指圧

I’m big believer in true Japanese shiatsu, wherein the practitioner should make it hurt. Afterwards, I always ask what they found.

“Anger,” said the expert.

Thought about that. Since October 7, I think that’s true.


My latest: RIP, Mr. Mulroney

The biggest achievements in politics – the only achievements, really – are the ones involving risk.

As in, taking a risk. Making a decision, making a statement, making a law that entails risk to you and your career.

Brian Mulroney took risks.

I didn’t work for him. In fact, I worked for Jean Chretien, his Liberal Party opponent. And part of my job was to make the Mulroney government miserable.

Despite that – and when behind closed doors – Martin Brian Mulroney, PC, CC, GOQ, was a bit of a marvel to us. Because he took risks. Because he had guts.

Case in point: South Africa.

In the Eighties, when Mulroney was Prime Minister – and presiding over two successive super-majorities – South Africa still practiced apartheid. Apartheid was institutionalized racism, essentially. It was racial segregation and discrimination that had been forced on the black majority in South Africa by a white minority.

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were Brian Mulroney’s closest allies internationally. They professed to oppose apartheid – but they vociferously opposed international sanctions to bring it to an end. Thatcher called them “counterproductive.”

Brian Mulroney stood up to Reagan and Thatcher – and many within his own Conservative Party. In September 1986, Mulroney imposed tough sanctions on the apartheid regime, and encouraged other nations to do likewise. Said he: “I viewed apartheid with the same degree of disgust that I attached to the Nazis — the authors of the most odious offence in modern history.”

Nelson Mandela thanked him for that, saying that Mulroney, and Canada, would be forever remembered for their support.

Mulroney’s other great and courageous achievement: free trade.

And, yes, we Liberals initially opposed it – or, at least, the John Turner-era Grits did (Chretien, as the country would soon see, not so much). But Brian Mulroney saw where the world was heading – with technology ushering in an era of lightning-fast global commerce, dominated by companies all too willing to move to where they could do more business for less.

Mulroney’s free trade stance was targeted by Turner during the 1988 federal election – and, for a while, it very nearly turned the tide against the Tory leader. He could have blinked, then, and backed away. He could have reversed himself. He didn’t. Mulroney persisted – and won another huge majority, and signed a comprehensive free trade deal with the United States.

There were other, less notable, parts to the man. On the Hill, in the pre-Twitter days – when things were more civilized – all of us heard stories about Brian Mulroney’s human side. A gift of ties to Brian Tobin, his Liberal tormentor, when the MP’s son was born.

A call to Chretien during a health scare. Quiet wishes whenever a Liberal was going through personal hardship. Not for publication, ever. But never forgotten by the recipients.

Brian Mulroney was not a great politician and Prime Minister because he won two big elections. He was one of the great ones because he took risks – because he took risks with things that mattered, the things that will be remembered by history.

My deepest condolences to his family, some of whom I now know and consider good friends.

Your Dad was a great one. He will be missed.


My latest: the next battlefield is closer than you think

It’s the next front in the war.

There’s been no ceasefire reached yet. Fighting is still going on, in and around Southern Gaza. Rockets and bullets are still being fired into Northern Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah.

Slowly but surely, however, Israel is winning the war.

As of last week, more than 12,000 Hamas terrorists have reportedly been killed. Three-quarters of Hamas’ 24 battalions – each containing more than 1,000 men – have been wiped out. Missile attacks on Israel have dropped off dramatically.

And, like Adolf Hitler in his final days, Hamas’ leadership is in hiding in subterranean bunkers, moving from one hideout to another, more preoccupied with survival than directing the fight against the IDF – who, incredibly, have lost only 300 troops since the war began in earnest on October 27.

So, Israel is winning. After the military “mop-up” is done, Israel will relinquish governance of Gaza to someone else – possibly some amalgam of the Palestinian Authority, humanitarian agencies and peacekeepers.

One thing is clear: as in the past, public opinion in Israel overwhelmingly opposes governing Gaza. They want Hamas defeated, and the remaining hostages back, but no role in governing the ungovernable.

The Middle East, however, is just one front in the war that broke out after the horrors of October 7. There is another battle raging, and it is not centred in Gaza and the West Bank.

It is the war against Jews taking place around the world.

Not even the “pro-Palestinian” protestors – some of whom are being paid to protest, as this newspaper has documented – dispute the reality anymore: they don’t just oppose Israel’s government (which isn’t anti-Semitic to do). They oppose Jews (which is).

Their Jew hatred has manifested itself, in Canada, in firebombing and shootings and acts of vandalism from coast to coast – at synagogues, Jewish schools, businesses, and even the private homes of Jews. The same sort of anti-Semitism is happening around the planet, too, every single day. It is, as noted, the next front in the war that commenced on October 7, 2023.

This writer has authored ten books, most of them about anti-Semitism, racism and their variants. Regularly, I get asked by exasperated and frightened readers: where does this anti-Semitism come from? In the year 2024, why have we not killed it off, once and for all?

It’s no longer true to say that anti-Semitism is caused by Christians. While the Holocaust was indeed conducted in European Christian nations, no one seems as preoccupied, anymore, by the notion that “Jews killed Christ.” (They didn’t: the Romans did.). And polling shows that the vast majority of Christians in the West strongly support Israel’s right to defend itself, within safe and secure borders.

