Okay, I’ll take the wheel, here. Just for a bit.

Why? Well, you guys don’t come here to get my analysis of how well the Secret Service do their job. Although, if you ask me, I think the Secret Service will be considered a full-fledged member of the Deep State before the sun goes down tonight. If they aren’t already.

I’m not an expert on the Secret Service or how to protect Presidents, Premiers and Prime Ministers. I’ve gotten lots of credible death threats over the years, too, so I’ve interacted with police and security experts. And I learned, long ago, to defer to their expertise and judgment. But man oh man, are the Secret Service in for a rough Summer.

And you don’t come here for my take on U.S. gun laws, either. I consciously stopped commenting on mass shootings in the United States years ago. I figured that, if the mass murder of twenty five-year-old kids at Sandy Hook didn’t change them, nothing would. Not the shooting of presidents or presidential candidates, either.

They’ll continue to kill each other, because they are a nation at war with itself. Where a twenty-year-old who hasn’t even voted yet can get his hands on an assault rifle.

So, you don’t come here for any of that. You come here to get my political take, because I’ve been involved with political stuff for a long time. So, here it is. Five things.

One, it’s 113 days until Americans line up to vote. Donald Trump was already ahead, and he’ll be even more ahead now. But – but, but – it’s 113 days, which is several lifetimes in politics. So he’ll say or do something outrageous, and it’ll tighten up again, a bit.

But, as Brian Lilley and Charles Adler and Tasha Kheririddin said this morning, it’ll make Trump’s base even more convinced that he is the literal messiah. It’ll firm up his vote, big time. And he’s going to enter the Republican convention this week even stronger than he was before. Which is to say, strong. The vote may be 113 days away, but he’s the one to beat, right now.

Two, Joe Biden – who I worked for last time – has pulled his ads, changed his schedule, and is laying low. He was already going to lay low during the GOP convention. Sure. But, now, Democrats are going to be agonizing over every damn thing they do. Their internal debates – which had already spilled out into the open, after Biden’s disastrous presidential debate – are going to get a lot more challenging.

Abortion and Trump will continue to work for them as a strategy. That hasn’t changed. But the other attack? The one about the importance of democracy? That one is now a lot harder. Republicans will say American democracy is ruined and, after an attempted assassination of their candidate last night, lots of people will agree with them.

Three, I think NATO, the EU, America’s allies and American governmental institutions will start treating Trump like he’s already president. You can see that in their post-shooting comments last night. They think he’s won, now. They’re going to start changing their approach to Trump. They didn’t want Trump, but they think Trump is what they’re going to get. So, light’s out, NATO, Ukraine, Taiwan and free trade. Those are gone when and if he wins, and they all know it.

Four, Justin Trudeau. Canada’s Prime Minister is running out of time, and he has run out of moves. All that he had left was a possible Trump win. Because – sorry, Team Tory – many Canadians won’t want Pierre Poilievre in the Prime Minister’s Office when Donald Trump is in the Oval Office. They’ll want an alternative to the craziness they believe, correctly, is coming our way.

Is it enough to narrow a twenty-point gap? No, not right now. But it’ll make a difference. Canadians are big believers in alternation – Team Red at one level, Team Blue at the other level. Hell, even Calgarians do that – they’ve been electing Tory Premiers and Liberal mayors for decades.

Trump coming back will spook Canadian voters. And Trudeau will make full and frequent use of a second Trump presidency. Believe it.

Five: we live in a dangerous world – a world more dangerous than I can ever remember. As someone said to me when we went out for dinner last night, we are seeing things in 2024 that we all thought we’d never see again.

And an assassin’s bullet made everything more dangerous.

We are heading into a dark, dark place, my friends, and no one has the wheel.

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Rats, feces, drugs and used needles.

That’s the proud legacy of the “pro-Palestinian” youngsters who occupied the main entrance to McGill University for the past months.

