“You f**king Jew.”

That is what the big skinhead wearing the DROWN THE BOAT PEOPLE T-shirt had just called the lead singer of the Calgary punk band called the Hot Nasties. The Nasties had just finished their set at the University of Calgary’s MacEwan Hall, opening for the popular British punk band 999, when someone spotted the skinheads making Nazi salutes.

The skinhead and his buddies continued to spew Jew hatred. The Hot Nasties’ lead singer and lead guitarist continued to tell the skinheads to shut up, or else. The skinhead threw a punch, a fight erupted. The skinheads retreated – on that night, at least – bloodied and bruised, but vowing to return.

And, really, they never really left. Because anti-Semitism remains a significant problem in popular culture, and in music in particular. We’ve been seeing plenty of it since the atrocities of October 7.

Evidence that showed up again this week: Roger Waters, regarded as an anti-Semite by his own former bandmates in Pink Floyd, was this week dropped by his music publisher, BMG. As Variety reported, Rogers’ anti-Semitic statements “infuriated his former bandmates, as they have driven off several suitors interested in acquiring the wizening band’s recorded-music catalog, which was said to be on the market for half a billion dollars.”

Other artists who have refused to perform in Israel, or cancelled gigs there because of pressure from the anti-Semites who make up the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, include, but are by no means limited to:

Rage Against the Machine, Cypress Hill, Patti Smith, The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas, System of A Down’s Serj Tankian, Questlove, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Run The Jewels, Anti-Flag, Santana, Sting, Lorde, Lana Del-Rey, Shakira, Elvis Costello, Lauryn Hill, Pharrell Williams, Snoop Dogg, Coldplay, Lenny Kravitz, Cassandra Wilson, Cat Power and (unfortunately) many more.

Some very notable artists refuse to go along with the BDS bigotry, however. Nick Cave, of the Birthday Party and Bad Seeds, refused to cancel shows in Israel, memorably saying: “At the end of the day, there’s maybe two reasons why I’m here. One is that I love Israel and I love Israeli people, and two is to make a principled stand against anyone who tries to censor and silence musicians.”

Thom Yorke, of Radiohead, had a similar view, posting on X: “We don’t endorse [Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu any more than [Donald] Trump, but we still play in America. Music, art and academia is about crossing borders, not building them.”

Sir Paul McCartney, formerly of a little outfit known as the Beatles, was similarly defiant. In 2008, McCartney received numerous direct death threats for his insistence on playing in Israel.

Not only did McCartney show up, he dedicated a song in Hebrew to his deceased wife Linda, who was Jewish. McCartney told Israeli media: “I got death threats, but I have no intention of surrendering and I’m coming anyway…“I’ve heard so many great things about Tel Aviv and Israel, but hearing is one thing and experiencing it yourself is another.”

So, why do the BDS types continually lobby artists to boycott and besmirch Israel? Because they know cultural icons can have a tremendous influence on the opinions of millions of people, in a way that politicians rarely do. For low-information voters – who make up the majority in most electoral contests – the opinions of Taylor Swift can often be far more consequential than those of anyone else.

But, at the end of the song, politics and culture often make for an uneasy mix. Musicians tend to be lousy politicians. Just ask the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten.

The punk pioneer travelled to Israel in 2010 to play with his post-Pistols band, Public Image Limited. Asked about the Israel-haters and boycotters, Rotten (typically) minced no words: “I think it’s disgusting. I think they shouldn’t have agreed in the first place if they were gonna back out.

“I’m here to say: People of Israel, I support you 100 percent!”

[Warren Kinsella was the lead singer of the Hot Nasties.]

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“Temporarily paused.”

That’s what the Trudeau government said it has done with funding it gives to UNRWA, the United Nations agency that supposedly helps Palestinians – but, it is alleged, also participates in massacres of Jews.

Since that shocking news dropped last Friday, just about every other civilized nation on Earth as also stopped funding UNRWA, because the accusations that its employees helped torture and murder 1,200 Israelis – and helped kidnap some 250 others – are just too credible. There is evidence.

And, yet: just ”temporarily paused.” Doesn’t sound like it’s going to be very permanent, does it? It doesn’t.

Even if Canada’s withdrawal of support for UNRWA becomes permanent, it may not matter at all. Why? Because Canada continues to fund other organizations without ensuring the proper oversight.

