Peace in our time. 

With war raging, and yet more war seeming imminent, speeches were made. Leaders gathered together, rising to leave behind some words that would be remembered. Remembered by history.

Addressing his people, and the world, one powerful man rose and said these things.

“We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing causes, but trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and goodwill.”

Applause. 

He went on: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible we should be preparing for war because of a quarrel in a far away country of whom we know nothing.”

More applause. 

He lowered his voice for the next part: “No doubt the Jews aren’t a lovable people. I don’t care about them myself.”

Oh, wait. The above words were not uttered in the United Nations General assembly on Tuesday, although they certainly could have been. On Tuesday, you see, scores of nations – Canada among them – also deplored war and called for peace in our time. Canada, and others, called for a ceasefire. 

The above words didn’t come from the UN this week, however. They come from decades ago in Britain. Neville Chamberlain said those words.

He uttered that hateful statement about the Jews, too. Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of Britain and the United Kingdom, actually said those things.

He was wrong about Jews, of course. But he was also wrong about ceasefires, and peace in his time. But he would’ve fit right in, quite well, at the United Nations this week.

With very little effort, too, he would’ve fit right in to Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, wouldn’t he?

It is regrettable that we need to remind people that Neville Chamberlain was hoodwinked by Adolf Hitler, and tragically wrong to call for “peace in our time.” But with a significant number of voters now getting information from TikTok, and not actual books and newspapers, it’s important to recall that lesson of history.

Namely, a ceasefire then only benefited Hitler. Just as a ceasefire now only benefits Hamas.

It’s a bit ironic, of course, that Trudeau’s government cravenly called for a ceasefire this week. It is almost amusing. Because, of course, a ceasefire was already in place. 

For years, Israel and the warring factions that surrounded it – the ones who wanted to wipe it from the face of the Earth (Hamas and Hezbollah, mainly) – had a ceasefire. Apart from the occasional skirmish, tentative peace was in place. It lasted for years.

It ended on October 7, 2023. Hamas broke it. 

It’s impossible to know, of course, whether Hamas’ billionaire leaders in their Qatari mansions laughed about the ceasefire vote at the United Nations this week. But we know that their predecessor, Hitler, certainly laughed when he fooled Neville Chamberlain.

It gave him time to regroup and rearm, and to spread his hateful ideology throughout the rest of Europe. As Hamas intends to do, in the Middle East. 

As we say, we do not know how Hamas reacted to the vote in the general assembly on Tuesday. The terror group gives us a clue in its Charter, however.

There, in Article 13, Hamas says: “So-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.” Take that, general assembly. 

It goes on: Hamas calls peace talks, and talk of peace with Jews and non-believers, “a waste of time.” Peace talks only help “the infidels,” says Hamas. All that is permitted is “jihad” – that is, holy war.

But Hamas does admit one thing, right in its Charter: peace conferences, and calls for ceasefires, are strategically useful. It gives them time to prepare for the next battle.

Take a bow, general assembly of the United Nations: you gave Hamas a big and unexpected victory this week.

Just like Neville Chamberlain did, so many years ago

To Hitler.

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What do you do when hate shows up in your neighbourhood?

In some cases, knowing how to react is pretty straightforward. When Heather Reisman’s bookstore in Toronto is attacked and vandalized because its owner is a Jew? You call the police. So, too, when Yeshiva Gedoloa, a Jewish school in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood, is shot up – not once, but twice? You call the police.

When a member Ontario’s legislature – and a city councillor in Victoria, and a rape crisis centre at the University of Alberta – deny the acts of sexual violence that indisputably happened on October 7? When unions and universities applaud acts of genocide and hate? You petition those places and institutions to take remedial action.

But hate, and anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, can express themselves in subtler, less-obvious ways, can’t they? Hate does not always end up on the front pages of newspapers, especially in dangerous and dark times like these.

And that’s been happening a lot, in Canada, since, October 7. Hate has been like a snake, slipping into unexpected places, manifesting itself in surprising ways. Unseen, until it is often too late.

So, all of us have had friends and family saying truly awful things since Israel commenced its (necessary, unavoidable) war against the monsters who constitute Hamas.

For myself, I have had a friend of thirty-plus years say that a column I wrote – one in which I quoted someone calling for peace for Israelis and Palestinians alike, and in which I said Hamas were inhuman – was “dehumanizing.” Another one, a prominent former Conservative candidate, opined that Jewish community centres were legitimate targets of hate graffiti. What does one do with that?