No, the genesis of modern anti-Semitism is a lot harder to pin down. A lengthy essay in the new Time magazine by Noah Feldman, a professor (ironically) at Harvard’s law school, is now making the rounds. In his “New anti-Semitism” piece, Feldman writes: “Anti-Semitism is actually a shape-shifting, protean, creative force. Anti-Semitism has managed to reinvent itself multiple times throughout history, each time keeping some of the old tropes around, while simultaneously creating new ones adapted to present circumstances.” Jews, he continues, are the targets of whatever hatred is fashionable at the moment.

And Feldman is right. Whenever there is a global calamity, people cast about for a scapegoat, and Jews are always the best candidates. So, 9/11 was caused by Jews, because no Jew was killed that day. The 2008-2009 global financial crisis was caused by Jews, who disproportionally benefitted from the economic chaos. Covid was a Jewish invention, because they own the pharma companies.

Even wildfires has been the fault of Jews: in his amusing (but disturbing) new book, Jewish Space Lasers, Mike Rothschild – who ironically, bears the surname of a centuries-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theory – tells the story of MAGA Trump fanatic, congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. She promoted the notion that Jews were “beaming the sun’s energy back to Earth” with non-existent “space-based solar generators,” and missing non-existent “receiving stations.” And thereby causing wildfires in California.

Anti-Semitism, then, is indeed a shape-shifter, never dying, never completely going away. It adapts, like cockroaches adapt. It is unkillable.

So, since October 7, anti-Semitism is back with a vengeance, globally. It is the new front in the next war.

And, as in every war, the frontlines will grow. Other targets will be added.

Because what starts with Jews never ends with Jews.


My latest: the online road to Hell

“Free speech,” says Salman Rushdie, “is the whole thing, the whole ball game.”

“Free speech,” he says, “is life itself.”

That feels like a bit of an overstatement. But in Rushdie’s case, it’s probably heartfelt. The British-American author has faced several death threats and assassination attempts since the publication of his book The Satanic Verses in 1988 – including one death threat from Iran’s supreme leader, no less.

Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and several Islamic terror groups have also promised to kill him. In 2022, one Islamic terrorist came close to doing so, stabbing Rushdie repeatedly before a speech in New York. Rushdie lost sight in one eye, and the use of one hand.

There’s no way to know, of course, what Rushdie thinks – if anything – about the Trudeau government’s latest attempt to reign in harmful speech online. But it’s reasonable to assume that Rushdie would be unimpressed.

Rushdie might disagree, but it is not ever unreasonable to have some limitations placed on hate speech, terrorist content, incitement to violence, the sharing of non-consensual images, and child exploitation. For example, the toxic wave of anti-Semitism seen everywhere these days is clearly corroding our social fabric, and causing actual terror in the Jewish community.

So, what would Trudeau’s sweeping package of legislative reforms, announced Monday, do to combat anti-Semitism? Not much.

For starters, Trudeau’s bill is predicated on a falsehood – the notion that it is possible for one country to control what is on the Internet. How, exactly, does one do that? The Internet truly is, as its name implies, a World Wide Web. If the owners of a web site promoting hate or terrorism dislike governmental control over what they have to say, they can just move it to another jurisdiction that is less bothered by it.

The proposed Trudeau law anticipates this, and says it will target social media platforms and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) operating in Canada, and essentially deputize them to police content.

But the social media mavens and ISPs – many of which are headquartered in the United States, where the First Amendment frowns on virtually any restraint on speech – have said they have no interest in acting as Internet hall monitors. They will (and have) simply pull the plug. Which doesn’t just limit free speech. It ends it.

Another problem: who decides?

The proposed federal overseer – an ombudsman-type official – will be vested with extraordinary powers to decide what is, and what isn’t, acceptable. The problem with such an approach is obvious: what is one person’s medicine is another person’s poison. It is wildly subjective, always.

The post-October 7 era has offered us plenty of awful examples of why this is problematic. Anti-Israel types are being permitted by the authorities to regularly promote hate – while pro-Israel voices are being suppressed or cancelled with impunity. A Toronto Star former ombudsman and current columnist, to cite just one example, last week opined that Hamas was “provoked” into attacking Israel – and that Hamas is a mere “system of government” composed of “civilians working for a living.” So, what if the proposed online speech ombudsman possesses similarly vile views? Where does a Canadian Jew go to complain, then?

Now, it may be that the online harms bill is simply a ruse – a political head fake. Trudeau’s Liberals can proclaim that they have taken action against online hateful conduct, without ever actually planning to pass it into law. The real objective, perhaps, is to trap the Conservatives into opposing the bill, which will permit Liberals to say that Tories don’t care about hate and child exploitation.

Which would be cynical and duplicitous. And classic Trudeau-style sophistry.

If the bill’s objective is stamp out online harm, it goes about it in the wrong way. It presently gives too much power to an unelected official to decide what is acceptable – and it underestimates the willingness of social media platforms and ISPs to simply ignore the new rules.

The road to Hell, someone once said, is paved with good intentions. Trudeau’s new bill is full of good intentions.

But it’s still a Hellish mess.