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From the river to the sea, CBC will be…discriminatory.

We’ve all grown used to hearing about managerial missteps at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: controversies about layoffs, controversies about mandate, controversies about executives quietly getting big bonuses.  But Canadian Jews, in particular, continue to be treated unfairly by the taxpayer-subsidized broadcaster.

This writer has documented some of that imbalance in recent months.  CBC has adamantly refused to call Hamas terrorists what they are, which is terrorists; they accept Israel-Hamas war casualty counts that come from Hamas; and they have established a secretive internal group – “Middle East 2023” – to oversee coverage of Israel, leaving Jews feeling isolated and victimized. As one former senior producer said about CBC’s treatment of the Jewish state: “It’s extremely one-sided and is only leading to more misinformation and hatred towards the Jewish community in Canada.”

And, since the atrocities of October 7, the situation is getting worse.  To cite just one example, a writer and producer for CBC’s digital team has shown up in the Toronto newsroom wearing a keffiyeh – and has posted online that Israel is “an oppressive, destructive” country and “you’re a vile human being if you still defend or excuse Israel.” Employees who complained to CBC bosses were told to mind their own business.

That’s not all: this newspaper has learned that CBC management has convened “listening sessions” for staff in the coming days – and the sessions are being led by “facilitators” who say they want to “challenge the status quo of Zionism,” who say Israel oversees “an immoral and oppressive occupation” – and one of whom has said he “wholeheartedly, unreservedly supports” an Ontario politician who has been sanctioned for antisemitic views in the provincial Legislature.

The “listening sessions” have left Jewish journalists feeling outraged. Said one: “Many of us Jewish journalists have spent our entire careers committed to fairness and making sure that the work we put out is balanced, and that it’s backed up by journalistic ethics.  And what we’ve seen within the last number of years is a pivot within the CBC from journalism to activism.”

Despite that, the CBC’s top spokesman, Chuck Thompson, was dismissive when asked about the sessions: “Respectfully, whatever meetings or sessions we may be having with employees are just that, they’re internal.”

With Jewish staff feeling targeted – and with Canadian Jews feeling like their tax dollars are being used against them by CBC – what is the solution? A British lawyer, of all people, may have one.

Trevor Asserson is an experienced litigator and Oxford-trained scholar.  He’s an award-winning member of the bar in both Israel and the U.K.  A few days ago, Asserson released a shocking report on the the CBC’s original inspiration, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) – which found “a deeply worrying pattern of bias and multiple breaches by the BBC of its own editorial guidelines on impartiality, fairness and establishing the truth.”

Asserson and a team of data scientists and neutral lawyers examined nine million words produced by the BBC across television, radio, web and podcasts. They found an “overwhelming disparity in the perception of the two sides, with sympathy for Palestinians
vastly outstripping sympathy for Israelis, even shortly after the massacre of October 7th, 2023.”

Key findings of the Asserson report:

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She baited him.  But she didn’t catch and release.

No, instead, Kamala Harris hauled the slippery, slimy form of Donald J. Trump onto her boat and…well, it wasn’t pretty. She baked him, she roasted him, she poached him, she broiled him, she grilled him.  Most of all, she filleted him.  Like the prosecutor she once was, Kamala Harris used precision – and facts, and passion, and That Look – to slice and dice the hulking, wrinkled, flushed form of the Mango Mussolini.

It was beautiful. It was brutal.  It wasn’t even close.

Oh, and that childless cat lady, the singer. At debate’s end, Harris won the endorsement of the most-famous, most-loved person in this and several other worlds, Taylor Swift.  That, too.

But – sorry, Swifties – Kamala Harris didn’t need your endorsement.  She won, indisputably, long before your heroine took to social media.  Here’s ten reasons why.