Forty-eight hours after Canada announced it was “temporarily pausing” support for UNRWA, Ahmed Hussen, the Trudeau government’s Minister for International Development, issued a defiant-sounding press release that stated Canada was still shoveling out $40 million to these non-Governmental agencies (NGOs):

• World Food Programme: $16 million
• UNICEF: $6 million
• United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA): $5 million
• World Health Organization: $3 million
• International Committee of the Red Cross: $3 million
• United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA): $2 million

Do innocent Palestinians need help as they navigate a war zone? Of course. But are the above organizations deserving of Canadian millions?

We need to know – because an expert is urging caution. The expert is Anne Herzberg, a human rights lawyer and the legal advisor to NGO Monitor – a Jerusalem-based group that tracks NGOs operating in the Middle East. And what she and her 22-year-old organization have found is deeply disturbing.

Says Herzberg, in an interview from her Jerusalem office: “UNRWA employees taking part in the October 7 massacres is certainly shocking. But its certainly not an aberration. There are other cases of terrorist entities that have embedded people into humanitarian aid organizations and NGOs. It’s not unique.”

Many other organizations are still receiving millions from Canada. Should they?

“One of the problems we’ve found is that there is not proper vetting going on,” says Herzberg, who obtained her law degree at Columbia University. “So, you have governments, including the Canadian government, pouring millions of dollars into the NGOs without really checking to see the extent to which they are hiring members of Hamas or other terrorist groups.”

She cites examples, and names names. The Gaza-based head of World Vision, Herzberg says, diverted $40 million to Hamas, and was later convicted in an Israeli court and sentenced to 12 years in prison for supporting terrorism. And World Vision receives substantial support from Canada – just last year, $41 million from Global Affairs.

Herzberg sighs. “There has been a very long and sad history of exploitation of humanitarian organizations to commit terrorism, unfortunately,” she says. “We’ve been seeing evidence of this abuse going back to the early 2000s. In Gaza, the problem became most acute when Hamas took over the strip in 2007. What’s been surprising to us is the degree to which the human rights industry and the United Nations have tried to cover it up. They knew.”

Canada knows, too. Or it should, she says.

Citing recent stories in this newspaper documenting how anti-Israel protestors are being paid to protest, Herzberg says Canada needs to take corrective action, now. “The first thing Canada needs to do is look at the protests, and try and find out who is paying. I think that’s critical. Canada especially needs to take a close look at the organizations it is funding.”

But that’s not all, she says.

“Canada claims to support a two-state solution, and claims to be against anti-Semitism. Yet a lot of the money they’re giving out is going to NGOs who do not support two-state solution, and who do not oppose anti-Semitism They actually actively promote anti-Semitism. Same goes for the United Nations organizations that Canada is supporting. Canada needs to have a full and comprehensive review of all this development aid.”

Will we? So far, it hasn’t happened. And, when you poke through the entrails of the Trudeau regime’s own language – “temporarily pausing,” above – they don’t seem very committed to fixing a big, big problem.

Until they do, until our money starts going to the organizations that truly oppose terror and hate, more October 7 massacres aren’t just possible.

They’re likely.

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October 7, 2023 is a day that will live in infamy.

It is also a day that has caused a massive shift, everywhere – culturally, politically, militarily, strategically.

Even on the personal level, October 7 has dramatically re-ordered the lives and priorities of many who are far from the battlefields: when a Jew is afraid to wear an indication of their faith outside their home – when they are afraid of posting a representation of it on the doorframe of their home – you know that all is changed, per Yeats, changed utterly.

The news is not all bad. By war’s end, Israel will have mostly defeated Hamas, and inoculated itself against another such attack for a generation or more. Moderate Arab nations, who have been quietly applauding the demise of Hamas, will continue to forge trade and political ties with Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu – who had been told October 7 was coming, disbelieved it, and did nothing to prevent it – will be gone, consumed by serial corruption trials or Israeli fury, or both. Israel will likely be governed by Benny Gantz, who is what Israel needs, because he represents the desired mix of military experience and centrism.

The world’s civilized nations – already brought closer by Putin’s foul war on Ukraine – will embrace a further and superior alliance, one that is better equipped to defeat terrorist threats as well as military ones. Donald Trump will not be the one to lead it.

But one glaring, shocking problem will remain. And that is that the Beast is awake.