Said McGill: “The encampment [was] the site of profound health and safety risks that continued to grow in scope and severity…due to the presence of human waste, a rat infestation, discarded syringes, a large amount of rotting food and garbage, and other potentially dangerous and unsanitary conditions within the site, it was necessary to use heavy machinery to remove parts of the camp for the safety of all involved…For the same reasons, it will be necessary to excavate and replace a layer of contaminated soil on the site.”

That’s not all, of course. The McGill tenti-fada was characterized by drug overdoses, vandalism, mini-riots, assaults, and regular attacks on Jewish students. When this writer was there, just a few days ago, signs were up telling Jews (“Zionists”) to stay away. It was an ongoing, malodorous, fetid hate fest.

And that’s truly how bad it became: the university has had to excavate it, to remove contaminated soil.

Contaminated, too, is a word that can be applied to what happened at the University of Windsor, albeit in a different context. There, the illegal occupation hadn’t gone on as long as McGill’s. As law student Sydney Greenspoon wrote in the Times of Israel, the University of Windsor is now “an unsafe place” for Jews. Greenspoon wrote that she has been targeted with antisemitic comments by students and professors – including Holocaust denial.

Wrote Greenspoon: “It is a campus that fosters hate and allows antisemitism to flourish, forcing the few Jewish students to hide any sign of our Jewish identity, in fear for our physical and psychological safety.”

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Eylon Levy eats a slice of watermelon.  

Watermelon is green, white, black and red, like the colours of Palestinian flag.  Online, a slice of watermelon has become an unofficial symbol of Palestinian defiance – and, often, online support for Hamas and Hezbollah.  Improbably, it has become a visual representation of the post-October 7 war – what Levy calls “the information war.”

After October 7, Levy became one of the best-known spokesmen for Jews and Israel, around the planet.  He was everywhere, fighting in the information war: CNN, Fox News, Sky News, BBC, CBC and many more.  And, as he thinks about his answer to the question, he is here, eating some watermelon.  Before he can be asked whether it is a symbolic attempt to recapture a symbol that has been used to promote extremism or terror – or simply if he likes watermelon – Eylon Levy answers the question.

The question is this: what do they want? 

What do the invisible forces behind a well-funded, well-organized, propaganda war against Jews, the Jewish state and the West want, in the end? What is their strategic goal? What are the policies they hope to impose, when and if they win the propaganda war?

Levy gives his answer.  It is a long one, but it sounds like Levy knows every word of it to be true. 

“There is an attempt by Israel’s enemies to weaponize and militarize misinformation against Israel. Because Hamas’ is goal is not only to kill Israelis, and shatter national morale, it’s to poison global public opinion against Israel. It’s to create tension and friction between Israel and its allies. It’s to make good, ordinary, decent people turn against Israel by convincing them that Israel is evil incarnate. That is the meaning of the campaign to charge Israel with genocide, extermination, starvation, and being a white supremacist, colonial, apartheid, fascist state.  And to throw every nasty word in the dictionary at it.”

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The tents are gone. The stench isn’t.

On Wednesday morning, suburban Moms and Dads – some wearing kefiyyehs like they saw Madonna wear one time – pulled their shiny $80,000 SUVs up to the curb at the University of Toronto to collect Junior and wheel them back to multi-million-dollar white neighborhoods with nice views of the lake. The months-long illegal occupation of U of T was over.

The illegal occupation was over because it was, in fact, illegal. My former law partner,
Justice Marcus Koehnen, made all of the usual sounds about freedom of speech and the Charter of Rights in his 98-page Ontario Superior Court ruling in support of the injunction sought by the university.

But in the end, Koehnen merely told us what we already know: private property is, you know, private. And if the University of Toronto wanted the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas kidlets off their private property? So be it. Done.

So the Gen Z Gaza gang chose discretion over valor. They fled. But behind them they left little hints of how truly awful they all are.