1. It was her show.  Right from the first moment – when she crossed the bluish ABC stage to shake his hand, leaving him looking off-balance and uncertain from the get-go – Harris knew what she wanted to do, and she did it.  Polls had told her that she needed to do two things: look and act presidential, and tell Americans more about her and her plan.  She did that stuff, with lots of policy bits in between.  But she didn’t overwhelm folks with detail, like Professor Obama did in his first debate with Mitt Romney.  She was conversational – and she was in control.  It was the Kamala Show, with an Insane Asylum as the first guest.
2. He was medicated at the start.  But Dr. Harris knew how to throw him off his meds, and she swiftly (sorry) commenced baiting the porcine putative president.  She needled him about his former supporters, now supporting her.  She needled him about world leaders wanting her, not him.  She even needled him about the size of crowds at their respective rallies.  That last one was so obvious, so predictable, you could see it coming as far back as the DNC.  But he fell for it all anyway, proverbial hook, line and sinker.  A sucker is born every minute. But a huckster-sucker? There’s only one of those, and he got his ass handed to him last night in Philly.
3. She spoke to people in their living rooms, right to camera.  When the job assignment is getting people to know you, that’s what you’ve got to do, and she did.  But you also have to do that when you want to establish a connection – and the polls had told her that many Americans were saying they didn’t really know who she was.  So she got to work on that, and reached out to millions.  Trump, meanwhile, was your angry, racist uncle at the end of the open bar at the wedding, saying things that made you wish he was back in County jail. He didn’t connect, he was disjointed.  She connected.
4. TV is about pictures, I was taught in J-school.  And it’s a journalistic catechism I have never forgotten.  TV is about emotion.  TV is about how you look, not what you say.  It’s about how you say something.  And – and, yes, I’m campaigning for her, so I’m a bit biased – she looked like a million bucks.  He, meanwhile, looked old, his turkey neck quivering, and his mouth resembling a sphincter, with all that that implies. He desperately wanted to rattle her.  But she effortlessly kept her cool, and when he said something insane – which was every three seconds, just about – she’d do this arms-crossed, eye-narrowing thing that my Mom used to do when my brothers and I knew that she knew what we did, and she was just enjoying watching us try and wriggle out of it.
5. She brought the facts, however. Look, I’ve prepared Prime Ministers and Premiers and Mayors and leaders for TV debates.  As such, I know that you can’t just show up to a debate with a firm chin line and nice smile.  You have to know stuff. And she did, she did. In debate prep, you can over-prepare your candidate, and they can end up robotically spitting out statistics and factoids like an algorithm in a suit.  But Kamala Harris wasn’t over-prepared – she was prepared just right, as Goldilocks might say.  She knew when to deploy facts that would be devastating (on abortion, etc.) and when to deploy facts to get under his spray-tanned skin (on the border, etc.). She knew her stuff.  He doesn’t know any stuff.
6. Conspiracy theories showed up, and she didn’t get fazed or flustered.  I’ve worked on campaigns for Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.  In all of that time, I’ve learned one Star Trekkian thing about Donald Trump: he will always go where no politician has gone before.  He will say people in Springfield are eating dogs (when, in fact, it’s his fave drug dealer, RFK, who does that). He will accuse migrants of rape (when, in fact, he’s the one he’s been found civilly liable for rape). He will say his opponent is a Marxist (when, in fact, he’s the one who has every Communist dictator on speed dial).  Trump says all those things because (a) the mouth-breathers who support him love how it upsets the pointed-headed elites and (b) it throws his opponents off the trail.  But Kamala Harris wasn’t thrown off.  She’d listen to his demented soundbites, shake her head, smile, and move on.  She didn’t take his bait.
7. She showed foreign policy chops, he showed he doesn’t belong back near the nuclear codes.  On Israel, on Ukraine, on any number of international flashpoints, Harris sounded moderate, sensible and firm – you know, like a U.S. president is supposed to sound.  Trump, meanwhile, just mused about his fondness for dictators, and claimed that he would end all wars.  When she asked him how he’d do that, he didn’t say.  In fact, when asked by Harris or the moderators about anything at all, he’d whiff the ball.  I’ve got “Concepts of a plan,” Trump actually said, thereby giving standup comedians a line to use until the end of time.  But on foreign policy – on anything – he has neither a concept nor a clue. (Bonus: I liked that she mentioned his indifference to antisemitic hate.  Because he, the Klansman’s son, is.)
8. She came with zingers. “You’re a disgrace.” “Trump abortion bans.” “You sold us out.” “Same old tired playbook.” “You’re a disgrace” (again). All of those zingers – trust me, are plotted and planned long in advance in debate prep.  The key is using them when they fit, and making them sound natural.  She achieved both, and thereby won the war of the clips.  Because – sadly, or not – most voters now form their views about a debate based on clips, not the whole broadcast.  And she delivered the lines that the Democratic team knew would win her the war of the clips.
9. We knew, he knew, we all knew: her strategy was to let him talk, and hang himself.  He knew, he knew.  He’d been warned (that’s what the whole psychodrama about the muted microphones was about).  But Trump still jumped into the coffin-sized hole she had dug for him, and he got a shovel, and he kept digging.  He thinks he won the presidency the first time by saying whatever pops into his tiny cranium (he’s not entirely wrong about that).  But, this time, he lost a second shot at the presidency by putting all of his many shortcomings in the window – when the circus had left town.  What’s amazing is that he knew what she wanted him to do, and he did it anyway.  Cue the Republican chattering classes, yammering about the moderators, even though Trump got many more minutes to speak.  When they attack the moderators, that’s when you know they’ve lost: they’re kvetching about the ref.
10. I’m not saying Donald J. Trump is a racist, a rapist and a convicted criminal – even though, well, he is.  Despite (and hopefully not because of) those things, he won the highest office, and looked like he was going to win it again.  Last night, a Montreal high school kid – and a big city criminal prosecutor – showed up, and stripped every piece of bark off his tree.  By the end, there was nothing left.