The aforementioned William Butler Yeats wrote of it in his Second Coming poem: “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Yeats’ Beast was the anti-Christ, probably, a monster that he believed would extinguish Christianity and the world. In the post-October 7, 2023 context, it is anti-Semitism – ironically reawakened in Bethlehem, which is located in Palestine. Not Israel.

The Beast of Jew hatred is everywhere – in Canada, a Jewish restaurant in Toronto vandalized, its windows smashed as in Kristallnacht, and a synagogue in Fredericton attacked on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. And that is just in the past two days. Two days.

Anti-Semitism, the oldest hatred, is everywhere we look, these days. It has shaken the historical alliance of Jews and blacks, forged in the civil rights years. It has riven academics and unionists in a way that will take a decade or more to repair. It has made the class wars far worse, because of the (provably false) perception that Jews are all rich and white.

But the Beast of anti-Semitism is seen most visibly in one place: among our youth.

This writer has seen the public opinion research, conducted in Canada, the United States, Europe and beyond. And what it reveals cannot be denied or dismissed: vast swaths of Generation Z ( who are 18 to 26) and Millennials (who are 27 to 42) are wildly, avowedly anti-Semitic. More, much more, than the university professors or public sector union bosses or anyone else you can think of.

The polling, by Leger and several other firms, is shocking. A third of young Canadians – Gen Z and Millennials – support targeting Jews. A quarter of them say they want Israel destroyed. Forty per cent of them do not want those who promote genocide – a criminal offence, in Canada – punished.

And on Hamas, that Satanic and malevolent force, they shrug. Forty per cent of them don’t care about Hamas’ butchery, and refuse to condemn it. A Harvard poll, conducted right after the carnage of October 7, found that more than half of American Gen Z support Hamas. That it was “justified.”

On the Holocaust, which was the mass-murder that Hamas was emulating, the numbers are just as depressing. Twenty per cent of young Americans call the Holocaust a myth. Thirty per cent of them “don’t know” if it is a myth. Thirty per cent of them think “Jews wield too much power.”

There’s more – too much more – but all of the pollsters have concluded the same thing: anti-Semitism is back, everywhere, and almost half of our young people have embraced it.

That, to this writer at least, represents a greater threat than Hamas, Hezbollah, and all the idiotic professors and union bosses put together. We are at risk of losing an entire generation to Jew hatred.

The Beast is awake, but it is not slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

It has been birthed already, and it is everywhere.

And it is taking hold of our youth.

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Most Canadians believe – or believed – in the idea of the United Nations.

On paper, it all made sense.  An international body that would promote peace and security.  One that would foster better relations between countries.  A place to coordinate the actions of nations.  To create a better world.

The UN was borne out of the ashes of World War II, phoenix-like, with the initial aim of preventing future world wars.  That was a good objective.  So, four dozen nations met in San Francisco in June 1945, and hammered out the broad principles that formed the UN Charter.

There are 111 articles in the Charter, collected in 19 separate chapters. This is the very first one: “To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace.”

Those are the first words you see, really: that the United Nations would always strive to maintain peace, and take action to prevent and remove “threats to peace.”

So, what happens when it is the United Nations itself that is violating the peace?  What does it mean, when representatives of the UN – its paid staff – are actively involved in acts of aggression against innocent civilians? What then?

Because that, now, is the truly shocking news that seeped out on Friday morning, when the world was distracted by a historic ruling of the International Court of Justice.

That United Nations staff participated in the massacres on October 7.

Read that again, because it is not made up: United Nations staff participated in the massacres of 1,200 Israeli men, women, children and babies on October 7.

UNRWA – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees – admitted it, just as the ICJ’s ruling was breaking.  Here are the words of Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner-general:

“The Israeli Authorities have provided UNRWA with information about the alleged involvement of several UNRWA employees in the horrific attacks on Israel on 7 October. To protect the Agency’s ability to deliver humanitarian assistance, I have taken the decision to immediately terminate the contracts of these staff members and launch an investigation in order to establish the truth without delay.  Any UNRWA employee who was involved in acts of terror will be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution.”

Lazzarini then “condemns in the strongest terms” what happened to Israeli civilians on October 7, and says a few words asking for the return of all remaining Israeli hostages. But, again, it is important to note that UNRWA made their admission when they knew everyone would be focussed on the stunning ruling of the International Court of Justice. (Which – against the expectations of most – declined to declare that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.)

