Categories for Feature

Comments (26)

If countries have hearts, and they actually do, then Israel’s heart was found – for more than 500 days – at a little place called Nir Oz.

That’s where an entire country’s wounded heart had taken up residence: at a modest single-story home, with a red roof and white walls, and a backyard full of kids’ toys. There were bikes and trikes, and a multicoloured soccer ball on the picnic table. There were Tonka toys, too, and a folded-up baby’s carriage on its side. It looked like play had been suspended for dinner, and then bedtime. Life, suspended.

There was a hammock strung between a post and the single kumquat tree that was in the backyard. If you stood there long enough, and I did, you could picture Yarden or Shiri Bibas in the hammock, smiling, laughing, watching Ariel running around, playing in his Batman jammies. Ariel, who looked like what an angel would look like, was just four years old.

Ariel will be four years old forever. His little brother, Kfir, was nine months old, and that is what he will be forever, too. Some monsters in the shape of men took them from their home in Nir Oz on the morning of October 7, 2023, and – shortly afterwards, no one knows for sure when – murdered them with their bare hands, and then crushed their tiny bodies with stones and concrete, to make it look like they had been killed by Israel, during an airstrike.

Someone has planted some flowers at the base of the kumquat tree, which Ariel loved. The flowers are reddish-orange, as if to recall the color of Ariel and Kfir’s hair. For more than 500 days, all of Israel, and millions of Jews and non-Jews around the world, held out hope that the Bibas boys were still alive. They would post online reddish-orange words of prayer, and everyone knew what it referred to: Ariel and Kfir. Those boys, and their home in Nir Oz, became Israel’s centre, its beating heart, for more than 500 lightless days.

[To read more, subscribe here]

Comments (0)

Canada could experience a lone-wolf terror attack soon, intelligence authorities have advised the federal government – and antisemitism is overwhelmingly the motivating factor.

“Amid [rising] anti-Semitic hate, an undetected lone actor could commit an act of serious violence in Canada at any time,” one June 2024 secret assessment reads. Multiple other secret assessments in 2024 similarly warned Ottawa about likely terrorist violence inspired by Jew hatred. 

The documents do not indicate what, if anything, the Trudeau government did to prevent such attacks from taking place, however.

The unsettling warnings are contained in a number of recently-declassified security reviews conducted by the Ottawa-based Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre (ITAC), the federal organization tasked with assessing threats of terrorism in Canada. The documents were obtained under freedom of information laws by the University of Ottawa’s Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

Among ITAC’s disturbing findings:

• “ITAC continues to monitor the rising tide of antisemitism and violent rhetoric associated with the conflict in Gaza in Canada with concern…Online actors continue to share violent rhetoric and antisemitic content related to the conflict.”
• “There has been a significant increase in the number of demonstrations in Canada. The number of events from May 1to 17 was approximately triple the volume during each of the preceding months.”
• “Demonstration tactics have become more targeted and disruptive…Pro-Palestinian protestors have grown frustrated due to perceived government inaction on their demands…groups that are listed [terrorist] entities in Canada, namely al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah have voiced their support for the demonstrations…”
• “Violent extremists have been known to target large demonstrations for recruitment, networking and radicalization opportunities and will likely try to do so again in Canada.”
• “Criminal activities and intimidation tactics on campus and online are likely to continue.”

[To read more, subscribe here]

Comments (0)

Comments (28)

As a starting proposition, I am grateful my parents are not alive to see any of this.

Babies and mothers abducted and murdered, for the sin of being Jewish, and much of the world shrugging. Monsters disguised as men, spraying schools and places of worship with bullets. Swastikas and symbols of death being paraded through places where ordinary people live, with impunity. Science being denied, democracy being denuded, ignorance being celebrated.

And, now, the most powerful man on Earth – in just one month – upending Western civilization, demonizing allies, and forming a Satanic alliance with the fascistic, genocidal Russian regime.

It is a cliché to say that we are living through history. But this? This? This feels like what my parents must have felt, observing the rise of Nazism and Hitler, and wondering if it was ever going to get better. Wondering if it could all be actually happening.

Now, as then, it is probably a waste of time to speculate about the motivations of madmen. Is Donald Trump mentally ill? Is he fashioning a dictatorship? Is Putin blackmailing him with some decade-old footage taken one night at the presidential suite at Moscow’s Ritz Carlton Hotel?

The same sorts of questions were asked about Hitler and his ilk, and no one had the answer. So, then – as now – politicians and pundits sought to defend the indefensible. All of us are familiar with the symptoms of that disease: asserting that Donald Trump is right on borders or fentanyl or dairy products or banking or military spending, or whatever lie he conjures up to justify his psychopathy. As long as he has the right ideology, these Vichy Canadians believe, Trump’s thuggery is justifiable.

Except it isn’t, not ever. Three years ago this week, Russia invaded Ukraine.

[To read more, subscribe here]

Comments (8)

Comments (22)

“Flooding the zone” is a football term, but it’s been appropriated by political people.

In football, flooding the zone happens when a team sends a lot of receivers to one side of the field – to force the other team to overcommit defenders to that side of the field, and thereby leave the middle or opposite side of the field exposed.

Political guys loves sports metaphors, because it makes them sound like tough guys, instead of what they mostly are, which is dweebs who never got picked for any team, and who got involved with the debate club instead.

Donald Trump’s Reubenesque former Chief of Staff, Steve Bannon, is apparently out of jail now, and he loves to use that term. In 2018, Bannon famously said this to a writer at Bloomberg: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.”

Politicos love that tough-guy jocky stuff. So, over on the search engine Bing, which keeps track of these things, “flood the zone” shows up in 2,280,000 places, most of them in the context of politics. Sorry, football.