And, from my Jewish readers, I have heard how people they considered close friends have favourited anti-Semitic memes online, or even said aloud anti-Semitic things. I have heard such stories too many times to count.

And, then, there are the many, many who remain silent in the face of horrors. Like Canada’s hapless Global Affairs Minister, for instance, who took 62 days to condemn the rape and sexual violence endured by Jewish women on and after October 7. Sixty-two days.

So what does one do when hate shows up in your backyard? What then? What does one about those you know, and who should know better?

Take Prince Edward County’s Royal Hotel, for example. Because I live most of the time in the County, as it is called, I have been there a few times. It’s an old hotel in Picton, Ont. that has been painstakingly restored by Greg Sorbara – the former Ontario Finance Minister, the current York University chancellor – and others. They did a good job.

This week, another local business, Bloomfield Beauty Co. – a spa that offers facials and “cosmetic injectable services” – announced that it was joining the “global strike in support of Palestine.” They were doing so, they said in a post on Instagram, because of “the most horrific crimes against humanity.” And that “it is weighing on us.”

People have been urged to stay home and not go to work or school during the global strike. The strike was called by Palestinian National and Islamic Forces, which came into being during the second Intifada (uprising), and was the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Marwan Barghouti, a convicted murderer and terrorist.

I heard from people who live in Prince Edward County – Jew and non-Jew – who were appalled that a business they had patronized was accusing the Jewish state of “crimes against humanity” and “genocide.” Quote unquote.

Someone at the Royal Hotel saw their Instagram post, too – and indicated support. “The Royal Hotel Picton” – it applauded the words about genocide and crimes against humanity. “Wow” was all I could muster.

So, I wrote to Bloomfield Beauty Co. and asked them “what is your response to Jewish residents who have been upset by your post?” I also asked them if they had also “commented on the need to release the hostages, and condemn the acts of violence against women on October 7?”

They didn’t respond. I asked the Royal Hotel the same thing: would “the hotel (or the Sorbara family) also condemn the documented acts of violence on October 7 against Israeli men, women and children?”

Late in the day, an executive at the hotel replied: “[We are] shocked to find out that such a post was “liked” by our account. This in no way reflects the values or opinions of the hotel, me or my family. We have removed the “like” and are dealing with this internally.”

Hate is always bad. When it is accompanied by violence, of course, it is even worse. We in the media write and broadcast about it.

But paler shades of hate – racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, take your pick – don’t always attract attention of the media.

But when subtler hate slithers into your backyard, or when it comes out the mouths of those you know? That’s almost as bad.

Sometimes, it’s way worse.

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Ehrlich Anthony Coker was a rapist.

He was a murderer and thief, too. While serving three life sentences at the Ware Correctional Institution in Waycross, Georgia, Coker escaped.

On that same night, Coker broke into the home of Allen and Elnita Carver and held the couple hostage. He raped Elnita, and then took her with him, using the couple’s car. Elnita got free, and the police re-captured Ehrlich Anthony Coker.

This time, he was charged with a capital crime – rape. In Georgia, North Carolina and Louisiana, in those days, rape was punishable by death. Coker was sentenced to death.

The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Justice Byron White wrote for the majority. White wrote that rape is a crime that shows “almost total contempt for the personal integrity and autonomy of the female victim.” Apart from murder, rape is, White wrote, “the ultimate violation of self.”

The ultimate violation of self: that is what it is – and, as we have learned in the intervening years – it is really not just about sexual gratification. It is, as White wrote for the highest U.S. court, an act that “inflicts mental and psychological damage.” That, oftentimes, is the rapist’s purpose, their goal: subjugation, degradation, domination.

That was the goal, too, of Hamas on October 7. They slaughtered 1,151 Israelis, their government now says, and they took 240 hostage.

But Hamas also raped many of them.

At the United Nations this week, there was finally a presentation about Hamas’ use of sexual violence. CNN, which has been frequently critical of Israel’s war against Hamas, reported – as fact – that the U.N. was shown “evidence of sexual violence [that] was ample and overwhelming and came from different sources.”

Here is just a short summary of it.

