PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY – Barack Obama called it the “empathy deficit” – which the former U.S. President defined as “being able to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes.”

Obama didn’t invent the concept, of course – Jesus Christ did, per Matthew 7:12: “Do to others what you would have them do to you” – but it’s a really important one, politically.

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre showed some overdue political empathy on the hustings in Alberta’s Battle River-Crowfoot by-election, and it paid dividends. He won in landslide on Monday night. Said Poilievre before the vote: “I am a born and bred Albertan, with strong Alberta values.

“As leader, I can take the fight for farmers, oil and gas workers, firearms owners, soldiers, for Albertans to the national stage. That means strong, forceful, representation for the people of Battle River-Crowfoot.”

The social scientists remind us that people develop empathy for other people when – like Poilievre, like people who travel abroad a lot, like people who move from one province to another – they uproot themselves and develop something called “neuroplasticity.” That happens when the human brain literally reorganizes itself through new connections throughout life.

This writer’s neuroplasticity moment happened a few years ago, when I moved to rural Canada (Prince Edward County, PEC) from a lifetime in big cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Dallas, Ottawa). The pandemic was the impetus, but the payoff was almost immediate: “Why didn’t I do this years ago?” I asked my labs, out loud.

PEC is a wonderful, beautiful, amazing place to live, an hour and a bit outside Toronto. But, in the past few months, no small amount of sadness and anxiety have crept in. Drought is the reason.

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Have our cultural icons lost their collective minds?

Across the cultural landscape – music, film, books – it certainly seems that way. Musicians, filmmakers, authors have apparently persuaded themselves that they alone can solve the Middle Eastern crisis from their distant perches in Canada or the U.S. or Europe.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, most politicians generally know they lack the superpowers to single-handedly end wars like the one raging between Israel and Hamas. But some self-important culture types clearly think they do.

Take TIFF for example (please). In the past few days, as the entire world knows by now, TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey and his Toronto International Film Festival adamantly refused to screen a documentary based in Israel by acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Barry Avrich – after having previously promising that they would.

Why? Well, many suspected latent antisemitism played a role with unseen forces at TIFF. This writer wondered if Hamas’ banker – Qatar – had put pressure on TIFF, with whom it has quietly partnered since 2019.

TIFF’s stated reason? Avrich and his fellow producers had failed to secure permission from Hamas – to show some Hamas footage in the documentary! (We are not making this up, as much as we wish that we were.) It was absurd and insane: Bailey and TIFF wanted a terror group’s approval first.

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Unlike Hamas, which still maintains an office in Qatar, the Doha Film Institute (DFI) operates out of a post office box in the oil-rich Middle Eastern country. But the institute – which proclaims that it is “independent” and merely interested in promoting film and culture – wields a lot of clout.

With the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), in particular.

DFI came into existence in 2010. It is led by Fatma Hassan Alremaihi, a telegenic Qatari woman. Alremaihi has not hidden her disdain for Israel, in her public remarks or in the films she funds.

Just days after Hamas murdered, raped and wounded thousands of Israelis on October 7, 2023, for example, Alremaihi spoke at a conference in Doha promoting “voices from Palestine.” The DFI CEO called for “resistance,” quote unquote, presumably against Israel.

She called for a minute of silence for Palestinian “martyrs,” and, according to at least one news report, attacked “ongoing Israeli aggression” and “the Israeli war machine.” Said the report, in The Peninsula:

“Alremaihi pointed out [Israel’s] violations of international and ethical laws, as well as humanitarian standards and values, by the Israeli colonial occupation. She highlighted the importance of the ‘Free Palestine’ slogan, noting that it represents a defence of not only Palestine and its people but also our universal principles of freedom and humanity.

“Today, when millions of people all over the world say ‘Free Palestine,’ it’s not a slogan to defend Palestine and Palestinians only. It’s a chant defending our own freedom, humanity and values.”

Alremaihi called for “resistance…through various means,” said The Peninsula’s reporter.

Watching the circus that was the Toronto International Film Festival this past week, one can be forgiven for wondering: does that “resistance” extend to TIFF? How much influence does Qatar exercise over the celebrated Canadian film festival? Both are fair questions, particularly after TIFF refused to screen The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, a Canadian film that showcased one Israeli’s family’s experiences on October 7.

Among other things, TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey had told the film’s makers their documentary would be barred from TIFF because they did not obtain “legal clearance of all footage” – essentially, from Hamas, a terror group. A massive controversy ensued, with Bailey and TIFF being pilloried on front pages around the globe. On Thursday afternoon, Bailey and TIFF completely reversed their idiotic decision. Sources say “heads will roll” soon at the organization, this newspaper has been told.

Bailey is not an antisemite, those same sources say. So, what persuaded TIFF to bar the film? Was it Qatar?

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“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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