Will she win? Yes, she’ll win.  It’ll take days, it’ll be close, it’ll be contested, stop the steal, blah blah blah.  But she won.

Well done, “Madame President.”  All of us like the sound of that. 

Childless cat lady Taylor Swift, too.

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Kissed by Jesus.

When you ask addicts, or those who are regulars on the sidewalk outside the Bridge Street United Church in Belleville – or anywhere – what using fentanyl is like, the first time they did it, that’s what some will say: it’s like the heavens parting, and some deity reaching down to embrace them.

For the first time in their lives, they’ll say – lives which have been too often sad and lonely and dark – they felt wanted and loved.

Some writers used to say heroin was like returning to the womb, except fentanyl is 100 times better, users say. The warmth starts in their toes and fingers, and creeps towards their heads and hearts.

All your troubles go away, they say. Nothing else intrudes on the bliss that results from fentanyl. They fall in love with it.

The first time, they say, nothing else compares. There is no joy as complete as the joy bestowed on them by fentanyl, that first time. Until that first feeling fades.

And then, the pain begins. The darkness returns. The depression seizes them.

After the vampire that is fentanyl sinks its fangs into them, nothing else is ever the same. It owns them. It controls them.

Fentanyl takes over.

**

Dr. Meldon Kahan is dispassionately describing what fentanyl does to the human brain.

“We all have, in our brains, a reward system,” says Kahan, who is a Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Toronto, and Medical Director of the Substance Use Service at Women’s College Hospital. “It’s in the middle of our brain. And when we do something that’s important for survival – like eating or sex or what have you – there’s a dopamine spike in our reward pathway in the brain. That’s what gives us a sense of pleasure.”

He pauses.

“That is all related to the memory part of our brain, too. So, we vividly remember the next day how it felt. And, that memory center, it’s related to the executive function part of our brain – which is what tells us to go out and do it again and again. Drug use acts on that reward center in our brain, too. And the dopamine spike users experience is often more powerful than what they get from activities like eating or sex. In essence, the drug hijacks the reward center of our brain, and it becomes more important than normal survival activities.”

Heroin and other opiates literally do that; they hijack a person’s brain. But how to they compare to fentanyl?

