“We don’t need no education.”

It’s ironic, and telling, that the author of that 1979 Pink Floyd lyric was Roger Waters. Waters is a musician, but he is also one of the most notorious Jew-haters on the planet.

He dresses up in Nazi-style uniforms for shows, he refuses to eat what he calls “Jew food,” he’s been quoted going on about “dirty kikes,” and he says “the Jewish lobby” controls the music industry. Among other things.

And, as he wrote for his band, “we don’t need no education.” It was deliberately ungrammatical (perhaps) and meant to be ironic (probably). But, these days, it rings true, although not in the way the anti-Semite Roger Waters meant it.

How else to react to the presidents of some of the world’s most prestigious universities – Harvard, M.I.T. – shrugging about anti-Semitism on their campuses, and refusing to say that promoting genocide against Jews isn’t against the rules?

How else to read about the rape crisis centre at the University of Alberta denying that Israeli women and girls were the victims of sexual violence on October 7 and thereafter? Or police being needed to escort Jewish students at McGill University – or more security being secured for Jews at UBC, Simon Fraser and U Vic?

How else to regard attacks on Jewish students at Concordia University in Montreal, and a Concordia “humanities” professor screaming at a Jewish student that she was “a whore” – and telling her to “go back to Poland” (a slur that was shouted at Jews at a counter-protest in Toronto on the long weekend)?

How else to react to the case of teacher Javier Davila, who continues to be employed by Canada’s largest school board, even after promoting the work of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a listed terror group in Canada?

Says lawyer and human rights advocate Michael Teper, who has complained to Ontario’s teacher college about Davila: “Ontario’s public classrooms are for learning and building critical thinking skills, not for propaganda.  Staff members such as Javier Davila, who abuse their positions and public resources to tout their own beliefs, should be shown the door.”

And so on, and so on. Our places of higher learning, increasingly, have become seen as places of ignorance and hate. A recent poll conducted for The Economist magazine, for example, came up with some shocking results:

• Twenty per cent of American respondents age 18 to 29 think that the Holocaust is a myth
• Thirty per cent of the same age group said they “do not know” if the Holocaust is a myth
• Nearly 30 per cent of young Americans think “Jews wield too much power” – five times what those who are 65 and older believe

Those results reinforce what this writer has reported weeks ago: a Fall poll conducted by Harvard University found that more than 50 per cent of Americans between 18 and 24 believe Hamas’ pogroms were “justified.”

Holocaust denial and wide support for Jew-hating homicidal maniacs: are the universities solely to blame? Perhaps not, says The Economist: “In our poll, the proportion of respondents who believe the Holocaust its a myth is similar across all levels of education.”

The main culprit, it seems, is social media – specifically TikTok, which is the number one search engine for Generation Z.

The Pew Research Center has found that the under-thirty generation trusts social media more than mainstream media – and that a third of them actually get all their news from TikTok. Meanwhile, the data-intelligence firm Generation Lab has concluded that those who use TikTok are much more likely to hold anti-Semitic views.

It can’t be disputed that educational institutions – from a school board in Toronto, to Harvard in the U.S. – have been largely indifferent to the growth of hateful ideologies in and out of the classroom. It’s also accepted that the promoters of ancient hatreds have sought, and obtained, employment as teachers and professors.

But educational institutions, it seems, are not solely to blame. Social media generally – and China’s TikTok, in particular – have made a bad situation far, far worse.

“We don’t need no education,” sure.

But, more than that, we don’t need no TikTok, either.

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Two sides.

One side hasn’t shot up schools for little kids. It hasn’t firebombed community centers and places of worship. Its clergy haven’t called for a deity to slaughter the other side. It hasn’t yelled death threats at people in shopping malls.

It hasn’t targeted businesses with threats and abuse because the business owner belongs to a particular religion. It hasn’t attacked Santa Claus and tried to shut down Christmas. It hasn’t blocked roads to keep people from getting home.

The other side? It has. It has done all of those things. Everyone knows it, too. Everyone.

But not everyone knows this part.

A few weeks ago, this writer was invited to the Israeli consulate in Toronto to see 42 minutes of raw video footage. It was mostly taken from video recorders dead (and uniformed) Hamas terrorists brought with them on the morning of October 7, 2023.

