Canada will impose a ban on arms sales to Israel, the country’s Foreign Minister Melanie Joly announced on Tuesday. “It’s a real thing,” Joly told Canadian newspaper The Toronto Star on Tuesday. The decision follows a vote of 204-117 in the Canadian parliament on Monday in favor of ending the sales. While it originally called for a suspension, it was later changed into a full ban.
h/t DS
A political cartoon in a French-language newspaper depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a vampire has sparked accusations of antisemitism.
The cartoon appeared in Wednesday’s edition of La Presse, a prestigious digital-only newspaper. It shows Netanyahu with long claws, pointed ears and wearing an overcoat — imagery reminiscent of Count Orlok, a vampire from the 1922 silent film, Nosferatu.
This is pretty tame by Palestinian standards.
“It seems clear that the Biden administration would like to see the rapid creation of a Palestinian state or at least a “Palestinian unity government” — unfortunately composed of the Palestinian Authority and the terrorist group Hamas — and, abracadabra, recognize it.”
The gov't that appointed you invited "Hate" to settle in Canada. Federal, provincial and municipal governments made hate acceptable by approving racist DEI programs within public institutions, our schools & the corporate sector. No one cared so long as whites were the target.
— Fancypants Maloney (@fancypants_s) March 20, 2024
The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) has filed its defence against accusations from some Jewish members that the union’s response to Hamas’s attack on Israel discriminated against them.
The union denies the allegations in the case before the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, but its denials are undermined by its own statement of defence, which indicates just how ingrained antisemitism has become in Canada’s largest trade union.
Hate crimes are on the rise in France, new data shows, as the country grapples with increased racial tension tied to the conflict in the Middle East and the unprecedented popularity of the far right heading into this summer’s EU election.
The French interior ministry reported that crimes “of a racist nature” jumped 32 percent from 2022 to 2023. Such crimes doubled in the last quarter of 2023, after the Oct. 7 terror attack by Hamas and the war Israel launched against the militant group in retaliation. The number of antisemitic acts quadrupled, the ministry found.
OTTAWA—Late Monday night, after the New Democrats agreed to overhaul a controversial motion that could have seen Ottawa recognize Palestine as a state, two NDP MPs walked up to the House of Commons’ public gallery where a group of Palestinian Canadians had gathered.
The party’s foreign affairs critic, Heather McPherson, and her colleague, Matthew Green, briefly sat and spoke with the young activists, many of whom wore black and white kaffiyehs: scarves traditionally donned in parts of the Middle East that have become emblematic of the Palestinian cause.
“I’m not going to lie. I wish that I could have delivered to them statehood for Palestinian people,” said McPherson, who championed the NDP motion, in an interview with the Star.
Quebec Liberal MP Anthony Housefather says he is “reflecting” on his future in the Liberal party after a heavily amended NDP motion on Palestinian statehood passed in the House of Commons on Monday.
Housefather was among three Liberals who voted against the final motion, which called only for progress towards a two-state solution instead of the recognition of a Palestinian state.
The other two, former public-safety minister Marco Mendicino and Manitoba MP Ben Carr, both say they are disappointed in how the 11th-hour amendment process went.
Watch Housefather describes how Trudeau visited his riding, assured Jewish constituents at a synagogue there would "be no daylight between the Liberal position on Israel with the Conservative position" Since Oct 7 Liberal wedge position is the NDP anti-Semitic one.."horrendous!" pic.twitter.com/EdNenfNGRx
— cbcwatcher (@cbcwatcher) March 20, 2024
Anyone watching the media coverage of the war in Gaza could be forgiven for thinking that civilians, and only civilians, are being killed. Israel is usually portrayed as a military Goliath, ruthlessly crushing the defenceless Gazans. It often appears as if Israel is indiscriminately carpet-bombing civilians, while deliberately targeting aid convoys, hospitals and schools. Meanwhile, Hamas and its terrorists are conspicuous by their absence in the images and discussions of Palestinian casualties.
Canada’s decades-old bipartisan consensus in support of a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian question is falling apart.
Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government voted Monday night for a heavily diluted version of a non-binding NDP motion that advances supports for Palestinians in the conflict in Gaza.
The amended version arrived at almost literally the last minute, after Parliamentarians had spent the day debating the original and much firmer NDP motion. Clearly, the two parties had been in talks that went down to the wire, before reaching wording both could live with.
With Friends Like Chuck Schumer, Who Needs Enemies?
In a speech on March 14, 2024, US Senate Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said:
“The only real and sustainable solution to this decades-old [Arab-Israeli] conflict is a negotiated two-state solution — a demilitarized Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel in equal measures of peace, security, prosperity, dignity and mutual recognition.”
Schumer and his friends in the Biden administration who continue to talk about a two-state solution are either naïve or ignorant of the sentiments among the Palestinians, most of whom support the Iran-backed Hamas terror group, which does not recognize Israel’s right to exit and does seek to replace it with an Islamic state.
OTTAWA—The Trudeau government will cease future arms exports to Israel even though a motion passed Monday by the House of Commons that called for such action is non-binding, says Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly.
“It is a real thing,” said Joly, speaking to the Star briefly on the morning after a majority of Liberal MPs and cabinet voted in support of a modified NDP resolution that some Jewish groups say undermines Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas.
The controversial resolution sought to toughen Canada’s stance on the Middle East conflict. The original motion supported an immediate ceasefire (to which was added a call for Hamas to disarm); recognition of the State of Palestine (which was changed to support for the “establishment of the State of Palestine as part of a negotiated two-state solution negotiation); and a weapons sales suspension (which was changed to a cessation or ban).
"I think it's the first time in my parliamentary career that I've had a reflection like this where I truly felt, last night, that a line had been crossed," Liberal MP Anthony Housefather says when asked re: his future with party after passage of Israel-Hamas war motion.#cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/TzDPXn3MBS
— CPAC (@CPAC_TV) March 19, 2024
If there was any need for evidence of the shambolic nature of what the Liberals laughingly call their Middle East policy it was on full display Monday night in the House of Commons.
The Commons had spent a good part of the day debating an NDP motion that called for Canada to recognize “a State of Palestine.”
File this one under iconic international charities with long-blemished reputations behaving with even more baffling hypocrisy than usual. True, the shocking shenanigans at Unrwa, the so-called relief agency that has been found to have Hamas terrorists on the payroll, take up much room in that expanding brief. All the while, though, the Red Cross seems to have been lending a hand to convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists by helping them stuff their pockets with wads of misbegotten cash that could fuel more terrorism.
North York councillor James Pasternak was the target of suspected antisemetic threats earlier this month, his office has confirmed to CP24.
On Tuesday, police announced that they charged a man after he allegedly contacted the constituency office of a local councillor over the phone and made “several antisemitic threatening comments towards them.”
The incident, which police are calling hate-motivated, happened on March 9.
NEW: Toronto police arrest 64-year-old Mehboob Rajwani of Markham, accused of making antisemitic threats against a Toronto city councillor pic.twitter.com/XajB6O3cH8
— Bryan Passifiume (@BryanPassifiume) March 19, 2024