Last week, before Koehnen gave the Infant-fada the hook, this writer took a stroll around the perimeter of the U of T “encampment,” a documentary camera crew in tow. Everywhere we looked, there were signs and symbols saying things that seemed benign – but weren’t. Here’s a summary.

The inverted red triangle. Some of the aspiring Gazans may believe the triangle has something to do with the Palestinian flag or a wedge of watermelon. But it doesn’t. Online, the inverted red triangle indicates support for Hamas, full stop.

Elsewhere, meanwhile, the red triangle means this: “we will kill you.”

After the atrocities of October 7, the red triangle started to show up in glossy Hamas propaganda videos, superimposed on footage of Israeli soldiers or citizens. There, the inverted red triangle means “this is a target.” It was, by far, the most-seen symbol at the U of T illegal occupation.

When a can of red spray paint wasn’t handy, the U of T pro-Hamas kids – always masked – would touch the tips of their thumbs together and then touch the tips of their index fingers, pointed downward. They’d they’d wiggle that at passerby. Why?

It again means: you are a target, we want you dead. The Hamas glee club were doing that, still, hours before the police were ready to move in. The police saw it and did nothing.

Intifada. You would see this word on a lot on signs, professionally rendered or otherwise, at U of T. It’s an Arabic word, roughly meaning shaking off or sort-of rebellion. For Jews, however, it has a very specific meaning.

The second Palestinian Intifada, 20 years ago, was notable for stabbing, shootings, car bombs and the murder of more than 1,000 Jews. The second Intifada is also remembered for the kidnapping, torture, lynching, disemboweling and murder of two Israeli reservists who made a wrong turn and entered the West Bank.

On that occasion, one of their murderers – after calling one of the reservists’ wives on his cell phone, to say: “we are slaughtering your husband” – leaned out a police station window with his hands covered in blood (more on that shortly). The crowd below erupted in cheers, and then the Israelis’ bodies were flung onto the street for further desecration. An Italian camera crew captured it all on film.

So, that’s what “intifada” means to the intended victims, which are Jews. The U of T tenti-fada may claim not to know that, because they are the first university students in history who have never tried out this thing called “Google.” But Jews, as always the main targets, know the truth.

The red hand. The red hand symbol wasn’t as widespread at the illegal U of T occupation, but it could be seen in quite a few places. As noted above, the red hand originated on the dark day in October 2000 when two Israeli reservists were slaughtered.

The red hand has shown up in other contexts – in Ireland’s troubled North, or to represent missing and murdered Indigenous women – but, at of T, it didn’t refer to any of those things. Obviously. There, it was a celebration of murder.

SJP: This one was harder to find, but it revealed itself on some signs and banners at U of T over the past months. It refers to Students for Justice in Palestine.

SJP has been around for two decades, and were founded in Berkeley (of course they were). They have hundreds of chapters on campuses across Canada, the United States and elsewhere.

According to a lawsuit just filed against SJP and others in Virginia by survivors of Hamas’ October 7 Nova music festival butchery, SJP is the public relations arm of Hamas in North America. SJP explicitly and unashamedly support a murderous cult of Islamic madmen. And they were extremely active at U of T, supplying rhetorical and material support for weeks.

Which should be illegal in Canada. But isn’t.

There were other words and images seen over the many weeks that U of T was illegally occupied by spoiled children who despise Jews and civilization. A popular one wasn’t obscure at all – “genocide.”

Genocide is a bit rich, of course, because the population growth of Palestinians has for years exceeded that of Israelis by about 35 per cent. And because even the UN, which hates Israel almost as much as Hamas, has started to back away from claiming that a genocide is underway in Gaza. If that’s “genocide,” in other words, it’s a pretty ineffective genocide.

And so on and so on. If you ever took a stroll past the U of T encampment – which was the equivalent of a city block, surrounded by reality – you would’ve seen some of those words and symbols. And now you know what they mean.

The occupants of the illegal occupation knew what they meant, too. So does the people they hate the most. The ones they want to wipe off the face of the Earth.

The Jews.

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