The uniformed Hamas killers wanted to keep a record of what they did in Israel that morning. They were proud of what they did: on the videos, they said so, over and over.

The footage was unedited and had the feel of a snuff film. Which is what it was. It showed 138 Jews being shot, or decapitated, or blown to pieces by grenades. Men, women, children, babies.

The video showed the aftermath, as well. Israeli women and girls, naked from the waist down, their genitals bloody and mutilated. Parents and children, wired together, then burned alive. A baby’s skull, the brain spilling out onto the ground.

With the permission of the victim’s families, some journalists and legislators have been allowed to see the video. To bear witness, the Israelis told us.

We bore witness to something else, however. Something that hasn’t been written about nearly as much, but is important.

It was easy to spot the Hamas men. As noted, they wore uniforms and looked like soldiers, even though they acted like animals. (Worse than animals, actually.)

But here’s something else we witnessed: people who weren’t in uniforms, at all, flooding into Israel to participate in the barbarity of that dark Saturday.

In the Hamas footage, a Palestinian in civilian clothes uses an oversized green garden hoe to decapitate a foreign agricultural worker who is still alive. There are videos of Palestinian civilians beating hostages – some elderly – with sticks and their fists. And there is footage of corpses of Israelis being desecrated by Palestinians, on the back of a truck.

The Hamas video footage – some now online – also shows non-Hamas Palestinians loot and vandalize the homes and bodies of Jews.

Multiple videos document Palestinian citizens flooding into Israeli, following Hamas. At Kibbutz Be’eri, near the border with Gaza, video footage – mainly taken from home security cameras – shows dozens of Palestinian citizens following ten truckloads of Hamas killers into the kibbutz.

Some Palestinians came by car, and some on foot and on bicycles. Some are armed. Some are children. They can then be seen stealing agricultural equipment, televisions, motorbikes and more.

Not every Palestinian is Hamas. That’s true. But it’s also true that – on that terrible day – many, many Palestinians were supporting Hamas.

Before that day, too. Before, and as everyone has seen by now, Hamas had tunnels snaking seemingly everywhere in Gaza – tunnels with armored doors concealed in Palestinian hospitals, schools and even children’s bedrooms. With, one can only assume, the knowledge and approval of Palestinian citizens.

That’s not all. One of the reasons why Hamas mass murder on October 7 was so effective and efficient was because Palestinian civilians – Palestinians who had been working alongside Israelis in those kibbutzim farms – had told Hamas how to disable the Israeli security and communications systems. They had told them who to kill first, and where victims could be found. Palestinian civilians did that.

Now, it goes without saying that some Israeli citizens are not blameless, either. Innocent Palestinians have been targeted for violence by far-Right Israeli settlers in the West Bank. That is in evidence, too, and it is indisputable. The wrongdoers must be brought to justice.

But Hamas did not act alone on October 7. It did not act alone before or after that date, either. Palestinians – ordinary citizens – aided and abetted Hamas.

The best way to conclude, here, is to quote an extraordinary book written a few years ago by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.

“It is a grave error to refuse to believe that people could slaughter whole populations—especially populations that are by any objective evaluation not threatening—out of conviction. Why persist in the belief that ‘ordinary’ people could not possibly sanction, let alone partake in wholesale human slaughter? The historical record, from ancient times to the present, amply testifies to the ease with which people can extinguish the lives of others, and even take joy in their deaths.”

Ordinary German did.

Ordinary Palestinians, too.

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Picking the big winner of 2023 is easy. It’s Pierre Poilievre.

At year’s end, the fledgling Conservative leader is a winner not simply because he is leading in the polls. At various times, Erin O’Toole and Andrew Scheer – along with the likes of Robert Stanfield and Kim Campbell – all led in the polls, too.

Polling leads come and go. They’re transitory. Illusions.

What matters most is the polls that show why one is losing, not winning. And then making the the necessary changes to yourself.

Back when he was posing for selfies with the anti-vax convoy types who had occupied Ottawa – back when when he was enthusing about cryptocurrencies, playing footsie with anti-abortion forces, and raging about conspiracies at the World Economic Forum – Poilievre was behind in the polls. That’s when, and why, he was losing.