“Fentanyl,” Khan says, exhaling. “Well. It is an extraordinary drug. The other opiates are like puppy dogs compared to fentanyl. I’ve seen patients where their entire existence is focussed on getting it, because they cannot tolerate withdrawal from it.They are tormented every single day by powerful cravings.” He pauses again. “And, sure, they have free will. But addiction is a mental disorder. Their decision-making is completely compromised. Whatever they are going to do in their life is completely compromised by the drug.”

“And the drugs we have to counter it? They’re not enough.”

**

Fentanyl is an opioid, which essentially relieve pain. It is a synthetic opioid, too, which means that it was made by people, not nature.

Fentanyl – its formal name is N-phenyl-N-[1-(2-phenylethyl)-4- piperidinyl]propanamide – has been around for a long time. It was invented in the Belgian laboratory of Dr. Paul Janssen in 1959 or so. Janssen was in the pharmaceutical business, and he had been looking for a drug that would be as potent as it was fast-acting – and make him a fast buck.

Morphine and the like were available back then, but Janssen wanted something stronger than that. He and his colleagues played around with the molecules in morphine and meperidine for a while, until they decided to synthesize a derivative, one that would break through the blood-brain barrier much faster. In 1960, they did. They created fentanyl.

It was as much as 200 times more potent than morphine. It was more than 50 times more powerful than heroin. It was, and would for a long time remain, the most potent opiate in the world. Like other opiates, it could cause “fatigue, sedation, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, respiratory depression, and unconsciousness/anesthesia,” the American Pain Society wrote a decade ago. Too much of it could kill. But unlike the others, its effects – especially if taken orally or nasally, which is how most addicts now use it – could be felt in just seconds.

Oh, and this: it was wildly, massively addictive. Wrote the Pain Society, in what would be one of the biggest all-time understatements: “Patients need to be carefully monitored for signs of opioid overdose.”

**

They should be. About 22 people die every day from opioid overdoses in Canada; most of them are men in their thirties, and 82 per cent of the time, it’s fentanyl that kills them. B.C., Alberta and Ontario have it the worst.

On one cold and unforgiving February night in Belleville, Ontario, nobody was “carefully monitoring” Brian Orford and his friends at the Bridge Street United Church. Mostly, locals were doing what doing what they always do: staying away. Crossing the street to avoid the sad-looking people at the basement entrance to the church. Or, avoiding the area entirely.

On the two days in question, in the first week of February, the Belleville police issued a statement that is the sort of thing you see in war-torn corners of the world. But not so much in Belleville, Ontario, the Friendly City. For Belleville, as far as anyone could remember, this was a first:

“The Belleville Police Service is advising the public to exercise caution and avoid unnecessary travel to the downtown core area following reports of a significant number of overdoses on Tuesday afternoon,” the statement read. “[There is a] need for increased vigilance and awareness in the affected areas.”

It was a state of emergency, the authorities would say, which is what you declare when you’ve got “a danger of major proportions,” one that could cause “serious harm” to people. So, just about every ambulance and paramedic and police officer in the 613 area code hurried to the corner of Bridge and Church streets, sirens and tires cutting through the night.

Two dozen of Brian Orford’s friends had overdosed on fentanyl mixed with something else. Close to half of them were at death’s door, with doctors and nurses frantically working to save their lives.

The news flashed across the country like a rocket, because something like that had never really happened before in Small Town Canada. Belleville, the Friendly City, became the scary city. On TV, news anchors solemnly described it as unprecedented, because it was. Things would get worse before they got better, too: on the Thursday, the very next day, with overdoses continuing to happen on and along Bridge Street, Belleville declared the actual state of emergency. Life on the sidewalk at the Bridge Street United Church – never good – had gotten measurably worse.

Brian Orford is 44 years old, but he looks much older than that. His eyes are profoundly sad, sadder than an unused crib in a dumpster. His hands are swollen and red from drug use, and they clutch at the corners of his donated parka. He’s been on the streets, without a home, for almost a decade.

