My latest: Ottawa has an antisemitism problem. Still.

Meet the new boss, worse than the old boss.

Apologies to The Who, but the misapplication of their song lyric is apt: on all matters related to the Jewish state, former Global Affairs Minister Melanie Joly was bad. But her successor, Anita Anand, has already shown herself to be far, far worse. That is no easy thing, but the Toronto-area MP has pulled it off.

This week, reporters approached the newly-appointed Anand for a pro forma comment about the Hamas-Israel war. This is what she said.

“We cannot allow the continued use of food as a political tool … Over 50,000 people have died as a result of the aggression caused against the Palestinians and the Gazan people in Palestine. Using food as a political tool is simply unacceptable,” Anand said, before a cabinet meeting. “We need to continue to work towards a ceasefire. We need to ensure that we have a two-state solution, and Canada will continue to maintain that position.”

She then turned on her heel and stalked away. Jewish Canadians – and the many who support the Jewish state – registered genuine shock.

There are several factual problems with what Anita Anand said. Here are the big ones.

• “Over 50,000 people have died.” The source of that figure is Hamas, which runs the health authority in Gaza. Multiple agencies have stated that Hamas – which, all but the likes of Anita Anand recall, is a designated terrorist entity that broke the ceasefire and killed 1,200 people on October 7, 2023 – has promoted casualty counts that are deliberately, provably false. Even the Gaza authority now acknowledges as much. Zaher al-Wahidi, the head of statistics at the health ministry, told Sky News last month that thousands of individual deaths had been reclassified. “We realized a lot of people died a natural death,” Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [something] caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”

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