I don’t know what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was thinking when he significantly changed his position on the Israel-Hamas war Tuesday evening during an event in B.C. unrelated to the conflict, but his choice of words and the way he structured them will fuel anti-Semitism in Canada.
Iran’s supreme leader told the head of Hamas in a face-to-face meeting in Tehran that his country would not enter the war with Israel and accused the terror group of not giving any prior warning of the Oct 7 attacks.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Ismail Haniyeh that Iran – a longtime backer of Hamas – would continue to lend the group its political and moral support, but would not intervene directly, according to three Iranian and Hamas officials with knowledge of the discussions who asked to remain anonymous.
Hamas is losing badly, but what the Ayatollah says and what he does are different things.
Over a month later, Israeli authorities are still identifying the remains of those killed in the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas — that’s how brutal, sadistic and ruthless the violence was that day. One of those victims was Canadian-Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver, who was 74 years old.
Three hours before dawn, witnesses and doctors inside Gaza’s largest hospital reported that Israeli tanks had entered the sprawling medical compound on the western edge of Gaza City. “We can see them pointing the guns of the tanks toward the hospital … they are inside the complex with the tanks,” Khader Al Za’anoun, a reporter for the Palestinian news agency Wafa, told CNN.
Munir al-Boursh, a doctor inside the Dar al-Shifa hospital and a Palestinian health ministry undersecretary, had earlier appealed to approaching Israeli forces to exercise caution. “You being inside the hospital will create a state of fear and hysteria among the patients here,” he told the Israel Defense Forces in a phone call obtained by Al Jazeera. “All floors of the hospital are full of people from floor one through to six.”
7 minute one-shot unedited IDF tour of Al-Shifa hospital with your tour guide @jconricus pic.twitter.com/IEYgjrCtxF
— The Mossad: Satirical, Yet Awesome (@TheMossadIL) November 15, 2023
Government still refuses to acknowledge link between Muslim immigration and antisemitic acts
A major march against antisemitism was held in Paris on Sunday, November 12th, at the call of the country’s main political forces. Supposed to be a moment of national unanimity, it was the subject of major divisions and, several days later, continues to be the subject of controversy.
Since Hamas attacked Israel, antisemitic acts have exploded in France. The idea of a march against antisemitism gradually gained ground within the various political groupings, until it was officially launched by the two presidents of the assemblies, Macronist Yaël Braun-Pivet for the National Assembly, and Les Républicains Gérard Larcher for the Senate.
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?’
Participants in a massive pro-Israel rally near the White House on Tuesday described a distressing sentiment they’ve been grappling with for weeks.
In summary: A sense of betrayal.
Jewish Americans said colleagues, friends and allies they so frequently agree with unexpectedly went silent after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7.
“Nobody wants to talk about it,” said Jill Berkman, a longtime Democrat and non-religious Jew from Maryland.
“Many of my Democratic friends who’ve supported so many other groups — just don’t want to talk about this.”
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.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau now has the dubious distinction of being the only world leader to be publicly rebuked on Twitter by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack. Which says a lot given the lack of love the Jewish state generally gets from the international community. Yet, as Julius Caesar found out, it stings much harder when your own friend stabs you in the back.
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.
The roots of the elite university’s antisemitism and Nazi association run deep
In the aftermath of the October 7 attack on Israel, when videos were circulating on social media showing the enormities perpetrated on Israelis by Hamas terrorists — women raped, old people and children abducted, civilians murdered en masse — students of Harvard’s leftist groups banded together to condemn… Israel. Members of thirty-four student organizations signed a letter declaring that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The spectacle of America’s elite youth engaging in a shameless act of victim-blaming sent shockwaves through the world.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan today said Israel was a ‘terror state’ committing war crimes and violating international law in Gaza, while repeating his view that Hamas gunmen are not terrorists but a ‘political party elected by Palestinians’.
In a fiery speech to members of his party, Erdogan said Turkey would work to ensure that Israel’s political and military leaders are recognised as ‘terrorists’ and brought to trial in international courts.
A ranting Erdogan said Israel was a ‘terrorists state’ intent on destroying Gaza along with the thousands of people who live in the besieged territory.
I was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. We were part of a dwindling population of Lebanese Jews who had remained in our homeland despite the growing tension facing our community. Growing up, I faced countless instances of Jew-hatred (see chapter 1 of my 2020 The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense). When the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser died in 1970, I vividly remember, as a five-year-old child, the procession of protesters walking by our home screaming with great zeal “Death to Jews.” I suppose that the mourning is rendered less painful if accompanied by a call for the extermination of Jews.
