“It is not the pain and the wounds that are the worst,” the Swiss philosopher Pascal Mercier wrote, many years ago. “The worst is the humiliation.”

The Nazis knew that. After Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, widespread public humiliation of Jews commenced. In one notorious case, a young Jewish man named Julius Wolff and his non-Jewish fiancé, Christine Neeman, were taken by the Nazis’ brown shirts – the Sturmabteilung – in Norden, Germany, and forced to parade through the streets wearing signs.

Wolff’s said: “Ich bin ein Rasseschänder” – that is, “I am a race defiler.” Wolff and Neeman were later taken to concentration camps.

For the Nazis, public humiliation of Jews, and those who would consort with Jews, wasn’t something that just happened by chance. It was something that was central to their program of oppression of the Jews and non-Aryans, from the very start. It was all designed to inflict suffering on Jews.

But – and this is key – it was also how the Nazis drew a distinction between Jews and non-Jews. Ritual public humiliations were a way to remind ordinary Germans that Jews were not human – they were, as the Nazi propaganda of the time repeatedly proclaimed, parasites. They were vermin, ungeziefer, infecting the corpus of the Third Reich and the world.

We don’t know what the man who assaulted a Jew in a Montreal park a few days ago was thinking, at this point. We likely never will – his defence lawyers will be working overtime to ensure that the judge, or the jury, never hears a solitary word about antisemitism.

So, we will be left to wonder: was it an argument that simply escalated? A case of mistaken identity? Just an unstable person, assaulting a man in broad daylight, in front of his children?

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Media truth.

For many, those words are an oxymoron – you know, two words that have the opposite meaning of the other. For many supporters of Israel and Western democracy, these days, “media truth” is just that. An oxymoron.

So: the New York Times, the ostensible newspaper of record, placing a photo of a child on its front page, and then falsely suggesting it was dying as a result of an Israeli campaign of starvation against Palestinians. Or most other media simply ignoring authentic footage of a skeletal Israeli man being forced by Hamas to dig his own grave – whose “state,” by the by, Canada just announced it would formally recognize.

The media has lost tremendous credibility over cases like these. Media have also lost a lot of legitimacy for playing fast and loose with the truth in the Israel-Hamas war.

The CBC, which all Canadian pay for with their taxes, has been among the notable offenders. Instead of presenting verifiable facts in a fair and balanced way, it has seemingly chosen sides, and presented a wildly-distorted view of the Hamas-Israel conflict.

This reporter has documented multiple examples of that at CBC. Many relate to Mohamed El Saife. 

El Saife is paid by CBC to work as a “videographer.” A fawning essay about him was posted on the main CBC website at the anniversary of the slaughter of hundreds of Jews by Hamas, October 7. A similarly-sycophantic profile of him was broadcast on CBC’s main news programs, on both CBC News Network and on its main network. There, he was described as CBC’s “eyes and ears” in Gaza.

His “eyes and ears” apparently see and hear things differently than many of us. El Saife says “Israel” — he puts the Jewish state’s name in quotation marks, to suggest that it is a fiction — is an “occupation army that violates the dignity of of the bodies of martyrs.” He has accused Israel of “massacring” citizens in the Gazan city of Khan Yunis, without any proof.

He has published an A.I.-generated image of a Palestinian child wearing wings, and chased by demonic-looking weapons-toting IDF troops.

And, now, we learn about a new example of CBC’s “eyes and ears in Gaza” conducting himself in manner that many journalists never would: the raw footage he sends that is ultimately seen by hundreds of the network’s journalists. These are actual quotes from the footage – the “shot lists” – he sells to CBC:

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A Thai man is lying on the ground. He seems to be bleeding from a gunshot wound to his chest. The man moves his arms, a bit.

A Gazan man, one not in a Hamas uniform, takes a hoe, and starts hacking at the man’s neck, over and over. It makes a thick, crunching sound every time it lands.

It is apparent the Gazan is trying to behead the Thai man, who came to Israel to work on a farm. “God is great!” he shrieks, over and over, as he brings down the blade on the man’s neck.