• “A woman was shot in the back of her head, lying on her bed, naked from her waist down. A live grenade was planted in her hand.”
• “[Another woman] had nails and different objects in her female organs. Her body was brutalized in a way that [first responders] could not identify her.”
• “There were girls with broken pelvis due to repetitive rapes, their legs were split wide apart.”
• “We heard girls that were pulled out from the shelters. Girls that shouted. They raped girls. Burnt them just after that. All the bodies outside were burnt.”
• “Several female soldiers were shot in their crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or shot in the breast. There seem to be a systematic genital mutilation of a group of victims.”

And, now, CNN reported, “dozens of hostages have been released from Gaza as part of a truce between Israel and Hamas and some have also mentioned sexual abuse during their testimonies.” So the rape and torture and sexual violence that happened on October 7? It continues.

A few weeks ago, this writer (and others) was invited to the Israeli consulate in Toronto to see video shot by Israeli first responders, or Hamas terrorists themselves. Over the course of 42 minutes, I saw 138 people killed by Hamas, or the immediate aftermath. Men, women, children and babies. Over and over and over.

We also saw something else: many, many women and girls, stripped below the waist, legs apart, their bodies bloodied and charred. We didn’t need to be told what had happened to them. We knew.

Despite that – despite all of us knowing that denying sexual assault re-victimizes the victim, despite the lessons of #MeToo – some denied it all. The former Ontario NDP politician Sarah Jama denied it. So did the University of Alberta Sexual Assault Centre. So did a Victoria, B.C. city councillor, Susan Kim. So have others, using cowardly, slippery phrasings online.

And some have just ignored it. It was only this week, in fact, that Canada’s own Minister of Global Affairs, Melanie Joly, finally issued a clear statement on the rapes and horrors of October 7.

Sixty-two days after the rapes took place, Joly put up a few words on X: “Using sexual violence as a tactic of war is a crime. We strongly condemn [sexual and gender-based violence], including rape, perpetrated by Hamas against women in Israel on October 7. We believe Israeli women. Canada will always stand against #SGBV and advocate for justice for all victims.”

Except Canada didn’t strongly “advocate” for Israeli women, in that way, for many weeks. Despite being asked to do so. Despite clear evidence that “the ultimate violation” had taken place on October 7.

Which leads us back to the 1977 judgment of the U.S. Supreme Court in the appeal of Ehrlich Anthony Coker. Capital punishment was too harsh a penalty for Coker, the Court ruled.

For Hamas, it isn’t.

Find them, and end them all.

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My girlfriend Paula Christison had been over, and we’d been studying, then watching something on the little black and white TV we had. My Carleton roommate, Lee G. Hill, was there too. Lee and I had been great friends in Calgary. In junior high, we’d started a couple fanzines with Beatles-centric themes. In our shared room on Second Russell, we had a couple John Lennon posters up amongst the punk rock stuff.

Paula left for her place downtown, so Lee and I were studying when the phone rang. It was Paula. “John Lennon’s been shot, babe,” she said. “It’s on the radio.”

His assassination, on December 8, 1980, was of course a terrible tragedy – and so, to me, was the fact that his last album (before the inevitable avalanche of ham-fisted compilations and retrospectives) was a piece of self-indulgent, saccharine shite like Double Fantasy.

Generally, he always needed Paul as an editor, and vice-versa. But his best album – and one of the best albums of all time, in my view – was Plastic Ono Band. It was like him: it was stark, and raw, and different, and deeply, deeply personal. Some say the LP was the product of his dalliance with primal scream therapy, or his response to the (necessary, and overdue) collapse of the Beatles. To me, it was instead an actual piece of art and great rock’n’roll, improbably found under the same piece of shrink wrap. Like listening to someone’s soul, without having received an invite to do so.  You should listen to it today.

The next morning, exams weren’t cancelled, though it felt to me like they should have been. When I walked into Carleton’s gym, there was a guy sitting there, already wearing a John Lennon T-shirt. I wanted to punch him. Instead, I just took my seat and wrote the stupid exam.

So long ago. I can’t believe he’s been gone that long; I can’t believe I’m way older than he ever got a chance to be. It sucks.

Here’s my favourite picture of him, the one I used to use on posters I’d make up for Hot Nasties shows.  I liked it because he looked like a punk. That’s Stu in the background, I think.  Also long gone.

We miss you, John.  Hardly knew you.