To Justin Trudeau, no less. To the worst Prime Minister in generations.

And then Poilievre, and/or some of the smart people around him, took a long and hard look at his vulnerabilities. And they made changes.

He stopped fulminating about vaccinations. He went silent on bitcoin and the WEF. He stopped talking about the stuff that had been holding him back, in effect.

And then he started talking about the things Canadians really cared about. How to make the rent or pay mortgage. How to deal with a utility bill. How to put bread on the table.

He ditched the glasses and the prep school ties, which had made him look like an angry physics lab nerd. He started working out. He was seen laughing and smiling more, in front of the cameras. He shared the spotlight with his lovely immigrant wife.

And – voila – things started to change. Around May or so, Polievre started to move ahead in the polls, and he hasn’t looked back.

He is who he is, however. Flashes of the old, angry Pierre Poilievre still occasionally reveal themselves. The same pollsters who say Poilievre is way ahead say that people find him arrogant and insincere, too.

He lets reporters get under his skin – reporters who ask dumb questions, because it is our job to ask dumb questions – and lashes out. It makes him look like a bully. Someone who enjoys punching down.

He’s stubborn, too. He voted against a trade deal with Ukraine – which Volodymyr Zelenskyy personally wanted and travelled here to get – supposedly because it contain provisions calling for a carbon tax.

When Ukraine already has a carbon tax. When he, you know, seemed to forget that leading Canada doesn’t entitle you to lead Ukraine at the same time.

And he still occasionally uses a rhetorical sledgehammer to kill a housefly. Insisting that Canada is “broken,” when it isn’t. Our politics are broken. Not the people.

Those exceptions notwithstanding, credit where credit is due: unlike Justin Trudeau – who is genetically incapable of accepting responsibility for his own mistakes and making changes to himself – Pierre Poilievre isn’t exactly who he was a couple years ago.

He’s changed. Not every aspect of his being, no. But he’s changed enough to dramatically improve his standing in the polls.

Justin Trudeau has helped, of course. (And we will be dealing with Trudeau in a separate column about the big political loser of 2023.)

But Pierre Poilievre truly seems to have learned from his mistakes.

And, given the sad state of our national politics these days, that’s about all we can ask for.

Happy new year.

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It’s that time of year – when columnists make predictions about the year ahead.

The ones found below were written before this writer, and this newspaper, were targeted by an army of trolls – and some we considered friends – accusing us of anti-Semitism. Us, arguably the most pro-Israel newspaper on the continent. Friendly fire does not begin to describe it. It left a sour taste.

I may come back to the Israel-Gaza subject, but I am taking a break from it on social media for the next while. In the meantime, here are ten predictions about Israel, Gaza and the Middle East.

1. Benjamin Netanyahu is toast. He was in trouble before October 7. He’s in more trouble now, for failing to prevent October 7. He promised to keep Israel secure. He didn’t deliver.

2. Netanyahu still faces three corruption prosecutions, which he has so far been unsuccessful in getting dismissed. Unlike Donald Trump – who is just one or two indictments away from winning the Republican presidential nomination – Netanyahu has not been helped by the prosecutions.

3. Netanyahu has also been revealed – by a huge, multi-part New York Times investigation- to have known Qatar was funding Hamas, to the tune of millions. He didn’t just do nothing about it – he encouraged it. In Israel, that too is unlikely to be forgiven anytime soon.

4. Israel cannot run post-war Gaza and doesn’t want to. Neither does the US or any of the surrounding Arab states. That leaves just one candidate for the job – the (corrupt, inefficient) Palestinian Authority. As imperfect as they are, no one else can be found to do the job.

5. Thousands of Gazans worked in Israel before October 7. After October 7, that’s unlikely to ever happen again. Some of them, it is clear, gave Hamas intel on Israeli military, communications and civilian weaknesses – and that’ll never be forgiven. So they’ll need massive foreign aid for infrastructure and to survive, because they’re not going to be working in Israel (or any neighboring Arab country) anytime soon.