Not far away, at yellow metal gate leading to the Be’eri kibbutz – which is just up the road from the site of the Nova Music Festival – a man drives up in his car, waiting for the gate to slide open. Uniformed Hamas terrorists step out from some bushes and shoot the man. He’s dead. His car slowly slides forward, and comes to rest against the gate.

The terrorists fire off a few more rounds into the man’s body, and then walk into the kibbutz. They creep past rows of single-story white homes, mostly silent. On the GoPro footage they are collecting, they can be heard whispering to each other: “Where did they go?” They are looking for Jews to kill.

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Someone really needs to reacquaint Benjamin Netanyahu with the 1988 Hamas Charter. Quickly. 

In particular, they need to show the Israeli Prime Minister articles 10 and 30. In those, in their governing document, Hamas says that it will use “word and deed” to wage Jihad – which has come to mean holy war. 

Article 30 is pretty specific: “Jihad is not confined to the carrying of arms and the confrontation of the enemy. The effective word, the good article, the useful book, support and solidarity – all these are elements of the Jihad for Allah’s sake.”

In other words, propaganda. What the terror organization is telling everyone, here, is that they wage war with words and images just as much as bombs and bullets. Implicitly, Hamas has always acknowledged that their desired genocide of Jews and infidels is a daunting military challenge. Propaganda, however, is Hamas’ real forte. At that, they excel.

So, in the information war, Hamas – and its axis, with Hezbollah and Iran and Qatar and Russia and China – is winning. You only need to cast your eye over the offerings of most news or social media – or look at what is happening in the streets – to see that is true. Israel is losing the propaganda war. It is getting its ass kicked.

Netanyahu is a big part of the reason. Israel’s leader is propped up by a coalition of far right religious extremists, and adamantly refuses to let anyone else speak for Israel in the West. He has been in power too long, and the majority – inside and outside of Israel – are weary of him.

But Benjamin Netanyahu alone cannot be fairly blamed for all of the grave harm that has been done to Israel’s reputation. Hamas is the main author of that.

Since the beginnings of the war in late October 2023, Hamas’ propagandists have completely dominated the news and information agenda. When an IDF tank moves through Gaza streets, for example, Hamas typically sends out four men: two to attach explosives to the side of the tank, one to guard the getaway – and one to shoot broadcast quality propaganda footage.

Even with its leadership and its ranks decimated, Hamas and its axis never give up on propagandizing. Look at the evidence.

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When a country doesn’t matter militarily or diplomatically, when no one is sharing intelligence with it anymore, all that it has left are…empty words, basically. Piety and preaching. That’s it.

So, now, when it comes to world affairs, Canada is a season’s ticket holder in the nosebleed seats. Holding up homemade signs, hollering, hoping to get on TV, while the real action is playing out elsewhere, far, far away.

Ever since 2004, when Paul Martin and his brain trust thought it would be a good idea to meet the homicidal Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi in a tent in the desert, Canada has mattered less and less internationally. It all happened gradually. We became a bit of an afterthought, and then a punchline. Donald Trump, in particular, knows this. He’s noticed that the rest of the world hasn’t rallied to our side, as he’s openly coveted us as his 51st state.

It was not always thus. At one time – say, when Mike Pearson won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for resolving the Suez Crisis, or when Brian Mulroney fought to end apartheid in the Eighties, or when Jean Chretien refused to participate in George W. Bush’s war against Saddam Hussein in 2003 – Canada truly mattered on the international stage. Not so much anymore.

In recent years, we’ve been reduced to thumbing out sanctimonious tweets from the sidelines, far removed from the action. In both official languages, bien sur.

So, Prime Minister Mark Carney issued a tweet on Thursday. Here’s part of what it said:

“Canada condemns the Israeli government’s failure to prevent the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian disaster in Gaza. Israel’s control of aid distribution must be replaced by comprehensive provision of humanitarian assistance led by international organizations. Many of these are holding significant Canadian-funded aid which has been blocked from delivery to starving civilians. This denial of humanitarian aid is a violation of international law.”

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