Orford, who grew up in and around Belleville, is well-known at the church. Like the others – hundreds of them – he comes in the mornings for the continental breakfast, usually a bagel. On Sundays, they come for something that is closer to a full meal. They get fed at the Sally Ann, too, depending on donations.

When you stop and ask if he will talk to you, Brian Orford says sure, and leans against the church wall, as if to steady himself. He speaks in a voice that sounds weary and broken. He’s asked about his friends, the ones who overdosed and nearly died. Was it a bad batch of fentanyl?

“A lot of people here have switched to those other drugs,” Brian Orford says. “It’s pretty dangerous.”

The fentanyl is being cut with GHB, the date rape drug. Xylazine, too. That one is called “tranq dope,” and it started up in the States a few years ago. Tranq is even deadlier than fentanyl, because naloxone – or Narcan, which is used to save those who are overdosing – doesn’t work on it. If you use too much tranq, you can get necrosis – rotting of human tissue, flesh-eating wounds. Parts of you can literally fall off. They call it the zombie drug.

Brian Orford talks a bit more about his friends, in a quiet voice, and then he excuses himself to get something to eat in the basement of the church. He shuffles off, bent like a twig in a storm.

**

The overdoses at the Bridge Street United Church still happen, but not as bad as in February. Maybe it’s because the people there stick together. Compared to other towns and cities, they look after each other. They’re proud of that.

Tammy and Sherri do. Tammy sits on a bit of cardboard on the ground, Sherri beside her, on the lawn chair she favors. They’re both 51 years old. They’re best friends, they say. They don’t want to give their last names, because feel ashamed by what their lives have become. They don’t want to get their pictures taken, either, because some of their family don’t know where they are.

Which is on the street, for years. Both have been living on Belleville’s streets for a couple years, now. Tammy, who is Indigenous and tattooed and smart and plain-spoken, is from Belleville “and out Peterborough way.” Sherri, who is quieter and usually willing to let Tammy speak for both of them, is from a little town near Brantford. Sherri is housed now, in a rooming house. Tammy is hoping to be, but she’s scared about it: she’s not used to living under a roof. Sherri isn’t addicted to anything except coffee and cigarettes, she says. Tammy, meanwhile, doesn’t hesitate: she’s addicted to fentanyl.

They’re asked, first off, what they and everyone at Bridge Street really need. Safe supply? Programs? They both answer: housing. “We need more low-income housing for everybody,” Tammy says. “There’s not enough housing.” No one ever really kicks a drug habit, she says, unless they have a place to live. It gives them hope, more than just about anything else. “If you don’t have housing, that just adds to your drug problem,” says Tammy. “I just want a home. Then I can work on my addiction.”

One of Tammy’s sons comes up and sits down on the ground beside her. He’s a gangly, dark-haired boy, and he doesn’t say a single word during a discussion that lasts a long time. He’s an addict, too. Tammy has three other kids; Sherri has six. All of Sherri’s were taken away from her, for adoption. Tammy’s are on the street, like her.

The conversation turns to what social workers and politicians prefer, which is “hubs” where there is “safe supply.” Tammy immediately frowns and shakes her head. Sherri shakes her head, too. Some places offer people like her weaker-dose opioid pills to get them off fentanyl, Tammy says. But most of the addicts just sell the pills to get more fentanyl, she says. And then the people they sold pills to? They start looking for something more powerful – and then they turn to fentanyl.

“I was into fentanyl really, really bad,” Tammy says. “So I went to Kingston to get clean, about eight months ago. They dropped me off at the hub they have there. It’s just a place where they do drugs. It’s the epitome of friggin’ drug abuse, there.”

They’re asked about the night of all the overdoses, the night Belleville made the national news. “I ended up dying right here on the lawn,” Tammy recalls, pointing at the dirt. She had no vital signs, but she was eventually brought back. She continues: “I don’t remember what was in it. Maybe tranq.” She squints, remembering. “Narcan just brings you back to life. It doesn’t work on the tranq.”

She stops and looks at a scarecrow of a man wobbling down the sidewalk. “You okay, buddy?” she calls out to him. “You okay?” He nods and moves off. Tammy waves a thin arm in the direction of the other ghostly people navigating the sidewalk. She starts to say something, then stops.