6. Hamas will be destroyed, much in the way that ISIS was. But there’ll be some new monster to take their place, soon enough. Islamic terror organizations come and go. But their hatred for Israel and the West never seems to go away. We need to stop believing that it will, and prepare accordingly.

7. Western politics is going to swing dramatically to the Right. It’s already started. “Pro-Palestine” extremism will fuel anti-immigrant sentiment – and result in some limits being placed on some liberties. Few will object, initially.

8. Universities and colleges – the publicly-funded ones, at least – will pay a steep price for permitting anti-Semitism and violence to flourish on their campuses. It’ll take a decade or more to fix. It has become an institutional problem, and is deep-rooted.

9. There has been a yawning demographic divide – generational, racial – on Israel/Gaza. Social consensus has seemingly fractured, and former allies now seem to deeply hate each other. We ignore that divide at our peril.

10. A military solution cannot be imposed on Israelis and Gazans. There are millions of them, and they all live side-by-side. Once Hamas is eliminated – and it must be – the people of Israel and Gaza must find a way to live in peace. Themselves. No one else can do it for them.

Those predictions aren’t particularly sunny, but neither is the post-October 7 world in which we all now live.

Here’s hoping that peace – and an elimination of terror – awaits Israel and Gazans in the new year.

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Joe’s message to me: “Well I love you baby, but I must be rhythm bound.”

The sticker affixed to the London Calling album shrink-wrap, so many years ago, boldly declared that the Clash were “the only band that matters.” If that is true – if it was more than record company hyperbole – then Joe Strummer’s death 21 years ago today, of a heart attack at age 50, was a very big deal indeed.

It wasn’t as big as John Lennon’s murder, of course, which came one year after London Calling was released, and shook an entire generation. Nor as newsworthy, likely, as the suicide of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain in 1994. No, the impact of the sudden death of Joe Strummer – the front man for the Clash, the spokesman for what the Voidoid’s Richard Hell called, at the time, “the blank generation” – will be seen in more subtle ways.

For starters, you weren’t going to see any maudlin Joe Strummer retrospectives on CNN, or hordes of hysterical fans wailing in a park somewhere, clutching candles whilst someone plays ‘White Riot’ on acoustic guitar. Nor would there be a rush by his estate to cash in with grubby compilation and tribute discs. Punk rock, you see, wasn’t merely apart from all that – it was against of all that.

Punk rock was a specific rejection of everything rock’n’roll had become in the 1970s – namely, a business: an arena-sized, coke-addicted, utterly-disconnected-from-reality corporate game played by millionaires at Studio 54. Punk rock, and Joe Strummer, changed all of that. They were loud, loutish, pissed off. They were of the streets, and for the streets. They wanted rock’n’roll to matter again.

I met Joe Strummer for the first time on the night of October 16, 1979, in East Vancouver. Two of my Calgary punk rock buddies, plus my girlfriend and I, were loitering on the main floor at the Pacific National Exhibition (PNE). We were exhilarated and exhausted. We had pooled our meager resources to buy four train tickets to Vancouver, to see Joe Strummer and the Clash in concert. Their performance had been extraordinary (and even featured a mini-riot, midway through). But after the show, we had no money left, and nowhere to stay.

The four of us were discussing this state of affairs when a little boy appeared out of nowhere. It was near midnight, and the Clash, DOA and Ray Campi’s Rockabilly Rebels had long since finished their respective performances. Roadies were up on stage, packing up the Clash’s gear. The little boy looked to be about seven or eight. He was picking up flashcubes left behind by the departed fans.

We started talking to the boy. It turned out he was the son of Mickey Gallagher, the keyboardist the Clash had signed on for the band’s London Calling tour of North America. His father appeared, looking for him. And then, within a matter of minutes, Topper Headon appeared, looking for the Gallaghers.

Topper Headon was admittedly not much to look at: he was stooped, slight and pale, with spiky hair and a quiet manner. But he was The Drummer For The Clash, and had supplied beats for them going back almost to their raw eponymous first album, the one that had changed our lives forever. We were in awe.

Topper asked us where we were from and what we thought of the show. When he heard that we had no place to stay, he said: “Well, you’d better come backstage with me, then.”