Why cover up? Why try and take out the trash, as journalists put it, on a Friday? Because UNRWA and the United Nations know: the damage has been done.  And the damage is irreparable.  Twelve of their employees helped to murder, maim, and kidnap Israelis.

The Israelis have been raising the alarm about UNRWA for a long time.  But, as with most things at the United Nations, nobody really listened to them.

About a week ago, to cite just one example, international human rights lawyer Hillel Neuer’s UN watchdog told the international body that 3,000 UNRWA employees were active on a Telegram feed, “replete with praise of the Hamas massacre of October 7th.”  UNRWA and the UN shrugged.  They didn’t care.

One of that group, United Nations employee #30026166, Safe al-Najjar, was an administrator of the group.  She regularly praises Hamas, calling them “holy warriors.”  Another UNRWA employee (#10777281), Weam Majdi Kalloub, praised massacres of Jews.  And on and on. So many Jew haters, there is not enough room to name and shame them.

All of that is bad enough.  All of that should be sufficient cause for concern.  But then Israel provided the United Nations with proof that its own employees had actually helped to butcher Jews.  The United States immediately announced it was stopping funding of UNRWA.  Canada, which has provided UNRWAS with $90 million between 2019 and 2023, needed to do likewise.

And, to the surprise of many, we did – late on Friday. Because of the fence-sitting for which the Trudeau regime has become notorious, it was doubtful. But they did the right thing. So, good.

But can we now expect Trudeau to finally admit that sad and shocking truth – which is that the United Nations and its agencies have become complicit in murder?

And that, like all murderers, they deserve to be punished?

Because they do not deserve to be funded, or supported, anymore.

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Israel won.

Israel won, in particular, by not losing.

On Friday morning, the International Court of Justice declined to rule that Israel was committing genocide in its war against Hamas in Gaza.

The president of the U.N. court, American Joan E. Donoghue, spoke at this morning’s hearing. Said Donoghue:

“On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas and other armed groups present in the Gaza Strip carried out an attack in Israel, killing more than 1,200 persons, injuring thousands and abducting some 240 people, many of whom continue to be held hostage. Following this attack, Israel launched a large scale military operation in Gaza by land, air and sea, which is causing massive civilian casualties.”

South Africa had the right to take Israel to court, she said. But – against the expectations of many supporters of Israel, and perhaps Israel itself – she said two important things. One, she said on behalf of the 15-member court that that Israel must take take steps to ensure its IDF troops do not violate the Genocide Convention. Israel must prevent genocide, and punish those who incite it, she said.

But on the key question, brought forward in a packed courtroom by South Africa two weeks ago – whether Israel would be ordered to cease its military operations in Gaza, which is what South Africa, China, Russia, Iran and the world’s despots most desired – the ICJ did not order Israel to stop.

Just adhere to the Geneva Convention. Which, as the civilized world knows, Israel was already doing.

It is difficult to overstate the significance of this ruling – which was always going to be more about symbolism than reality. The UN’s court lacks the power to force Israel, or any country, to do or not do anything. But its ruling was important, and taken seriously by Israel, because the eyes of the world have been focussed on Gaza since Israel commenced its – overdue, necessary – action against Hamas at the end of October 2023.

Judge Donoghue said one thing on which both sides could agree: “Gaza has become a place of death and despair.” But the disagreement is over who is to blame for that. Israel (and too few others) says Hamas; Hamas (and too many others) says Israel.

The ICJ did not say so, but the facts are the facts: a ceasefire was in place on October 6, 2023, and on most of the days prior to that. And it was Hamas who broke the ceasefire, with an orgy of murder, torture, rape and kidnapping – of citizens, not soldiers.

The ICJ indicated that it has not passed a final ruling on the case brought by South Africa, which has effectively become a satellite of Russia and Hamas since the Mandela era. It may still rule on the specious genocide claim. But, as its practice, that ruling may take months or years to arrive.

Surprising many, Donoghue said: “The court is not required to ascertain whether any violations of Israel’s obligations under the Genocide Convention have occurred. That will happen at a later stage of the process.”

For the Israel-haters on the international stage, the ruling is a major setback. A United Nations court that has been traditionally hostile to Israel has refused to rule that genocide is taking place.

That, for Israel and its allies, is a massive victory – because it is so surprising. The UN’s General Assembly has condemned Israel no less than 14 times in 2023 alone. Most expected the International Court of Justice to do likewise.

It didn’t. And, for Israel and the cause of decency and sanity, that is a very big victory, indeed.

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