Kids as young as 15 can now be found at the church, Tammy and Sherri say. Much older people, too, well into their seventies. People sometimes drive by the church in their big, shinybSUVs and scream at them, they say. These people drive up and down Bridge Street and tell them to die, over and over. “Some people are really mean,” Sherri says.

They’re both quiet for a while.

**

Lori Regenstrief is a doctor. Her expertise is addiction, and she’s blessed with the ability to speak passionately about it. She’s helped addicts in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Inuvik, Sudbury, Manitoulin Island and inner city Toronto. These days, she’s in Hamilton. Reached while on the road, again up near the Arctic, Regenstrief listens carefully to what Tammy had to say about hubs and “safe supply.”

“It’s almost like palliative care,” she says, agreeing. “You are basically saying to people like Tammy, ‘Well, you don’t have to get better. You just stay where you are and we’ll give you these pills.’”

Tammy is right about so-called safe supply, she says. “Look, even with small amounts of fentanyl, people become very quickly addicted. It’s very, very addictive. It’s way more potent than heroin. And, you know, we never as a society offered heroin on a wide scale, did we? We never said: ‘Oh, high school kids should really have access to clean heroin,’ did we?

She pauses, and she sounds angry. “But that’s what we’re doing now.”

**

The discussion, which has gone on for a long time, is coming to an end. Tammy and Sherri are asked whether the outside world – the world beyond Bridge Street – understands them. Cares about them. Wants to know them.

Sherri shakes her head and says nothing. She looks down the road.

Tammy finally speaks. “They want us to be invisible,” she says.

“Gone.”

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Hamas U. is back.

Across the country – across the United States and Europe – post-secondary students are returning to class. And, with them, the Israel-hating, Jew-hating lunatic fringe are returning, too.

This week, at the University of British Columbia, a blood-red banner is hoisted alongside a real pig’s head: PIGS OFF CAMPUS, said the “People’s University for Gaza.” At the University of Calgary, a monument to Israeli hostages was vandalized within hours of its creation. At Toronto’s Metropolitan University, at its clubs fair, the Jewish Hillel club was attacked by screaming anti-Israel bullies, telling Zionists (ie., Jews) to get “off our campus.” And, at Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., a professor was propagating misinformation about the war in Gaza – in a course syllabus.

The haters and the hate are back. So, where are students – Gen Z and Millennials, mostly – getting this misinformation about Jews and the Jewish state? Why have so many embraced antisemitism? Because, make no mistake, they have: as one Canadian pollster has revealed, 35 per cent of Canadian Gen Z “support the destruction of Israel,” and 41 per cent say “extreme violence” is “justified against innocent Jewish civilians.”

Young Canadians (and Americans, and Europeans) are getting antisemitic conspiracy theories and disinformation online. And they’re being led by Hamas and its axis into the dark side.

Cyabra is one of the world’s leading firms in fighting disinformation. They uncover fake profiles and disinformation and publicize the results. And they have now published shocking a shocking report about the avalanche of Jew hate that has overwhelmed the Internet since October 7, when Hamas killed 1,200 Jews, raped Jewish women and girls, and committed an untold number of atrocities.

Cyabra found that thousands of fake accounts started to sprout up on social media almost exactly 18 months before October 7. They were at first mostly benign, posting in Arabic or English about cricket matches or kittens. And then, in the early hours of October 7, the fake accounts sprang to life.

One, called “RebelTaHa,” had just 82 followers before October 7. When Hamas attacked Israel, RebelTaHa’s followers suddenly grew exponentially – just one of his antisemitic posts would be seen 170,000 times. It went viral.

RebelTaHa, Cyabra found, wasn’t real. It was fake. And, with the clever use of hashtags and interactions with 162,000 other fake accounts – and, with boosting by what Cyabra calls “non-state actors” – fake accounts like RebelTaHa reached an extraordinary 530 million social media accounts in just two days.

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