Sprawled out in a spartan PNE locker room, Strummer was chatting with lead guitarist Mick Jones and bassist Paul Simonon, along with some Rastafarians and a few of the Rockabilly Rebels. They were all stoned, and grousing about an unnamed promoter of the Vancouver show, who had refused to let them play until he was paid his costs. The Clash, like us, had no money. That made us love them even more.

Joe Strummer, with his squared jaw and Elvis-style hairdo, didn’t seem to care about the band’s money woes. While Mick Jones flirted with my girlfriend, Strummer started questioning me about my Clash T-shirt. It was homemade, and Strummer was seemingly impressed by it. I could barely speak. There I was, speaking with one of the most important rock’n’rollers ever to walk the Earth – and he was acting just like a regular guy. Like he wasn’t anything special.

But he was, he was. From their first incendiary album in 1977 (wherein they raged against racism, and youth unemployment, and hippies), to their final waxing as the real Clash in 1982 (the cartoonish Combat Rock, which signaled the end was near, and appropriately so), Strummer was the actual personification of everything that was the Clash. They were avowedly political and idealistic; they were unrelentingly angry and loud; most of all, they were smarter and more hopeful than the other punk groups, the cynical, nihilistic ones like the Sex Pistols. They believed that the future was worth fighting for.

The Clash were the ones who actually read books – and encouraged their fans to read them, too. They wrote songs that emphasized that politics were important (and, in my own case, taught me that fighting intolerance, and maintaining a capacity for outrage, was always worthwhile). They were the first punk band to attempt to unify disparate cultures – for example, introducing choppy reggae and Blue Beat rhythms to their music.

They weren’t perfect, naturally. Their dalliances with rebel movements like the Sandinistas, circa 1980, smacked of showy dilettante politics. But they weren’t afraid to take risks, and make mistakes.

Born John Graham Mellor in 1952 in Turkey to the son of a diplomat, Strummer started off as a busker in London, and then formed the 101ers, a pub rock outfit, in 1974. Two years later, he saw the Pistols play one of their first gigs. Strummer, Jones and Simonon immediately formed the Clash, and set about rewriting the rules.

While political, they also knew how to put together good old rock’n’roll. Strummer and Jones effectively became the punk world’s Lennon and McCartney, churning out big hits in Britain, and attracting a lot of favourable critical acclaim in North America. Some of their singles, ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’ and ‘Complete Control,’ are among the best rock’n’roll 45s – ever. Their double London Calling LP is regularly cited as one of history’s best rock albums.

After the Clash broke up, Strummer played with the Pogues, wrote soundtrack music and formed a new group, the world beat-sounding Mescaleros. He married, and became a father. But he never again achieved the adulation that greeted the Clash wherever they went.

Strummer didn’t seem to care. When I saw him for the last time – at a show in one of HMV’s stores on Yonge Street in July 2001, which (typically) he agreed to give at no cost – Strummer and his Mescaleros stomped around on the tiny stage, having the time of their lives. They didn’t play any Clash songs, but that was okay by us. Joe Strummer’s joy was infectious, that night.

As the gig ended, Strummer squatted at the edge of the stage – sweaty, resplendent, grinning – to speak with the fans gathered there. They looked about as old as I was, when I first met him back in October 1979. As corny as it sounds, it was a magical moment, for me: I just watched him for a while, the voice of my generation, speaking to the next one.

I hope they heard what he had to say.

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Where were you, Mom and Dad, on the day that Hamas thanked the Trudeau government?

Agreed: the day that the world’s most notorious terror group offered up video thanks to the Justin Trudeau regime probably doesn’t rank up there with 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. But it’s in the same category, isn’t it?

Like 9/11, it is an Islamic death squad trying to humiliate us. And, like Pearl Harbor, it was a bit of a shock.

And, if we are being honest with ourselves, we all know what Hamas was trying to do. It was engaging in a bit of old-fashioned Soviet style agitprop, designed to cause controversy and embarrassment here in Canada. And it certainly did that.

Social media was overflowing with more outrage than usual about the video statement by some Hamas apparatchik who deserves a bullet, not a microphone.

And, if a snippet of the video ends up in a Conservative Party campaign attack video at the time of the next election, no one will be very surprised.

