively treating them as Nazis to be obliterated.

This amounts to collective punishment, a war crime under international law. It is also deeply unfair to the 2.3 million Gazans — half of them children — who clearly had no role in the highly secretive Hamas attack.

Ms. McQuaig should be asked her interpretation of “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” and the characterization of baby killing as “resistance” by so many of our fellow “Canadians.”

For a party that so brazenly accuses its opponents of spreading disinformation and misinformation, the federal Liberals too often fail to pass their own test. In the aftermath of Hamas’ brutal terrorist attack on Israel, and in the midst of one of the most pivotal geopolitical crises in recent years and a pronounced spike in antisemitism, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and some of his cabinet ministers seem to be having a hard time breaking their bad habits.

They call it “Hamal” – short for “war room” in Hebrew. It sits high in the mountains on the Israel-Lebanon border, at the heart of a complex protected by blast walls.

Everything here is about security. There are no windows, and before you can pass through the solid door you have to leave behind mobile phones and smart watches – anything that could give away this secret location.

Inside are banks of monitors. Right around the clock, a team of soldiers are gazing at them intently.

Workers in most other comparable countries have more freedom than Canadians to disassociate themselves from unions they find ideologically objectionable, says labour expert John Mortimer.

Mr. Mortimer, who is president of the non-profit Canadian LabourWatch Association, discussed with The Epoch Times the realities workers face if they want to stop paying dues to unions such as the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE).

On Tuesday afternoon, Democratic congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar rushed to Twitter to repeat Hamas’s claim that Israel had bombed a Gaza hospital, killing 500 civilians, as though it were a fact.

“Israel just bombed the Baptist Hospital killing 500 Palestinians (doctors, children, patients) just like that,” Tlaib tweeted. “Bombing a hospital is among the gravest of war crimes. The IDF reportedly blowing up one of the few places the injured and wounded can seek medical treatment and shelter during a war is horrific,” Omar tweeted.

Israel’s fight against Hamas has been compared to the war against Isis between 2015 and 2019. That war was largely waged in Iraq and Syria, and one of the most important battles was the struggle to retake Mosul from the Islamists in 2017. The city and its outlying areas were home to two million people when Isis conquered it in the summer of 2014, and Isis had embedded itself within the local population. Around two million people live in Gaza today. It’s hard to distinguish Hamas from civilians.

What College support for Hamas reveals.

One unexpected blowback from the medieval Hamas’s barbaric murdering of hundreds of Israeli civilians is the revelation of current global amorality.

More than 20 Harvard university identity politics groups pledged their support to the Hamas murderers—to the utter silence for days of Harvard President Claudine Gay.

Americans knew higher education practiced racist admission policies. It has long promoted racially segregated dorms and graduations. And de facto it has destroyed the First Amendment.

It should be clear to everyone on this grim day that the fashionable rage against Israel is no longer just irrational, it is dangerous. That most peculiar union of woke elites and perma-angry Islamists, wedded together in an implacable loathing for the Jewish State, is not only unsettling, it is also menacing. In the aftermath of the calamity at al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, and the rush to blame it on Israel, we can now see that anti-Israel hysteria poses a palpable threat to regional stability in the Middle East and to the social fabric here in the West.

Hamas apologists deserve the scrutiny of Norman Geras

Norman Geras, who died 10 years ago today, was an unusual figure on the Western Left: he was a Marxist who steadfastly and unequivocally opposed militant Islamism and jihadi terrorism. As a free-thinking political theorist, he was as strident in his opposition to the abuses of Western imperial power as he was in his support for individual human rights, especially free speech. But he was also a formidable critic of the worst tendencies of his own side, often making him a pariah in that quarter. This week, his most relevant legacy is this iconoclasm: a willingness to expose the moral and intellectual nullity of Left-wing apologia for terrorism and war crimes.

A far-left French MP who claimed that Hamas is a “resistance movement” faces possible criminal prosecution for making an “apology for terrorism” after French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin announced he would be referring the MP’s comments to the public prosecutor.

MP Danièle Obono, member of the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) led by former presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, spoke about Hamas on broadcaster Sud Radio this week and stated, “Yes, Hamas is a resistance movement. It is an Islamist political group which has an armed wing and which resists Israel.”