So, that’s what the aforementioned Trump is now doing, albeit without the assistance of Bannon (see jail, above). He’s flooding the zone with sh*t.

There is literally not enough room in this entire newspaper to properly describe what Trump and his winged monkeys have done in the 27 days since he was re-inaugurated (feels like 27 years, don’t it?). Suffice to say it’s been a lot.

He’s thrown Ukraine to the Russian wolves. He’s threatened to use military force against Denmark, a NATO ally, to seize Greenland. He’s threatened force against Panama, another ally. He’s freed January 6 felons, and fired FBI agents. He’s pulled out of the World Health Organization and hired an anti-vaxxer and former junkie to run health care. He’s changed the names of mountains and bodies of water to things he likes better. He’s barred reporters who ask questions he doesn’t like.

And, most significantly, he’s threatened to use “economic force” against Canada. He’s said, a couple dozen times, that he wants to make us the 51st state. He’s mocked our Prime Minister and our Leader of the Opposition. He’s said that we offer nothing of value. And so on and so on.

[To read more, subscribe here]

Comments (23)

If the polls are accurate, this has never really happened before.

The Conservative Party of Canada has dropped nearly 30 percentage points in six weeks. 

Now, in 1984, there was a 30-point shift that ended up favouring Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives. Sure. But that happened over a longer period of time.  Same with 1993, when my former boss Jean Chretien wiped out the Tories. Thirty points, give or take, but the shift occurred over a number of months, not weeks.

Thirty points in just six weeks! How did that happen?

As the Conservative Party’s nervous-nellie caucus gathers for a meeting in Ottawa this week – and as thousands of Tory MPs, staffers and their families congregate in Ottawa’s Rogers Centre on Saturday – more than a few of them have to be asking themselves that question: what happened? What went wrong? Can we get back to where we were?

All fair questions. From being 30 points ahead of the Liberal Party at the start of the year – to now, with several pollsters suggesting the Tories and Grits are nearly tied. Or that the latter are actually ahead of the former. Ouch.

How they lost their lead is simple. As this writer opined in these pages months ago, Trump’s victory in November was always going to hurt the Tories. And it has. Canadians mostly hate Trump, and they quietly suspect Poilievre dresses up in his Donald costume at night, when no one is around.

Once Trump was re-installed in power, things got worse. In the intervening days – when Trump has threatened and belittled Canada, over and over, saying he wants to make us the 51st state – Pierre Poilievre’s predicament has become dire. See polls, above.

There are three reasons for this.  It is an open question whether Poilievre possesses the will, or the insight, to repair the damage.

One: he needs to stop aping Trump’s policies.  For example, this week the Toronto Star topped a report with this headline: “PIERRE POILIEVRE PROMISES ‘MASSIVE’ FOREIGN AID CUTS.” In any other week, at any other time, Poilievre throwing a bone to his migrant-hating red-meat base would be grist for the mill. 

But doing it now, in the selfsame week that Trump and his evil Elflord Elon Musk have shut down USAID, America’s vaunted agency for international development and foreign aid? That’s deeply stupid, Team Tory. It doesn’t exactly advance the narrative that you’re not Trumpy, now, does it?

Two: Poilievre needs a MAGA-enema. In every Conservative caucus, at any given time, you always have a Randy White or a Myron Thompson. Remember them? Smart Tories sure do. The loose lips of White and Thompson and their troglodyte ilk sank Stephen Harper’s Conservatives when it counted – during elections. So Harper flushed them at his earliest opportunity.

Poilievre needs to do likewise. Polls show up to half of partisan Conservatives really like Trump. If that’s even partially true, that means that there are probably even more closeted MAGA types in Poilievre’s circle (Google “Pierre Poilievre staff MAGA hat” to see what I mean). So, Poilievre needs to march them out to the town square and – with a gleeful CBC and the aforementioned Star in attendance – terminate the Vichy MAGA-Canucks, with extreme prejudice. Like, yesterday.

[To read more, go here]

Comments (54)

Comments (29)

Now we know why the Tories wanted an election right away.

At the start of 2025, when Justin Trudeau was still in charge, pollster Angus Reid reported that the Pierre Poilievre Conservatives were at 45 per cent support nationally. The Trudeau Liberals were down to an extraordinary 16 per cent.

Back then, other pollsters showed nearly the same thing. Nanos put the Tory lead at 23 per cent. Research Co. said it was 26 per cent. And then, in the first week of January, Trudeau announced that he was quitting at the start of March. The polls didn’t meaningfully change. Not right away, anyway.

For those of us who used to work for Jean Chretien, it all seemed familiar. Kim Campbell won her party’s leadership in June 1993, succeeding the very unpopular Brian Mulroney. For months, we Liberals had been ahead, sometimes – like Poilievre – by as much as 30 percentage points.

As soon as the Tories selected Campbell, however, the bottom start to fall out. Under Campbell, the Progressive Conservatives (as they were then known) surged ahead. By the time the Canada Day weekend rolled around, Campbell had become one of the most popular Prime Ministers in history.

So what happened? A few things – because, in politics, you never win or lose because of just one thing. Chretien ran a superior campaign in the Fall of 1993. Campbell was inexperienced and undisciplined. The Tory campaign ran an ad mocking Chretien’s facial paralysis.

Mostly, however, Campbell and her party lost because they’d been in power for almost a decade. People wanted change.

It’s dangerous, then, to suggest – as some Liberals are now quietly doing – that they could now somehow snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Under Mark Carney, they whisper amongst themselves, perhaps a fourth consecutive Liberal win is possible.

Their reason for making such bold claims is, again, the polls.

[To read more, subscribe here]

Comments (8)