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Follow the money.
 
That’s the best strategy when trying to get to the bottom of a political scandal.  Follow the money, and you’ll eventually find the bad guys.
 
But what about ethical and moral scandals? What about, say, when the presidents of some of the most prestigious universities on the continent – Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology – appear before a U.S. congressional committee, and smirk their way through non-answers about Jew hatred on their campuses? What then?
 
The rule still applies: follow the money.
 
Some background, first.  The Harvard, UPenn and M.I.T. presidents deigned to appear before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday.  They were there, mainly, to field questions about how they are dealing with an explosion in anti-Semitism at their universities.
 
To say that they did not do well is an understatement of epic proportions.  Harvard president Claudine Gay, Penn president Liz Magill and MIT president Sally Kornbluth smirked and smiled and sniggered when asked, repeatedly, whether “calling for genocide of Jews” was against their respective codes of conduct.
 
Every time they were asked that question – to which the answer, always, is “yes” – the university presidents dissembled and prevaricated.  
 
Said UPenn’s Magill, echoing the other two: “It is a context-dependent decision.”
 
No, it isn’t.  It’s not even a difficult question, either: calls to exterminate a people based on their faith is clearly against the rules at every place of higher learning in the world – and, in countries like Canada, a criminal act.
 
It’s also wildly-bad PR.  Donors and students are now boycotting universities where anti-Semitism is going unchecked, and politicians are talking about withdrawing funding.  So why don’t these university presidents do the right thing?
 
It’s about prejudice, of course.  But it’s also about money.
 
This writer’s first book was called Unholy Alliances.  In part, it detailed how outlaw Middle Eastern nations – Libya, Iraq, Syria, Iran and others – have been jamming “students” into Canadian, American and European universities for decades.  And, too often, some of those students aren’t here to study.
 
In Unholy Alliances, I revealed how the FBI uncovered a Libyan plot to use students as spies, terrorists and intelligence-gathering operatives. During a raid at the Virginia home of one Libyan “businessman,” Mousa Hawamda, the FBI found dozens of documents relating to the Canadian Bureau for International Education, World University Services Canada and similar organizations.
 
The CBIE, WUSC, and others work to find spaces for foreign students at Canadian universities and colleges.  The FBI did not make any specific allegations about these groups – but they alleged that some of the Libyan students were indeed involved in terrorist plots, including one to assassinate former White House aide Oliver North.
 
Arranging spots for the Middle Eastern students is big, big business.  Despite the 1986 pledge of former External Affairs Minister Joe Clark – to keep Canada from becoming “a backfill,” as he put it, for students who posed a security risk – Libya, to cite just one example, gave $35 million to place 900 students at educational institutions across Canada in that very same year.
 
Since then, the numbers have grown exponentially. In 2023, the federal government has conceded, Canada is expected to admit around 900,000 foreign students – and reach an astonishing 1.3 million by 2026.
 
And what is the dollar value of all those foreign students? Some $20 billion, Ottawa says.  And most of it is going into the coffers of those universities.  
 
To cite just one small-scale example, reported by The Hub: “[Cape Breton University] reported a haul of nearly $85 million in tuition fees [in Spring 2023], a 200 percent increase from just five years ago, driven mainly by an increase in international students.”  
 
The same thing is happening across Canada, the U.S. and Europe.  Foreign students, particularly from the Middle East, are fattening the coffers of universities big and small.  And, now, we are seeing those same universities look the other way when anti-Semitism is surging on their campuses.
 
It’s not a coincidence.  At Harvard – where, full disclosure, this writer studied law and business, and now wishes he hadn’t – anti-Semitic incidents and crime are epidemic.  And, at Canadian universities like Concordia, Jew hatred can now be seen everywhere, and is captured on nightly TV news broadcasts.
 
Asked about that, one Concordia professor told me: “I don’t know who those people are.  They don’t look like our students.” 
 
There’s a reason for that: they aren’t.  They’re not here to learn.  They’re here to cause trouble, and worse. And they’re doing just that, a lot, since October 7.
 
Like we say: follow the money.  
 
And do it before it’s too late.

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…why we still need effective gun safety laws, and why we need to stop violence against women.

So many years ago.

1. Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
2. Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
3. Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
4. Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
5. Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
6. Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
7. Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
8. Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
9. Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
10. Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
11. Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
12. Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
13. Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
14. Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student

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