After the video landed like one of the hundreds of missiles Hamas has fired at Israel in the past 24 hours, Trudeau’s clueless and feckless Foreign Affairs minister, Melanie Joly, swiftly issued a tweet saying mean things about Hamas. But, like everything else that Joly does, it isn’t even worth quoting here.

Because even Joly would know, deep in the recesses of her cranium, that her tweet wouldn’t have been necessary – and the Hamas video would never have been issued – if Canada had not cravenly, stupidly, voted for a cease-fire.

When asked by assorted anti-Semites at the UN to go along with the cease-fire vote, Trudeau’s chosen representative, Bob Rae, could have and should have said: “There already was a cease-fire. Hamas was the one who broke it on October 7.” According to some sources, that is precisely what Rae wanted to say.

But that’s not how the Trudeau government conducts foreign affairs, is it? Consistency and coherence are not its core strength. What it does best is saying lots and doing little. Over promising, and under-delivering. Being useless, in other words.

Observing that the Trudeau government has been a disaster on the Israel-Gaza war since October 7 isn’t even worth saying out loud. It is so obvious, so true, everyone knows it.

The consequences are equally obvious. If there is a single Canadian Jew who is prepared to vote for Trudeau’s Liberals in the next election, it should be made into a Canadian Heritage Minute commercial. It would be a miracle.

And, if the Americans or the Brits or the French are prepared to even listen to us for two minutes at the water cooler at the next international summit, it would also be a miracle. With them, with all of our allies, our credibility has been utterly shredded by the performative, puerile antics of Trudeau and Joly.

And, most seriously of all, we have hurt our ally, Israel. We have said to our Canadian Jewish brothers and sisters that, in the big scheme of things, they don’t matter as much. Sure, 1200 of your friends and family were slaughtered on October 7, but we think you should suck it up and move on.

Well, that’s what the Trudeau government thinks, at least. And that’s why Hamas issued its little thank you note.

It was a bit of a joke, yes.

But so is the Trudeau government.

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Forty-six years.

Forty-six years ago tonight, the Social Blemishes – me, Ras Pierre, Rockin’ Al and a few others miscreants – took to the makeshift stage in the gym at Bishop Carroll High School in Calgary for the first-ever performance of a punk band in our hometown. In all of Alberta, too.

We were opening for local luminaries Fosterchild, and we were terrible. But we were hooked: maybe this punk rock stuff would never win us fame or riches or groupies, but could there be any better way to alienate our parents, teachers and peers?  Nope.

And, besides: it was fun. Case in point: we even got our picture in the Calgary Herald, up above.  The guy on the far left (ahem) was John Heaney, who went on to be Rachel Notley’s Chief of Staff; beside him, Ras Pierre, now a multimillionaire engineer in Alberta (and my best friend, still); Yours Screwly, in shades, homemade Sex Pistols T-shirt and (seriously) a dog collar; Rockin’ Al, a standout stand-up comedian and performer and Also Best Friend; Allen Baekeland, later a DJ (RIP); Pat O’Heran, an award-winning Hollywood filmmaker; and, behind the skins, Ronnie Macdonald, another successful engineering technologist type, but in B.C.

Me and Ras Pierre would leave the Blems to form the Hot Nasties – and Al and Ronnie would go on to the Sturgeons or the Mild Chaps or Riot 303.  Along the way, one of the songs we wrote, Invasion of the Tribbles, was to be covered by British chart-toppers the Palma Violets. Another one, Barney Rubble Is My Double, ended up covered by Nardwuar and the Evaporators.  And Secret of Immortality was to be covered by Moe Berg of Pursuit of Happiness.  Not bad.

Anyway, because I’m going to taking a dirt nap any day now – or so says one of my sons, now the same age I was in that photo, up above – I’ve immortalized the Social Blemishes in Recipe For Hate and its sequels, New Dark Ages and the just-out Age of Unreason. Meanwhile, The Ballad of the Social Blemishes is a song about our departed-too-soon former manager, Tom Wolfe, and came out on Ugly Pop Records – the video, showing rare Blems footage, is here.

Forty-six years: I can’t believe I’m so old.

The only solution is to continue acting like I’m seventeen.

Gabba gabba hey!

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